by Jan Cherubin
“You want that table?”
I looked up. Brenda was watching me trace my finger over the ivory Taj Mahal. “Yes, I’ve always wanted this,” I said. “My parents’ friend brought it back from Delhi.”
“I’m sorry to burst your bubble, Joanna,” Brenda said. “But your parents’ friend brought them a cheap piece of tourist junk.”
My mouth dropped open. I was startled by the hostility, and also the truth of her remark. No one I knew growing up had anything like the Indian table with the elephant-trunk legs in their living room. Now that Brenda called it cheap tourist junk, though, I easily pictured stacks of them at Pier One. I drew my hand away from the tabletop. Elephants were destroyed for the ivory inlay. I’d be better off denying any connection to the tainted piece of furniture. But I was loyal to the past. “It’s not junk,” I said.
CHAPTER 6
We had years of family happiness. We really did, the years I was in elementary school. My mother was no longer stuck at home with me. She had a job as a secretary at Beautiful Kitchens with a paycheck and she was happier out in the world, even if it wasn’t fighting the good fight. Hardly, she would say. My father convinced her to bleach her black beatnik hair blonde, and she dressed in fake Chanel suits, wore a glamorous French knot, and brought home presents the salesmen gave her. Susan and I went two doors down to the neighbors after school until my father and mother came home, threw down their keys and coats, briefcase and purse, and together started preparing the chicken or hamburger or (wonderfully transgressive to them) unkosher pork chops defrosting in a puddle on the draining board. “From each according to his abilities,” my mother said, quoting Karl Marx while holding aloft a pot by its aluminum handle. And then, as she spooned a pile of Birds Eye peas onto my plate, “to each according to his needs.”
My father was a performance artist before his time, putting on an act for his students at City, trying to scandalize with radical views or unpopular views, and later when things loosened up in the late sixties, lacing everything with profanity and sexual reference. He was a provocateur, in the service of learning. If you were for the Vietnam War, he’d challenge you, but if you were against the war, he’d challenge you, too. He hated phonies, the pious, and the pompous. He was disgusted by weakness, by inaction. He could be mean if you were too earnest or shy. He was earnest himself, though, and strict but not close-minded. He had a temper. Some kids were afraid of him. The smart kids weren’t, he said. He got agitated not being able to smoke in the classroom, although he got away with smoking in the Collegian newspaper office. In class, he ate peanuts instead, something he could do with his hands, dropping shells on the floor. His jacket pockets bulged, filled from the bushel bag in the trunk of his car, a present from the newspaper staff. “The will, the will. Yes, let’s stay and hear the will,” he said and cracked open a shell one-handed with the snap of his thumb. “You boy, front row! What’s the importance of Caesar’s will?” His thunderous voice was like boulders tumbling down a mountain. I sat in the back of the classroom with Susan. My father had taken us to work with him because school was canceled that day in Baltimore County for some reason, but school was open in Baltimore City.
It figured City College High School was all boys, because boys got the best of everything. If I went to City I would flunk out. You had to memorize eighteen rules of grammar. There was no way I could go. They had an indoor swimming pool and the boys swam naked. This was supposed to build character. At the time, I didn’t know what character was, only that girls couldn’t have it. Susan and I were hurried past the pool entrance. I thought if I went through that door, I would know everything.
On Fridays, my father brought teachers home to have dinner with us, bachelors they were called then. John Heinz was always there, the bald drama teacher from West Virginia who spoke with a British accent. Without hair, he seemed cleaner than ordinary people. He wore white Jack Purcell sneakers with his summer suits and had no family waiting at home, my father said. So we’d give him a home-cooked meal. When Shep Levine came, he usually brought a girlfriend. Shep was husky and tall, with dimples that made a long groove in each cheek when he smiled. He was always laughing and joking around. Students were invited, mostly Collegian staff. They ate with us at the table where hours before they had laid out and pasted up the weekly newspaper. Shep brought his guitar. “This is for you, Evie,” he said, dimples showing. It was impossible not to smile when Shep smiled. Then he sang “Union Maid.” Some students blushed so much in front of my mother they had to leave the room. My father watched with confused happiness.
Peter Grafton was there even on weeks with no paper to lay out. He was a genius, my father said. We had to fetch him in the car from his parents’ apartment building where he’d be leaning against the wall waiting for us in a raincoat with a paperback. One time he was reading E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. That night Peter admired the little table from Delhi. “When you leave this house, Joanna,” he said, “you must take this table with you.” I gazed at him with solemn eyes. “Why would I leave this house?” I said. He laughed.
With the others gone and only Peter left, I lay in bed as he and my father recited “The Waste Land” into the reel-to-reel tape recorder on top of the hi-fi cabinet in the living room. My father’s voice overpowered Peter’s and traveled toward me through the hallway in the dark. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, my cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. Why did they say this with such seriousness, when it was only about children on a sled? I felt a strange excitement and had the urge to climb out of bed and join them. But I wasn’t sure where I belonged. Certainly not in the material world of dresses and errands my mother and sister lived in.
My father didn’t know what to make of me. Maybe I’d never get married. He worried about it. He told everyone to stop calling me Jo. Only Joanna. When I was in fourth grade, he insisted I quit clarinet lessons. He said clarinet was a boy’s instrument. Piano was better for girls. I had been looking forward to playing the clarinet in the elementary school band, but I didn’t say anything out of fear I wasn’t good enough at the clarinet to play up on the stage. My parents went into debt buying the goddamn piano.
“Yes it is,” said Brenda. “That table’s a cheap piece of tourist junk.”
I glared at her. Finally she sashayed down the hall to get ready for bed. She and my father had separate bedrooms, across the hall from each other. As far as I knew, the arrangement hadn’t had anything to do with the state of their sex life, but only that my father “needed his space.” I told Brenda when I first arranged the visit that I didn’t want to sleep in my father’s room because it would haunt me so soon after his death and Brenda accepted the explanation, as I knew she would. In truth, I wasn’t nearly as timid as she believed, and I wouldn’t have been afraid to sleep in his bed, or felt it was morbid or incestuous. I didn’t want to sleep in his room only because I didn’t want to be stuck in the back of the house near her. I spread the sheet and blanket on the sofa, and sat and waited, propping my feet on the little Indian table, half expecting the cheap piece of junk to collapse. I waited while the water ran in the bathroom sink and the toilet flushed and the bathroom door opened and her bedroom door clicked shut, and then, when a little more time had passed, I went down the hall and stood outside Brenda’s door and listened for her slow, rhythmic breathing. When I was sure she was asleep and not faking it, I tiptoed into the den to search for the suitcase with the yellow handle.
The den no longer had a bed or a couch, but only a rolling cart with Brenda’s sewing machine on top and a desk the length of one wall that my father built when I was little. I remembered him using the picnic table in the carport for a sawhorse, the woody smell of particleboard, the careful way he glued on the Formica veneer, then fitted drawers together, and wired lights. The built-in desk was one of several feats of craftsmanship that survived him. Catty-corner to that was the closet. I rolled
open the sliding door, kneeled on the floor and crawled into the dark end, jacket hems brushing my forehead, and soon I was backing out grinning like a wolf. The suitcase! Its latches clicked without much resistance. They flipped up and the lid popped open. I sighed with deep satisfaction. There was the black orphanage photo album, Ye Olde Picture Booke, just as I remembered, on top of two manila envelopes, the inter-office kind, each with a red paper button and a red string latch. The linoleum floor in the den was hard on my knees and I had a lot to look at, so I closed the lid under one arm and brought the full suitcase into the living room and put it down on the sofa. June 23, 1934. I turned the page and studied a snapshot of my teenaged father bare-chested on a horse: Bestride my steed Playboy about to set forth upon a journey. He wrote the captions in a biblical style with a nostalgic tone that was sometimes edged with irony, the grim institution lurking as backdrop. Thither in winter we stored us sleds, in summer we loaded knapsacks. In my favorite picture, a group of orphans is splashing around at a swimming hole. Under this one he wrote: Aye verily, a Garden of Eden. This place where, I later learned, they beat the children with their fists.
When I was twelve, the pictures and captions were so tantalizing I stayed glued to the Picture Booke and paid no attention to the manila envelopes. Now I unwound the red string on the paper button of the first one and lifted the flap. It was all bureaucratic correspondence, so I put that envelope aside and unwound the red string on the second one and there it was. The manuscript he showed Peter.
Tuckahoe it said at the top, typed on our old Royal typewriter with the sticky “e” that landed slightly higher than the other letters. My pulse quickened as I flipped through the pages. It looked like a novel. But I noticed he hadn’t changed names. Uncle Harry was Harry. My mother appeared and she was still Evie. Her family was still the Bravermans. I put the suitcase on the floor under the coffee table so I could stretch out. I couldn’t wait to read about the orphanage, and maybe, somewhere, something about me. I propped up the pillows and slipped between the covers.
CHAPTER 7
Tuckahoe
One Saturday in the spring of 1924, my father took me downtown to see the building where he worked. Why I will never know. Rarely was I alone with my father, but for this trip it was just the two of us. I was in the second grade and the oldest of four. Papa said he wasn’t interested in babies; they couldn’t have a decent conversation. The outing, as well as that comment, held a lot of promise for me. I felt anointed.
Times were good in the Bronx in those days, if you could speak English without an accent, and sometimes even if you couldn’t—the tabloids were calling it the Roaring Twenties. In fact, my mother and father were doing fine, better than the rest of the family. My mother was expecting a fifth child, my littlest sister, as it turned out, and my father had a nice job in an office at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company down on Madison Square where we were headed. At 153rd Street the elevated train went underground, plunging us into darkness, and I let go of the pole we were holding onto and grabbed my father around his legs. He laughed at me, but kept his hand on my shoulder the rest of the way. As soon as we came up from the subway, I spotted the Metropolitan Life tower with the clock on it high in the sky. It was the second tallest building in the whole world at the time, the tallest being Woolworth’s. I asked my father to slow down while I cleaned my spectacles with my shirttail. I’d just gotten the eyeglasses and I liked seeing everything clearly. We crossed the street and stood on a corner by the park and shared a hot dog, and then he hoisted me in his arms and pointed up at the clock tower. “That’s where I work,” he said. I knew that already. I asked why we didn’t go inside. I wanted to see the giant gearwheels behind the clock face. He didn’t answer.
Summer came and in July of the same year, 1924, we went on another outing. Papa took all of us this time—me, Harry, Vivian, and Alvin—but I didn’t complain since we were going for sundaes at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor way down on Alexander Avenue. My mother stayed home, feet up, resting with the baby in her belly. I couldn’t wait to dig into the gooey chocolate and whipped cream with the cherry on top, but for some reason, after one bite, I felt nauseous. Papa said it was thanks to the man at the next table smoking a cheap cigar. I went to the john and threw up, then rinsed my mouth at the sink. I felt a little better, and when I got back to the table, I ate a few more bites of the sundae. I could tell that made my father happy. He leaned back in his chair and watched the four of us eat while he smoked a cigarette with a private smile on his face.
“You feel better, Clyde?” my father said.
I nodded and swirled a spoonful of ice cream in my mouth. Afterward, my father put us on the streetcar headed for home with me in charge. “You tots listen to Clyde,” he said. “I have to take care of some business.” He jumped off when the car started to move. I watched him through the window, walking west. Later, people said he disappeared into thin air.
“Let your father’s family suffer,” my mother said. “I’d like to see those no-goodniks keep a clean house with four kids underfoot.”
I wasn’t sure what my mother meant, but I listened with keen interest in case she speculated as to my father’s whereabouts. I nodded sympathetically, standing on a stool filling the soup kettle with water, using all my strength to lift the pot onto the stove for her. Her big belly was in the way. She could hardly reach to turn on the gas. What did she mean, let your father’s family suffer? I couldn’t figure out what my mother was talking about half the time. Nevertheless, I was her confidant. Seven years old, and she told me everything.
“You’re intelligent, Clyde. You understand things. So you’ll go live with your bubbe, your papa’s mother, Grandma Aronson. Maybe she’ll tell you where your father is. She has room for you and Harry over there on Gerard Avenue. Whereas my mother has a full house with poor Sadie not married and Slow Uncle Archie still at home.”
“But Grandma Aronson has Uncle Bert, Moe, and Estelle,” I said.
“How am I supposed to feed all of you, when your father leaves me with nothing? Your Grandma Aronson tells me I should go to work after the baby comes, get a job. A regular genius, that one. And who takes care of you kids?”
Our relatives on both sides were poor, except my mother’s brother Rich Uncle Seymour, and he was on the road with his carnival. Everyone else squeezed into cold-water flats in the South Bronx, some of the aunts sleeping on couches, and uncles three to a bed, head to foot. No one volunteered to take us in, so Mama picked somebody.
“I don’t want to live with Grandma Aronson,” I said. I could just see myself sleeping with Uncle Moe’s feet in my face. “Make Vivian go.”
“You can’t always get what you want,” my mother said, and this burned me up because I hated being told what I already knew.
Harry and I dressed in our best clothes like we were going to shul, which we did only rarely. I wore knickerbockers, but Harry was five years old and still in short pants. “Someone should take a picture,” my mother said, hurrying us downstairs. Even with her belly, we could hardly keep up. There wasn’t much time. The lady across the hall could spare only an hour to watch Vivian and Alvin. My mother’s high heels scraped the sidewalk, scrape-tap, scrape-tap over to the Grand Concourse, aptly named, as it was a wide boulevard with a grassy median and automobiles and carriages clattering in both directions, and then two more blocks to Gerard Avenue, which was so hot the asphalt stuck to our shoes. “Sixth floor,” said Mama. “628. Ring the bell.”
“You want us to go up there alone?” I said. Everyone expected too much of me. I pictured my father in his crisp collar, waistcoat, and jacket, unaffected by the summer heat, hopping gamely off the streetcar.
“She’s not a monster,” my mother said. “Grandma Aronson just isn’t as fond of me as she is of you and Harry. Here.” She handed over the beige suitcase with the brown trim and the yellow Bakelite handle. Papa had told me how Bakelite was invented in 1909 by a couple of mad scientists in Yonkers, which was in the co
untryside, my father said, up in Westchester, north of the Bronx. The scientists mixed the potion in a laboratory over their garage at Snug House (their house was so important it had a name), and you could pour the liquid Bakelite into a mold in any shape or color you wanted. Now those mad scientists were millionaires. My father loved that story and always ended it by singing: If I was a millionaire, kids/ If I was a millionaire/ There wouldn’t be nothin’ too good in the world/ For me and my pals to share.
Harry and I got out of the elevator on the sixth floor and walked down the wide hallway tiled with tiny white hexagons, and I put the suitcase on the doormat in front of 628 and rang the bell. There was no answer. I pressed the buzzer again and waited. It was quiet except for the sound of water running somewhere, and a muffled voice.
“Aw, nuts,” said Harry. He knocked my arm out of the way, stood on his tiptoes and jabbed at the bell with his thumb. Buzz buzz buzz! I let him get away with it. Finally footsteps, and the door opened a crack.
My grandmother poked her head out. “I don’t know where he is,” she said. “That’s the truth, the emis.“
I got a whiff of her apron—a perfume of fried onions and Dove soap, as familiar as my pillow—I was her little boychik—and yet she kept the door cracked the way she did for junkmen selling pots and pans.
“Hello, Grandma,” I said.
“What’s this?” she said. “What’s this—with the suitcase?”
“Hi Grandma,” said Harry.
“Oh, no!” she said. “No, no. I’m an old woman. Go home. Gay avec.” She pulled her head back inside and slammed the door.
I looked at Harry and he looked at me, and we ran like hell. Just as we reached the stairs, Grandma Aronson flung open her door and called after us: “Tell your mother I’ll see her Friday night for poker!”