Chains Around the Grass (19 page)

“Teh, teh. You should get her teeth fixed,” Sylvia clucked, shaking her head at Ruth.

“Whew! Vat are you talkin? Custs alot a money,” Lydia interjected with authority. “Ven I got mine Eddie’s teet fixed, a fahchune dey charged me, just a fahchune. You know vat?” She leaned forward intimately, as if about to reveal a secret “Tell hair to do dis.” She shoved her lower teeth out like a cash drawer several times in rapid succession, giving her face a vampire-like quality.

There was absolute silence as everyone stared, amazed. “Why?” Ruth finally whispered, wondering if the answer was obvious and the question foolish.

“Vhy? Dis vill straytin out de mout! Eef de botum teet steek oud more, so den it looks like d’top steecks oud less. And dat dunt cost nuting!”

“Lydia always has ideas for everything,” Sylvia smiled appreciatively.

“Ken I look round?” Lydia Gelt asked, then, without waiting for Ruth’s startled response, she walked through the house, opening and closing doors, drawers and closets. “See vat big rooms. You gotta be-you-ti-ful ’partment. How much you pay rent?” she demanded.

“Forty a month,” Ruth answered uncomfortably.

She gasped. “Yuh hear dat, Sylvia? Fordy, for a nice big ’partment like dis!” The two women stared at each other, frowning in amazement. “Vat da ciddy does f ’ de pepul. Such a be-you-ti-ful ’partment. Such a big rooms,” she almost sang. “Nice, vehra nice.” She wandered back into the living room and sat down.

“You god gas?” “What?” Ruth gasped.

“De rent, ’cludes gas, ’lectric?” Ruth nodded unhappily.

“Yuh heard, Sylvia?”

“I heard, I heard. Wonderful. Wonderful!”

“Ven ve came t’ dis conetree, ve didn’t have nod even two rooms. Nod even a toylit. Nuting!! I’m happy for you, ’lieve me. Mine heartz is happy.”

“This you don’t know, but I tell you. When Lydia says something she means it with all of her heart,” Sylvia interjected. “She is such a good person, so fine! When my husband died, she came to me and said ‘Sylvia, you come to me, to stay until you feel like you want to go.’ But I got so attached to the children. I love them so! And they loved me like I was their mother. I know them since they’re babies.

How old was Eddie when I came, maybe two? ‘Auntie Vee,’ he used to call me, a broocha on his sweet keppeleh. Whenever I wanted to go, the children would cry: ‘Auntie Vee, don’t go, don’t leave us!’ It broke mine heart. I could never go.”

“Oh!” Lydia interrupted, overcome with some deep emotion that almost made her shake. “Mine children! Dey vere so easy to vatch! Everybody lufft dem so!” She turned to Sylvia. “And dey lufft you, it’s true.” She turned to Ruth. “If she vould be dere real aunt, dey couldn’t lo? her more.”

“Sometimes I used to think I should try to find a husband, have my own children…”

“Dey da same to you, Sylvia. Believe me, de same like vas your own. No difference!” She placed her hand over her throbbing bosom. “Ven you see Eddie, you esk him ifs not true.”

“I know, I know,” Sylvia sighed, turning to Ruth: “Thank God you have beautiful children. You’re very lucky. Children are a comfort to a widow, better than money!”

“So you ged Soshal Scurity? Dank God! So you haf to budgit, be a gut managair. But dank Got’s nod like it vas den. Den you god nuting. You could starve. Nowdays, you see, it’s a difference voild! A nice, big apahtment. A check every mont. America. Sooch a vonderful coontree! Ve so lucky, all of us! Den ven de baby geds biggair, you could voik. You know to do someting?”

“I used to be a medical secretary…”

“Dat’s vonderful, vonderful! You’ll get a gut JOB, make a nice SALARY,” her voice boomed. “And you haf a big boy, he’ll also voik, he’ll help—”

“I want to work,” Jesse interrupted eagerly, seizing his big chance.

“You could get a job aftah school. Collect old newspapuhs. Dey pay good money for dat…”

“I want to learn a business—”

“In high school, dey train you. Everyting nowdays dey give you. You sign vocational and den you voik in a machine shop, or printing. Ged a goot job layder.”

“I thought the wine business was good!”

“Oh, vat you need vine! How hard mine poor dahling husband ust to voik. Day and night. Sooch aggravation all d’time! You don need it, ’lieve me. You a smart boy. You ged a goot job, bring home a check every veek to your mother, vit no vorries.” She shifted in her chair. “So vaht time. Ve hafte get back. D’doctors.”

“You’re right, Lydia. Two more minutes. So.” A sudden silence descended, pregnant with possibilities. “Well, the reason we came—” Sylvia began.

“Vas mine Eddie! He’s…”

“Now don’t, don’t,” Sylvia adjusted the trembling fur around

Lydia’s shoulders. Lydia wiped her nose on a lace handkerchief. “Mine Eddie is sick.” She looked around the room expectantly.

They waited for her to continue, but she just sank back into her chair, making it clear she had concluded.

“I told Lydia how religious you are, Ruth. So maybe you could say a prayer for him every Saturday when you go to shul.”

“Take dis,” Lydia pressed an envelope into Ruth’s hand. “Mine Eddie,” she wept. “Gotteinu, Gotteinu. Dey tink even, maybe, he’s got…”

“Don’t say it, Lydia. Don’t even think it!” Sylvia demanded. “And this is for you, a little something,” Sylvia handed her a small box.

Lydia rose, her heavy breasts heaving like a wind-driven prow. “Ve go now. I vish you vell. You haf beyootiful chill-dren. Dey should just be helti.”

Sylvia patted Sara on the head, then leaned over to peck Ruth’s cheek: “Try not to worry too much about Eddie. It’s in God’s hands,” she whispered conspiratorially.

Jesse saw them back to the car. And when he returned, the children gathered around Ruth in the kitchen, pressing against her as she tore open the envelope. Her hands trembled as she saw the familiar green with its slightly sour smell. A twenty. She turned the envelope inside out, hoping it was hiding more. It wasn’t.

“That’s very nice, very nice,” she exhaled uncertainly, unwrapping the box. Inside was old costume jewelry. “Nice,” Ruth repeated, stunned.

“Oh, dat’s becauze you just such a vonderful, vooooooooonderful poison.” Jesse jumped to the top of the kitchen table, his hands straining under two imaginary pendulous breasts. “Mine fat heartz is plotzing fyous. Mine fat behind is shvitzing from dis vonderful deal ya got!”

“Look at me! I’m gonna suck yet blood. Whaaaaaaaaa!” Sara screamed, shoving her jaw in and out.

“I gots a great deal for ya, kids,” Jesse shouted over her, flicking an imaginary cigar. “How wouldja like to work for me forever for nuting!!? How wouldja like t’be a niiiiiiiiice boy!?”

Sara joined him on the tabletop, her body swaying like a man in deep prayer.

“Oh mine heartz, mine heartz! Please let mine schmuck of a son get whatever he’s got, and get it good!” Jesse shouted.

“Oh, you shouldn’t, Jesse” Ruth began, scandalized. Then suddenly, she felt herself convulse with laughter, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Jesse jumped down off the table, pushing his face belligerently into his mother’s.

“YOU GOT GAS?” He stood there staring until she nodded, helpless with laughter.

“SO TAKE AN ALKA?SELTZER!!”

Ruth sighed, wiping her eyes, thinking about Sylvia, Dave’s older sister, in the Woodhurst mansion watching over other people’s children for twenty years because she didn’t have the guts to rent an apartment, get a job, remarry…wondering how such a human being might feel herself qualified to give advice.

Interesting, Ruth thought, how Sylvia had had only contempt for her own immigrant mother, ashamed of her accent, her clothes, her piety. So much so that she’d set her own father up with a more “modern” woman. Money, Ruth smiled to herself cynically, washed away a multitude of immigrant sins. Once you had gold, your greenness could be forgiven.

But certainly, if there was retribution in this world, Sylvia had got hers, poor dope. So that’s what had been going on all those years in the elegant mansion behind the green hedges. A fat old greener—charmless, tasteless, classless, stupid—all her money couldn’t change that!—and Dave’s sister, the one-hundred percent American with her Friday night card parties, licking her tuchas and being nursemaid to her children, all the while convincing herself she was an indispensable part of the family, instead of a cheap form of domestic servant.

With odd contentment, she watched Jesse rip some tape off the plastic upholstery—neatly repaired in honor of the visit—then throw a clump of stuffng over them like confetti.

She felt a sudden flash of pride. My own home, she thought. My own children. That was something, after all.

Chapter eighteen

It was a long time coming, it seemed to Ruth. First, there was the vagueness, the confusion, the weakness. Then gradually her world began to clarify, the lens turning and turning, bringing things more sharply into focus. At last she looked at herself, her life, clearly, understanding what she was up against and the few weapons she had with which to fight her battles.

On a warm summer day in August she put on a clean white blouse, slightly frayed at the collar, and a carefully ironed old blue skirt. She combed her hair and pinned it back, neatly but stylelessly. The effect was clear: poor but respectable, she noted with satisfaction. She left the children with Mrs. Cohen’s eldest girl, and with more purpose and determination than she had ever felt in her life, she took the bus to Far Rockaway.

The Far Rockaway Hebrew Day School was housed in four white mansions, summer homes of wealthy, turn-of-the-century German Jews who had prospered beyond their dreams. Bought up sometime during the Depression by an upstart Polish Jew who had guessed right when the snotty Germans who wouldn’t invite him to dinner had guessed wrong, the houses and several acres surrounding them had eventually been donated (partially out of piety, and partially on the advice of a shrewd tax lawyer) for the “furtherance of Jewish religious education.”

There were wide, fragrant lawns, a punch ball field, a basketball court. Through the tall pines and oaks and maples, the salty fresh sea air drifted languorously, bringing with it the sounds of comfortable, middle-class residents and carefree vacationers reveling on the clean white beaches.

Standing outside the buildings, Ruth imagined boys in dress shirts and slacks, girls in pleated skirts and bobby socks, children flowing through the wide halls, giggling up and down the stairs. It was an expensive school—a private, college preparatory school, with religious education thrown into the bargain.

She took a deep breath and walked into the office. “I’ve come to see the principal,” she announced too loudly and with more insistence than was appropriate since she hadn’t yet been denied anything.

The secretary looked up, surprised, even a little amused. “Do you have an appointment?”

Ruth shook her head defiantly. “But I’ve got to see him anyway.

“What about?”

Ruth considered that. “It’s about my boy.”

Hoover High—those dark old buildings near the bay; the sinister iron mesh around the entrance—filled with the rough teenage offspring of project welfare families from the inner city. And they weren’t the worst. The Italian and Irish kids from Howard Beach—they were the worst. Thugs in motorcycle jackets. The future gangsters of America. She didn’t care what color people were—truth be told, she felt more comfortable among Blacks than ignorant, snobbish Jews like her sisters-in-law. But Blacks, she understood, were no one’s darlings. She didn’t want her son to be no one’s darling; to be in a place where the textbooks were worn, the teachers bored and contemptuous. She didn’t want him to be forced to learn the survival tactics of outsiders. He didn’t deserve to be there, after all. They weren’t one of those families, not really, she often assured herself.

They’d wound up in the projects by accident, like castaways, washed up on an inhospitable alien shore.

“Is your son a student here?”

She already knows the answer, Ruth thought. She can see it in the way my hair is cut, from the worn-down heels on my shoes. Her asking was a kindness Ruth appreciated. “No. Not yet. But the Rabbi’s got to take him in. We don’t have any money, but he’s got to anyway!”

A warmer light came into the woman’s eyes. “Please, sit down. Rabbi Lerner…he’ll be back any time. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? I always need something this time a day. Kind of a pick-me-up, know what I mean? To get through all this typing.”

“Quite a load,” Ruth commiserated, relaxing a little. A working woman, Ruth thought, feeling the camaraderie of secretary sisterhood. Not the Doctor’s Wife, a creature with dry-clean only knits and beauty parlor hair; the kind of woman she always dreaded running into; the kind whose children, she imagined, would inhabit these halls come September.

“You must be fast if you’re going to get through all that any time soon,” she nodded toward the pile of papers covering the desk.

“Oh, I don’t have a choice. Tomorrow there’ll just be more.

“I had a job like that once. It was like one of those I Love Lucy episodes, you know? Where the conveyer belt keeps moving and the candy keeps piling up, then falls off the sides and Lucy keeps trying to catch up, but it just gets worse and worse.”

The secretary grinned. “Oh, it’s not that bad. Rabbi Lerner’s a kind person. Keeps telling me to take it easy. Go home early.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice? Glad to hear that,” Ruth smiled nervously. Very glad.

The door opened and a short, dapper little man with black, slicked-back hair, a small mustache and a dark skullcap walked in energetically. He wore a new, well-fitting suit and smelt of expensive aftershave.

“Darn pipes leaking again, Selma. Better call the plumbers before the girls’ bathroom overflows into the ocean like last year. How much did they charge that time?” He suddenly noticed Ruth. “Oh. Sorry.” He put on his rabbinical dignity. “I’m Rabbi Lerner. How can I help you?”

Ruth stood up abruptly. “I want my son to register here for next year.”

Ruth watched Rabbi Lerner take her in. He took a deep, unhappy breath that he let out slowly, like a man who realizes that something is going to cost him money.