Jew Store (33 page)

My father laughed and walked away. What was one crazy deadbeat, this ultimate “slow-pay”? Times were good, customers came aplenty. If he didn't right out say that life was a bowl of cherries, it certainly described how he felt.

My mother thought of the good times as “helpful.” They canceled worry about money, and, almost as important, they enabled her to have a car, and a car could take her out of Concordia occasionally. The car was at her disposal, Seth was at the wheel. She could go on an excursion anytime.

We took out-of-town jaunts every Sunday. Sometimes we just drove out onto dirt roads in the country, into the dense woods and around the little lakes. (The big lake—Deerfoot—was off-limits, my mother's memories of Hannah and Manny and that body of water still painful.) Sometimes we went to a nearby town.

My mother tried hard to get Miriam to go with us, partially, it has to be said, to distract her from dwelling on T. “Come, darling,” my mother would say, “come. Come see something different. We'll take a ride and have some ice cream after.”

Miriam would always shake her head and say, “Just go on.”

My mother was sure Miriam would go with us when we learned from Sammy Levine that
The Jazz Singer
, the first “talkie,” was playing in Paducah. “It's a picture that's got singing and dancing,” my mother told her, and anyway, why should Miriam stay home all alone?

When Miriam answered, “I won't be alone. T's home for the weekend,” my mother sighed, “T, T. Always T.”

T
his time my father said, “She don't want to go, so she don't want to go,” and suggested we ask the MacAllisters.

For my mother the trip abruptly lost appeal. Since Vedra had done her nasty deed, my mother hadn't gotten back on track with, um,
Gentiles
. And as to Sylvan MacAllister, he never said boo, my mother told my father, so what good was he? Anyway,
The Jazz Singer
wasn't a picture that had anything to do with the MacAllisters. “It's about a Jewish family in New York. So why should they care about it?”

“A Jewish family, a
family
, what's the difference?” my father answered. He offered an inducement: They could show off Al Jolson as a Jewish boy who had made really good. “We got the car,” my father said. “For the same money they can come with us. So ask them already.”

The MacAllisters came with us. Seth drove and stayed with some Paducah cousins until it was time to come back and get us.

My mother cried through the whole picture. The tears showed up at the very beginning, when the mother was torn between her son's ambition to be a jazz singer and her rabbi husband's wish for his son's beautiful voice to be put in the service of the shul; escalated through the son's leaving to join the show world; and climaxed when the son came to his father's bedside on the eve of Yom Kippur to tell him he would do the singing of the Kol Nidre, the prayer asking atonement from God for the sins of the past year.

In the car going home the picture stayed with her. She sat thinking of a particular Yom Kippur service in her neighborhood shul when a celebrated cantor had been a guest singer. When his voice had broken under the heavy emotion of the Kol Nidre, the whole congregation had burst into wailing. How
joyful
it had been, and how joyful afterward had been the mingling with the
mishpocheh
, everyone holding their hands over their hearts to show how deeply they had been moved.

From the front seat my father turned to talk. “So everybody enjoyed? What did you think of it, Mrs. Mac?”

“Real good,” Carrie MacAllister said. She offered that there was a lot in the picture to think about. “Lord, I like to cried my eyes out,” she said. “I sure had me a good time.”

So occupied had my mother been with her own tears, she had taken no notice of Carrie's. “If crying is a good time, I guess you could say we had the time of our lives,” she said, and gave Carrie a little smile. It meant something to her that Carrie had cried, so much in fact that all at once her anger went up in smoke. “I hope you had plenty of handkerchiefs,” she said to Carrie, and laughed.

“Used up the two I brought and then went down to my petticoat,” Carrie answered her, and laughed back.

Sylvan MacAllister was a blond, open-faced man, the physical pattern for his children. He was staring out the isinglass with a look of turning things over. In the theater he had watched the screen as if observing creatures on another planet who by some miracle had been caught by the camera.

Since Sylvan was so reserved—he never introduced a topic and rarely participated in one already introduced—my father thought to start things off by asking him something with a simple answer. “Has that Al Jolson got talent or what, Mr. MacAllister?”

To my father's surprise Sylvan took his time, as if the question needed thinking about. “Some, I reckon,” he finally said. Al Jolson, it seemed, didn't “do a colored” as well as some he'd seen. (With Seth in the car, Sylvan perhaps thought to substitute “colored”
for the usual.) “He made himself up good, but he don't have the ways coloreds have. Take the Knights of Americus minstrel shows, for example. Lord, they got end men so good at being coloreds, you just bust out laughing. That Jolson fella's got to practice some.” This was the Sylvan MacAllister who never said boo?

As to Al Jolson's blackface act, my father always said he himself was perplexed over it, though the jury is still out on whether this perplexity came then or in later years. Still, I want to take him at his word and believe that even at that moment he found it hard to defend Al Jolson. Those thick white lips, the coal makeup. Was it not too much? To make fun of people already so
auf tsores
, already so full of woe?

He didn't go on with it with Sylvan MacAllister. He addressed himself instead to Carrie. “Like you said, Mrs. Mac, there was a lot in that picture to think about.”

I
n June of that year my mother had a plan for a longer excursion. Where it would take us was to New York, to Aunt Hannah's wedding. If I was ecstatic, she was surprisingly not. She was in a dither about her garden. Here it was the middle of the gardening season, everything planted and growing, and where would she be when it came time to pick and put up? In New York, that's where.

I didn't care about my mother's garden; I cared about
finally
getting to go to New York, to see all the relatives, to experience
New York
. I could think only
Please, Mama, please!

And, of course, my mother decided she couldn't
not
go. My father said he was not going, and “that's that,” and when my mother said she definitely wanted Miriam to go with us, Miriam just as definitely wanted not to. T was going back to school in the fall, and Miriam wanted to be with him as much as she could.

My mother sighed, T again, and then a letter came to Miriam from Aunt Hannah asking Miriam to be there. It was a plea Miriam couldn't refuse.

Aunt Hannah was getting married to Ezra Goldstein, the son of the furrier just moved in around the corner from my grandparents' apartment. Officially Ezra was a “cutter” in his father's shop, but in truth he was only an unskilled “nailer.” What he did was nail the customer's selected skins to the boards on the basement wall and trace out the pattern.

He and Aunt Hannah had met when his father had stopped her as she walked past their shop window. “Ezzy, come up,” Mr. Goldstein had yelled into the bars of the basement window, according to how Aunt Hannah told the story to us. “I got a girlfriend for you. A real
schaineh maidel
. If I didn't have Mama already, I'd marry her myself.”

Soon afterward Ezra had a talk with my grandfather, asked him if he could take Hannah out, and got a yes.

My grandmother had expressed doubts: The boy had no pep. My grandfather's answer was that Ezra was the son of a boss and the son of a boss didn't need as much pep as the next one.

A
fter we got to New York and met Ezra, Miriam told my mother, in the contentious mode she had adopted for the visit, that thin, quiet Ezra was certainly nothing to get “all hot and bothered about.”

“I declare,” she said to us, “when I think that Aunt Hannah could have had Manny, I could just weep.”

My mother told her not to mention Manny anymore.

On this visit I met all my relatives and was dazzled by all of them, by all these people who were
not
dazzled by New York—who accepted casually life way up high in a tall building, who rode the subway as if there was nothing strange about traveling under the ground, who simply raised their voices to be heard over the uproar “downtown.”

We stayed in my grandparents' apartment, and I made a viewing spot of the fire escape just as Joey had. I didn't play
stickball in the streets, but my cousins had roller skates and my mother bought me some, and we went roller-skating on the sidewalks (we skipped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York?) or in the big asphalt-paved schoolyard. Although there were sidewalks in Concordia, they were narrow and had grass growing through the cracks.

The wedding was big, attended as it was by the whole of the New York family plus the contingent that had defected to Boston. A little orchestra played, everybody danced, and my Uncle Meyer, red-faced with drink, danced with me and all the other children. All the women said that at these affairs he always drank too much so he could forget he had an Austrian-Jewish wife who looked down on Russian Jews, that he had a fat son (my cousin Morty) who was never interested in anything he couldn't eat—a
gruber yung
, they called him—or that he was a door-to-door cemetery plot salesman; and maybe that was true.

After the newlyweds left, to honeymoon in the Catskills, we stayed on in my grandparents' apartment, Miriam still prickly as a sandspur.

“So what's wrong with your daughter?” Aunt Sadie asked my mother. “She don't like being with the family?”

My mother tried to think of something in a hurry. “No, what it is, is she's homesick.” Would this go down?

It wouldn't. “Homesick for what? For that hilly-billy place? That's a place to be homesick for?”

Joey tried to entertain Miriam by taking us to the downtown department stores, and our cousin Eddie worked especially hard, only to have his efforts fail every time. He finally asked her, “What's wrong with you anyway?”

And Miriam answered him, “I don't care to discuss it.”

“Why not?” Eddie considered Miriam for a long moment and snapped his fingers. “I got it. I know what it is. You got a boyfriend and he's down there and you're up here.”

Miriam did a flounce. “So?”

“So you miss your boyfriend, that's all.”

“We don't call them
boyfriends
, “Miriam said, summoning hauteur. “We call them
beaus
.”

“Well, anyway, you got one, right?”

“Maybe I do.”

Eddie opened his eyes wide. “You got a
Gentile
boyfriend? A
shaigetz
?”

Miriam and Eddie exchanged glares as the word hung in the air.

I
f Aunt Sadie was disdainful that Miriam actually
wanted
to go back, she was thunderstruck when my mother announced she was ready to go as well. “Your husband can't make out without you?” she asked my mother.

“You know he ain't no helpless man. It ain't him only.”

“So what is it?”

My mother hesitated. Her answer would go over with Aunt Sadie like a plate of hog jowls. She steeled herself. “It's my garden, Sadie. I hate to think how it must be. Nothing picked, everything overgrown.”

“A garden ain't family,” Aunt Sadie said to her.

“No, it ain't. But try to understand,” my mother answered, herself not totally understanding. All she knew for certain was that her garden needed her and that
she
needed
it
. “You ain't never had a garden, Sadie, so you can't know.”

W
hen we came home, my father asked, “So why are you home so soon? You missed me so much?”

My mother laughed. “You and my garden. Don't ask me which comes first. You at least I knew would be all right. But
oy
, my garden!”

My father winked at me. “Well, what do you expect? You left it to run itself. What can it be but terrible?”

“I hate to take a look.”

My father's advice was that when there was something to do that you didn't want to, best to do it right away and get it over with. “So why not go out now and take a look?” he asked my mother.

She held back. My father gave her a push. My mother tried not to look as we went out the back door and into the yard.

Now I knew the reason for my father's wink: There was nothing rotting, nothing in ruins, just plants looking as they should look after the season—stripped clean.

And when we got back on the porch, my mother saw the jars—the shelves and shelves of jars and jars.

It was the neighbors, my father explained. “They came over and picked the place bare.”

Then they had put everything up. “Some hard job they gave themselves,” my mother said. “
Oy
, such a hard job.” And no, nobody, she said, could have done anything nicer.

And here we have an “upsy” in my mother's “upsy-downsies” with Concordia, when my mother first allowed the word
home
to take a place in her thoughts. And what this meant was that if the Miriam-and-T thing hadn't been fluttering around, “tem-porary” would be hanging on for dear life.

I
n the fall of that year, 1929, the business picture was, as usual, exceedingly bright. My father had no significant debts, the Nashville men and my grandfather having been paid off long ago. My father was feeling himself at last to be a businessman of consequence.