There were so many of us, we’d travel south in two cars, some of us riding with Daddy and Mommy in Daddy’s car, some with Walter and Henry in a second car. One night as we began one of our migrations back to New York from Richmond, Uncle Henry got drunk and was driving at a hundred miles an hour in his Oldsmobile with me, my sister Judy, and my Uncle Walter inside. “This baby’s a powerhouse!” he roared, stomping the accelerator and flying up Interstate 95 as I watched Daddy’s headlights through the back windshield grow dimmer and dimmer, then disappear altogether. As he barreled up the road laughing, Uncle Walter screamed at him, “Henry, slow down, dammit!” Uncle Henry ignored him for a few more harrowing minutes, finally pulling over at a rest stop. Minutes later Daddy’s car, full of Mommy and the rest of the kids, screeched up behind us. Daddy jumped out of his car so fast his hat flew off.
“Goddammit, Henry!” Walter had to restrain Daddy, and Henry, the boldest of the brothers, backed off and apologized. Daddy was the most respected of the brothers, and anger was a rarity with him. He had a peaceful, strong manner that did not provoke anger or invite fights. We drove back to New York packed in Daddy’s car, while Henry slept peacefully in the back of his own car with Walter driving. Walter offered to take a couple of us with him but Daddy refused. “I had enough of y’all,” he said. Walter shrugged.
I thought my stepfather was odd. The fact that he and Mommy seemed to love one another did not help me think differently. He was nothing like my friends’ parents, who were younger, drove new cars, followed the Mets, talked about civil rights, and foot-raced with us. He had no idea of what the sixties meant, nor did they seem to interest him. His only interests were my grades and church. He came to my church confirmation alone because Mommy could not, dressed to the nines, shirt buttoned to the top, hat creased just so, and sat in the back by himself, paying no attention to the other, younger fathers dressed in bell-bottoms and hip sixties wear. He greeted my Sunday school teacher respectfully, hat in hand, and she smiled at him, impressed by his handsomeness and cool manner. But when she tried to engage him in conversation he seemed uninterested, taking my hand and backing away, his gestures saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” He went to my eldest brother Dennis’s college graduation dressed in his old-timey clothes and walked around the all-black campus of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania beaming, full of so much pride, his family and white wife in tow, as black students and their parents did double takes. I used to look at him and wonder, What is his problem? Doesn’t he know how goofy he looks? but it never seemed to bother him in the least. Race was something he never talked about. To him it was a detail that you stepped over, like a crack in the sidewalk. He was a person who never seemed to worry. “Everything’s gonna be alllllll riiiiight,” he’d say. That was his motto.
Then in 1969 he got a letter from the city of New York telling him to move out of his house in Brooklyn. They were planning to build a low-income-housing high rise there. He was stunned. He had renovated that old brownstone from a shell. It was his refuge, his joy, his hobby. They gave him $13,000 and he was gone. Twenty years later when I moved back to Fort Greene—now immortalized by Spike Lee’s movies, with gentrification pushing poor blacks out and brownstones selling for $350,000—I’d walk by 478 Carlton Avenue and look at the empty lot there. Nothing. A total waste.
When they tore down his house, it was like they ripped out half his arteries. He came to Queens and lived with us, converting a piece of the basement into his old-time headquarters; he squeezed in his antique furniture, his windup record player, and a small refrigerator in which he stored his jars of pig feet and cans of Rheingold beer, but his heart was back in Brooklyn. He’d retired by then—he was seventy-two—but he did odd jobs and worked on heating systems with his brother Walter. One night about three years after he moved in with us, he was staggering around the kitchen, cursing and saying his head hurt, and before I knew it, an ambulance pulled up and they were loading him in. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked Ma. She said nothing, her eyes red-rimmed, denoting deep alarm, as she climbed into the ambulance with his sweater grasped tightly in her fist.
He’d had a stroke. I was fourteen and didn’t know what a stroke was. I thought it was something you got from the sun. For me, the two weeks or so he was in the hospital meant I could hang out with my friends as long and as late as I wanted to, and I avoided going to see him until Mommy forced me to. I went with my sister Kathy, and when we walked into his hospital room, it was a brutal shock. He was laid out in hospital white. His face was slightly twisted. He could not talk. He could not move his right arm or right side. His hand, a strong, brown, veined hand that I’d seen gripping wrenches and tools and pipe fittings hundreds of times, was nearly limp, covered with IV gauze and connected to an IV. Mommy sat by him in silence, her face ashen. Kathy, who was always his favorite, walked into the room, saw him, and backed away from him, horrified. She could not look at him. She sat on a chair near the window and stared outside, crying softly. He raised his hand to comfort her and made some sort of horrid, gurgling speech noise to get her attention. She finally came over to him and laid her head on his chest and wept uncontrollably. I walked out of the room, wiping my tears, staggering toward the elevator, covering my eyes so no one could see, as nurses and hospital aides backed out of my way.
He came home from the hospital about a week later and seemed to get better. His speech, though slurred, returned. He sat in his basement headquarters, recuperating, while we crept around the house and Mommy walked about silently, eyes still red-rimmed, on edge. One day he summoned me downstairs and asked me to help him dress. “I want to take a drive,” he said. I was the oldest kid living at home by then, my other siblings being away at school. He put on his sweater, wool pants, hat, and blue peacoat. Though ill and thin, he still looked sharp. Slowly, he mounted the stairs and stepped outside. It was May and brisk, almost cold outside. We went into the garage and stepped into his gold-colored Pontiac. “I want to drive home one more time,” he said. He was talking about Richmond, Virginia, where he grew up. But he was too weak to drive, so he sat there behind the wheel of the car, staring at the garage wall, and he began to talk.
He said he had a little money saved up for Mommy and a little land in Virginia, but it was not enough. He said that since I was the oldest living at home, I had to watch out for Mommy and my little brothers and sisters because “y’all are special,” he said. “And just so special to me.” It was the only time I ever heard him refer to race in any way, however vaguely, but it didn’t matter, because right then and there I knew he was going to die and I had to blink back my tears. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, that I hoped with all my heart that he would get better, but I could not formulate the words in my mouth. We had never spoken that way to one another. We joked and talked, but his chief concern had always been my “schoolin”’ and “church raising” as he called it. He was not a man for dialogue. That was Mommy’s job.
Two days later he suffered a relapse. An ambulance came and got him. About four in the morning the phone rang. My sister Kathy and I lay upstairs and listened, and through what seemed to be a fog, I heard my older brother Richie telling Mommy, “It’s all right, Ma. It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right! It’s not all right!” Ma cried, and she wailed and wailed, the sound of her cries circling the house like a spirit and settling on all the corridors and beds where we lay, weeping in silence.
13.
New York
My mother knew I was pregnant and in trouble. Looking back, she knew. All she did was sit by the door of the store all day and fix up the vegetables and watch out for her two daughters. Dee-Dee and I were two young girls and there were men everywhere and she knew. She never said a word about it either. Mameh wasn’t a pushy woman. She was quiet and watchful. She had that polio, you know, and used to drape a towel over her twisted left hand sometimes to hide it when she walked around. She was nearly blind in one eye and had occasional fainting spells, but she w
asn’t weak-minded. She saw I was unhappy down there and had started sending me up to New York practically every summer by Greyhound to stay with her family. The fare was only nineteen dollars one way.
Mameh had five sisters and one brother in New York, plus her mother, and they all were living high. My Aunt Laura and her husband, Paul Schiffman, they owned apartment buildings in the Bronx and Harlem. My Uncle Hal owned a kosher delicatessen in Brooklyn. Aunt Bernadette married a furrier, and Aunt Mary opened up a leather factory. Now they were a funny family. They kept their feelings secret, bottled up inside them till they swelled and burst out like a water balloon you squeeze. I had two aunts, Bernadette and Rhonda, who hadn’t spoken to each other in fifteen years. I don’t know why. It was a big secret and you weren’t supposed to ask. I never did.
My aunts never wanted to be bothered with me too much. I was the daughter of their poor crippled sister. I was the poor cousin from the South. They called us, Mameh’s family, “greenhorns” in Yiddish, because we were the last to get to America and weren’t Americanized, but still I liked to visit them because New York was an eyepopper for me. Plus everyone seemed too busy to care about what race or religion you were. I loved it.
I had never seen so many people rushing about. I would say to myself, “Where the heck they gotta be, rushing like that?” But I wanted to rush like them, and got with the program as soon as I could. Sometimes I’d just go out and walk with them so I could rush with the crowd. I had nowhere to go. Just going crazy, rushing with the rest!
I would stay with my grandmother, or Aunt Mary or Aunt Laura when I visited. Aunt Laura was the oldest and richest of my mother’s sisters, a meticulous woman and a fabulous dresser who wore white gloves and beautifully colored dresses. She lived in a huge apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan with shiny hardwood floors, beautiful mahogany furniture, and a live-in German maid who cooked and kept house, though no one could clean Aunt Laura’s house better than Aunt Laura herself. She had no aversion to housework. She’d get on her hands and knees and scrub her kitchen floor till it shone. The meals would be served in courses by the maid while you sat there, and you had to ask to be excused from the table. Her family spent summers at Rockaway Beach or Edgemere, where they had a small cottage about eight blocks from the water. Anybody who was anybody was supposed to have a cottage by the beach.
Aunt Mary lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and ran a factory that made leather trimmings for fur coats, jackets, muffs, hats, and other wearables (Hercules Skivving or Trimming Company). I worked in her factory, running a machine that cut belts. Plus I did other odds and ends for Aunt Mary, whatever she ordered me to do. She was as mean to me as the day was long—“Rachel, do this, and hurry up, Rachel, and do that”—but she was an accomplished woman and in the 1930s it was unusual to see a woman running a business. She created it from her own ideas and with the help of her friends who were expert furriers.
Aunt Mary had two daughters, Lois and Enid, who were about my age, but they didn’t have to work in her shop like I did. They stayed home with the black maid, who made sure they got plenty of chocolate pudding and Yankee Doodles. I’ll never forget that. Yankee Doodles were chocolate-covered cakes with cream inside. I loved them but I couldn’t have any. On Sundays the maid would dress Lois and Enid in cute white cotton dresses and those two would stand in the mirror and gawk at each other like two mannequins.
One would say to the other, “Well, dear, you look so nice.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Are you ready to go, dear?”
“Why, of course I am, sister.”
And off they’d go to the movie theater around the corner, the maid fussing over them as they went. I’d be standing there and they wouldn’t even think of asking me to come. If I wanted to tag along, I’d have to pay my own way. I stayed home. See, my mother’s family, they didn’t say a lot to you. They would always take care of you in a basic way but they never said a lot to you. I didn’t feel loved by them. The only one that really loved me was my grandmother, Bubeh. Bubeh loved me. She had moved from Manhattan to an apartment at 1020 President Street in Brooklyn after Zaydeh died. It was near Prospect Park in a building that I believe was owned by my Uncle Dave. Bubeh was a warm, funny woman who spoke no English and was full of life. She was heavy and short, and after she had been here awhile she did away with that wig she wore in Europe and wore her long, shiny white hair combed and twisted into a round bun on the top of her head. She was clean as a whistle. Clean. I mean, she ironed herself to death. Everything she wore was cleaned and ironed. Her cotton housedresses were freshly washed and ironed. Even her tablecloths, which she changed three times a day—when you eat kosher you change the tablecloths for every meal—were ironed and always immaculate. I couldn’t iron, you know. I didn’t know how to iron a shirt till I got married. I could balance the books at the store and drive a trailer full of supplies and saw wood and pump kerosene and chop ice with an icepick, but I couldn’t iron or keep house or cook a pot of grits to save my life and still can’t. Boy, your father was in for a shock after he married me.
Bubeh had diabetes and had to take insulin every day, which my Aunt Betsy often gave her. She was on a restricted diet because of her diabetic condition, so we kept a lot of grapefruits and oranges in the house. The oranges were in case she went into a diabetic shock. I was instructed to give her a piece of orange if this happened. I would worry about this constantly, and I’d often sneak into her room when she was taking naps and watch her breathe. If I saw her shake, I’d wake her. “Bubeh! Bubeh!”
“What? What …”
“Are you sleeping?” I never knew what to say then.
“Yes, I am sleeping but I can talk as I sleep, it is no problem. Let us talk. What’s the matter, Rachel?” She was always so kind. Bubeh took me on my first trolley ride. The trolley used to run down Bergen Street in Brooklyn in those days. It cost five cents and the seats were wooden. You could hang near the back and get an open-air ride. I’d hang my head out the side and let the wind blow in my face, whooossssh! Anything that moved I liked. Speed. Trains, trolleys, skates. Bubeh liked to sit on the benches that lined Eastern Parkway near her house and crochet quilts and sweaters and covers for clothes hangers, and chitchat with her Jewish buddies. They were all old women, immigrants who had come over with their children, and America fascinated them. Bubeh often held court talking Yiddish with her pals as people swept past on their way to work. “These young people in America go too fast,” she would say—her needle would go zip, zip! while she talked. “My granddaughter, Rachel”—and she’d point to me—“she can never sit at home. She wants to ride the trolley all day.” And the old ladies would nod and smile at me and say, “Yes, yes, but you should stay at home and be a nice girl, Rachel.” They were funny old ladies.
My Aunt Betsy, the youngest of my mother’s sisters, was living with Bubeh during those early years. She worked as a bookkeeper for a lingerie store on the East Side in Manhattan. Aunt Betts was beautiful, like all of Mameh’s sisters. She had long dark hair and dark eyes and dressed fine and took very good care of herself. She had a lot of friends who would drop by the apartment and talk to me and make me feel grownup. They always talked about shopping at Klein’s on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan to pick up dresses at bargain prices. Aunt Betts was young and kind of with it, so when I come up to New York in the summer of ‘36, pregnant, she could see something was wrong with me. I wasn’t showing, but she knew something was going on because I was so distraught. She kept asking me, “What’s the matter, Rachel? What’s the matter?” I had to tell someone, so I finally broke down and told her. She didn’t ask me anything else. She just went about it in that matter-of-fact way my mother’s family did things. She made a few phone calls, found a Jewish doctor in Manhattan, and took me to his office, where I had an abortion. It was a horrible, painful experience and the doctor used no anesthesia. Afterwards, I was in so much pain I couldn’t walk, so Aunt Betts and I sat on the stoop of
the doctor’s office and I cried, and even through my tears I was apologizing to her, because I was ashamed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to be a bother.”
“It’s all right,” Aunt Betts said. “Just don’t let it happen again.” And that was it.
I was always grateful to Aunt Betts for that. Even though she slammed the door in my face years later, I never felt bitter toward her. She had her own life and her own sets of hurts to deal with, and after all, I wasn’t her child. Mameh’s sisters were more about money than anything else, and any hurts that popped up along the way, they just swept them under the rug. They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind. But you know what happens when you do that. If you throw water on the floor it will always find a hole, believe me.
14.
Chicken Man
For months after my stepfather died, Mommy walked around the house as if she were blind, staggering through the motions of life. She gave away Daddy’s clothes, his tools, his hats…gone to the Goodwill. She sent us off to school and tried to maintain her crazy house as usual, ranting about this and that, but the fire was gone. In the evening she often sat at the kitchen table completely lost in thought. She’d stop in midsentence and walk away silently, covering her face. At night she cried in her bedroom, though she always hid her tears from us. Daddy’s gold Pontiac sat in front of the house for months, leaves gathering around the tires and bird crap gathering on its hood. “I’m going to learn to drive it,” she promised, but instead she started riding her bike and taking piano lessons, sitting at the piano every evening, staring at the music and slowly, excruciatingly, picking out the notes to her favorite gospel hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” She played each note separately, as if they had no connection to each other, and they echoed through the house and landed on the walls like tears. I couldn’t stand to hear it. I would cover my ears at night, or better still, I would just go out. There was no one to tell me not to.
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