Jew Store (37 page)

M
y mother's dream that the Depression would be short-lived, and we could go to New York, remained a dream. The Depression lingered and lingered. Still, our store remained open and even made a little living, and the shoe factory limped along.

A couple of years went by in this way, and then Miriam was seventeen, and everything came to a head. It happened at the moment when Miriam asked my mother for permission to spend a weekend with T in Knoxville.

Miriam thought to broach the subject in the kitchen while my mother was fixing cole slaw. As Miriam never watched my mother cook, never just sat in the kitchen and chatted,
schmoozed
, as my father would say, when Miriam came in, I knew something was up.

Miriam sat in the nook and plunged right in. She told my mother that she would take the train to Knoxville. “Goodness knows I'm old enough,” she said, an unsure quality in her voice. “After all, I'm seventeen.”

Exactly, my mother was thinking:
Seventeen
is exactly the
problem. Hadn't she herself been seventeen when she got married? Chopping furiously at the cabbage, she gave a curt no.

Whenever Miriam could see that my mother was in a mood where no amount of wheedling would help, she could be counted on to say absolutely the wrong thing, and she did it then: She told my mother how “important” T was to her.

“What are you saying?” my mother asked her. “A boy means so much to you?”

Apparently Miriam still wasn't thinking. “Yes,” she said.

My mother finished chopping. She grated the carrot and onion (her addition to traditional cole slaw) and went to the icebox and brought out the mayonnaise (the mayonnaise issue having long ago been settled in favor of the mayonnaise). She was saying nothing, seemingly just going about her business. I knew better.

Like everybody else in Concordia, Miriam rushed into all silences. “I'm thinking how T's way over there,” she said, while I cringed, “and I'm over here and how much I love him.”

Was my mother swayed by Miriam's evocation of romantic love?

She was not. She said, “We all want things we can't have, Miriam. It's time you learned that.”

Miriam was not through. As she said later, “Mama always thought T just hung the moon, so I just
knew
she'd give in when I reminded her how
smart
and
considerate
he was.”

My mother said she didn't have to be told how good T was. But did Miriam have to be told that T was not a Jewish boy? “You're altogether too serious about T,” my mother said to her.

Miriam, now desperate, said the worst possible thing: “If you don't let me go, I'll just run away!”

No surprise here, my mother could also say the wrong thing. “So run,” she said. After which she left her cutting board and went to her bedroom with a headache.

M
iriam did not run away after all; she ran over to Miss Brookie's. I ran with her.

We rushed into Miss Brookie's house, Miriam already crying out for relief—from all the abuse she had endured, from all the
unfairness!
What do you think, Miss Brookie? Mama's just so
unyielding!

Miss Brookie astounded both of us. She did not immediately settle into her usual half-humorous, half-serious comments on my unbudgeable mother. Her opening remarks were something quite different and quite unexpected: She talked about what she called “blighted love.” I was stunned, and Miriam was as well. What did Miss Brookie know about love, blighted or unblighted? As it turned out, Miss Brookie knew a quite a lot.

It seemed that Miss Brookie had experienced a “blighted love” of her own.
My
Miss Brookie? My round Miss Brookie, my unstylish Miss Brookie, my Miss Brookie who, as far as I could tell, disdained all feminine stratagems? Where? When? Who? In Chicago was where; when was the time she had visited with the Landaus; and Jack Landau was who.

The story poured out of her, as if, I thought, she was telling it for the very first time. Had the story always been a secret? I've always hoped that perhaps in later years, she was able to tell it to T.

She and Jack Landau had wanted to get engaged, but—“Wouldn't you know it?”—Miss Brookie's father “just wouldn't hear of it.” If Miriam's “blighted love,” was due to my mother, Miss Brookie's was due to her father. He had been just like my mother on the subject, Miss Brookie said—“rigid as a steel flagpole.” And what had Jack's German-Jewish folks thought of it? Well, they thought “the planet would keep on rotating,” as Miss Brookie put it. But in the end, her father had been so “downright apoplectic,” Miss Brookie said, that Jack just stopped trying. When she told us the story she took her glasses off, as if to return to the days before she wore them.

As to what Jack Landau looked like, he had black curly hair “like Joey's.” (We've often thought that Joey's hair may have been one thing that tipped Miss Brookie off that first day that we were Jewish.) And as she would have it, he was the “perfect image” of the David of Michelangelo. Yes, Miss Brookie could have romantic dreams, too.

But what could Miriam do about her plight? Miss Brookie's advice—and this was also surprising from one so independent—was that if Miriam were older, she could follow her heart's “yearning.” But Miriam was so young, too young to make a decision that might deprive her of her family. “You don't want to get yourself into that wicked fix,” she said to her.

But, I remember thinking at the time, Miss Brookie
had
been older; and this was apparently on Miss Brookie's mind as well. “You could say I deprived
myself
,” she said. “I often think what a ninny I was.”

Miriam wasn't interested in being told she was too young. She wanted to be told that everything was my mother's fault. If my mother would only understand! Couldn't Miss Brookie do something with her?

Miss Brookie said no, she couldn't. “Your mama's come a long way, Miriam, but this is one threshold she won't allow herself to cross. And no amount of yawping from me is going to change that.”

P
ush was coming to shove. For my mother this last go-round with Miriam was also the last straw. It was time to leave. She started her campaign slowly, as my father had done when he was trying to get my mother to leave New York. That night when she spoke to him, it was only about Miriam wanting to go to Knoxville.

My father asked what Miriam was going to Knoxville for.

“To see T, of course,” my mother answered him.

“So? So she'll give him our regards.”

My mother blazed. “She's going out of town to see the boy she's in love with and you say ‘give him our regards'? And who is she in love with? A
shaigetz
, that's who!”

My father waved a hand as if to swat away an idea that had no right to be in the same room with sane people. “Are you trying to tell me them two babies are in love?”

“What else am I trying to tell you?” my mother answered. “And Miriam's no baby!”

My father continued to scoff: “Tell her it's enough already with T,” he said to my mother. “Tell her she should have more than one boyfriend.”

And who would another
boyfriend
be, if my mother could ask. “It could only be another
shaigetz
,” she answered my father, “or ain't you noticed there are no Jewish boys in Concordia?”

My father was not really in the dark; he knew what my mother was up to, and that she had thrown down the challenge. So he said, “Aha, so now we finally at last get to the point.”

The point was, of course, that my father was being called upon to make a decision: whether we would live on in Jew-less Concordia or move to Jew-full New York. Push had come to shove. He could no longer keep the problem in it-will-never-happen land.

He tried to shake my mother's determination by reminding her of what Miss Brookie had said about the azalea that had suddenly appeared in my mother's garden. “If we leave,” he said to her, “we'll be like the little azaly. We'll be volunteers. And turning up our toes, like Miss Brookie said.”

“So we'll turn up,” my mother answered him.

My father wanted time to think it over. Did my mother expect him to just “pucker up the lips” and blow a kiss good-bye?

I
f in New York my mother had lain in bed and pondered going to the South, my father now lay in bed and pondered leaving it. What made it so hard was that my father thought of Concordia as his home.

On the face of it, Concordia as “home” seemed inappropriate, just this side of unthinkable. My father was not an old-timer, much less a native, and he was a member of almost every possible minority: a shopkeeper among factory workers and farmers, foreign-born among American-born, a Jew among Gentiles. Even as a white, his majority status was doubtful, for a proper census might have revealed that not whites but Negroes made up Concordia's majority. So, to face facts, the Democratic party was the only majority membership he held. Still, he asked himself, so where else was more appropriate for him to call home?

The place in which he had been born was certainly not home. There he had come into the world a stranger, and from all signs he had been going to stay one. And though Savannah and Nashville had been promising, his stay in those places had been too short to make a real judgment.

If Concordia was my father's home, the store was the essential element in making it so. In twelve years Bronson's Low-Priced Store had become so much a part of First Street that it was hard for people to remember when it hadn't been there. Its success had given my father confidence, and on at least one (memorable) occasion he'd used it to help out the town. So, he figured, if Concordia needed him, and he needed Concordia, why not call it home?

My father guarded against sentimentalizing Concordia, going “too easy” on it, as he said. He reminded himself that it was not a place of uniformly soft hearts and warm spirits, a place where the inhabitants were partial to Jews. He wasn't a fool; he knew Concordia wasn't that way. But the way it
was
was okay by him. And why not? Having in Russia been tormented, chased, and attacked by Cossacks, having in New York been insulted and ignored, whatever maltreatment he had endured in Concordia was minor league. The Ku Klux Klan? Their threats had not materialized, though my father did not kid himself. “It wasn't
because they loved me so much,” he would say. No, it was more that having experienced a Jew store, they were now convinced that having one in Concordia was a good thing.

He did not have to ponder long whether Miriam and I thought of Concordia as home. That was a given.

But my mother, my mother. My mother had bent but never truly bowed to the idea that Concordia was home. She could not comply when my father used to say, “Know when you're happy and the rest is easy.” It was good and useful advice, but given as my mother was to standing on one foot and then the other, she never knew if she was happy or not. There was always something missing, something that if she only had it, her life would be complete.

Beginning at the beginning—with Miss Brookie—my father thought of all the Concordians who had helped us, wished us well, wanted to be our friends, and he wondered if my mother could leave them as easily as she imagined. And the neighbors? Why, in this, the summer season, their yards were dense with growing things that were the very progenitors of my mother's growing things.

All in all, discounting some occasional unpleasantnesses (and where was that place so dedicated to providing the milk of human kindness that the milk was ever-protected against turning sour?) and my mother's uncertainties, my father concluded with some confidence that Concordia had brought more than a modicum of contentment to the Bronsons.

And so it followed that one morning as my father lay in bed thinking these things, so cooled was he by the overhanging trees in the side yard, so delighted by the fragrance of what he called “Mama's Abie's Irish Rose bushes,” a euphoria overtook him. What would be so wrong, he asked himself, if we brought Gentiles into the family? Ask my mother, point blank, why Miriam should not marry T? What would be so wrong?

Oy
, with my mother, what would be so right? She would say, “That's your answer? That's what you'll say to your daughters? That it's all right to marry a
shaigetz?
”

Well, my father wondered, was it all right,
really
all right for us to marry a
shaigetz?
In facing the possibility—no, the
probability
—that if we stayed in Concordia, Miriam and I would do just this, he had to face what would happen if a Concordia boy brought home the news that he wanted to marry one of the Bronson girls. Accept us though Concordia did, call me a Concordian as it would, my father knew it was with a gingerliness, a reservation. In their eyes we were different in a way important to them, and Miriam and I would doubtless be thought not quite right for their sons. (Still, it could be said that we had gone a long way toward convincing them that Jews were not sent from the devil.)