Mitla Pass (35 page)

It was painful, thoughtless, bloody, and mercifully quick. He was soon asleep with his back to her, snoring, so he did not hear her stifled sobs. Hannah’s fear had come home to roost, like a dire prophecy.

Hannah moved around in a daze for several days, shocked by the nightly onslaughts. There was no place for her to seek comfort or respite. There was no one to confide in. She called on her spunkiness to stave off a depression and told herself there were other things in life.

She could make a decent home. She would come to love Saul and Lazar. Perhaps she could have her own children. But, to look into the future coldly, there would be years of his sordid behavior to endure, perhaps the rest of her life.

“I’ve made a list of things we need,” Hannah told him at the end of the first bitter fortnight. “If I make a trip to Baltimore to do the shopping, we can save a great deal of money.”

Moses looked at the list and turned pale and angry. She wanted kitchen utensils, linens, towels, flatware, material for curtains, clothing for the boys, mattresses.

“You are furnishing the Dublin Castle?”

“This place is wretched. I am only trying to make a home for you and your sons.”

“Gevalt!
What is this business here?” he said with the paper trembling in his hand. “Suits for Saul and Lazar.”

“They are shabby, like orphans. If you don’t want to spend for them, at least you could sew them a few pairs of knickers. Buy me the wool and I’ll knit them sweaters.”

“What is this item? And this? And this? Eggbeaters, upholstery material, a knife sharpener, mattress pads, window shades. This is some kind of madness!”

“I won’t live in such filth with your boys dressed in rags. And you might as well think about hiring a
shvartzer
to do some painting and paperhanging.”

“Maybe,” he cried, “if you had brought in a dowry like a proper wife!”

“My dowry has nothing to do with dirt. What is more, I am keeping kosher and I am going to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have rocks in the mattress.”

He glared at her list again, croaking incoherently. Hannah had had the gall to ask him to make an outlay of over a hundred dollars. And this would only be the beginning with such a woman!

“I don’t have the money,” he lied. “And I don’t know where you get such royal ideas. Maybe you’d better go ask for some money from your Uncle Hyman. He spent a fortune for the reception in China Hall and what have we got to show for it?”

And so it went. Moses’ stinginess went to war against Hannah’s determination. Within a few months, permanent battle lines had been clearly drawn. He oozed, bled, and whined out a few dollars.

Hannah resorted to taking in sewing and advertised to make wedding gowns, but Havre de Grace was not Baltimore and the dimes and quarters came in grudgingly. By her deft management and scrimping, the place took on a new appearance by the end of the year and Saul and Lazar had lost most of their scruffiness.

What happened in the bedroom did not change. After fast, brutal, animal thrusts, he’d roll over, his back to her, and the snoring soon followed. At least, she reasoned, he didn’t prolong the agony.

Saul and Lazar loved their stepmother as they had never loved anyone before. Although Hannah was only ten years the senior of Lazar, she was the light of their lives, their redemption from the loneliness and fear of being ignored and slapped, from a life of constant hurt. Hannah was bosom and hugs and kisses and pinches on the cheek ... and laughter. Hannah was cookies and big plates of soup filled with matzo balls and clean shirts and trimmed hair and studying poems and churning ice cream and butter and the smell of bread baking and an
angel,
as she lit the candles on the Sabbath. She positioned herself between the boys and Moses to protect them whenever his vile spells consumed him.

“Momma, can I call you Momma?” Lazar asked. She beamed. Lazar was changing, accepting her affection, doing things to please her and make her proud. Almost like the first friend the boy ever had, certainly the first love of his life.

Saul remained wild and troubled, but some light had entered his life through her. Slowly, painfully, he responded to her, but opened up only a tiny crack at a time.

It was in the third month of her pregnancy when Moses plunged into the blackest of spells. Hannah had spent some money to start a layette for their expected child. In an outburst of rage, he demanded to know why she didn’t sew the baby gowns herself.

“So don’t worry, Moses,” she retorted. “Expect to spend more. We’ll need a crib, a carriage, diapers, bottles—”

“Borrow from Sonia! She has all those things. I’m not made of money.”

“You’re made of
dreck,”
she told him in unvarnished Yiddish. He silenced her with a punch in the mouth. The next morning she was gone.

A very fine good riddance, Moses thought when he read her note. However, it was not very long before he began to miss her. So many things had changed while she was in the home. So many good things. Maybe ... just maybe ... he had been a little bit wrong, he thought. Maybe ... just maybe ... he would have to put up with a few of her fancy ideas. Of course, he’d never tell her where the money was hidden under the floorboards of the shop.

The house quickly fell from sparkling to drab. What was worse, the
shvartze
woman was an awful cook and the boys bellowed day and night for Hannah.

After a month, during which she did not crawl back, Moses caved in. He sucked in his pride, put his temper on hold, and went to Baltimore to reclaim her, hat in hand.

Hannah laid down a set of rules that covered everything from enough money to run the home properly to a limitation of once a week, on the Sabbath, for the carnal act. Finally she drew an absolute promise that he would never again strike her or the boys.

Moses reluctantly agreed to her terms and she agreed to return to Havre de Grace for a trial period.

Five months later, she returned to Baltimore again to deliver her baby. She held an infant girl, Leah, named for her mother, and wept bitterly as Sonia tried to comfort her.

“Moses is waiting outside,” Sonia said.

“I hate him,” Hannah wept. “I hate him!”

M
OSES AND
H
ANNAH
Balaban had three daughters: Leah, Fanny, and the baby, Pearl, who was born just a few days into the new century.

Hannah had experienced a number of miscarriages, as well as three difficult full-term pregnancies and births. She was warned against having more children. Taking Saul and Lazar as her own sons, she was satisfied. The house was filled and lively and she was mother, homemaker, and protector.

Moses reduced himself to the role of star boarder in his own home, a semi-reclusive stranger. After a time, Moses stopped teaching Saul and Lazar Hebrew and the Talmud, further diminishing contact with his family. The boys matriculated into apprentice tailors and helped otherwise in the shop, sweeping, aiding the
shvartze
with the dry cleaning, doing some of the pressing, and making deliveries. As long as Hannah was there, they each played their roles without too much rebellion.

Moses did make his daily presence felt at dinner, invariably complaining, scolding, and Talmudizing. But make no mistake, Hannah was the
balabosta,
the one in control of the family.

As the years passed and the boys grew, it became apparent that they wanted out. They even concocted secret plans to run away. It was Hannah who picked up their drift, gained their confidence, and held them together. For love of her, the unit remained intact.

Moses Balaban was content to dull his way through life, sitting cross-legged on a pillow on his cutting table and sewing and praying. He overwhelmed himself with his sense of piety, always the good Jew, particularly on the Sabbath.

From outward appearances, Havre de Grace seemed a pleasant, quiet, pretty little Southern town. There were swimming holes and great open meadows and canal barges to hop and huge, gnarled oaks to climb and dogs to pet and frog-jumping contests and watermelons to gorge and that wonderful, soft-breezed Southern laziness.

But the Balaban boys did not enjoy an idyllic childhood. Life was continually ugly for Havre de Grace’s only Orthodox Jewish family. The other three Jewish families were fully assimilated, not really openly admitting to or practicing the religion.

Inside the house, the Balabans spoke Yiddish, and insofar as their neighbors were concerned, they were foreign, strange, and even frightening. They were treated with suspicion. Gossip, however ridiculous, about weird rituals taking place was generally believed around town. Outside the classroom, the other children practiced children’s cruelty.

Where they don’t wear pants,

In the southern part of France,

But the things they do,

Are enough to kill a Jew.

Saul became the family defender. He was a tough, mean fighter. Life could have been intolerable had he not been able to retaliate on behalf of his brother and sisters. After Saul demolished the town bully, the word was out not to mess around with the Jew boys or their sisters.

But Saul couldn’t whip the entire town, particularly when adults took up the banner of Jew-baiting with crude “Hymie” jokes. Moses had forbidden his children to play with the
goyim
and
shiksas.
However, they all had their secret gentile friends, but could never bring them home.

Although Moses ranted against it, the boys played the godless games of baseball, basketball, and football and became quite good at them. This opened a small passageway for them into the “other” world. For the most part, the Balaban children were isolated and clung together.

The house of the Balabans inevitably became permeated by the lovelessness between Hannah and Moses and between Moses and his children. It was especially hard for the daughters, who were growing up with a deeply etched loathing of their father. The Sabbath was a bad day that angered and saddened the girls, because they knew it was Hannah’s duty to make sex with their father.

From their earliest memories, they watched their mother in pain afterward, oftentimes holding her back and grimacing. Although Hannah rarely spoke to them of it openly, they knew and they hated.

“Be careful of the boys,” Hannah warned; “they will only bring you suffering.” The legacy had reached a new generation.

Each year Hannah’s pain grew more severe and the alienation of the daughters from Moses heightened. The prospect of becoming mature women was encased in fear.

The house divided began to molder. And Baltimore, with its large Jewish community and many caring relatives, expanded in their minds as a fantasy place, a nirvana, an end to the perpetual suffering.

The proposition of a move was always on the table and rarely did a month pass without Hannah’s bringing it up.

“So what by you is the distinct honor of living in Havre de Grace, Maryland?” Hannah would demand.

“Do you have, in your noggin, any idea what it would cost to live in Baltimore?”

“You’re a
meshugga,
Moses Balaban. You can’t even earn a living here. Without me
shnorring
Uncle Hyman a couple of times a year, we would have had to close this miserable business years ago.”

“How can you explain finances to a woman? Look at this kitchen. You bake for three armies. You think I don’t know that the children give away enough cakes to supply a bakery to
goyim
friends they have made behind my back?”

“What has that got to do with moving to Baltimore? At least in Baltimore, I can start again making fancy gowns. Believe me, well make out much better. And in Baltimore—”

“Woman! You have Baltimore mixed up with Jerusalem.”

“I have Baltimore mixed up with Baltimore. Your sons do not have a single Jewish friend here. Not one. They have no
shul
to pray in. They can’t live a day without hearing dirty words following them.”

“A Jew can live anywhere, so long as he keeps the laws. It says so in the Talmud.”

“And where in the Talmud does it say the girls will find husbands in Havre de Grace? In a few years they will start becoming eligible for marriage. Husbands you expect will suddenly appear from the Susquehanna River?”

“We’ll find, we’ll find. Don’t worry, we’ll make for them good
shiddachs
when the time comes.”

“How? This is America. You can’t make matches like they were made in the old country. They must live in a place where they can meet Jewish boys.”

The discussion always ended with Moses slamming the door to his shop and locking himself in. It was his sanctuary and he
davened
in prayer, asking forgiveness for his wife’s stupidity.

After a decade of this, Hannah secretly plotted to leave with the girls. By scrimping and cutting corners, at which she had become a genius, and taking in alterations that kept her sewing far into the night, she was able to save a little money. It grew more urgent as the girls became older. Hannah knew in her heart what Moses feared most. The cheap bastard was quivering with fright that he might have to give them each a dowry.

She had her cache tucked away in a trunk that held a number of dresses she had sewn for the girls’ trousseaus. Moses, who never revealed his true earnings, had his cache beneath the floorboards under the counter of the shop.

The Sabbath became particularly oppressive during the dog days. On a Sabbath in August, wet heat steamed off the river and the trees went limp and the grass browned and one could hear the cornfields crackling in agony. Rock the rocker and fan and dunk your head under the water pump. The house of Moses Balaban was shut tight, trapping the soggy stagnant air. Shades drawn ... a dingy gray light ... Moses at prayer.

Movement around the house. Every step ended with a long, whiny creak of the floorboards and steps. Hannah grunted torturously from her night of being plundered.

The children were locked in. They could neither sew, nor cook, nor read for pleasure, nor play loudly. A whispered game of checkers. Drowsiness and sweat. Oh God, where is thy blessed sunset?