Shining Through (6 page)

She worked till she couldn’t. Her arthritis got so bad she could hardly lift her pocketbook much less heavy machinery. So my father had to leave school and support her.

But my father. When he left school, he told his mother, “I’m not going to get stuck making sausages the rest of my life. This is temporary.” By the time he was eighteen, though, my father was the master sausagemaker of Ridgewood, a prince among butchers, and he was making the wages of a man twice his age.

And he seemed content. He was always having fun, something Olga (being German) was slightly suspicious of.

Fun was something that happened on Sunday afternoons. If you came from Berlin, sure, you were much more lighthearted than the average potato-dumpling German, but you were not exactly a fluff-headed fool. You knew real fun was for the people who could afford it: business tycoons who kept cabaret singers as mistresses; barons who threw huge post-boar-hunt bashes. It was the job of the rich to have fun. The
berlinerisch
-speaking lower and middle classes were supposed to be the happy masses.

But it’s an effort to be a happy mass, and Olga couldn’t manage it a lot of the time. She was too busy trying to figure out why she’d been born poor and plain and Jewish—why life had shoved her into three slots she wouldn’t have chosen for herself—to let loose and go whoopee. Olga had wanted to be a grand German lady, and she never even came close. And so while she kept her solid
berlinerisch
ability to laugh at the guys at the top, she couldn’t laugh at herself too well; she had never realized a single one of her lovely dreams. That was no laughing matter.

But my father was an American. And was he a popular, SHINING THROUGH / 35

happy
American! Olga used to say it was a blessing they couldn’t afford a telephone, because it would never have stopped ringing; as it was, there was a parade of girls past the house every summer night. He was so handsome it didn’t matter that he was a Jew. He was a catch for any girl. Olga said it a little wistfully, because any girl would have been better than what he got; my mother was not exactly what Olga had in mind as daughter-in-law material.

But my father wasn’t having anything to do with the local Helgas; he wanted a girl as red, white and blue as he was, and sure enough, he found one. He was twenty-three years old, keeping company with a girl named Annabel Johnston. Could you get more American than that? It seemed so, because to both families’ amazement, my father dropped twenty-year-old Annabel and eloped with her sixteen-year-old sister. Her name was Betty.

My mother. The all-American girl—dumb blonde variety.

Truly dumb. Smart dumb blondes marry sugar daddies with limousines and fat cigars. But my mother was the real McCoy: absolutely magnificent, genuinely dim; she picked a guy who worked ten hours a day in a two-bit sausage plant, who came complete with a live-in mother who didn’t speak English. And smart dumb blondes keep their figure; my mother got pregnant with me a couple weeks after the wedding.

But big deal: they were crazy for each other. When I was a kid, my mother would leave Olga and me with the dishes and lead my father toward their bedroom. He wouldn’t look back, but my mother would give us a wave. “Nighty night,” she’d call.

“We’re so-o-o sleepy.” Even then, when I didn’t understand, I knew.

It wasn’t just in the bedroom, either. They were more in love than Romeo and Juliet. When the Depression came and the meat business got bad and my father got laid off for almost a year when his plant closed, a lot of beauties would have taken a hike. Not my mother. She loved having him around the house, and even though for a while there things got very bad—to keep us going, we had to take scraps from 36 / SUSAN ISAACS

a butcher my father knew who was still working—she was blissfully happy. (To be fair, my mother only looked at the pictures in the Sunday paper, and since we couldn’t even afford the paper in those days, she probably didn’t realize there was a Depression on.)

There was only one thing my mother couldn’t give my father: companionship. But that was okay. All she had to be was his

“little girl.” That was enough. That was wonderful, in fact. His mother had been smart and hardworking, but so German. Finally he had someone who wasn’t ambitious for him; he had a dumb, happy American, not an ambitious immigrant. If it wasn’t for
her
, Olga told him, you’d own a string of butcher shops by now.

My father grinned at his mother and said, Who needs butcher shops? I have my family. What he meant was, I have my little girl.

And so what if my mother couldn’t give him companionship?

For conversation, he had the guys at work. And then he had me. Since “little girl” was taken, he called me his pal.

“Hey, pal, I’m gonna take you to the plant Saturday. Show you what a real, prime pork belly looks like.” Boy, did we have great times! Going places, or just talking. “What are you, a parrot? Don’t tell me what the radio says. Tell me what
you
think.” Naturally, we had our moments. If I was fresh, he wouldn’t take any guff from me. “Shape up, Linda!” he’d snap, and a couple of times he gave me the back of his hand.

But most of the time was wonderful. Just walking to the hardware store with him to pick up a bunch of penny nails, I’d be so proud. All the other girls’ fathers looked like fathers. Mine was tall and lean, with strong, manly features. He looked special, like someone famous who was just passing through the neighborhood.

We talked about everything—movies, baseball, politics. He was a Dodger fan and a Democrat. “Pal, there’s only one group in the world richer and rottener than the Yankees—Republicans.

They don’t care about anything but holding on to everything they got. They don’t give a damn about the lit-SHINING THROUGH / 37

tle guy, and don’t ever let anyone con you into believing different.” He told me all about sausage casings, and I told him all kinds of dopey things about the kids in my class and, later, about the people at work. We talked about everything in the world—except two things: ragtime music, which he loved, which I didn’t get…ragtime music, and my mother.

My mother did nothing except stay beautiful; at thirty, she still acted like the sixteen-year-old my father had eloped with.

She listened to the Victrola, visited her girlfriends (they gave each other manicures) and went to the city, to the fancy department stores, to try on clothes. So my grandmother got down on her arthritic knees and scrubbed the floors. She did laundry, she cooked. Naturally, I worked alongside her. I guess I figured housework was something that skipped a generation. But once I finished high school and went to business, I wasn’t much of a help. My grandmother was really the housewife in her son’s home—which I guess made my mother, the dumb blonde, the kept woman.

Olga was smart. (My father didn’t get his brains at Woolworth’s.) She read every German-language newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on, kept up a correspondence with a couple of old relatives in Berlin. And so she was at least as well informed about what was going on in the world as the average U.S. senator.

By the mid-thirties, Olga and I started having fights about Hitler. She called him the Austrian, and she said he was an embarrassment.
An embarrassment?
I fumed at her. We stood on opposite sides of the table, stretching strudel dough. “An embarrassment is when you spill soup on the tablecloth. He’s passing laws saying Jews can’t be citizens. They have to have a ‘J’ on their identity cards.” She eased the dough, coaxed it, into a paper-thin sheet. She was a great German cook. Her strudel technique was not only graceful, it was flawless. “You’re the perfect German,” I went on. “But not in their eyes. Don’t just read what they say.
Believe
it. You’re not one of them. They’d make you go around with a ‘J.’ They hate you.”

38 / SUSAN ISAACS

She looked away and murmured: “And you also. You’re half…”

I lowered the dough so I could look her right in the eye.

“I know. You know what they call my parents’ marriage?

Rassenschande
.” Race defilement. I didn’t rub it in by pointing out that her son would be considered the defiler and that his dopey wife would be viewed as Miss Aryan Purity. “You call all that an ‘embarrassment’?”

My poor, smart, sweet, hardworking grandma…stuck in a foreign country she didn’t understand, hated in her home-land, living with a birdbrained American daughter-in-law who, if she thought about Olga at all, considered her an old foreign thing attached to a mop.

I tried to talk to my father about it. I tried to tell him how hard it must be for Olga; she couldn’t say a bad word about my mother to him because she was afraid he would get so angry he’d ask her to leave. And where would she go? But my father didn’t want to hear about it. Listen, pal, your grandma’s a good sport and she
likes
to keep busy. Anyway, if she had a gripe, wouldn’t she tell me?

I tried to say, Hey, Dad, Mom will pick up a dust rag and spend a half hour admiring the fabric and then forget to dust.

He wouldn’t listen. I’d try again. She’ll put down the dust rag, wander over to a mirror. She’ll make a little face; she wasn’t perfect. So she’ll drift into the bathroom for repairs. Makeup.

Eyebrow tweezing. He didn’t want to hear any of it.

Whenever I started on him, my father would just shrug or stick his head back into the paper or smile. Love isn’t blind. It’s deaf. He wouldn’t hear me. And he couldn’t hear the weariness in his mother’s voice, or the sadness. But he was all ears for his Betty, his little girl. The minute she warbled, “Herm, honey,”

he’d leave me in the middle of a sentence and rush down the hall to their room.

When I started working and got to listen to some of the lawyers, I realized my father was as smart as any of them. What he lacked was education—and ambition. But they lacked something my father had: a honeymoon waiting when they got home. They worked till all hours on Wall

SHINING THROUGH / 39

Street, but in Ridgewood when the clock struck six, my father could have been sorting a new truckload of meat, getting his pay or talking to his boss. It didn’t matter. He took off and ran home.

In 1933, when he was forty-six, he died when a fire caused by a sparking electric meat saw blazed out of control in one of the refrigeration rooms. The funny thing was, it happened about two minutes to six. Just a hundred and twenty seconds later, he would have been safe, rushing through the streets of Queens, back home to his little girl.

I know, I know. It may not have been a breeze to be the sole support of an arthritic grandmother and a lush mother, but it’s no old-maid guarantee, either. Some smart girl could have landed a guy who’d buy a house with a couple of back bedrooms.

So why wasn’t I married? Was I a prune-face, a blimp? Did my breath wilt celery? Did my small talk send guys into comas?

No. What went wrong, I guess, was that I waited too long. I was looking for someone to love.

In senior year of high school, when the rest of the girls were grabbing up anything with hair under its arms, I said, Uh-uh, not me. I can do better. I was smart enough, and pretty.

While I didn’t inherit my mother’s true beauty, at least I had her fair hair and her eyes: big and brown. Depending on the light, they made men think I was either sad or intelligent or romantic. And I’d wound up with my father’s good, solid German bones: definite cheeks, strong mouth. It wasn’t a gorgeous face.

People didn’t pass me in the street and go Ooh! But if a guy looked twice, he might say, Hey, not bad.

So while I wasn’t whistle-bait, I looked pretty nice in a dress and heels. And without; sometimes after a bath I stood on top of the toilet seat and angled the medicine cabinet mirror so I could see myself. It looked okay to me. From the front, anyway.

I couldn’t really see the back. So except for guys who insisted on a girl with a chest like two footballs, I could do fine. Then how come I didn’t?

40 / SUSAN ISAACS

Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, I was doing okay. There was always someone for Saturday nights; there even was a proposal.

Willy Bauer was a bookkeeper for Con Ed and going to Brooklyn College at night to become an accountant. He had a friendly face—like the men in chewing gum ads—and there was nothing wrong with him. But at twenty, that wasn’t enough, so I said no.

I had a half proposal too. Michael Donnelly, who was a steamfitter, asked me to marry him after knowing him three weeks. It was half a proposal because there were strings attached; our children would have to be raised as Catholics. Michael said

“Catlicks,” and that probably had more to do with my saying no than any worries about my future kids in a confessional. In any case, our romance happened so fast I never actually learned what a steamfitter was.

And then came twenty-two, twenty-three and twenty-four.

Suddenly the phone got quiet. All of Queens, to say nothing of the other four boroughs, was married. And the few guys who weren’t, the bachelors and the widowers, either had the brains or faces of cockroaches or were old enough for my Grandma Olga.

Sure, I could have kept busy with someone at the firm; in the history of the world, it is not unknown for lawyers and secretaries to be buddy-buddy. There was always some corporate partner from New Canaan who wanted to grab a couple of laughs (etc.) before grabbing the 8:38. They didn’t tempt me, though, those lawyers whose wallets bulged with pictures of their kids. But even if my tongue had been hanging down to my knees for one of them, I would have said no. I was supporting Olga and my mother. Getting mixed up with a married man could mean a lot more than lonely Christmases. It could mean a pink slip when the fun stopped, and you’d have to be a complete fool to take such a risk during the Depression. The world was full of fast typists. So no married lawyers. And no unmarried ones, because what did they need me for?

It was then, right before my twenty-fifth birthday, that I SHINING THROUGH / 41

suddenly realized I’d missed my chance. I was so lonely. All my friends were married, and I was the old maid. I had reached the age when guys say, So what’s wrong with her she’s not married?