Jew Store (12 page)

On this day the two men shook hands, and Spivey put the lease in his pocket. My father was to get his the next day, after it had been typed up. “There's a lady at the bank uses a typewriter,” Spivey told him.

M
y father had a store, and of course it was time for giving himself congratulations. This he did, but it was not the congratulations he had envisioned, with a “Hoorah!” and a walk on the moon. No, he wasn't moon walking. And why he wasn't was no mystery. As my father said later, he knew that when Tom Dillon charged out the door, it wasn't the end of Tom Dillon. And, of course, it wasn't. My father had made an enemy, and he knew what to expect of enemies. Still, he and my mother never had to face Tom Dillon's most hateful act against us, and that was because Miriam and I never told them of it.

W
hen my father came home, the story of his newly acquired store was warm inside him, ready to go. But when he saw the bedroom dark and my mother lying on the bed, a white cloth across her forehead, he decided to hold it in a bit longer.

He conformed to practice and asked my mother how her day had gone, though he could see with his own eyes that it had not only gone but slammed the door behind it. My mother said she wanted to answer with something happy, to
be
happy, to make a joke about the rag on her head. It all stuck in her throat, and out came, “I got a headache, that's how it went.” She used to say that at that point in her life she was not only like a tolling bell but like a window shade with a busted spring: the slightest touch and she went flapping around.

The cloth on her forehead contained sliced white potatoes—“Irish” potatoes we called them in Concordia or, more precisely, “Arsh” potatoes, to distinguish them from sweet potatoes, just as we said “sweetmilk” to distinguish it from buttermilk. This potato contrivance was Lizzie Maud's idea of a headache cure.

My mother had been secretly feeling that
this
particular
headache had come from a couple of sources: She was expecting no good news from my father, and there was a problem having to do with Lizzie Maud. My mother had noticed that Lizzie Maud's bag (“bag” to my mother, though in Concordia it was a “sack”) contained only her work shoes when she came to work in the mornings, but when she went home in the evenings, there were other things in the bag. Today the bag had been full.

Could she tell my father that her headache came from Lizzie Maud stealing? And be more of a
kvetch
—a complainer—than ever? And anyway, my father would only tell her it wasn't her business. So whose business was it? Miss Brookie's? A lady who cared so little about household matters she could have been a guest herself? Still, my mother thought, it
wasn't
her business.

She had been lately trying to tell herself she should stop worrying so much, that she ought to think more on the bright side.
Should. Ought to
. She heard these words a lot these days—from my father, who said she should stop worrying or she'd make herself sick; from Miss Brookie; and from herself. She felt the pressure of the words, their intimidation, especially since she was unable to do what they advised.

With my mother so bleak, my father decided maybe a ride out to the fount from which blessings would flow—the shoe factory, whose construction by all accounts was just about completed—would be helpful. Then, he envisioned, he would surprise her with his good news and—
poof
—her dark cloud would go someplace else. He told my mother to get up, that they were going to see how their “little gold mine” was coming along.

Gold mine
? My mother did not think of the factory as a gold mine. She thought of it as a dark pit of frustration. Why should they go? To have more heartache?

My father spoke softly to her closed eyes. He didn't want her to just lie there in the dark; he wanted her to take a ride with him in the wagon. “Reba, come,” he said. “Come, little Rifka. We'll take a ride. Don't that sound good?”

Another ride in the wagon? No, it didn't sound good to my mother; it sounded terrible.

My father was not to be put off. If the wagon was the problem, they would borrow Miss Brookie's carriage. So he got Miss Brookie's okay, hauled Miriam away from the piano, got Joey from where he was playing with the neighborhood boys, hitched Willy to Miss Brookie's carriage, and off they went.

As they drove the north road out of town, if my mother was deep into melancholy, my father was on the crest of euphoria. When he was in this state, he always brought himself up to date on all the wonderful things in his life. First of all, now that he had a store, my mother would be her old self again. She would talk and laugh and fix her hair in the New York way, when it was crowned with thick braids glistening with little blue lights.

For my mother's beautiful hair we all knew that my grandfather was responsible, for he had at some point ordered the women of his house to eschew the
sheitel
, the wig worn by ultra-orthodox married women. He liked to look at a woman's hair, my grandfather said, so why should he have to look instead at cotton strings dyed as if with black shoe polish?

Euphoria also brought my father thoughts of how Joey would surely do well in school, the start-up of which was imminent. And Miriam? Who sat like a little lamb by the piano with Miss Brookie, this child who couldn't sit still a minute and was always flying off like dandelion fluff in the breeze?

Miriam was, he thought, definitely a child with a mind of her own. And
I
had always thought that Miriam had decided not even to
look
like anyone else. Her hair was neither my mother's black nor my father's blondish but an assortment of browns; her eyes, though essentially brown, were flecked with red and yellow—my father would say “sprinkled over with paprika and mustard seed.” Only in the high cheekbones did she share family traits.

In many ways they were Slavic traits. The fact was, of course,
that my family's looks—my father's light coloring, his and Miriam's high cheekbones, the short features and full lips of Joey and my mother—were influenced not by the Semitic races but by the Slavs, the Cossacks who had been busy for generations in my parents' shtetls. My father would on occasion refer to this. “Can you beat it?” he would say. “Us Cossacks showing up in the U.S. of A., state of Tennessee, town of Concordia.” To which my mother would say nothing, pretending ignorance.

I
n the carriage my brother's attention was on the road side, his attention drawn to some identical signs sporadically appearing. My father explained they were announcements for Chautauqua. He had heard about Chautauqua, and he was pleased to see that it made a stop in Concordia. He explained that it was a traveling show. “And lots of speeches,” he said.

Joey thought about a button he was carrying in his pocket. Did it come from this Chautauqua? It had been given to him by Halsey Cunningham that morning when they had been playing in Halsey's yard. Halsey had several of them, and when Joey had expressed an interest, he had given him one. Whether they had come from Chautauqua, Joey didn't know: All he knew was that they had been given out at some kind of speech, a “preaching,” Halsey had said, at which somebody named Billy Sunday had “spellbinded” everybody.

My mother came slightly alert at the reference to speeches. It recalled for her one of her fondest memories—the time she had attended the inauguration speech of Mayor Mitchel in New York.

But then, Joey has remembered, he spoiled it all by pulling the button out of his pocket and showing it to my mother. That the button was big and shiny white was fine; that it said “Booster for Jesus” was not.

Booster? Booster?
What was a booster, and
who
did the button
say you were a booster
for
? My mother felt at that moment that just as my father had predicted, she was going to get sick.

“Everybody wears one,” Joey said, and his attention went back to the roadside, to white blocks appearing now and then in the fields. He had found out they were salt. For the cows. And he wanted everybody to know.

My mother didn't care about cows, and she didn't care about salt. She cared about buttons. Whether Joey intended to wear one, he hadn't said, but my mother assumed the worst. “Joey! Joey, look at Mama!” she cried. “You can't mean it!”

My brother could tease, too, just like my father, and he remembers saying to my mother, “Sure I do. Cows need salt just like human beings.”

He kept it up. “It's a good thing cows have long tails. Otherwise only stubby cows could flick the flies off.”

The only one Joey had entertained was my father. Miriam wasn't listening, and my mother had no intention of being amused. The, um,
Jesus
thing had started already. And what could she do about it? Her answer was that Joey should know his own religion. And what was she doing about
that
? Nothing, that's what.

Well, to be fair, on their first Friday in Concordia, my mother had already initiated “Friday nights,” and that was something. For this special night—what my parents called
Shabbos bei nacht
—my mother had worked out a routine that followed custom: In the morning she had salted a chicken in the kosher way to make the blood run out; in the afternoon, as no cooking was allowed on the Sabbath, she had cooked the
cholent
(the food for the Sabbath); and on Friday night she had spread a tablecloth on the kitchen table and brought out the candlesticks that had come with them from New York, fitted out with candles from Nashville. And with her head covered by a shawl, she had murmured over the bread the prayer she had learned from her mother.

As if Lizzie Maud hadn't been astonished enough by all this, when my mother had baked her own challah, she was totally nonplussed by the braids on top of the bread, and she had emitted one of her “shoot-dog”s when my mother pulled the fat from a chicken and rendered it. “You tell me you gwine put that mess in
mash taters
?” she asked my mother.

And when into the icebox had gone the Mason jar of chicken fat cheek by jowl with Lizzie Maud's can of bacon grease, Lizzie Maud had said, “It be in there, and it can stay in there, all I care.” But Miriam has remembered the day Lizzie Maud saw her eating the crisp bits of fat left from the rendering, tried some, and became a convert. “Ain't a whole lot different than my bacon rinds, Miz Reva,” she had said, my mother “Reva,” as always, to Lizzie Maud. “Both just oozing good-tasting grease.”

My mother actually had it over New York Jews (those who cared about it, at any rate) in one way: Lizzie Maud's wood-and-coal stove stayed banked and glowing at all hours on all days, and my mother would therefore need no “
Shabbos
goy,” the Gentile boy who for a penny did the work of lighting the stove so that food could be warmed up on Saturday.

Well, so what? she thought now as they rode out to the factory. All what she did for
Shabbos
might help Miriam to become a
balabusteh
, an expert housewife (though she had so far detected little enthusiasm emanating from Miriam), but did it help Joey for bar mitzvah? No, she thought sadly, of course not.

The woods finally cleared, and there at last in the center of a large field was the factory, all three stories of it, every inch of the three stories red brick. It was a building softened by neither tree nor bush. Of natural growth there was only a stubble of grass, as if the land had been shaved hurriedly by a giant straightedged razor.

My father, Joey on his heels, dropped down from the buggy. The rows of windows were in place, the glass in them painted
blue, a sure sign that the factory was near completion. My father stood gazing, feeling the building's purpose.

In front was the sign, and my father read the words out loud, directing his voice toward the buggy: “
GRAND OPENING/ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, AT 11 A.M./THE REVEREND CHARLES BOOMER JONES OFFICIATING/COME ONE, COME ALL.
” At the bottom it said,
THE PINDER SHOE COMPANY/TO EMPLOY 175 PERSONS.

In the late afternoon as they drove back, my mother began thinking of supper, of the potted chicken that just needed to be warmed up.

My father halted the buggy on First Street. “
Sha
,” he said to the family. At such a moment, he wanted no talking. He got down from the buggy and, while the family watched, walked across the street to Dalrymple-Eaton's Department Store. He counted its five display windows and, for his trouble, got a painful poke in the chest.

He knew it was foolishness, this envy. His Jew store and this plush palace were
supposed
to be worlds apart. Still, he had to say that when a goy turned on the ritz—like these guys Dalrymple and Eaton—only a big merchant Jew like a Cohen in Nashville could match, even if he in turn was overmatched by a Bergdorf in New York.

Through the windows he could see the mahogany counters gleaming richly in the store's night lights. All right, he'd have only tables, even if they were just lengths of wood laid over sawhorses, but they'd hold plenty. As for how customers would pay, so okay, Dalrymple-Eaton's had this fancy overhead pulley system, but he could make do easy with a secondhand register—if he was lucky enough to find one—or a cigar box, if he wasn't. Still, he had to blink away the image of my mother standing dignified behind a shiny register, chatting with the customers as she made change.

The windows also offered sightlines into the shoe department, an island to itself, and set about with upholstered chairs
of such luxury that every customer would feel like a king. Of course, like all shoe departments in the South, it was for white trade only. Negroes tried on shoes from atop a crate in the back alley and tested them on a strip of rug laid down there.