Jew Store (38 page)

On our side, if we married local boys, my father envisioned something worse: my mother avoiding us. Maybe there would be, with the birth of a grandchild, an uneasy reconciliation. What was the good of this? As my father saw it, there was not much good in it at all.

And if we stayed and tried hard to turn up some Jewish boys? In later years my father used to say that in this particular scenario, he pictured us scouting around in a couple of Tennessee counties, whacking at bushes, climbing trees, peering through binoculars, in which case we might flush out one or two (not Sheldon Rastow, nobody would have tried to flush out that pest Sheldon Rastow), but even my mother would have thought it unfair to have such a small pool to choose from.

And the “lists,” those famous lists my father knew from the Savannah days, which cataloged all the Jewish eligibles for miles around? Where were they when we needed them most? They had thus far not come to our little dot on the map and showed no promise of doing so. Perhaps the compilers of the lists were not as interested in attracting girls as boys, and it was true that
though most any Jewish boy was on the list, faraway Jewish girls were there only if they came from wealthy families. And a wealthy family we were not.

Send us to New York? My father himself scotched that idea. We live in New York while he and my mother stayed on in Concordia? The family divided like that? Like what happened with Joey?
Oy
, whenever he thought this, he always asked himself, What could compare to a family being together?

Still, the notion of dwelling in a place with a heart as hard as iron and a spirit as cold as ice,
oy!
And with the Depression holding everything in its grip, what, my father wondered, would he
do
in New York? Especially what would he do if he could not sell the store, which he saw as likely? Again he did not kid himself. Sale or no sale, my mother knew as well as he that we could still make it: What with the money that was still in the bank, what with the factory continuing to pay back (if only in small amounts), we could live out the Depression for a few years without my father joining a breadline or—almost as despised a thought—clerking for somebody else, if, as was doubtful, such a job could be found. Since in these days a little money went a long way, and my mother was skilled in making money go as long a way as possible, the family would survive.

And if the store by some miracle was sold? Well, my father figured, in that case there was a possibility of getting something in New York. It wasn't out of the question. During the Depression, people were willing to deal down, down, down. “Down to where they paid you to take it off their hands,” my father used to say.

He saw what this decision must be: If my mother couldn't yield, he could. We would abandon Concordia, abandon the store. So on the last morning of contemplation, and with the bedroom no longer cool and fragrant but sticky hot and musty, my father turned to my mother in bed beside him and said, “So you want to try some gardening in New York? So we'll go there and see.”

It was left to my father to break the news to Miriam. “She'll take it better from you,” my mother said to him. “From me she'll be like a wild animal.”

She didn't take it very well from my father either. “What do you mean
moving to New York?
” she asked him, eyes dark.

“I mean moving to New York,” my father answered her.

Miriam's response was to fling herself at my father's feet. “Take it back, Papa!” she cried, her toes kicking against the floor. “You can't mean it! We can't move, we can't!”

Though he was far from calm himself, my father tried to calm Miriam. He looked down and spoke to the back of her head. “Sweetheart,” he said to her, “you'll see. It might be a hard fit at first, but we'll use a nice little slipper spoon and you'll slip in easy.”

“I don't want to slip in! I want to stay here!” Miriam screamed. “You can't take me away!”

“We have to go,” my father said to her.

“But why? Why? Just tell me why, that's all I ask!”

Of course it was not all she asked, and the answer would not satisfy her. And my father's answer—that we couldn't afford to take risks—did not. “But you're always taking risks, Papa!” she cried. “You're not afraid of anything.”

To which my father said, as if to himself, “And that's what you think.”

On the floor Miriam lay hoping she was having a nightmare. And like my father, she had idea after idea: We would go and she'd stay alone in the house; she'd stay with a neighbor; with one of her friends. She'd stay with Miss Brookie.

My father wouldn't answer, wouldn't listen. And when he had finally had enough, he reached down and dragged her to her feet. To my surprise he was very angry. My father? Angry with Miriam? He was
never
angry with Miriam.

“I've had enough of this,” he said to her. “Enough to last me
a lifetime. It's time for you to realize you're a member of this family and you'll do as we tell you.”

And Miriam, perhaps as surprised as I was, said no more.

O
f course, I didn't much want to go either. The next year I was destined for the big school (for grades five through twelve), and I had a lot of plans. I had already been thinking ahead to college and had made no secret of it. The teachers, no doubt excited by my enthusiasm for college, gave me special attention. Miss Nonie, the adviser for the
Annual
, had told me she would be “tickled” to have me work on it, and I was definitely looking forward to
that
. And what would happen to T-Dog? To Willy? To
everything?

How to leave? A going-out-of-business sale? My father dreaded the thought. There would have to be an advertisement in the paper and signs plastered on the store windows. My father shrank from this vision. What kind of thanks was that for a store that did by us so good?

It didn't occur to my father to call on his good luck. He had been thinking lately that his good luck must have grown old and feeble and gone into retirement. Still, the store was saved from humiliation by something, because it turned out that a buyer was not as unlikely as my father had thought: Out of the blue the One-Stop people came by one day and made an offer.

On that day my father came home in the late afternoon and sat down full of weight on the divan. He sat inspecting his hands in the way Manny had done on that last day with Aunt Hannah. “All right,” he said.

“What's all right?” my mother asked him.

“Nothing is.”

“So what are you talking?”

He was “talking” that One-Stop representatives were looking to expand from Kentucky into Tennessee and had come into
the store and made him an offer, and he had accepted. My father said, “They got their teeth all set to gobble us up.” Glad as he was not to be forced to have a going-out-of-business sale, it was the only thing he
was
glad about. The moment of truth had arrived.

My mother was stunned. “Expanding in these times?” she asked my father.

I knew that even though President Hoover had been insisting that prosperity was “just around the corner,” my father always said, “A lot he knows about it.” But now with President Roosevelt newly elected, I wondered if maybe the Depresssion had already started to go away.

No, my father said, it was just a new concept in business that enabled the One-Stop to expand. One-Stop was a chain, like Woolworth's. “With so many stores to stock,” he explained, “they can buy cheaper.” He didn't want to go into it any further. He saw chains as the new way of doing business, and not his way at all.

It was not too long before the
Sentinel
had the story:

MERCHANT TO LEAVE CONCORDIA

Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Bronson of Fifth Street, proprietors of Bronson's Low-Priced Store on First Street, have announced their intention to leave Concordia and to return to their home in New York City. According to Mr. Bronson, the move will be within the next month.

The Bronson family have been residents of Concordia since 1920, having come here from Nashville, where they had gone after arriving in New York City from their native Russia. They have operated a successful business here since that time.

It was a very long article, pointing out all the details of our lives in Concordia: my father's role in the saving of the shoe factory, my mother's standing up for Miss Brookie, Joey's success in school, even Miriam's withdrawal from the piano competition, which, it said, was due to “an untimely accident.” And, it added, “Stella Ruth, the youngest, is a native of Concordia, having been
born in our town in 1922.” It ended with, “The Bronsons leave many friends in Concordia. The
Sentinel
wishes them well.”

My father cut out the item and tucked it into his wallet.

The buzzing was all over town: “Did you hear tell of the Bronsons? They're
leaving!
Hellfire, just picking up and high-tailing it out of here! Lord, lord!” People called at the store. One old farmer told my father that he didn't sleep “a lick” all night. “What's a fact is we was beginning to think of y'all as kin,” he said.

Even if this wasn't strictly the truth, my father thought it took something for the old man to say it. He thanked him, and said, now easy with Southernisms, “And for our part we'll carry a heap of Concordia away with us.”

Those closest to us wanted to blame somebody, so they blamed my mother, and of course they were mostly right. T came to the house, Erv along. Miriam was not at home. My mother and I were packing that day, and Miriam was taking no part in the packing, not even her own.

We were in the front room, my mother and I wrapping things in newspaper, stashing them in crates, she impatient and in no mood for argument. T had questions. Did she want to leave? No. Did she have to? Yes. She tried to explain to T in the easiest way. “Look, T,” she said, “don't you see? Down here we're like jelly in iced tea. It just don't go.”

T jumped on what he saw as a flawed premise. Arguing with T had always been difficult, and my mother again found herself being pulled up short and held to reason, by that way of T's that always reminded me of Joey's. “There ain't nothing against jelly in iced tea, Miz Bronson,” T said. And I thought, well, what
is
there against jelly in iced tea?

We never doubted that T knew the real reason we were going, but if he had been told by Miriam or had just “suspicioned” it, we weren't sure. At any rate, he saw the future somewhat differently from my mother. What he saw, he said to her, was a future
in which we stayed and became kin. Hearing this, my mother wrapped and stashed ever more furiously. Finally, T, perhaps realizing it was hopeless, stopped saying anything, turned to Erv, and told him to tell us good-bye. “See can you do it,” T said to him.

Erv prepared his little speech by working his lips in and out. “Good-bye,” he said at last. “Good-bye to you Jews. Having Jews here was the best thing Concordia ever done.” Was my mother going to correct Erv? No, she was not.

Lizzie Maud wanted to know what got into my mother that we “gwine go away.” She stared at my mother,
glared
at my mother, arms stuck out on her hips like doughnut halves. “Shucks, you ain't gwine like it up there no way, no how,” she said to her. “All them peoples, all them big buildings, all them trains!” She shuddered at the vision she had projected. “And ain't I reckoned you be one of us by now?”

Miss Brookie knew the specific thing to blame it on—“the religion hokum,” as she called it—and offered my mother an out. “If it's religion you're hankering for, why, you don't have to go an inch.” She suggested we just stay right in Concordia and “partake” of hers.

Religion? Miss Brookie had a religion?

Yes, she said, she did, and one that was a “heap sight” better than most. Hers was doing for other people, people who couldn't do for themselves. Slipping into her sociologist mode, she said, “Powerless people.”

My mother was bewildered. What kind of religion was that? She was in for more bewilderment when Miss Brookie said that my mother was a member in good standing.

“Remember when you joined?” Miss Brookie asked her.

Though my mother shook her head, I knew what Miss Brookie was talking about. And when my mother thought about it, she knew as well. As she often said, how could she forget a moment of such joy?

Miss Brookie said, “Oh, Reba, I could just shake you for making us all so unhappy.” And when she said this, a barely there smile slid off her face, like icing off a too hot cake.

Before we left, Miriam was already homesick. She told me she felt like a dog during dog days. I didn't even like to think about dog days, that August week when stray dogs suspected of having rabies were rounded up and towed through the streets by a rope attached to the dogcatcher's wagon. Was that how Miriam felt? Like a dog being dragged down a gritty dirt road? She certainly looked forlorn. Her hair seemed to have darkened, or maybe her skin had paled. And her cheekbones stood out more than ever on her too thin face.

T
here was no ceremonial leave-taking from the store. On the Sunday before the Monday takeover my father and a representative of the chain would take inventory, on which, my father said, he was going to get “a big twenty cents on the dollar.”

On the last Saturday, he made no fuss about the closing, just followed his routine: He showed up early, stayed late, and in between good-byes did some selling.

At midnight, in his customary way, he stood at the door to give a last inspection. When he was satisfied, when he saw that the muslin was completely over the counters, that no boxes were in the aisles, that stools and sticks in the shoe department were where they ought to be, he turned out the lights, went outside, locked the door, put the keys in his pocket, and began to walk.