East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (28 page)
Read East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's Online
Authors: Sidney Weissman
“I want my daughter back,” he said as he sat down.
She shut her eyes against the scene, she wished she had some way to plug her ears against those words. She said in a dead tone of voice, “You’re looking for a small child. I’m a grown woman. What you’re looking for is gone, doesn’t exist. Why can’t you understand that?”
“Oh, I understand. I understand very well. Lots of things. I see my daughter wasting her life, that I understand. I see her pretend to be what she isn’t, that I can see.” He looked up at her once more and asked, “Are you married? I see on the letter box downstairs a different name for this apartment.” She shook her head. “Are there children?” She shook her head once more. “Then what do you have? Tell me.” Something in Edie had gone out of her, that steel she had forged
internally whenever she had faced him. And now she waited, afraid of his words, knowing that more would come. And her father said, “You have no children. Who will remember you when you are gone, hah? Who will say, My mother, my father, or my grandmother, my grandfather, used to say this, do that, play special games with us, call us by special pet names? Who? What is the value of a life if it is not in remembrance by children, grandchildren? Without that, when you are gone, it is as if you never were there, that a shadow had come and gone,” he snapped his fingers, “Like that.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she finally said grasping the back of a chair.
“I want it said. I must say it.” He looked across the table, stared at his clenched fist. She glanced across the room, into the night-blackened windows, into the outer night. Her father’s voice went on, “You are living a life of pretense, of fraud. You live with that bare-chested one—that man—” She began to interrupt but his words went on relentlessly, “that man who will leave you some day.” She turned to walk away and her father said wearily to her, “Let me talk. I can see it. Why can’t you? When that happens what will you do? Live with another man? And then? And then?” He paused, she said nothing. “Life is nothing without commitment. When you live together, there is nothing, no commitment because you can live together and one of you can decide to leave. When you marry there is commitment, with the other person, with the families, with society.”
She felt her anger rising now. Once again grasping the back of the chair she leaned forward towards her father and said, “I’ll live with somebody if I want to, I’ll get married to somebody if I want to. Or I won’t. I don’t have to ask anybody, you hear me?”
“Yeah. Sure, sure,” her father replied, his words full of disbelief, of disapproval. “And children?”
“Children? What for?” she said. “Who wants children in a crazy world like this?”
“It’s the only world we have. It can be a terrible world, Itteh, terrible. But we must try to make it better, however we can—”
Oh, my God! she thought. He’s preaching now. She couldn’t stand it, she wished Frankie was there, he would be able to manage her father, Frankie would argue for her. But no, she suddenly thought. There will be a fight, an argument, it would have to come to that between them. She knew there were other, still unspoken issues between them, and that would come out into the open. She looked at the clock ticking on the small table in of a narrow vertical mirror on the wail above it. Frankie might be coming home soon, just to change before the meeting. Stay away, Frankie, she silently prayed. Don’t come. Let him leave here, first. Just let him leave. Please.
“It’s enough,” she heard herself say to her father. “You’ve had your say. Enough.”
“No, Itteh—” he began.
“I’m not Itteh!” she shouted out. “Itteh’s gone, finished, dead.”
“Yes!” he shouted in return. “Itteh is dead. There was another Itteh, a cousin of yours, another named after your great grandmother, she remained in the Old Country. They killed her. That Itteh went up in smoke and ashes with most of the family. Maybe all, I don’t know. I just now found out about her and some of the others. That’s why I came to see you, to make you realize you have an obligation—”
“What obligation?” Edie asked, startled now, bewildered, furious at her father for telling her all this. “What did I, what do I owe her? Did I ask her to stay in the Old Country? Did I force her to stay, what did I do to her?”
“You forgot about her,” her father said slowly. “You abandoned her and the others too by disowning all of them. In a way you did to yourself what Hitler did to them. You murdered yourself, one less Jew in the world, without even the use of the camps and the ovens. You should be proud of that, Itteh, Edie, Gypsy, whatever you are. You did Hitler’s work. You should get a medal for that from him.”
Furious now, the room around her a swirl, she screamed at her father, “Get out of here! Don’t come back! I don’t want to see you, I don’t to hear you! Get out!”
Silence. Heavy. Unbearable. Her father had risen from the chair and now stood motionless. As he stared at her, she noticed his controlled anger showing only in his clenched fists banging against his thighs. She stared at the slow metronome of the movement of his fists smiting himself. Then without another word he turned and left the apartment.
She stared at the closed door, hearing her heavy breathing, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, the tick of the clock keeping pace with the sounds coming from within her. She looked around the room, empty, empty at last, silent, silent at last. No more words, no more reproaches, no more anything. At last that was all over. Finished. Done with. She began to stare out into space, hearing within her, Itteh, Itteh, the name she wanted lost and forgotten. But this other thing crept into her mind, remained there, would not leave, there had been another Itteh, someone she had never known but someone who had, in some fashion, been a part of her, their names had been attached, Siamese-twinlike. And that Itteh was gone. Smoke and ashes, her father had said, his voice still rumbling in her mind.
No, she wouldn’t cry, she couldn’t cry, she had welded that armor to herself too well. And she thought, A whole family, gone? Destroyed?
It wasn’t a definite thought, it was as if she had become a marionette moving to invisible manipulations. Slowly, almost trancelike, she walked to a closet in the kitchen, removed a small dish, a book of matches, a small white candle which she had put there as a reserve should the electricity fail, returned to the living room, went to the small table in front of the narrow mirror. She lit a match, it hissed into flame and with the lit end heated the bottom of the candle, saw it begin to soften and melt, stood it upright in the cooling wax adhering to the plate, lit the wick of the candle, saw its flame sputter, come alive as she blew out the fire of the match.
She returned to the large table, sat down, and fascinated by the candle’s flame, stared at it. Now and then she looked into the mirror, watched its flame flicker and twist, jump and curl, soon saw its melted wax in slow small trickles, like tears, roll slowly
down its sides. Suddenly, she emerged from her trance, saw the flickering flame, and realized that in the old tradition, she had lit a candle for the dead.