Jew Store

by Suberman ,Stella

  I was delighted. Deerfoot seemed to me ideal for a courtship or, for that matter, for any kind of good time. In summer it served as our spot for picnicking and swimming, although it had ragged gray trunks of trees sticking out of it, reminders that Deerfoot had once long ago been not a lake but a forest.

  Deerfoot was good in winter, too. It was shallow and froze fast, perfect for ice-skating. If you fell in, you couldn’t fall too deep, and lots of people were there to pull you out.

  I pictured Manny and Aunt Hannah driving around the lake, walking on the ice close to shore, holding hands.

  They were going to eat in the restaurant at Deerfoot. “Just the three of us,” Manny said to Aunt Hannah.

  Me? My heart was beating fast.

  Sadly, the three turned out to be Aunt Hannah, Manny, and a widemouth bass. Bass, along with the crappies, flourished in Deerfoot. “Only a widemouth different than the ones in the house, believe me,” Manny said.

  Gladys Rastow came charging out, Irving and Delores and Sheldon behind. She eyed the blanket, as if the function it was performing was not only unauthorized but illegal. She snatched it up. “We’ve got to go,” she said to Manny.

  Manny got up slowly. He bent down over Aunt Hannah. His lips were right on her ear. “Don’t forget next Sunday.”

  Aunt Hannah nodded, and Gladys watched. And so did my mother. And so did Aunt Sadie. Well, so did everybody.

  Aunt Sadie spilled out to my mother, my mother used to say, like an open fire hydrant. Gladys Rastow seemed to be her main target. “I wouldn’t wish that sister-in-law on my worst enemy, never mind my own flesh and blood. Oy, what a yenta.” (I always thought Gladys would rather have been called a yokel than a yenta.)

  My mother was trying to keep her plan on track. “What are you making such a fuss? Nobody’s marrying Gladys.”

  “And in that little Southern town yet,” Aunt Sadie said.

  “I’m in a little Southern town and I’m still alive,” my mother answered her. “Things ain’t perfect, but—”

  Aunt Sadie was ready. “But you ain’t permanent. That makes the difference, right?”

  On Sunday Aunt Hannah awoke in a fever of excitement that heightened as the morning went on. She dressed right after breakfast, even to her green wool tam, stationed herself in the front room, and dashed back and forth to the window. “I could have sworn I heard a buggy,” she’d say. She’d sit down again, get up, sit down. As she darted about, the scallops around the hem of her white wool dress caught the light like newly minted silver coins. She looked beautiful.

  Around eleven Manny clip-clopped up and in a quick jump was out of the buggy. Aunt Hannah ran back to her chair and sat down, jamming the tam on her head, firmly, as if it were a device to keep her from jumping up again. Miriam opened the door.

  In came Manny, calling out greetings, dashing from one to the other of us, being playful as usual, seizing a handful of Joey’s curls, bowing to Miriam while he kissed her hand and clicked his heels, pinching my freckles and pretending to hold them in his fist. Aunt Sadie watched from the kitchen doorway.

  Manny wondered if Aunt Hannah was going to be warm enough. “Anyways, we got the blanket in the buggy, that big important blanket,” he said, smiling at me as if I was a co-conspirator. “So let’s go.”

  Aunt Sadie came walking in. “Don’t be so quick, Mr. Buggy Ride. She forgot something.” She handed Aunt Hannah a brown paper sack. “This is for you while Mr. Sidalia, Kentucky, is eating in his restaurant.” Aunt Sadie referred to Manny only by a made-up name or “he,” as if using his real name would make him a real person. “I don’t want you should get sick while I’m in charge.”

  When Aunt Hannah looked stricken, my father took the sack from her hands. “She won’t need this,” he said, handing it back to Aunt Sadie. “They’re not in business to make people sick.”

  Manny grabbed up Aunt Hannah’s coat, and then he took her hand, and pulled her out the door. On the porch they stood for a second while Manny put her into her coat, and then they both laughed and ran to the buggy.

  When Aunt Hannah came in, if she was sick, it was more like lovesick. Manny plucked off her tam, and her hair flicked up from the dry air, shooting out a little, as if from the sheer joy of liberation. He unwound her scarf, and told something of how the day had gone, looking all the while into Aunt Hannah’s face. Aunt Hannah had apparently done a bit of the driving, and Manny said, “This girl with the reins in her hands—some sight.”

  “A city girl don’t know from horses,” Aunt Sadie countered promptly.

  Manny said he was a city boy and certainly knew from horses. On his wagon, he said, there had been two horses and six legs: “Him with his four and me with my two.”

  Aunt Sadie grabbed the scarf and tam from Manny’s hands. “So thanks for the buggy ride. Hannah enjoyed.”

  Manny laughed. “Looks like I’m saying goodbye.” He touched Aunt Hannah on the arm, his fingers lingering. “I’ll be seeing you. Soon.”

  Aunt Hannah nodded. “Yes, Manny. Soon.” After Manny left, she stayed looking out the window for long minutes.

  “See?” Aunt Sadie muttered. “Now we got some job to do!”

  Aunt Hannah may not have even heard. She had grabbed up the tam and scarf, plunked the tam on Miriam’s head, and flung the scarf around her own shoulders. In a moment she was pulling Miriam around the room in a movement half dance, half ring-around-the-rosy.

  Aunt Hannah’s eyes squeezed shut, then flew open. She took Miriam close in her arms. “Oh, baby girl, you should have been there! Everything so quiet! And the snow white, white, white!”

  She swung Miriam into a twirl, and Joey began singing a current tune, one that might have been written for the occasion, promoting as it did buggy riding over automobiling: No smell of gasoline, just an old-fashioned team,” it went, and further told of the “wonderful treat to hear the pat of horses’ feet.” As Joey caroled, my father clapped along.

  I could resist no longer. I wedged myself between Aunt Hannah and Miriam and started twirling with Miriam. Then Aunt Hannah grabbed Joey. In a moment she and Joey snatched up my mother and they became a twirling threesome.

  That left my father and Aunt Sadie, but there was not going to be any twirling there.

  Aunt Sadie said to Aunt Hannah, “Sure, go on and dream yourself into a nightmare.”

  Everybody at last stopped dancing, and Aunt Sadie wanted to know where it went from here.

  “Back to the lake, I hope.” Aunt Hannah closed her eyes.

  Aunt Sadie told her to save her jokes. “And for God’s sake, keep your eyes open already.”

  Well, Manny was coming to Concordia tomorrow afternoon.

  “He don’t go to work on Mondays?”

  Well, he did, but he would be taking off early.

  Taking off early? Aunt Sadie smelled something. So what was so important he had to take off early?

  Manny wanted to talk to my father.

  To who? You could see Aunt Sadie feeling insulted.

  My father maintained his calm, perhaps not wanting to get into a competition with Aunt Sadie about who had family authority when. He said the thing to do was to let Manny talk, and if Manny was serious, he’d just tell him to talk with my grandfather in New York. “You think he’s serious?” he asked Aunt Hannah.

  Aunt Hannah said, yes, she thought he was serious.

  If this was harmonious music to my ears, to Aunt Sadie it was discordancy. “Just hold your horses, everybody,” she said. “Hannah ain’t really thought about this thing.”

  Uh-oh.

  Aunt Hannah stared at her. “You got something against Manny?”

  Aunt Sadie took a seat in the nearby chair and leaned close. “It ain’t him,” she said, in a lowered voice, as if they might hear her in Sidalia. “Though what’s so hot about him, I ain’t sure either.” There were, apparently, plenty of other things to worry about.

  The other things, Aunt Sadie said, “began at the beginning,” when
my mother came to the South. According to Aunt Sadie, perhaps forgetting that it was she who had fought tooth and nail to keep my mother from doing it, my mother had to come. “Her place was with her husband,” Aunt Sadie said to Aunt Hannah. “But you ain’t in that kind of predicament.”

  It was when Aunt Sadie went on to say that Aunt Hannah would meet a nice boy in New York and settle down like “a normal Jewish woman” that Aunt Hannah burst into tears.

  How could Aunt Sadie make my pretty, everybody-loved-her Aunt Hannah cry?

  My father at last opened up. He said that Aunt Sadie did not have the last—or best—word on everything. “Do what you want, Hannah,” he said. “You want Manny, so tell him. You don’t have to do everything Sadie says. Be your own person for once.”

  Could my Aunt Hannah act on what my father had said? No. Defying Sadie was something outside her experience, and she was at this point totally confused. She asked through her tears, “But what’s wrong? Wasn’t this what we all wanted?”

  “Not all of us,” Aunt Sadie answered her. “Only Reba and the rest of the Southerners.”

  My mother was darting from Aunt Sadie to Aunt Hannah. “Wait! Wait! In the morning we’ll be calmer,” she pleaded.

  “You may not be calm,” Aunt Sadie answered her, “but I am. Like a cold potato I’m calm.” She crossed her arms and sat motionless. “There’s things Hannah should think about before Mr. Horse-with-Two-Legs comes back tomorrow.”

  Aunt Sadie looked to my mother. Hadn’t my mother been telling her how her heart ached to see her mother and father, her “Ma and Pa”? Did my mother wish this on her baby sister?

  My mother’s face drew in like a pricked balloon. “Hannah,” she said, “Hovvah-leb. Maybe you should listen. You’re so young, you don’t how it is to live among strangers.”

  “But I’ll have you! Since when are you strangers?”

  There was a long silence while my mother wondered if she could chance it. Could she say, with my father sitting right there, that we wouldn’t be in Concordia forever, that we were temporary? She couldn’t help herself; she said it. And then she asked Aunt Hannah, “And what will you do then?”

  She would have Manny, Aunt Hannah said. “Don’t that make up for everything else?”

  And Aunt Sadie said promptly, “Not everything.” What was Aunt Hannah going to do when she had a family? “Then what?” Aunt Hannah asked her. Then, according to Aunt Sadie, Aunt Hannah would be like my mother, living in a goyish world, not knowing what to do when it was time for her son to become a man.

  It was Joey’s cue to bolt out of the room. And my father’s cue to really get into it. Aunt Sadie had finally said too much. “That is our business, not yours,” my father told her. “So just butt out.” To Aunt Hannah he said, “How can you listen to Sadie and her bogeyman stories?”

  This gave Aunt Hannah a bit of spunk. She raised her chin and said to Aunt Sadie, “I think I can manage.”

  But Aunt Sadie had an ace in the hole, the coup de grace: “Have you figured how you’re going to leave Philip?” she asked Aunt Hannah.

  And, of course, Aunt Hannah cried out, “Philip! Oy, Philip! Don’t say Philip!”

  Aunt Sadie cried right back, in a voice as loud as I had ever heard, “Why shouldn’t I say Philip? I got to say Philip!” Her groans filled the room. “So she thinks she’s found Mr. Happy-Ever-After! A Jewish girl don’t have no business to cut herself away from her family for that! Is she a cripple she has to marry the first man who asks? There are plenty of men looking for wives, believe me! My Izzy can bring them home by the dozens!”

  The thought of the men my Uncle Izzy could bring home by the dozens, the men from the immigrant pool, switched my mother to the other side. My mother said that by this point she was “so much to-ing and from-ing,” she was dizzy. But how could she not speak out when Sadie was comparing such men to Manny? “Sadie, listen!” she cried. “You’ll still see Hannah. You’ll come here! You can come here when you want!”

  Aunt Sadie ceased all motion and sat staring at the opposite wall as if reading a legend written thereon. “No, I ain’t never coming here again,” she intoned.

  “Oh, Sadie!” Aunt Hannah cried, and her sobs once more filled the room.

  My father, perhaps, like me, feeling overwhelmed by all the emotional firepower, agreed with my mother that it should be left for the morning. “And maybe whatever disease Sadie is suffering from,” he said, “will change its mind by then.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Aunt Sadie answered him.

  All through the night the house stayed awake. My mother slipped in and out of her sisters’ room. Toward morning Aunt Sadie came out and bedded down on the bentwood rocker. The crying from Aunt Hannah never stopped. In the morning she emerged from the bedroom silent and pale, stood at the kitchen door, and said, “I hate to be here when he comes.” Then she sat in the breakfast nook and stared at her coffee cup.

  The day passed in silence.

  Finally Manny arrived. He came around six, just as the early darkness was setting in, and was out of his buggy in a great leap. Aunt Hannah went to meet him in the front yard.

  Manny took her hands in his and smiled into her face. As she spoke, the smile faded until it disappeared altogether. In the next moment he had broken away and was striding into the house.

  He sat down on the sofa and shook his head when my mother offered him tea. His dark skin seemed to have gone lighter, though his eyes were darker than ever. No, there would be no playfulness from our playful Manny today. I pushed up against the wall on the other side of the room to distance myself from this stranger.

  Manny finally spoke, to say he was waiting for my father. “I need to talk to Aaron. I got to get put straight,” he said, sitting with his coat on, holding his hat in front of his knees.

  Aunt Hannah sat on the other end of the sofa, silent, tears always just about to spill over.

  My father came home, mad at Sadie, mad at my mother, and having to face Manny. He hooked his coat and hat on the rack. “Well,” he said to Manny. “Well, well.”

  Manny jumped up. No “hello,” no “Nu, so how’s business?,” just bewilderment, asking my father, “What’s all this, Aaron? What’s all this Hannah is telling me?”

  My father had no answers. He had nothing to offer that could possibly comfort. He said, to say something, “Ladies cut off their noses to spite their faces.”

  Manny pushed his face up to my father’s. “It ain’t up to the ladies! It’s up to Hannah. That’s all who it’s up to!”

  My father tried to tell Manny about Hannah, about who Hannah was, but Manny wouldn’t listen. “These sisters of hers have turned her so she don’t know which way is up no more,” he said.

  Manny looked to my mother. “How come you did this thing?” he asked her. “I’m really surprised. I always thought you liked me, Reba.”

  My mother felt a hard blow to her heart. “As much as a brother I liked you!” she cried out to him.

  “So now you don’t like me no more? So now all of a sudden I’m maybe a murderer or a thief?” Manny’s eyes were dark as night. “For God’s sake, so what’s wrong with me?”

  My mother used to say, in one of her most memorable mixed metaphors, that she was reaching in the barrel and finding there not a leg to stand on. What was wrong, she said to Manny, not really believing it, not really disbelieving it, was that she now foresaw no bed of roses for Hannah. “Let it be, Manny,” she said. “I beg you let it be.”

  Manny would not let it be until he had heard again from Hannah. He touched Aunt Hannah on the cheek. “Tell me what you want, Hannah. Don’t be afraid.” He had it right. Aunt Hannah was afraid. Afraid of sister Sadie, afraid of leaving Philip, afraid. Aunt Hannah said she couldn’t leave her family. “It’s not in me,” she said to him.

  Poor Manny. He had had the misfortune to fall in love with a family darling.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BAR MITZVAH QUESTION

  If the Manny and
Hannah story seemed enough misadventure for one day, there were misadventures yet to come.

  After Manny had left, all of us, except for Aunt Hannah, moved into the kitchen. The meal began as a silent one. My father was angry, but as I knew so well, he would not stay that way for long. When my mother was angry, she could persevere, but my father had no fortitude for this. His anger always had only a brief stay, and when it was gone, it was gone.

  He had done his best with Hannah, but he had figured all along that she would not listen to him. Although he thought she was a very foolish girl, a noodle, well, if she preferred something else to Manny, it was up to her. Her reasons were her own. Ah, women, he would have thought, go figure.

  At the table he pretty soon brought out a story from the store, about a customer who had grudgingly allowed Seth to wait on him and ultimately had bought not only the shirt he had come in for but also two ties. “What did I tell you?” my father said. “The man’s a born sal-es-man.” For Seth’s show of enterprise, my father had put him on commission.

  My father had instituted the practice of commissions some time ago. Not only would it give the clerks an extra incentive but would also allow them a share in the store’s prosperity. Vedra Broome was very much in favor and rushed around the store, as my father noted, “going like sixty,” as we said in the days when sixty miles an hour was a blazing speed. The commission added two percent of sales to seven-dollar-a-week wages.

  My father’s offer of conversation went unaccepted. All heads stayed bent over the soup.

  After supper, Joey and Miriam left, and my mother brought over the glasses of tea. For me there was my usual: a small amount of tea and a large dollop of jelly.

  Aunt Sadie gave a look to my mother, left her tea standing, slid out from the nook, and went into the front room. This was all very portentous. It was obvious that my mother wanted to talk, and to talk serious, as she would say, to my father. I scrunched into a back corner.