Jew Store (30 page)

T came into the depot, alone, no Erv. “I had to see for my own self that you was truly going,” he said to Joey. He stubbed hard at the concrete floor with his black hightop shoes. “You coming back?”

“Sure. Soon's I finish everything.”

“Lord, that's a long time off.”

In a moment there was the chugging, snorting, and clanging of an arriving train. Then it had stopped and was exhaling giant white puffs. The Negro porter came along and grabbed up all the bags on the platform and swung them into a car. “Whoever belongs to these here bags best come along,” he called out. “This here train's raring to go, like a hound dog after a rabbit.” I had often heard the porters say exactly this, and I had always laughed, but today it didn't seem much of a joke.

Aunt Sadie shouted to Aunt Hannah and Joey, and Aunt Hannah finally moved up the steps, Aunt Sadie shoving from behind.

Joey wasn't moving. There was a problem: My mother was holding him around the arms, and I by his legs. He finally wriggled
free from my mother's grasp; I was still wound around.

He bent down and spoke into my ear. He wanted me to do him a favor. He wanted me to wave good-bye to him like Raggedy Ann. “It'll make Mama laugh,” he whispered to me.

I unwound. I put my hand up and let it flop around crazily in a rag doll's version of a wave. Though it brought no laugh from my mother, I felt entitled to a quid pro quo, and I told Joey he had to bring me back a present.

Joey agreed. “A sweet to eat and a toy to enjoy. Promise.”

Aunt Hannah appeared once at the train window, did a small flutter, and went back out of sight. Aunt Sadie gave a few businesslike nods. Joey was leaning out the window waving to us as the train pulled out.

Afterwards T split off in the direction of school, and my mother and I turned the corner toward the wagon. A plump lady was rounding full tilt from the other side. “Did I miss him?” the lady asked, struggling for breath. It was Miss Brookie.

My mother nodded.

Miss Brookie said, “Damn! Double dog damn!” and blamed the stove for making her late. “Wouldn't you know that on this particular morning, it would decide to take its own sweet time?” She held up a cardboard box. Inside was Joey's favorite coconut cake. She had wanted to give it to him. “So he won't forget us,” she said.

“Forget us?” My mother hurtled into alarm. “Why should he forget us?”

No doubt sensing that at this moment my mother needed all the support she could get, Miss Brookie showed some signs of softening in her feelings toward her. “Why, I might have sent him to New York, too,” she said to her.

My mother brightened a bit. “You would? You would have sent him?”

“Yes, I might have.” But Miss Brookie could reassure no further. Certain principles could not be violated. She plunked the
box into my mother's hands and said, “But, mercy, your reasons and mine? As different as billy goats and bananas.”

We started on our way again. My mother was now carrying the cardboard box, though it took a moment for her to be conscious of it. Then all at once the presence in her hands of a lard-laden cake, given to her by a lady who chided and scolded her, meant for a son to whom she had just said a tearful good-bye, seemed just one burden too many. She settled the box on top of a nearby ligustrum hedge.

And the day was not over: At the end of it, there was my father moving out from the bedroom behind the French doors and into Joey's room. What he told my mother was that he didn't feel too good about things. “I don't even feel too good about me,” he said. “Maybe I need to be by myself for a while.”

A
t first we all missed Joey very much. We each had our own way of missing him, but we all missed him. Of course, with time these feelings subsided, and it wasn't long before everything closed over like grass over a bare patch in the earth, though, it must be reported, my father continued to sleep in Joey's bedroom.

My memories of Joey were like scenes from old picture shows, and they no doubt receded more quickly for me than for the others. It wasn't long before I had to work hard to bring him to mind. In short order I couldn't recall what he looked like; and then I had no memory of his ever having lived with us. As my father had predicted, in a few months, as I was very young, I forgot Joey just about entirely.

T
hough the passing years were bringing their share of changes, there was one constant: the long, boring Sundays. I had taken Joey's place in the casino games, but Miriam would play for only a short while before quitting. If we didn't say as Miriam used to, “I hate Sundays!” the sentiment was there.

The Rastows were never Sunday visitors anymore, and news of them was scarce. Sammy Levine had nothing to report until one day he told us that Manny had married a local Sidalia girl. My mother used to say that the news was a “lump” in her heart.

So on the Sunday I saw Seth walking up to the back door (in “good darky” fashion), I thought that here at last was rescue. I anticipated cat's cradles with the length of wrapping-counter string Seth always carried in his pocket.

He came onto the little back porch smiling funny. He told me to run fetch my daddy. Nothing else.

My father came right out, and Seth stood stiffly in his Sunday clothes and said he had something to tell him. “Something mighty important,” Seth said.

My father went to one of the private jokes he and Seth shared.
He said to him, “With all that Jewish blood you got in you, nothing but money can be that important. How much you need?”

It wasn't money. It was that he had “done bad.” Mr. Lassiter had told him so. Lassiter, the man who delivered coal.

“Lassiter? What's he got to do with the price of eggs?”

It was not eggs but Seth's clerking that Lassiter had made his business. He had told Seth that clerking was not for niggers, even if they only sold to niggers. “He say I dassent sell at Bronson's no more,” Seth told my father.

My father immediately pinned it on the Ku Klux Klan. Seth's news had caught him off guard, as he had somehow managed to forget about the Klan.

Trying to project an air of confidence, he managed a little—a
very
little—smile. “Where is it written that we're on this earth to keep Everett Lassiter happy?”

Seth confirmed it was the Ku Klux Klan. He pronounced the first word “Klu,” as did the rest of Concordia, black and white. There had, Seth said, been talk of marching. “It mean a cross-burning for sure. Maybe worse.”

My father could not allow himself to think what “worse” could mean. What he
could
think was that this all came from Vedra Broome. She had been unhappy when Seth had been put on commission, and this was the result. “I think I got the picture,” my father said to Seth. “You leave it to me.”

W
hen my father told my mother, he said, “I ought to fire Vedra so fast her curls would open up.”

But it wasn't that easy. First of all, my father didn't believe in an eye for an eye. “You do that,” he once said to me, “and pretty soon you got a town full of blind people.” Anyway, firing Vedra had to be weighed: It was not something you could do without considering ramifications. It was Seth who would have to go. He could not even go back to old handyman's job, not with Vedra in the store.

My father felt responsible for finding something for Seth to do, and, as usual, he wandered over to his regular post for problem solving, the window that overlooked the sward of grass between our house and the Overbys' about thirty feet away. He gave some thought to talking to somebody high up in the Klan, reasoning with that person, maybe even buttering him up. He decided against it. What that man needed was not a false kiss but an honest slap, and he was in no position to deliver it.

As he stood there gazing absently, he ran through Seth-type job possibilities. He had about exhausted them when the Studebaker swam into his line of vision.

He stared at the car, fast turning into a heap of rusting metal since Joey had left. My father had not followed through on his vow, after Joey's departure, to learn to drive. Whether he had declined to learn because cars had a lot of mechanical failures and it was necessary to be able to do some repair work at home—something, my father thought, that was definitely for Gentiles (my brother's affinity for car repair was considered aberrational)—or because cars were becoming associated with traveling salesmen, it didn't matter. Perhaps it was both reasons. At any rate, the car had become useless.

He watched a bird fly into an opening in one of the isinglass windows where a snap had given way. “The world's most expensive birdhouse” was the way he always described the car as he saw it at that moment. Still, it gave him an idea: Seth would be a chauffeur. “I guess that's nigger work, ain't it?” he said to my mother.

My mother praised him for working something out.

“Didn't take much brains,” my father answered her.

Recalling an old saying of her mother's, my mother said to my father, “The highest wisdom is kindness.”

“Ah, I did only what I had to.”

“No, you didn't
had
to. But you did,” my mother persisted.
She spoke to her invisible third person. “That's because not everybody's a mensch like my husband, you can't tell me no.”

A
nd on that night when it came time for bed, instead of giving a curt nod and making for Joey's room as he usually did, my father decided he'd had enough of the skinny bed and “bunking” his head on the shelf, and asked my mother, “You figure you got room for a mensch behind them French doors?”

F
or a time afterward, my mother tried hard not to speak much to Vedra. Vedra had betrayed them, in a way that to my mother was not much different from the way of kulaks. On ensuing Saturday mornings when she came to the store, she gave no greeting, just materialized. But, upon catching sight of her, Vedra Broome would launch into a wild welcome, and my mother would mutter
schmeichler
—flatterer—under her breath.

My mother's resentment of Vedra somehow carried over to Carrie MacAllister. It was Carrie MacAllister's misfortune to have the burden of representing for my mother all the Gentiles of the world. On this occasion my mother was so mad at Gentiles she gave up the flower-painting-on-dresses sessions with Carrie.

My father was puzzled. “What happened with the painting ladies and all the lilies? Mrs. Mac don't want to do it no more?

“I don't know what she wants,” said my mother, hoping to convey that she didn't
care
what Mrs. Mac wanted.

My father took this not at all well. He liked “Mrs. Mac.” He reminded my mother how Carrie had wanted the store to do well and how she had named Sarah Reba after her. “Don't that tell you something?”

“It tells me she used to work for us and might want to again.”

“Now you're talking crazy.”

“Mmmm.”

My father told her not to “mmmm” him when he was “talking a tip-top lady here,” one who could also take a joke. “Remember that time with the borscht?” he asked my mother.

We all remembered that time with the borscht, when Mrs. MacAllister had laughed until the tears ran upon learning that what she had done—plunked her shmaltz herring into her borscht—was not the custom after all.

“Taking a joke ain't everything,” my mother said.

“No, but it's something.”

My mother would not be convinced. “Deep down,” she said, “who knows? If we do one little thing they don't like, right away they say, ‘What can you expect from a Jew?'”

T
he time was approaching for my mother to concentrate on my brother's homecoming, when she would no longer have to depend on letters, though it's true that letters had been a great help to her. She would read them over and over and say, “Look how good Joey is doing. All A's. And doing good at cheder, too.”

My father would overflow with pride when it came to Joey's public schooling, but when it came to Hebrew school, praise from him was conspicuously lacking.

As for the actual bar mitzvah ceremony, my mother thought she had figured it all out: It would be during a slack business time, my father could safely leave, and off they'd go.

My father said off my mother could go without
him
. He said to her, “Are you
meshuggener?
Let people congratulate me on something I didn't want nohow?”

“We got to go,” my mother wailed. “We got to.”

“So go,” my father said, some of his old mad returning.

In the end my mother would not go without my father. She asked Aunt Sadie to have a party for Joey after the ceremony. “Make it nice,” she wrote, and enclosed money for it.

Aunt Sadie explained, in a letter written by my cousin Benny in the name of his mother, that without my father there, there could be no party. “If the father was dead,” the letter said, “that's different. But with the father alive and not here . . .”

So the bar mitzvah was a simple one, nothing like my mother's dream. Our grandfather took my brother to shul on a Saturday morning, and with Uncle Meyer and Uncle Philip assisting, the deed was done.

A
ll at once Joey's homecoming was down from months to days, and then it was the very morning, and my mother was merely counting hours.

She woke the family early. I said to myself, It's your brother—your brother Joey, remember? But I didn't remember. And I certainly didn't like all the fuss. I had called and called my mother, but never once had she come. When I yelled, “Mama! Mama! I need you!” all I got was my mother yelling back, “Get dressed, get dressed!”

My mother at last came into the room, threw a sweater in my direction, and left. The sweater fell on my lap. I looked down at it and decided it was not only repulsive but possibly dangerous. I wondered how my mother could expect me to put on the awful thing when my blouse wasn't even buttoned yet.