Unnerved by Gladys or not, my mother let it all out. “Like a fire hydrant I was,” my mother said in later years, “and to this lady who acted like I was just off the boat.”
She had gone on about all the things that were lacking—a shul, a rabbi, a Hebrew school. She finally got to her main point: that since there was no shul in Sidalia either, what was Mrs. Rastow going to do about Sheldon’s bar mitzvah?
Apparently Mrs. Rastow wasn’t going to do anything. “Do? What’s to do?” she said to my mother. If my mother cared so much, why not just send Joey to Nashville?
Nashville? If the sofa had not been of mohair, which was very grabby, my mother would have slid right to the floor. Send Joey to Nashville? Her Joey? To who in Nashville? To Mrs. Moskowitz, who would have him make his own meals out of the little inch she would give him in her icebox? To the rabbi’s wife, who was so busy being the rabbi’s wife, she would maybe have five minutes for Joey in between being the rabbi’s wife?
My mother said no, she didn’t think so. After which Mrs. Rastow suggested commuting. “You know,” Mrs. Rastow said, “go back and forth by train.”
Miriam has always said that if it had been about her, my mother would have given her two bananas—one for going, one for coming back—put her on the train and waved goodbye. But then Miriam has always thought Joey was my mother’s favorite, and Joey, though he has always laughed at this, has also never denied it. In any case, my mother felt that commuting—or whatever it was Gladys had said—was no answer at all: It was a heavy foot planted right on her body. Her Joey so much on the train?
That was the end of the bar mitzvah discussion, such as it was, though my mother was not out of things to talk about. She wanted to know what Gladys thought of the food. “Like on the moon, no?” my mother asked her.
She surged on. She talked about the people, about how my father said they were not strange, as she herself thought, just different. She kept waiting for Gladys to “chime in.”
Mrs. Rastow did not “chime in.” And why? Because she had a different view of things. And it was different because Gladys Rastow had been born in America.
Yes, Gladys had been born in America. She was born in the Bronx, and grew up in Yonkers, in tony Westchester County, just over the northern border of the city, to which her family had moved when she was very young. Unlike my mother, she had not grown up in a big apartment house surrounded by Jews, but in a place that, when she lived there, was populated almost exclusively by Gentiles. In Yonkers her father operated a humble enterprise called a candy store. This was a slight misnomer in that this kind of store carried not only sweets but also tobacco products and newpapers and accommodated soda fountains (which served up “two-cents plains”—a shot of seltzer that cost two cents and that at some point I understood to be New York’s elixir of life, as Miss Brookie had said iced tea was the South’s).
Gladys helped out in the store, before and after she finished high school. My mother would occasionally say, “What kind of job was that for a girl not only born in America, but a finisher in high school?” To my mother, if you had finished high school, you had at least a job in an office, like her younger sister, Hannah.
Gladys was hard for my mother, but my mother tried through the years to be charitable and attributed Gladys’s personality difficulties to never having gotten sufficient respect for being born in America and being a high school graduate. Still, she would usually add, “Just because I’m taking up for Gladys don’t mean I was crazy about her.”
At this first meeting the worst was to come. Mrs. Rastow had two suggestions for my mother: First, she should bob her hair, and second, she should call her by her first name. Braids and calling people by their last names were “out of the Dark Ages,” Gladys said, and it was clear that “out of the Dark Ages” was the last thing Gladys wanted to be. Born in America to a T, my mother thought.
In the dining room the men were having a good time. They were talking about business. My father’s business was continuing to grow, Manny Rastow’s showed promise, and, since Manny’s store was the main thing in his life and my father’s was second only to his family, the two had every reason to be cheerful. Irving, who was quiet (his wife had opinions for two, my father would say), mostly listened, but he was the sort who was happy to be in happy company. My father immediately liked Manny and Irving Rastow.
Manny had gone from New York to Alabama as a peddler’s helper and after a year had gotten his own wagon. He had peddled on his own in West Virginia and Kentucky, saved his money, and, after a few years, had had enough of the nomadic life. When a store came available in Sidalia, he’d bought it and sent for his brother and family to join him. He himself had no wife, something of which my mother took serious notice.
In the back of the house we heard Manny’s call to come into the parlor, and when we gathered, Manny gave a speech of welcome. “What it is is a great occasion,” he said, as if he were giving a formal speech in a great hall, “and I want you should know how welcome you are in our house. If I didn’t say shalom aleichem before, I say it now. I say welcome, and peace. You should know how good it is to have Jewish people here.”
He said that Irving had “a big surprise to pull, in honor” and that he would pull it in the kitchen. In the center of the kitchen table was a wooden barrel as squat and round as an oak tree stump.
Irving picked up a metal pry lying next to the barrel and proceeded to work off the lid, which responded with groans and squeaks. His reticence was gone. He was in full command. “Now!” he ordered. “Close eyes! Smell hard!”
Eyes closed. Noses inhaled, noisily.
My father cried, “Herring!” My mother cried, “Pastrami!”
Irving lifted items out one by one and gave each an honored place on the table: pink oiled-paper packets of corned beef and pastrami tied with string; ones of thin, thin slices of lox; tiny mustard-filled paper cornucopias; a whole tongue; a fat smoked whitefish; pickled onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes in white cardboard cartons with tiny metal handles astride; and, down in the bottom, rye bread, bagels, and nut-and-fruit pastries.
Miriam felt a tug. She turned and there was Delores, hissing at her. “See?” Delores said. “It’s just Jew food!” So what that it was “Jew food”? All we knew was that Mr. Rastow had performed mouth-watering magic.
For Miriam, Delores was a “burden” (Concordia’s word for anything calling for patience). To this day she will say, “Delores was the most irritating young ’un I’ve ever known.”
“Am I seeing what I’m seeing?” my mother was asking. She too called it magic.
Irving said indeed it was magic—magic sent from a St. Louis delicatessen, with which he had placed an order for a weekly barrel. Then every Sunday morning there was, as Irving said, “a magic at the front door, courtesy Railway Express.”
In her ecstasy at having “real” food, my mother told about a a recent encounter with some store-bought pickles. “Feh! So sweet they were, I should have given them for dessert. Whoever heard from sweet pickles?
“And the bread! Before you can chew it, it’s gone—like some kind of trick! And no taste! When I’m eating a sandwich, if I didn’t have something between, I wouldn’t know I was eating nothing!” My mother speared a slice of rye bread with her fork and held it high. “Now, this is bread. It looks like something, it tastes like something!”
After the Broomes, this was the second visit in a row that hadn’t been a great success, but my mother took comfort in the fact that the Rastows were Jewish. As if asking for confirmation, she said to my father on the ride going home, “That’s the important part.”
My father answered noncommittally. At this moment it seemed best to leave well enough alone.
My mother persisted. The most important thing, she said, was that Miriam and I would have Jewish friends.
This inspired a Miriam explosion. “For pity’s sake, Mama!” she cried out from the buggy’s back seat. “So what if Delores is Jewish? She’s about as muc
h fun as a dead cat!” Furthermore, she couldn’t understand why my mother wanted us to be friends with somebody who was so clearly hostile to anything Jewish. What about Delores saying “Jew” this and “Jew” that? “Just the way you hate it, Mama,” Miriam said.
“Did I hear anything like that?” my mother asked her invisible person. “No, I didn’t hear nothing like that.”
“I know you didn’t,” Miriam responded crossly. “It’s pathetic the way you hear some things and not others.”
My mother waved a hand toward the back. “She’s just a little girl talking. She don’t know what she’s saying.”
“Delores is a bent hairpin,” I contributed. “And Sheldon is a …” I was stuck.
My brother whispered something in my ear, and I said, “A snaggle-toothed comb.”
“Hush, Stella Ruth,” my mother said. “And, Joey, you quit telling her things to say… . Anyways, you’ll make the best of it. They’ll be your friends.”
Miriam argued that we had plenty of friends, plenty right in Concordia, so why did we need more?
My mother said we didn’t have any Jewish friends, that was why. “I only wish Joey had some Jewish boys,” she said.
“You and your Jewish!” my sister said. “Honestly, Mama!”
My mother closed it out. “You’re a Jewish girl, Miriam. Are you forgetting that?”
Was Miriam forgetting? As far as I could tell, it wasn’t so much forgetting as never thinking about it. “It’s just that it’s so gol-derned silly!” Miriam yelled. Then she yelled, “Gol-derned silly” to the great outdoors until she got tired of saying it.
My mother already had other things on her mind, specifically that Manny Rastow was a nice man and a bachelor and that her sister Hannah was a lovely girl and likewise unmarried. Plans for my Aunt Hannah were beginning to percolate.
The very next day my father placed an order for the St. Louis magic. So eager was he, he made a long-distance call, the kind of telephoning usually reserved for wholesale houses when an order, perhaps for superfrilly, superflouncy dresses needed for an Easter Sunday only two weeks away, had not yet arrived. But my father figured that my mother had been so joyful about the barrel, he should do whatever it took to keep her light shining.
My mother had told Miss Brookie all about the visit to the Rastows, especially—it was important to my mother to call attention to admirable things about Jewish people—how modren Gladys Rastow was. “She makes me feel like a sure enough greenie,” she had said to Miss Brookie.
Miss Brookie hadn’t thought that modren was all that much. “When it boils down to the low gravy,” she had said to my mother, “it takes more than being modren to be a mensch.”
A woman could be or not be a mensch? My mother had been a bit flustered, having never before heard this term applied to a woman. Was it right? she had wondered out loud, and Miss Brookie had said, Foot, all it meant was a person, a person who could be counted on.
CHAPTER 16
A HOUSE AND NEIGHBORS
What with Bronson’s Low-Priced Store fast becoming a fixture in Concordia—and what with the Rastows having a house—all at once my father was agitating for a house of our own. He put it to my mother. “We ain’t poor, so why should we live like we are?”
My mother sent up a wail. “Leave Miss Brookie?”
One thing my mother kept hold of: There was to be no buying, only renting. “It ain’t as if we’re here forever,” she said to my father.
Places to rent in Concordia were scarce. Houses in the “good” section of town were passed down through families, or, if not, were bought, not rented.
Carrie MacAllister took my mother to see a house that was on the rental market. It had been built six years earlier by two men who had come from Memphis to open an antiques shop. Before they moved into it, they had lived at Miss Brookie’s. Miss Brookie had enjoyed them and admired their artistic bent. When the men gave up their shop and left Concordia after about two years, the house had stayed empty.
The house was more than unusual. It was one story (the men had no doubt been caught up in that period’s craze for bungalows) and had yellow stucco exterior walls. Over an open, concrete-floored porch were several brown wooden beams, one of which supported a chain-hung swing. In Mexico it would have fit right in, but not in Concordia.
Mrs. MacAllister was keen to share what she knew about the house. First of all, the men were not “interesting,” as Miss Brookie would have said, but “plain peculiar.” Though they were friendly to one and all, they never dated any of the local girls. Carrie summed them up as “the flat-out oddest people you’d ever meet.”
Like the Bronsons, my mother thought. Still, she agreed with my father that we should take the house.
When my father came home from the lease signing, I was sitting on the front porch swing, across from Miss Brookie. She wanted to know how it went.
“There wasn’t nothing to it,” my father told us. “Herman Tucker directed his teeth at me, said ‘But, but’ a few times, not too loud, and that was that.” He eased into the seat next to me and looked across at her. “Seems those teeth of his are chewing on butter and honey with me lately. Must think I’m making money.”
The late-afternoon sun was in Miss Brookie’s eyes, and she shielded them with her hand to look at my father, exactly as she did in that snapshot of mine. “No doubt,” she said to him.
“So it’s all set.”
Miss Brookie said, “I sure hate it that y’all are going. Still, I know you got to.”
“That’s right, we do.”
Miss Brookie thought my mother needed to make some friends other than “an old maid and a Nigra servant and the Daily Clarion,” meaning Carrie MacAllister. “Anyway,” she said to my father, “y’all aren’t going to Mars.”
I knew we weren’t going to Mars, we were going two blocks away. And Miriam would still be taking piano lessons. “But,” Miss Brookie wanted to know, “who’s going to wake me up mornings with sounds of mortal combat with the harp?”
The house had almost enough room for us. My sister and I were still together in one bedroom, but my brother had his own—one that stuck out from ours like a wart on a finger.
What was supposed to be the dining room, behind French doors opening into the front room, became my parents’ bedroom.
The furnishings my mother chose for the bedrooms were simple and utilitarian. She hung straight marquisette curtains at all the windows, though in the matter of color, Lizzie Maud had prevailed. “You got to get you some color on them,” she said to my mother. “These look like stuff you lays out the dead in.”
My mother, having spent long hours hemming the curtains by hand, went into full protest. “Enough’s enough with the curtains,” she said, and hoped it was the last word.
In the end Lizzie Maud tea-dipped them, giving them a color that was “kindly red and kindly got some sun in it, too.” As she hung them back up, she said to my mother, “The thing is, if y’all got to leave us, we wants to be proud of y’all, don’t you know.”
All the furniture in the minuscule front room was newly purchased. A gray mohair sofa and two matching easy chairs sat cheek by jowl in front of the red-brick fireplace. With their identical curving backs and rotund arms, they had the look of a well-fed family having a cozy chat. An iron floor lamp was behind the couch, and, at the side of each chair, a smoking stand.
In the space next to the fireplace sat a cabinet with a windup phonograph, which had been liberated from storage in Miss Brookie’s basement. On the long wall were two windows facing the street, both curtained with lengths of white lace, with which Lizzie Maud had no quarrel.
Positioned squarely in the middle of the fireplace mantel, in a blackish-brown tortoiseshell frame, was the portrait of my mother’s family—a studio photograph flanked by a vase of wax lilies of the valley and the nine-branched menorah for Hanukkah, which had come with the family all the way from New York.
There was one other chair in the f
ront room: a way-too-big bentwood rocker Miss Brookie had brought down from her attic and sent around. There was only one remaining space—the doorway of the little square central hall, which housed the formidable presence that was the space heater—and a route had to be planned for going around it. But since Miss Brookie had sent the chair, we planned it.
Joey’s room was very private, perhaps because of the way it related to the house or perhaps because of its modest dimensions, which allowed accommodations for only a narrow bed and a skinny chest of drawers. We had taken out the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Since, according to Carrie MacAllister, the men had gardened and put things up, we’d assumed the room had been used as a pantry. At any rate, its ceiling was so low that T, who was undergoing a growth spurt, could barely stand up. Still, Joey’s erector and chess sets fit nicely under the bed, and the books sent by Uncle Philip were in reach on the slim shelf above.
With the dining room in service as my parents’ bedroom, it fell to the breakfast nook—a table and benches tucked into a little alcove in the kitchen (a sure sign of modernity, according to my mother)—to serve for eating.
The kitchen was remarkable only because the sink had not a pump but a spigot. Otherwise, it was the usual: a dominating coal stove; two tables, both wooden—one on tall legs next to the sink and the other an all-purpose one in the middle of the room; and an icebox on the minute screened back porch.
My mother’s most favored thing in the kitchen may have been the coal scuttle, a black metal open-spouted pail for bringing in coal from the shed attached to the back of the house. It spoke to my mother of America’s wonders. In Russia, coal, treasured like gemstones, had been brought in piece by piece, in hands. And here my mother had coal in great heaps, could fill the scuttle to overflowing, use it as extravagantly as she chose. Not that she ever would, but the choice was there.
The neighbors immediately came to call. They came in all manner of attire, some in gingham “wash dresses” with gardening sunbonnets still in place, some gotten up as if for church. Each came bearing a gift—a pie or baked apples or a few jars of home-put-up something from their gardens. (In Concordia things weren’t “canned,” they were “put up.”) One, a young bride from across the street, placed into my mother’s hands a slice of country ham wrapped in newspaper.
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