Tiffany Street (22 page)

As I munched and sipped, my mother and Sebastian Roon went through with Mrs. Klockner almost exactly the same performance I had seen them go through two nights earlier with Mrs. Groshartig.

Almost, but not quite. There were a few differences.

While Mrs. Klockner, I soon gathered, also worked at “turning” for Mr. Lebenbaum, she did not live in our building. She lived around the corner, on Fox Street.

Either she was somewhat brighter than Mrs. Groshartig, or my mother had with practice grown more skillful. She and Seb had clearly been interviewing many, perhaps all, of Mr. Lebenbaum’s employees for several days. While I had been downtown on my job with Maurice Saltzman & Company.

In any case, this time Seb did not interfere with helpful suggestions when the going got rough, the way he had done during the interview with Mrs. Groshartig. Seb stayed out of it. Except for his encouraging smile, of course. Short of encasing his handsome head in a pillowcase, it would have been difficult to keep that smile out of even the execution chamber at Sing Sing.

The most interesting difference—for me, at any rate—was the end of the interview. Up to that point, my mother and Mrs. Klockner had talked Yiddish. When my mother reached the penultimate argument about what was wrong with a hard-working woman receiving not a nickel a
shtikl
but six cents a
shtikl,
she went on to utter the final words in English: “So what do you say, Mrs. Klockner?”

It was not the sort of English spoken at Jesus College, Cambridge. But it was recognizable on Tiffany Street. Considering that my mother had obviously learned this scrap of English during the past forty-eight hours, hers was a creditable performance. Sebastian Roon was either a superlative teacher, or he was dealing with a brilliant and eager student. I did not doubt which of the two it was.

“Excuse me,” I said while Mrs. Klockner scowled down at her small nickel notebook and tried to think of an answer to my mother’s question. “Would one of you two entrepreneurs mind telling me where I sleep tonight?”

My mother did not take her eyes from Mrs. Klockner’s face. Seb, however, looked up.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “and it has been for some time.”

“Don’t be testy,” Seb said. “We’re getting a large project under way here. Try the spot on which you dossed down last night.”

I went out into the living room. The spot on which I had dossed down last night was now occupied by my mother’s old foot-treadle Singer. On East Fourth Street the sewing machine had stood in a corner of our only bedroom. Here on Tiffany Street, where we had two bedrooms, my mother had stored the Singer in a corner of my bedroom. The fact that it had now been moved into the living room was an event not unlike that of a manager ordering a pitcher into the bull pen. Things were about to happen.

The first thing that happened was negative. When I came out of the front room in the morning, my mother was not at her usual post in front of the gas range, preparing my breakfast. I tiptoed down the hall and put my ear to her bedroom door. I could hear two sounds. One was, of course, my father’s snore. I had been hearing it for years. I had always been impressed by my father’s snore. He did not just rip off the traditional dreary buzz. My father added music.

A moment or two of the low strong buzz. Pause. Slight gasp. Then a tinkly skipping note, as though a small bell had been tapped. Another moment or two of the low strong buzz. Pause. Then a series of rapidly varied tinkles, as though a cat was dancing across a xylophone. The sequence usually continued, with fluty little variations on the basic theme, until my mother’s voice said, “Joe! Turn over!”

She did not say it this morning. She was snoring away herself. Most unmusically, I might add. I could hardly blame her. It had been almost three in the morning when I left my mother and Seb with Mrs. Klockner in the kitchen and I went out into the living room to doss down on the floor beside my mother’s Singer.

I tiptoed back down the hall and put my ear to my bedroom door. I had never before heard a snore with an English accent. At another time I might have found things in it to admire. The clipped terminal point of each sequence, for example. Or the broad university drawl that gave a touch of elegance to the part that with my father was merely a low strong buzz. But this was not my morning for exploring a new art form.

I took a
toochiss
roll from the paper bag on top of the refrigerator. I cut it open and smeared both halves with butter. I slapped the halves together and left the house, munching my roll all the way to the subway.

Figuratively speaking, I kept munching it all day. At the office. In my C.C.N.Y. classes. On the subway going home. I was thinking, and my thoughts did not please me.

I didn’t really mind what my mother and Seb were doing. What I minded was being excluded. They acted as though I were a piece of furniture. Worse. A piece of furniture about the existence of which they were unaware until they stumbled into it, and then they merely shoved it aside.

It was one thing to have your mother give your bed to a visitor for a single night. But I had now been sleeping on the living room floor for almost a week, while Mr. Roon was corking off his Oxford-accented snore in my bed. It was undignified. I felt I should complain. I felt I should assert myself.

Climbing the stairs to our apartment, the pretense of indignation, on which I had been working all day, fell apart. I didn’t feel I should assert myself. I knew what I felt. An intensification of the old jealousy. For the fact that he was teaching her English. No, for the fact that from him she was willing to learn. I was almost afraid to open the door on another lesson.

When I did open it, what was going on could hardly be described as a lesson.

“You listen to me,” my mother was saying:

My spirits soared. She had said it in Yiddish. Then I saw to whom she had said it, and my spirits changed direction. My mother was speaking to my father.

“Chanah, please,” my father said.

His snoring may have been heavy, but his voice had always been light. Even before the accident that had put him into a wheelchair, he had always sounded like a polite and friendly usher directing you to your seat in the darkness after a performance has begun. Since the accident, my father’s voice had become something that was not quite human. A tiny animal bleat I tried to remember how he had once sounded, but it was difficult because, for years I had rarely heard him speak. Certainly not in my presence. Not anymore, anyway. Because my presence removed itself every morning while he was still in the bedroom, and he was back in his bedroom when I came home at night.

I stared at him as though I had never seen him before. This skinny little man wrapped in the thick khaki Austrian army greatcoat he had brought with him to this country in 1905 and had worn as a bathrobe ever since. This wreck of a human being huddled in a wheelchair. Was this my father?

I had not seen him for weeks. He did not like people to come into his bedroom. Not even his son. I realized with a sense of shame that this was a matter of relief to me. I did not like to go into his bedroom. It was shocking to see him out here in the kitchen.

“You’ve been hiding in that bedroom long enough,” my mother said. “The time it’s now the right time for you to come out and be a human being again like everybody else. Come on.”

She grabbed the bar at the back of his wheelchair and swung it toward the living room. I came further into the kitchen.

“Ma,” I said. “Can I help?”

“Everybody can help,” my mother said, not to me but to the place from which my voice had come. Then she seemed to become aware of my presence. “Oh, hello, Benny,” she said. “There’s milk and
lekach
on the sink. Go eat.”

She started to push the wheelchair toward the front room.

“Chanah, please,” my father said again.

“Wait till you see,” my mother said. “You’ll enjoy.”

She shoved the wheelchair into the living room. Munching my honey cake and sipping my milk, I followed. In the doorway I stopped and stared. If I had to doss down tonight on the living room floor, it would take a bit of doing to find an available spot. Something had been added to the Singer.

The round table in the middle of the room, on which we ate our Sabbath meals, had vanished. It was concealed under four long planks that converted the small round mahogany into a large rectangular cutting table. On it, layers of colored silk had been stretched to form a pad that seemed to be about an inch thick.

“I chalked it out for you,” my mother said. “I’ve watched Mr. Lebenbaum do it for over a year. Anything that Litvak can do, Joe Kramer can do. You were the best pocket maker on Allen Street.”

“Making pockets, Chanah,” my father said, “it’s not the same like cutting jazz bows.”

“How do you know till you give it a try?” my mother said. “Pockets is with tveet. Jazz bows is with silk. It’s both cloth. All you have to do is with the cutting knife, you follow the chalk marks. Here.”

My mother picked up one of those ugly knives I had seen on the cutting tables of bankrupt Seventh Avenue dress firms to which the staff of Maurice Saltzman & Company was sent almost daily to audit the records for the receiver. My mother thrust the knife at my father. He winced back in the wheelchair, shoved out both hands as though to ward off an assassination attack, and managed to seize the black bone centerpiece with both hands.

“Then like this,” my mother said. “Watch.”

She leaned over the cutting table. I noticed there was a row of nails set in the wood all along the top edge of the plank and another set in along the bottom edge. The nails stood about two inches up from the wood. Stretched tight between the nails at the top and the nails at the bottom was a series of strings dividing the thick pad of silk into a sort of miniature football gridiron.

“These things here, these cords,” my mother said. “I rubbed them with chalk. Watch.” Delicately, with thumb and forefinger, she lifted one of the tightly drawn pieces of string. When it had come up from the silk about two inches, she allowed the string to snap back to the silk. A small puff of chalk dust rose in the air. My mother lifted the string again and held it in the air so my father could see what had happened. The silk was now marked by a neat white line running from the nail at the top of the cutting board to the nail at the bottom.

“What you do,” my mother said, “you snap all these cords, one by one, until the whole silk it’s marked with straight lines. Then with the knife you start cutting, one line at a time. When you finish with the cutting, I take the cut pieces over here.” She went to the Singer and tapped the small nickel-plated hand wheel. “I sew them into the long belts, the little pockets, for the women when they come to pick them up to take them home for ‘turning.’ It’s easy,” my mother said. “You cut. I sew.”

My father looked around the room.

“Yesterday it was a place to eat on Friday night,” he said. “Today it’s a factory.”

“From eating on Friday night,” my mother said, “you don’t get rich.”

My father looked down at the ugly knife in his lap. When his head came up, his cheeks looked a little more shrunken. When he spoke, he sounded a little weaker.

“On Friday night,” he said. “The candles. Where will you
bentsh licht?
”

“It doesn’t say in the Torah God will throw you out of heaven if you light the
Shabbes
candles in the kitchen,” my mother said. An edge came into her voice. “On East Fourth Street I once had a chance for a life, and I lost it. Now here on Tiffany Street I have something I thought I’d never have again. I have a second chance. I’m not going to lose it. You hear me? I’m not going to lose it. Not a second time. You’ll cut silk, or you won’t eat. You hear?” My father reached out and touched the pad of silk. “On East Fourth Street,” he said, “I used to walk two miles to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society on Lafayette Street to write out the papers to bring people over from Europe. Here, on Tiffany Street, I sit in a wheelchair and I cut jazz bows.”

“That’s America,” my mother said. Down on East Fourth Street I had slept in the tiny back storage room, tucked snugly into a small bed next to the wooden keg in which my father fermented the Blue Concord grapes for the Passover wine. Here on Tiffany Street I slept on the floor of a jazz bow factory. My father and I finally had something in common.

“Ma,” I said, “can I go back into my room tonight?”

“Certainly not!” Sebastian Roon called in from the kitchen. I had not heard him come into the apartment. He now came into the front room, peeling off his coat. “Selfishness is most unbecoming to you, Benjamin,” he said. “I’ve had a frightfully exhausting day, lining up our outlets.”

“They’ll take?” my mother said.

I was only mildly surprised to hear her utter the two words in English. I didn’t doubt that before long she would know as many as Mr. Lebenbaum, Henry Ford, or Harvey Firestone, and in her spare time would be quoting Shelley. “Every bloody jazz bow we can produce, and more if we can produce them,” Sebastian Roon said. “They’re so eager, they said if our first delivery is up to standard we won’t have to advance our own money to buy the silk. They’ll provide the silk for us.”

“What means standard?” my mother said. “It means as good as the work they’ve been getting from their other suppliers,” Seb said.

I thought my mother looked puzzled. Then I saw what had invaded her face was not puzzlement but anger. I knew her well enough to understand what was going through her mind. Having learned a few English words, her confidence in her intelligence had led her to believe she knew them all. Seb seemed to grasp this, too.

“It means,” he said in Yiddish, “that if what we give them is as good as what they’ve been getting from other manufactures, they’ll give us for free the silk to work with. Which will be our salvation, I assure you, because my nine hundred dollars won’t last forever.”

“It won’t have to last forever,” my mother said, “and you’ll get it back every penny. They want, you say, they want we should make as good as?”

“Very much so,” Seb said.