He didn’t go on with it with Sylvan MacAllister. He addressed himself instead to Carrie. “Like you said, Mrs. Mac, there was a lot in that picture to think about.”
In June of that year my mother had a plan for a longer excursion. Where it would take us was to New York, to Aunt Hannah’s wedding. If I was ecstatic, she was surprisingly not. She was in a dither about her garden. Here it was the middle of the gardening season, everything planted and growing, and where would she be when it came time to pick and put up? In New York, that’s where.
I didn’t care about my mother’s garden; I cared about finally getting to go to New York, to see all the relatives, to experience New York. I could think only Please, Mama, please!
And, of course, my mother decided she couldn’t not go. My father said he was not going, and “that’s that,” and when my mother said she definitely wanted Miriam to go with us, Miriam just as definitely wanted not to. T was going back to school in the fall, and Miriam wanted to be with him as much as she could.
My mother sighed, T again, and then a letter came to Miriam from Aunt Hannah asking Miriam to be there. It was a plea Miriam couldn’t refuse.
Aunt Hannah was getting married to Ezra Goldstein, the son of the furrier just moved in around the corner from my grandparents’ apartment. Officially Ezra was a “cutter” in his father’s shop, but in truth he was only an unskilled “nailer.” What he did was nail the customer’s selected skins to the boards on the basement wall and trace out the pattern.
He and Aunt Hannah had met when his father had stopped her as she walked past their shop window. “Ezzy, come up,” Mr. Goldstein had yelled into the bars of the basement window, according to how Aunt Hannah told the story to us. “I got a girlfriend for you. A real schaineh maidel. If I didn’t have Mama already, I’d marry her myself.”
Soon afterward Ezra had a talk with my grandfather, asked him if he could take Hannah out, and got a yes.
My grandmother had expressed doubts: The boy had no pep. My grandfather’s answer was that Ezra was the son of a boss and the son of a boss didn’t need as much pep as the next one.
After we got to New York and met Ezra, Miriam told my mother, in the contentious mode she had adopted for the visit, that thin, quiet Ezra was certainly nothing to get “all hot and bothered about.”
“I declare,” she said to us, “when I think that Aunt Hannah could have had Manny, I could just weep.”
My mother told her not to mention Manny anymore.
On this visit I met all my relatives and was dazzled by all of them, by all these people who were not dazzled by New York—who accepted casually life way up high in a tall building, who rode the subway as if there was nothing strange about traveling under the ground, who simply raised their voices to be heard over the uproar “downtown.”
We stayed in my grandparents’ apartment, and I made a viewing spot of the fire escape just as Joey had. I didn’t play stickball in the streets, but my cousins had roller skates and my mother bought me some, and we went roller-skating on the sidewalks (we skipped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York?) or in the big asphalt-paved schoolyard. Although there were sidewalks in Concordia, they were narrow and had grass growing through the cracks.
The wedding was big, attended as it was by the whole of the New York family plus the contingent that had defected to Boston. A little orchestra played, everybody danced, and my Uncle Meyer, red-faced with drink, danced with me and all the other children. All the women said that at these affairs he always drank too much so he could forget he had an Austrian-Jewish wife who looked down on Russian Jews, that he had a fat son (my cousin Morty) who was never interested in anything he couldn’t eat—a gruber yung, they called him—or that he was a door-to-door cemetery plot salesman; and maybe that was true.
After the newlyweds left, to honeymoon in the Catskills, we stayed on in my grandparents’ apartment, Miriam still prickly as a sandspur.
“So what’s wrong with your daughter?” Aunt Sadie asked my mother. “She don’t like being with the family?”
My mother tried to think of something in a hurry. “No, what it is, is she’s homesick.” Would this go down?
It wouldn’t. “Homesick for what? For that hillybilly place? That’s a place to be homesick for?”
Joey tried to entertain Miriam by taking us to the downtown department stores, and our cousin Eddie worked especially hard, only to have his efforts fail every time. He finally asked her, “What’s wrong with you anyway?”
And Miriam answered him, “I don’t care to discuss it.”
“Why not?” Eddie considered Miriam for a long moment and snapped his fingers. “I got it. I know what it is. You got a boyfriend and he’s down there and you’re up here.”
Miriam did a flounce. “So?”
“So you miss your boyfriend, that’s all.”
“We don’t call them boyfriends, “Miriam said, summoning hauteur. “We call them beaus.”
“Well, anyway, you got one, right?”
“Maybe I do.”
Eddie opened his eyes wide. “You got a Gentile boyfriend? A shaigetz?”
Miriam and Eddie exchanged glares as the word hung in the air.
If Aunt Sadie was disdainful that Miriam actually wanted to go back, she was thunderstruck when my mother announced she was ready to go as well. “Your husband can’t make out without you?” she asked my mother.
“You know he ain’t no helpless man. It ain’t him only.”
“So what is it?”
My mother hesitated. Her answer would go over with Aunt Sadie like a plate of hog jowls. She steeled herself. “It’s my garden, Sadie. I hate to think how it must be. Nothing picked, everything overgrown.”
“A garden ain’t family,” Aunt Sadie said to her.
“No, it ain’t. But try to understand,” my mother answered, herself not totally understanding. All she knew for certain was that her garden needed her and that she needed it. “You ain’t never had a garden, Sadie, so you can’t know.”
When we came home, my father asked, “So why are you home so soon? You missed me so much?”
My mother laughed. “You and my garden. Don’t ask me which comes first. You at least I knew would be all right. But oy, my garden!”
My father winked at me. “Well, what do you expect? You left it to run itself. What can it be but terrible?”
“I hate to take a look.”
My father’s advice was that when there was something to do that you didn’t want to, best to do it right away and get it over with. “So why not go out now and take a look?” he asked my mother.
She held back. My father gave her a push. My mother tried not to look as we went out the back door and into the yard.
Now I knew the reason for my father’s wink: There was nothing rotting, nothing in ruins, just plants looking as they should look after the season—stripped clean.
And when we got back on the porch, my mother saw the jars—the shelves and shelves of jars and jars.
It was the neighbors, my father explained. “They came over and picked the place bare.”
Then they had put everything up. “Some hard job they gave themselves,” my mother said. “Oy, such a hard job.” And no, nobody, she said, could have done anything nicer.
And here we have an “upsy” in my mother’s “upsy-downsies” with Concordia, when my mother first allowed the word home to take a place in her thoughts. And what this meant was that if the Miriam-and-T thing hadn’t been fluttering around, “temporary” would be hanging on for dear life.
CHAPTER 25
CONCORDIA’S SAVIOR
In the fall of that year, 1929, the business picture was, as usual, exceedingly bright. My father had no significant debts, the Nashville men and my grandfather having been paid off long ago. My father was feeling himself at last to be a businessman of consequence.
And it was at this particular time, at this blissful time, that it happened. On a day when my father felt confide
nt—why should he doubt it?—that business would proceed in a routinely perfect way, the black hole that had, unbeknownst to him, been out there all the time opened up and all but swallowed him.
On that day my father had picked up the paper before he went off to the store, feeling that the usual cursory glance at the morning’s news would be sufficient. What could the paper tell him except that there was nothing to worry about, that people had faith in business, that stocks were rising? Did he need the paper to tell him what he knew from his own little Jew store?
He therefore paid scant attention to the headline before him as he sat with the paper on this particular Wednesday morning. But something caught at him. So before proceeding elsewhere in the paper, he stopped, went back to the headline, and read it again. When he did, when he could finally focus fully, what the headline was telling him was that the stock market had crashed.
It almost sent him from his chair. If the headline had said that a meteor was heading for earth, it would have been no more of a blow. His senses reeled, and when they at last slowed down, the questions came. How much exactly did it have to do with him? He tried on a couple of things. As one who never played the market, was it possible he was immune to a market failure? Or maybe a countrywide catastrophe would take a long time to reach a little town like Concordia?
Both fantasies had brief lives. In what seemed just weeks the factory men showed up with promissory notes in their hands. They said the shoe factory had run out of money.
All night every night my father’s eyes stayed open—his eyelids seemed to be held fast by thumbtacks—while he worried about what would be. (The only sure thing he had in his head was that my mother must not know the scope of the trouble.) It stayed with him all day as well. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he would suddenly bolt out of the store, to go see what the other stores were doing, to just walk up and down First Street, to talk to somebody. He decided one day to go out and have a talk with Roscoe Pinder. My father had resisted having any real conversation with Pinder since the day my mother and I had gone out to the factory, but now that episode seemed very small potatoes indeed.
He found the factory owner at the desk in his little office. The dish used as an ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. Pinder had always been spare, but, as my father liked to say, on this day he had the look of a yardstick.
“Yeah, I want to talk, too,” Pinder said. “Maybe not to you in particular, Bronson.”
My father took no offense: The man was hurting. “We’re all in this together,” my father said to him. “So talk, I’ll listen.”
My father recalled Pinder opening up with, “Hellfire, Bronson, did you come all this way just to aggravate me? Are you telling me my factory and your little Jew store have the same stake in this?”
My father brought out an old saying: “Look, Mr. Pinder, if there’s a fire at your neighbor’s big house, ain’t your little one also in danger?”
Pinder shrugged, as if it didn’t really matter. The problem was, he finally said, that orders had just slacked off. “You’d think nobody was wearing shoes no more.” He must have known that his problem wasn’t the competition from up North, but he seemed not to be able to resist saying to my father, “You and your goddamned Yankees.”
Being called a “Yankee,” with or without the prefatory “goddamned,” always made my father feel misunderstood. Who? Him? A Yankee? Who said so?
If my father had come out to give him sympathy, Pinder said, he should save it until he had heard it all: There was a matter of a forty-five-thousand-dollar note coming due in the next week.
My father was dumbfounded. “Forty-five thousand! My God! An old customer like you? They absolutely positively got to treat you right! They got to give you at least an extension!”
Pinder said to tell that to that “son of a bitch,” the president of the bank, Ernest Fetzer, who appeared to have another way of looking at the problem. “He says the whole economy is a piece of shit and he ain’t runnin’ a shithouse.” My father knew little about Ernest Fetzer. He had only noticed that nobody ever called him “Ernie.”
My father was puzzled. Even if what Pinder said was so, what good would it do Fetzer to foreclose? Why would anybody want to take over the building?
Pinder had a surprise answer: If Fetzer had to take back the building, it wouldn’t “piss off that fox atall.” What he “suspicioned” was that Fetzer had somebody eager to move in, somebody who hadn’t felt the Depression and maybe never would.
And who might that be?
Well, there was talk of the government looking for a place. For a chemical plant. For making chemicals for war. “But don’t get your hopes up, Bronson,” Pinder said. “Chemical plants don’t hire big. All you get from them is a big smell.”
But would that bother Ernest Fetzer? Not according to Pinder. “Fetzer wouldn’t care a monkey’s patootie if the town turned into one big stink,” he said to my father. He gave it a thought. “No sir, he’ll be downright pleased if I can’t meet the note.”
My father said that at this point Pinder cupped his hand to his ear and said, “You hear that, Bronson? That sound is from a piece of machinery that I had specially made at the tooling plant, that I stood a man behind and taught how to use, that I kept tiptop.” How did my father think it felt to know he was about to lose all that?
And the men. They had learned a trade; they took pride in being skilled workers. “What about them? Lord knows I got good men here. The men had apparently said they would tough it out. But,” Pinder said, “they’re depending on me to make things right… . Lord, the whole town’s depending on me.”
My father felt deeply for the man. That such a thing could happen, that what a man had built up for so many years should come to nothing. What was needed was some hope. My father recognized the moment as one in which a plan must be devised, and he set himself to devising one. And then, ah, he had it.
Pinder, however, not only didn’t want to listen, he didn’t even want my father to be there. And who could blame him? My father didn’t want to be there either. What he wanted was for something to pick him up and deposit him in the middle of the store on an ordinary day, everybody busy with customers or, if it was a slack time, everybody joking. His eyes suddenly filled with tears. Oy, he said, when the heart is full, the eyes overflow. Another saying in a day made for sayings. “Mr. Pinder,” he said, and now he said it firmly, “I want you should listen to me.”
Pinder, my father used to say, was like a man who had been running for miles and could just barely manage to stay alive. “Okay, I’m listening,” he said finally.
My father’s idea was for a meeting.
“I’ve had meetings,” Pinder answered him.
Yes, he no doubt had had many meetings, but none like the one my father had in mind. My father had in mind a town meeting. “We’ll invite everybody. The whole town,” he said, and waited for a reaction.
None was forthcoming. My father began to sell, hard. “It’ll work, Mr. Pinder. We’ll turn them out like family at a reunion.”
Pinder finally reacted: He gave a grunt. And then he said, “Or like family gathering for the viewing. Or more likely out of pure morbid curiosity, to see how I’m bearing up under the passing.”
He asked my father if he had a miracle up his sleeve. “You think you’re Abraham? You fixing to talk to God?”
My father certainly wasn’t thinking of talking to God. Could he guarantee Pinder the money? Of course not. But what he could guarantee was that he could sell the town on the idea that if they wanted the factory to stay open, they had to at least come to a meeting.
Pinder continued to resist. How could a town meeting help? He needed money, and he needed it fast.
To which my father said, “Well, I always brag about being a born sal-es-man, Mr. Pinder, and this is one time where I got to put tokhes ahfen tish.”
My father said Pinder’s eyebrows went up, so he explained, “It means I got to put my rear end on the
table.”
And when Pinder’s eyebrows stayed up, he said, “I got to put up or shut up.”
When my father came home from his talk with Pinder, it was at last time to fill my mother in. “So what do you think, Reba?” he asked her.
My mother went wide-eyed. The factory was in trouble? Oy, and oyoyoy. “So tell me what you’re telling me,” she said to my father.
It was no time for dissembling. “Trouble, trouble, trouble in spades,” my father answered her. Trouble in spades was an old pinochle term meaning that when spades are trump, all gains or losses are doubled.
“No need to get excited,” my father told my mother, while his own heart bumped away in his chest. He tried to infuse his words with reassurance: The factory was not going to close, if they did the right thing, which, he said—albeit with only a little conviction—was to have a town meeting.
My mother wanted to know if Roscoe Pinder had agreed to it, and my father had to say, “Not ‘agreed’ exactly. Just didn’t say no.”
On that day my mother recalled a saying, too: “He’s maybe like a drowning man grabbing even for the point of a sword,” she said to my father, and felt a chill as she said it.
My father was full of assurances and guarantees, too full. When he was like this, my mother knew, it usually meant he was only hoping for the best. So she cried, “Wait! Wait!”
“Tem-po-rary” had gotten off the ropes and was staging a comeback. It all at once seemed very logical to my mother: If there was a perfect time to leave Concordia, it was now. There was still money in the bank, and, though she didn’t mention this to my father, we could go before Miriam and T got anything really serious into their heads. “Look at it this way,” she said, “we came in with a letter and a wagon and we could go out comfortable. Ain’t that something to think about?”
“No,” was my father’s prompt answer. No, we had to help out. “We can’t just go and make believe we was never here.”
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