As to what Jack Landau looked like, he had black curly hair “like Joey’s.” (We’ve often thought that Joey’s hair may have been one thing that tipped Miss Brookie off that first day that we were Jewish.) And as she would have it, he was the “perfect image” of the David of Michelangelo. Yes, Miss Brookie could have romantic dreams, too.
But what could Miriam do about her plight? Miss Brookie’s advice—and this was also surprising from one so independent—was that if Miriam were older, she could follow her heart’s “yearning.” But Miriam was so young, too young to make a decision that might deprive her of her family. “You don’t want to get yourself into that wicked fix,” she said to her.
But, I remember thinking at the time, Miss Brookie had been older; and this was apparently on Miss Brookie’s mind as well. “You could say I deprived myself,” she said. “I often think what a ninny I was.”
Miriam wasn’t interested in being told she was too young. She wanted to be told that everything was my mother’s fault. If my mother would only understand! Couldn’t Miss Brookie do something with her?
Miss Brookie said no, she couldn’t. “Your mama’s come a long way, Miriam, but this is one threshold she won’t allow herself to cross. And no amount of yawping from me is going to change that.”
Push was coming to shove. For my mother this last go-round with Miriam was also the last straw. It was time to leave. She started her campaign slowly, as my father had done when he was trying to get my mother to leave New York. That night when she spoke to him, it was only about Miriam wanting to go to Knoxville.
My father asked what Miriam was going to Knoxville for.
“To see T, of course,” my mother answered him.
“So? So she’ll give him our regards.”
My mother blazed. “She’s going out of town to see the boy she’s in love with and you say ‘give him our regards’? And who is she in love with? A shaigetz, that’s who!”
My father waved a hand as if to swat away an idea that had no right to be in the same room with sane people. “Are you trying to tell me them two babies are in love?”
“What else am I trying to tell you?” my mother answered. “And Miriam’s no baby!”
My father continued to scoff: “Tell her it’s enough already with T,” he said to my mother. “Tell her she should have more than one boyfriend.”
And who would another boyfriend be, if my mother could ask. “It could only be another shaigetz,” she answered my father, “or ain’t you noticed there are no Jewish boys in Concordia?”
My father was not really in the dark; he knew what my mother was up to, and that she had thrown down the challenge. So he said, “Aha, so now we finally at last get to the point.”
The point was, of course, that my father was being called upon to make a decision: whether we would live on in Jew-less Concordia or move to Jew-full New York. Push had come to shove. He could no longer keep the problem in it-will-never-happen land.
He tried to shake my mother’s determination by reminding her of what Miss Brookie had said about the azalea that had suddenly appeared in my mother’s garden. “If we leave,” he said to her, “we’ll be like the little azaly. We’ll be volunteers. And turning up our toes, like Miss Brookie said.”
“So we’ll turn up,” my mother answered him.
My father wanted time to think it over. Did my mother expect him to just “pucker up the lips” and blow a kiss goodbye?
If in New York my mother had lain in bed and pondered going to the South, my father now lay in bed and pondered leaving it. What made it so hard was that my father thought of Concordia as his home.
On the face of it, Concordia as “home” seemed inappropriate, just this side of unthinkable. My father was not an old-timer, much less a native, and he was a member of almost every possible minority: a shopkeeper among factory workers and farmers, foreign-born among American-born, a Jew among Gentiles. Even as a white, his majority status was doubtful, for a proper census might have revealed that not whites but Negroes made up Concordia’s majority. So, to face facts, the Democratic party was the only majority membership he held. Still, he asked himself, so where else was more appropriate for him to call home?
The place in which he had been born was certainly not home. There he had come into the world a stranger, and from all signs he had been going to stay one. And though Savannah and Nashville had been promising, his stay in those places had been too short to make a real judgment.
If Concordia was my father’s home, the store was the essential element in making it so. In twelve years Bronson’s Low-Priced Store had become so much a part of First Street that it was hard for people to remember when it hadn’t been there. Its success had given my father confidence, and on at least one (memorable) occasion he’d used it to help out the town. So, he figured, if Concordia needed him, and he needed Concordia, why not call it home?
My father guarded against sentimentalizing Concordia, going “too easy” on it, as he said. He reminded himself that it was not a place of uniformly soft hearts and warm spirits, a place where the inhabitants were partial to Jews. He wasn’t a fool; he knew Concordia wasn’t that way. But the way it was was okay by him. And why not? Having in Russia been tormented, chased, and attacked by Cossacks, having in New York been insulted and ignored, whatever maltreatment he had endured in Concordia was minor league. The Ku Klux Klan? Their threats had not materialized, though my father did not kid himself. “It wasn’t because they loved me so much,” he would say. No, it was more that having experienced a Jew store, they were now convinced that having one in Concordia was a good thing.
He did not have to ponder long whether Miriam and I thought of Concordia as home. That was a given.
But my mother, my mother. My mother had bent but never truly bowed to the idea that Concordia was home. She could not comply when my father used to say, “Know when you’re happy and the rest is easy.” It was good and useful advice, but given as my mother was to standing on one foot and then the other, she never knew if she was happy or not. There was always something missing, something that if she only had it, her life would be complete.
Beginning at the beginning—with Miss Brookie—my father thought of all the Concordians who had helped us, wished us well, wanted to be our friends, and he wondered if my mother could leave them as easily as she imagined. And the neighbors? Why, in this, the summer season, their yards were dense with growing things that were the very progenitors of my mother’s growing things.
All in all, discounting some occasional unpleasantnesses (and where was that place so dedicated to providing the milk of human kindness that the milk was ever-protected against turning sour?) and my mother’s uncertainties, my father concluded with some confidence that Concordia had brought more than a modicum of contentment to the Bronsons.
And so it followed that one morning as my father lay in bed thinking these things, so cooled was he by the overhanging trees in the side yard, so delighted by the fragrance of what he called “Mama’s Abie’s Irish Rose bushes,” a euphoria overtook him. What would be so wrong, he asked himself, if we brought Gentiles into the family? Ask my mother, point blank, why Miriam should not marry T? What would be so wrong?
Oy, with my mother, what would be so right? She would say, “That’s your answer? That’s what you’ll say to your daughters? That it’s all right to marry a shaigetz?”
Well, my father wondered, was it all right, really all right for us to marry a shaigetz? In facing the possibility—no, the probability—that if we stayed in Concordia, Miriam and I would do just this, he had to face what would happen if a Concordia boy brought home the news that he wanted to marry one of the Bronson girls. Accept us though Concordia did, call me a Concordian as it would, my father knew it was with a gingerliness, a reservation. In their eyes we were different in a way important to them, and Miriam and I would doubtless be thought not quite right for their sons. (Still, it could be said that we had gone a long way toward convincing them tha
t Jews were not sent from the devil.)
On our side, if we married local boys, my father envisioned something worse: my mother avoiding us. Maybe there would be, with the birth of a grandchild, an uneasy reconciliation. What was the good of this? As my father saw it, there was not much good in it at all.
And if we stayed and tried hard to turn up some Jewish boys? In later years my father used to say that in this particular scenario, he pictured us scouting around in a couple of Tennessee counties, whacking at bushes, climbing trees, peering through binoculars, in which case we might flush out one or two (not Sheldon Rastow, nobody would have tried to flush out that pest Sheldon Rastow), but even my mother would have thought it unfair to have such a small pool to choose from.
And the “lists,” those famous lists my father knew from the Savannah days, which cataloged all the Jewish eligibles for miles around? Where were they when we needed them most? They had thus far not come to our little dot on the map and showed no promise of doing so. Perhaps the compilers of the lists were not as interested in attracting girls as boys, and it was true that though most any Jewish boy was on the list, faraway Jewish girls were there only if they came from wealthy families. And a wealthy family we were not.
Send us to New York? My father himself scotched that idea. We live in New York while he and my mother stayed on in Concordia? The family divided like that? Like what happened with Joey? Oy, whenever he thought this, he always asked himself, What could compare to a family being together?
Still, the notion of dwelling in a place with a heart as hard as iron and a spirit as cold as ice, oy! And with the Depression holding everything in its grip, what, my father wondered, would he do in New York? Especially what would he do if he could not sell the store, which he saw as likely? Again he did not kid himself. Sale or no sale, my mother knew as well as he that we could still make it: What with the money that was still in the bank, what with the factory continuing to pay back (if only in small amounts), we could live out the Depression for a few years without my father joining a breadline or—almost as despised a thought—clerking for somebody else, if, as was doubtful, such a job could be found. Since in these days a little money went a long way, and my mother was skilled in making money go as long a way as possible, the family would survive.
And if the store by some miracle was sold? Well, my father figured, in that case there was a possibility of getting something in New York. It wasn’t out of the question. During the Depression, people were willing to deal down, down, down. “Down to where they paid you to take it off their hands,” my father used to say.
He saw what this decision must be: If my mother couldn’t yield, he could. We would abandon Concordia, abandon the store. So on the last morning of contemplation, and with the bedroom no longer cool and fragrant but sticky hot and musty, my father turned to my mother in bed beside him and said, “So you want to try some gardening in New York? So we’ll go there and see.”
It was left to my father to break the news to Miriam. “She’ll take it better from you,” my mother said to him. “From me she’ll be like a wild animal.”
She didn’t take it very well from my father either. “What do you mean moving to New York?” she asked him, eyes dark.
“I mean moving to New York,” my father answered her.
Miriam’s response was to fling herself at my father’s feet. “Take it back, Papa!” she cried, her toes kicking against the floor. “You can’t mean it! We can’t move, we can’t!”
Though he was far from calm himself, my father tried to calm Miriam. He looked down and spoke to the back of her head. “Sweetheart,” he said to her, “you’ll see. It might be a hard fit at first, but we’ll use a nice little slipper spoon and you’ll slip in easy.”
“I don’t want to slip in! I want to stay here!” Miriam screamed. “You can’t take me away!”
“We have to go,” my father said to her.
“But why? Why? Just tell me why, that’s all I ask!”
Of course it was not all she asked, and the answer would not satisfy her. And my father’s answer—that we couldn’t afford to take risks—did not. “But you’re always taking risks, Papa!” she cried. “You’re not afraid of anything.”
To which my father said, as if to himself, “And that’s what you think.”
On the floor Miriam lay hoping she was having a nightmare. And like my father, she had idea after idea: We would go and she’d stay alone in the house; she’d stay with a neighbor; with one of her friends. She’d stay with Miss Brookie.
My father wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t listen. And when he had finally had enough, he reached down and dragged her to her feet. To my surprise he was very angry. My father? Angry with Miriam? He was never angry with Miriam.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said to her. “Enough to last me a lifetime. It’s time for you to realize you’re a member of this family and you’ll do as we tell you.”
And Miriam, perhaps as surprised as I was, said no more.
Of course, I didn’t much want to go either. The next year I was destined for the big school (for grades five through twelve), and I had a lot of plans. I had already been thinking ahead to college and had made no secret of it. The teachers, no doubt excited by my enthusiasm for college, gave me special attention. Miss Nonie, the adviser for the Annual, had told me she would be “tickled” to have me work on it, and I was definitely looking forward to that. And what would happen to T-Dog? To Willy? To everything?
How to leave? A going-out-of-business sale? My father dreaded the thought. There would have to be an advertisement in the paper and signs plastered on the store windows. My father shrank from this vision. What kind of thanks was that for a store that did by us so good?
It didn’t occur to my father to call on his good luck. He had been thinking lately that his good luck must have grown old and feeble and gone into retirement. Still, the store was saved from humiliation by something, because it turned out that a buyer was not as unlikely as my father had thought: Out of the blue the One-Stop people came by one day and made an offer.
On that day my father came home in the late afternoon and sat down full of weight on the divan. He sat inspecting his hands in the way Manny had done on that last day with Aunt Hannah. “All right,” he said.
“What’s all right?” my mother asked him.
“Nothing is.”
“So what are you talking?”
He was “talking” that One-Stop representatives were looking to expand from Kentucky into Tennessee and had come into the store and made him an offer, and he had accepted. My father said, “They got their teeth all set to gobble us up.” Glad as he was not to be forced to have a going-out-of-business sale, it was the only thing he was glad about. The moment of truth had arrived.
My mother was stunned. “Expanding in these times?” she asked my father.
I knew that even though President Hoover had been insisting that prosperity was “just around the corner,” my father always said, “A lot he knows about it.” But now with President Roosevelt newly elected, I wondered if maybe the Depresssion had already started to go away.
No, my father said, it was just a new concept in business that enabled the One-Stop to expand. One-Stop was a chain, like Woolworth’s. “With so many stores to stock,” he explained, “they can buy cheaper.” He didn’t want to go into it any further. He saw chains as the new way of doing business, and not his way at all.
It was not too long before the Sentinel had the story:
MERCHANT TO LEAVE CONCORDIA
Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Bronson of Fifth Street, proprietors of Bronson’s Low-Priced Store on First Street, have announced their intention to leave Concordia and to return to their home in New York City. According to Mr. Bronson, the move will be within the next month.
The Bronson family have been residents of Concordia since 1920, having come here from Nashville, where they had gone after arriving in New York City from their native Russia. They have operated a su
ccessful business here since that time.
It was a very long article, pointing out all the details of our lives in Concordia: my father’s role in the saving of the shoe factory, my mother’s standing up for Miss Brookie, Joey’s success in school, even Miriam’s withdrawal from the piano competition, which, it said, was due to “an untimely accident.” And, it added, “Stella Ruth, the youngest, is a native of Concordia, having been born in our town in 1922.” It ended with, “The Bronsons leave many friends in Concordia. The Sentinel wishes them well.”
My father cut out the item and tucked it into his wallet.
The buzzing was all over town: “Did you hear tell of the Bronsons? They’re leaving! Hellfire, just picking up and high-tailing it out of here! Lord, lord!” People called at the store. One old farmer told my father that he didn’t sleep “a lick” all night. “What’s a fact is we was beginning to think of y’all as kin,” he said.
Even if this wasn’t strictly the truth, my father thought it took something for the old man to say it. He thanked him, and said, now easy with Southernisms, “And for our part we’ll carry a heap of Concordia away with us.”
Those closest to us wanted to blame somebody, so they blamed my mother, and of course they were mostly right. T came to the house, Erv along. Miriam was not at home. My mother and I were packing that day, and Miriam was taking no part in the packing, not even her own.
We were in the front room, my mother and I wrapping things in newspaper, stashing them in crates, she impatient and in no mood for argument. T had questions. Did she want to leave? No. Did she have to? Yes. She tried to explain to T in the easiest way. “Look, T,” she said, “don’t you see? Down here we’re like jelly in iced tea. It just don’t go.”
T jumped on what he saw as a flawed premise. Arguing with T had always been difficult, and my mother again found herself being pulled up short and held to reason, by that way of T’s that always reminded me of Joey’s. “There ain’t nothing against jelly in iced tea, Miz Bronson,” T said. And I thought, well, what is there against jelly in iced tea?
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