East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (19 page)

We walked down the empty streets, my heart was pounding, I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to be home, in my bed. I wanted to feel secure.

We walked slowly, Goldie had warned us not to do anything to arouse suspicion. “Talk a little,” he said, but we had no words. “About school,” he said. We didn’t know what to say. “About girls,” he hissed. “What about that girl you like?” he said to me. “You know, the tall one with the red hair that lives down the block from you.”

“Yeah,” Izzy said. “The good-looking one.”

“You shut up! I don’t want to hear that!” I whispered fiercely, struggling to keep myself from shouting. I stopped and turned to face Izzy and said, “You keep her out of this.” And to Goldie, “You too. You hear?”

Goldie smiled, shrugged. “What did I say?” he asked spreading out his hands. “Okay, okay. At least you’re talking.”

“Not about her,” I said sharply. “Both of you keep her out of this.”

Izzy said, “Okay, okay.”

For a brief moment I thought of her, she was a nice girl. I didn’t want her talked about by anybody. Suddenly fear returned and barely listening to what Izzy was saying, I glanced around. Darkness, closed stores, a moving shadow, a stroller, nothing more.

We were two blocks from Auster’s. We could begin to smell the place even there, the rich warm sweet smell of cooked chocolate, that magic smell that caught your nose and held it. The smell grew stronger as we approached the locked darkened store.

Izzy began to look around him apprehensively.

My head swiveled, my eyes became a periscope, searching for a dark uniformed approaching shadow. I was afraid, my throat felt dry, my tongue seemed swollen and useless, I couldn’t talk. No, no, I told myself, I didn’t want to be caught.

Goldie seemed unafraid and said in a normal tone of voice, “Auster’s closed.” Both Izzy and I, wordless, nodded dumbly in the darkness. “That’s good,” Goldie whispered. “Let’s go.” We followed him slowly with leaden steps, always looking around, peering into the blackness of the night. “Come on, a little faster,” Goldie was saying.

Suddenly, in a strained whisper Izzy gasped out, “It’s a cop! I can see him!”

He was running. Now I was running after him. The shadows of the night around me flickered and seemed to move. I thought I saw a cop. Suddenly I was running away from the law, away from crime, away from all of this. I could hear Goldie’s speeding steps slapping the sidewalk, following me, all three of us racing away from Auster’s, away from the sweet smell of chocolate, away from the money that I could have had, my dream gone.

 THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE

The soapy water in the large tin laundry vat erupted and bubbled into soft popping sounds, smoke tendrils climbed curling into the air above the coal stove. Inside the vat laundry lay coiling and sliding slowly in the roiling water. Running from its both ends, the metal edges of the large container were parallel to each other, its two ends tapering to a curve, the center of each curve held a stained wooden handle set in a small metal projection.

In the heaving murmuring boil itself, propped against one of the sides of the vat was a length of rounded wood which the woman stirred listlessly round and round into the boiling vat.

Inside, in the tenement flat itself, even with the lone kitchen window open this late spring day, the air smelled damp, hot and soapy. In the kitchen, the woman’s small, four-year-old daughter, Ida, sat at the porcelain-topped table, playing with an old rag doll. The mother, at the stove, stopped for a moment, wiped some strands of hair away from her damp brow, a small smile appeared on her face as she glanced at her daughter.

“
Mamaleh,”
she said to her daughter. “You are such a good mother to your baby, you take such good care of your baby.”

Her daughter looked up from playing with the doll and said, “She’s a good baby, mama.”

The mother nodded, turned back to the stove. Silently working at the vat, a faraway look in her eyes, mechanically pushing the round stick around and around, moving the
vesh,
the laundry, clumps of cloth sinking and appearing in the gray boil in the container, she thought of those years gone by when she had just married her husband, Mendel. That was the time before the Crash and the onset of the Depression, and they had rented a flat in another, an older building

on the Lower East Side of New York. It had three rooms, and what they called the dining room they had furnished cheaply with a heavy oak table and chairs. The table sat beneath the light fixture with its gas mantles. On those rare occasions when they used the room, the gas mantles when lit, popped into a red-orange light, turned to yellow, then to a somewhat whitish brightness.

Later they had moved to another flat that had electrical lighting. In the kitchen, near the ceiling there had been a meter for the electricity, the meter had contained a slot where quarters were inserted when the lights began to dim and tremble. When the Depression came, when there were no quarters to feed the meter, when the electricity was cut off by the impersonal meter, they had used candles to light the flat at night. Every tenant in every flat had kept a reserve of candles for just those emergencies.

But that had once been, and since then had become different. The electric company operated differently, bills were sent out, and when she and her husband had no money available, there had been time to delay and stall. Most of the cooking was done on the coal stove, only occasionally, mostly during the summers, would she use the two-burner portable gas stove attached by a red rubber tube from one of the gas stove end-pipes to the main metal gas pipe that ran up the wall of the kitchen.

There had been those who took the gas pipe, as everybody called it, to commit suicide.
Ai,
poor, poor people, the woman thought shaking her head sadly. The times were terrible, terrible. Where was the
goldeneh medina,
the golden land?

Mechanically stirring the laundry in its soapy soup with round motions of the length of wood she thought of how she would like to buy a new pair of shoes for the little girl, but there was no money. They lived from hand to mouth, the shoes would have to wait. For a brief moment she looked at her daughter and sighed. Her body moved laboriously as she stirred the laundry in the vat. The Depression had been the beginning of real denial, of no quarters for electricity, of no payment for the gas bills until a collector came to visit them, the stalling of the payment of rent to the land lord, the use of the small book she clutched in which was entered her purchases whenever she shopped at the grocery store, the sporadic call to work for her husband in the garment center on Seventh Avenue, the squeezing of nickels, dimes and pennies, the eternal internal debate whenever something, anything, should be bought. Can we afford it? Do we have the money? Should we spend it on something else?

Yet sometimes there was a penny, two, a nickel, perhaps, to spare. When her husband, Mendel, miraculously had a little more work than usual and when his pay was a dollar or two more, she would spend an extra quarter, maybe a half dollar when the children’s’ birthdays came along. She had three of them, two older boys in school and Ida.

In good weather, there would be a wandering man in the back yard below who would look up at the windows and sing out loudly popular Yiddish songs. She would go to the kitchen window, open it, hold Ida up near her shoulder so that the little girl could see the singer down below.

After the man had finished with the song, he would remove his cap from his head and stare up at the windows above him. If she had some money, she felt she had to give him something, the man also needed money like everybody else did. He also had to live, to eat and pay rent and she would give a few coins to Ida who, with an awkward childish motion, hurled the money out into the air, both of them listening for the clink of the coins when they hit the pavement of the yard.

The man would scramble quickly to pick up the money, saying, Thank you, thank you, and would look up intently for the sight of other hands hurling some coins from windows.

The mother had said to her little daughter, “People are hungry, they have no eat and we must help them if we can. God should be good to us and give us some
parnusseh,
some money, so we can give some of it to a poor man like that.”

Now an Old Clothes Man chanted out hoarsely from the yard below, “I cash clothes, I cash clothes.”

And little Ida, listening to the chant said to her mother, “There’s a man singing, mama. In the yard. Open the window.”

Her mother, with a smile, said to her, “He’s not a singer,
mamaleh.”

“Listen, he’s singing, mama, I hear him.”

“No,
mamaleh,
he’s telling us he buys old clothes. Listen to him.” And the mother chanted along with the man’s words, and said, “See?”

“Is he poor?” the little girl asked. “Like the singer man?”

“Poor, we all are,
mamaleh.
But some are more poorer than others. Some have no eat.” Quickly as if to ward off a spell, “God forbid, it shouldn’t happen to us again.”

“He sings a funny song. What does he do?” Ida asked as her eyes followed the man down below moving slowly across the yard, a large sack over his shoulder.

“He buys things, old clothes, something people don’t wear no more, things they don’t want,” the mother said.

“People don’t want no more?” Ida said wonderingly. “You wear the same thing, mama. Papa too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the mother said as she brushed the child’s hair back with a swift motion of her hand. “Some place, there’s people who can’t wear their clothes no more.”

“They grow bigger like Heshy or Sammy?” the little girl asked speaking of her two brothers. “But when Sammy gets too big for something he gives it to Heshy. And you give some of Heshy’s things to
Tanteh,
Aunt Simmeh, for the cousins.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the mother replied.

At the stove the mother used the stick to lift up a piece of dripping underwear from the cauldron. Dashing quickly to the sink nearby, she deposited the steaming articles there, ran back to the vat several times until the sink was filled with a pile of wet laundry. She rinsed and with great grunting effort wrung out each article until the vat was empty.

Carrying the twisted damp articles which she deposited on a chair near the window, she hung the laundry on the line that stretched from the kitchen to a huge pole in the yard as tall as the tenement itself. As she strung the laundry out on the line and pushed the line forward to make room for more of the
vesh,
the small rotating wheels at each end of the line squealed out loudly. When she secured the laundry to the line the clothespins growled softly as she forced their wooden fingers into damp cloth. The gusts of wind began to whip and sway into frantic movement the towels and sheets, several pillow cases, Mendel’s BVD’S, bloomers, the boys’ things.

The little girl played quietly at the kitchen table, mothering her doll, making conversations with herself. Her mother, finished with the hanging of the laundry, shut the kitchen window, stopped for a moment, heaved a great sigh of relief.

Yet she knew that when the laundry had dried, the next day or the day after that, she would have to iron it all, a task that took up all of a morning, heating the two black metal heavy irons on the stove, lifting one, testing its heat with one of her fingers wet with her saliva, hearing the hiss at her fingertip, knowing then that the iron was ready to be used. But that was another day. Today the washing was finished.

As she went to the sink she said to her daughter, “You must be hungry,
mein tyreh,
my dear one. Mama will make some eat.”

The mother washed up at the sink, looked at her image in the small mirror above the sink, combed her hair. There were baked potatoes in the oven, but that was for supper. Later, after the boys had come home from school for their lunch, and the three children had eaten, she would prepare the
lungen
stew, the lung stew, for the family supper. She looked at the alarm clock on the small shelf above the sink, it was almost time for the boys to arrive. When they did, it was with a rush of noise, of a loud babble of talk awakening the previous quiet of the small flat.

Ida immediately asked them, “How was school?”

Her mother smiled, that was the question she, not her daughter, usually asked her sons. Heshy removed his plaid jacket, said, “It was okay.”

Sammy, sitting down at the kitchen table said, “Yeah. Fine. Okay.” Snapping his fingers he arose, hurried to the sink before his brother could, and washed his hands.

Both boys had finished with their washing and all the children were seated at the table. The mother had sliced bananas into three small dishes, added clumps of sour cream and a spray of sugar into each of them and brought the dishes to her children. She placed a bowl of three hard-crusted rolls in the center of the table.

The children had begun to eat hungrily, two rolls had disappeared, part of a third remained in the bowl. As they ate the boys bantered with each other and now and then they stopped momentarily to eat, or say something to their small sister and to their mother.

When they were finished the mother placed a glass of milk before each child saying, “Drink. It’s good for you.”

Each of the boys emptied his glass quickly. Ida was still sipping at the milk when the boys wiped their lips, and arose from the table. One of them said, “I got to go back to school.”

Their mother nodded to them and Ida, the half-filled glass still in her hand said to them, “I will go to school. Next year when I’m a little bigger.” And to her mother said, “Yeah, mama?”

“Yeah,
mein tuchteril,
my little daughter. Soon,” the mother replied. Soon, she thought. It’s too soon. To her sons she said, “Be careful. Be good in school, you hear?” The boys nodded and she turned to her daughter and said, “Finish the milk. We don’t leave eat to throw out. Go, finish it.”

The boys had gone, the house seemed strangely silent after the talk and joking the boys had brought with them. Ida picked up her doll and began playing with it as her mother removed the dishes from the table and washed them at the kitchen sink.

When she had finished drying the dishes, the mother prepared the banana and sour cream dish for herself, sat down at the table, picked up the uneaten half of the roll, slowly ate all of it. There was boiling water in the kettle on the stove, the small ceramic pot of tea essence near the kettle. She poured some essence into a thick glass, filled it with boiling water, carried it carefully to the table.

As she sipped her tea, there was a knock on the door. She looked up, startled, and asked, “Who is it, who?” There was a muffled reply, a man’s voice, did he say his name was Max or Moishe or Muttie, it could have been anything, it was too garbled. “Who?” she called out again, arising from the table and going towards the door. “God forbid, there was no accident, hah?”

“No, no, no,” the voice replied from behind the door. “No accident. It’s Itzak.” There was a short series of raps on the door. “I came to ask you something.”

“Itzak? Itzak, who?” she asked looking at her daughter who had stopped playing and was now staring at the door.

“Itzak, from down the street,” the man’s voice said. “You know me, I was here a few times before, already.”

The mother shrugged to herself, and as she unlocked the door her daughter came to her side. When the mother swung open the door there was a shabbily dressed man who said softly quickly in an imploring tone of voice, “Do you have something to give to a poor man?
A poor tzent?
A few cents, maybe? I need some money for my family to eat, for my wife and children.” His hand was out, palm up, as he spoke.