Joe’s mother was the trimmer, and there was another girl called Sophie who was learning the trimming from her. There was the machinist, Mrs Kramm, who was old and had a chest, and a pretty assistant from the shop named Ruby but called Lady R. Ruby was very nice to Joe, but she treated the others, even Joe’s mother, a bit haughty. As soon as she went out of the workroom they talked about her.
‘What a fine lady, I don’t think,’ said Sophie. ‘Some lady, I should say, and what was she before? – a little snot-nose giving the boys eyes the whole time,’ wheezed Mrs Kramm.
‘She’s very pretty,’ Joe’s mother said, picking up a small bunch of artificial cherries. ‘And good at her job.’
‘That you can say again,’ Mrs Kramm said. ‘That job she can do all right, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, such a job as she can do so well.’ She pressed the treadle of her machine so that the thread shot through the needle like lightning.
‘Mrs Kramm,’ Joe’s mother said, looking towards Joe, ‘I’m surprised at you. After all, it’s only a rumour.’
‘Oh no, it’s not, Becky,’ Sophie said quickly. ‘I’ve seen him after her behind the gown rail carrying on something terrible.’
‘Sophie,’ Joe’s mother said, ‘the child.’
‘Here you are, Joe,’ Sophie said; ‘I’ve found a caramel in silver paper for you.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Joe, because they were the soft kind with a nut in the middle, although he would rather have heard some more about Lady R and Madame Rita. But it was just as well Sophie stopped when she did because while he was taking the silver paper off the caramel carefully so as not to tear it, who should come in but Lady R herself.
‘Becky dear,’ she said to Joe’s mother, ‘could Joe go an errand? Would you go an errand, Joe sweetie, for Auntie Ruby, dolly?’
‘Certainly he could,’ Joe’s mother said, though Joe didn’t as a rule run errands for dollies.
‘Will you, dolly?’ asked Lady R, bending down and putting her face right close to his. ‘For me?’
‘All right,’ Joe said. Lady R smelt nice at least, and she had large brown eyes and a smooth dark skin and oily black hair very smooth and curled into a bun.
‘Bless you, baby,’ Lady R said, and suddenly she gave Joe a fat kiss on his cheek, which though better than a pinch is still a nuisance.
The errand was to go round the corner and collect Lady R’s genuine French calf handbag which was having its clip repaired. When he was coming back through the shop with the handbag, which was a sack of coal over his shoulder, he saw Madame Rita and Lady R behind the gown rail, and what Sophie said was true. Back in the work-room his mother got out her handkerchief and licked it and rubbed off Lady R’s lipstick, which meant that it had been on his face all the time and he didn’t know, which proves you shouldn’t go errands for dollies.
‘Don’t lick me,’ Joe said.
‘Keep still, Joe,’ replied his mother.
‘If you lick me clean, you should lick Madame Rita, too, because his face is even worse.’
‘Oy,’ wheezed Mrs Kramm, ‘the cat is in the bag. What goings on. For a respectable woman it’s terrible.’
After Joe had been cleaned up he went down into the cellar, where there were a whole lot of old dummies, coloured crepe papers, and boxes. Although he got filthy, it did allow the women to talk about Lady R, which is all women want to do, anyway. For his part he got down to a serious game of Club Row.
He was being an Indian fortune-teller with a green remnant round his head, when he had a happy thought. He thought how the women wanted to talk about Lady R, and how Shmule wanted to win another fight although he had already won two, and how Mr Kandinsky still wanted a patent presser, and how his father hadn’t sent for them yet.
So, Joe thought, everybody is always saying I wish, I wish, and always wanting things. And straightaway he improved being a fortune-teller by having Africana with him. Africana wasn’t very much bigger, but his horn was coming along nicely, just big enough for, say, five or six wishes. Joe set out four boxes, on which he made drawings with a piece of flat chalk he kept in his pocket for emergencies. One of his mother in a hat, one of Mr Kandinsky, one of Shmule and one of everybody else, including Sonia and Mavis. Then he led Africana, the wish-maker, to each box. After what was necessary was explained to Africana, he was very glad to bend his head so that his horn touched the drawing on each box. And that was how the wishes were granted. All this took a good deal of work, so it was not until Sophie came down to the cellar to call him for dinner that the job was done. When he went upstairs he still had the green remnant round his head. Lady R, who was eating a saltbeef sandwich, waved a pickled cucumber at him and called him the Sheikh of Araby dolly. If Joe didn’t find something to do in the afternoon she would spoil everything, because she was that type. It was good luck that Mr Kandinsky called in while Joe was eating his second jam sandwich. As Mr Kandinsky had spent the whole morning at Shafchick’s vapour bath in Brick Lane, he looked very pink and scrubbed, but he wasn’t angry about Moishe, which was unusual. He said to Joe’s mother, ‘That Moishe, the cap-maker, went too far today. He got cooked.’ And he giggled and asked Joe if he would like to come round with him to the Tailors’ Union; he had to tell them about how Moishe was cooked.
Moishe, the cap-maker, had a huge belly and was an old friend of Mr Kandinsky. They argued all the time, and always met on a Friday at Shafchick’s, where they would argue their way through the hot room, then the hotter room, then the hottest room in the world, and even while they were being rubbed down by Luke, the Litvak masseur, who only used the Russian massage whether you wanted it or not. Luke carefully made up his own bundles of twigs, holding them high in the steam to pick up the heat. He gave you a rub-down like an earthquake, then shook hands and said ‘Good health, Reb.’ He was a big man with a huge belly, and when he and Moishe stood together you could drive a pair of cart-horses between them. They carried the argument through whilst they drank glasses of lemon tea to put the moisture back into their systems, although they had just gone to all that trouble to get it out.
Mr Kandinsky’s arguments with Moishe were mostly political, like Macdonald and Baldwin, which is the best man, or was the Tsar murdered or can you call it execution, or whether the Tailors’ Union should run a sick fund or was it placing temptation in the way? In Shafchick’s such arguments became heated especially in the hottest room in the world, because at Shafchick’s you can always rely on the heat. They say that Shafchick was a great rabbi who was so pious that Barney Barnato wanted to give him something, so being pious he said what else but a vapour bath for the whole East End, and that’s what Barney gave him, and of course he became managing director and did very well, so they say, but why not since at Shafchick’s you can rely on the heat, day or night. It comes gliding out of a hundred small gratings slowly until the place is like a stew-pot boiling on the gas. No one bothers you, you sit in a deck chair like Bournemouth or the Crimea, play chess, drink your tea, argue, whatever your pastime happens to be. All the time you are getting the benefit of the heat. Rheumatism is melted before it can crystallise round the joints of your bones, veins become less varicose, the lumbago and all creaks in the back are eased, and you get a good rest into the bargain. And afterwards? Don’t ask. You feel like an angel walking through the green fields of Brick Lane. If you wanted to, you could fly looking down upon the hills of East London, while everything is fresh about you, as in the morning of life. You smell thebaigelsleaving the bake-oven. Cart-horses make the streets smell like a farm-yard, and the people about you have the faces of old friends. Everything is so good when you come from Shafchick’s that once you get the habit you never regret it, even if Moishe’s arguments are so ridiculous they make you a bit short-tempered. It is not a real short temper. It is a luxury to make you feel deeper the joy of having lived through yet another vapour-bath.
As they walked over to the Tailors’ Union, Mr Kandinsky giggled most of the time, and once or tw
ice he stopped dead, looked down at Joe and laughed out loud.
‘How that Moishe was cooked,’ he giggled. ‘What a hot-pot.’
The Union was in Whitechapel Road, and in the week there were not many tailors there, but on Sunday mornings they filled the room and spread out into the street, chatting in their long coats about this or that, small groups of them for a hundred yards up the Whitechapel Road. Sometimes a master-tailor would come up and say, ‘Have you seen Chaim? I got three days’ work for him,’ and everyone would shout out, ‘Where’s Chaim? Here’s work for him.’ The Union room itself was dirty, with dusty windows on which someone had written with a finger, ‘Up with,’ but they couldn’t decide who, so there was no name. The wooden plank floor was smeared with rubbed-out cigarette ends, and the only decoration on the walls was the black-and-red poster which said, ‘Wrestling Saturday Night,’ with pictures of Shmule and Python Macklin on it. A young coat-maker who happened to be temporarily unemployed was making up a small book at a table below the poster.
At one end of the room there was a trestle table with a big brown enamel teapot stewing on it, a quart bottle of milk, and a plate of rolls and butter. Behind the trestle Mrs Middleton, the caretaker, stood, cutting rolls, pouring tea, and talking Yiddish with some old tailor who, like Mr Kandinsky, looked in to hear what was happening in the world.
At another trestle table, which had benches along both sides, two men were playing dominoes. As Mr Kandinsky and Joe came in, they finished a game, and the bones clicked as four hands smoothed them over for the next, for domino games go on for ever. Two other men drank tea from big chipped enamel mugs they carried in their overcoat pockets.
‘So white gold is by you cheap stuff, rubbish?’ one said.
‘Who says rubbish?’ the other replied; ‘platinum is better, that’s all.’
‘Platinum is good enough for you,’ said the first; ‘you’re sure?’
‘Another cup tea, Missus,’ the other said.
‘You didn’t pay for the first two yet,’ Mrs Middleton answered.
‘You short of platinum maybe?’ the first said, putting sixpence on the counter.
Mrs Middleton filled the cups up with black tea, and sloshed milk on top. ‘Why, Mr Kandinsky,’ she said, ‘what a surprise.’ She always told her friends that Mr Kandinsky was a real gentleman.
‘Mrs Middleton, my dear,’ Mr Kandinsky said, shaking hands with her; ‘what a pleasure to see you. So well you look; ten years younger. How’s the boy?’
‘He’s in the sign-writing now,’ Mrs Middleton said proudly.
‘A good trade,’ one of the men said.
‘Very artistic,’ said the other.
‘You know,’ Mr Kandinsky said to the men, ‘that boy when he was twelve could draw anything you like: a pound of apples, a couple oranges, a banana anything.’
‘Maybe he should have gone in the fruitery,’ one of the men said.
‘No,’ replied Mr Kandinsky, ‘people as well, the King, politicians.’
‘Bastards,’ the other man said.
‘A nice cup of tea, Mr Kandinsky?’ asked Mrs Middleton.
‘By all means, with pleasure,’ replied Mr Kandinsky, ‘and a glass of milk for the boy.’
‘Your grandson?’ asked Mrs Middleton. ‘Bless him.’
‘Nearly,’ Mr Kandinsky said, ‘bless him.’
While they drank their tea and Joe sipped his milk, which was a little dusty, Mr Kandinsky asked the men how was business, and they said he meant where was it, it was a thing of the past, tailors were two a penny if you were throwing your money away because in a couple of months the tailors would pay you to let them work. Mr Kandinsky said it was terrible, he was feeling it bad, but what could you do? And the men agreed, what could you do?
All the time Mr Kandinsky was on edge to tell them how Moishe was cooked. He was leading up to it by saying how well he felt after a vapour bath at Shafchick’s. One of the men liked vapour baths very much, but the other one thought they were bad for the system, like lemon tea, tasty but rotting to certain organs of the stomach.
‘You,’ the other man said, ‘with a barrel organ in your stomach, you couldn’t make more noise, such rubbish you talk. Vapour baths is proven by the best medical authority to be the best thing in the world for the system. Lords and ladies are paying fortunes to go to foreign parts, and why? – because they got vapour baths. And here we got in the East End one of the finest vapour baths in the world, where for practically nothing you can go and sweat first or second class all day long to your heart’s content. He isn’t satisfied. It’s rotting the organs from his stomach, Mr Platinum here.’ He spat on the floor.
‘Manners,’ warned Mrs Middleton.
‘Anyhow,’ continued Mr Kandinsky, annoyed at the interruption, ‘who’s telling the story? You know Moishe the cap-maker from Cable Street?’
‘The one who married his son to the daughter of Silkin, the wholesale grocer?’ one of them asked.
‘No, no,’ the other said. ‘Moishe is the one with the big ears who goes to the dogs.’
One of the men playing dominoes looked up and grunted.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘Everything you know.’
‘You know better?’ the man replied.
‘You know,’ the domino player said again.
‘So play,’ said his partner, who was winning.
‘Anyhow,’ Mr Kandinsky continued, ‘Moishe comes to the baths on Fridays and you think you can argue, but that Moishe is one to argue you out of business. Doesn’t matter what you say, he knows better. Whatever it is, politics, history, business, anything, he knows better. I just come from Shafchick’s and you know what happened?’ Mr Kandinsky stopped to giggle again and to give the domino players a chance to look round from their game. ‘He just got cooked.’
Naturally they all wanted to know what happened, so after laughing a bit more to drag it out, Mr Kandinsky told them.
He and Moishe were talking about the slump and he said that if only he had a patent steam presser he could do all right, slump or no slump, because if you could do the work fast enough, it didn’t matter if you got paid less, just so long as you kept turning it over, and if you keep working you can always make a living. Also with a patent presser you could take in pressing when the trousers were slack. At once Moishe says what does Kandinsky know about economical matters, leave it to the specialists who get employed to know these things, they take years of study.
‘I been studying my trade with the goose-iron for enough years,’ Mr Kandinsky replied. ‘I know what’s what.’
‘Kandinsky,’ said Moishe, ‘that’s where you make your mistake. Do you know what is a price spiral with an inflation? You don’t. Do you know we are dropping off from the gold standard? You don’t. Do you understand the economical problem of today? You should worry.’
‘What is all this to do with making trousers for a living, if you don’t mind a question?’ asked Mr Kandinsky.
‘That’s what I mean,’ replied Moishe; ‘trousers-making you know, but what else?’
‘And what else am I talking about? I read plenty books in my time and now also, but leave that to one side; what am I talking about except trousers-making? I am saying a patent steam presser is what I need. I don’t know what is good for my business?’ But Moishe went on and on about gold prices and unemployment figures. He read the financial column of the paper very carefully every day as a hobby, and he was enjoying himself, especially as there was a shortage of cap-makers and he had plenty of work.
They went into the heavy steam room, where you can hardly breathe or see at all. But in spite of that Moishe went on talking and talking from his end of the room, lying on the marble bench with his towel under him, talking and talking. So Mr Kandinsky left him to it. ‘Let him talk to himself, since he’s the only one who knows what he’s talking about,’ Mr Kandinsky thought, as he went out for a massage.
He had his massage talking with Luke the Litvak about his brother-in-law, the
doctor in the children’s hospital, although, funny thing, no children of his own. Afterwards he sat down quietly in a deck-chair in a second-class cubicle. He drank a glass of lemon tea and read the paper. Then he settled down for a little sleep.
Suddenly, just when Mr Kandinsky is dreaming he is picking cherries in an orchard at home, and though the cherries are full and ripe, there is yet blossom on the trees, which is impossible but looks wonderful and the smell, there is a shouting, and he wakes up. There, the colour of borsht and steaming like a pudding, is Moishe, cursing him and saying what a thing to do, locking him in like that, and it’s wonderful he’s alive to tell Kandinsky what kind of a lousy dog he is. ‘And what happens,’ laughed Mr Kandinsky, ‘is this. I am so fed up with Moishe talking and talking, I slam the door of the heavy steam room, and it jams. I told him, is it my fault the door jams? It’s the heavy steam from him talking so much. What’s it got to do with me? You should have seen him, just like a stuffed neck he looked, stuffed with red cabbage. Luke and me laughed our heads off.’
The men laughed and said it should teach Moishe to argue the whole time; they must remember to ask him how he got cooked and how was his price spiral. Then they went back to their own arguments, which, since Mr Kandinsky was there, came down to the question who would win the fight tomorrow night. They placed bets with the man who was making the book, and Mr Kandinsky said as it was a special occasion he would put a shilling on for Joe. The platinum man said to the white gold man, ‘Even if he don’t win, I don’t want to make a crust out of that lousy Python Macklin, who is, without doubt, one of the dirtiest fighters in the ring today. Also if Shmule wins, it’s good for the tailors, and we should all be behind him, even if he loses.’
Joe put down the buttered roll he was eating.
‘Shmule will be the winner,’ he said.
They all looked at him in silence for a moment. ‘Put another bob on, Hymie,’ said white gold. ‘Out of the mouths of babes,’ said Mr Kandinsky. Just at that moment one of the old men stopped clicking dominoes and said to Mr Kandinsky, ‘Kandinsky, you want a patent presser? My brother-in-law, the one with the big factory.’
A Kid for Two Farthings Page 6