East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (10 page)

Yussie stood undecided for a moment then finally said in a tentative voice, “What do I owe you?”

Doc stared at him for a moment, waved his hand in front of his face, said, “What should I charge you, a hundred dollars? Come on,
boychik,
don’t talk
narishkeit,
foolishness.”

“No, I owe it,”Yussie said. “How much?”

Doc snorted. “Oy
vay?
he said to himself. “A sport.”

Yussie was reaching into his pocket for a coin and I said to him, “Forget it. He does it for all of us.”

Yussie stared at Doc and said, “Thanks.”

“Now, that’s it,” Doc said. “A polite boy, that’s what I like.”

We left the drugstore. Outside, I told Goldie I would take Yussie home, there was no sense in all of us tramping to Yussie’s house. Goldie agreed, he said he would return to school. “I’ll tell Coolidge everything looks like it’s okay. I shouldn’t, he doesn’t deserve it, but I will. Anyway, I want the guys to know that Yussie’s okay.”

He left. Yussie and I walked through the streets, I looked at him, he was holding his arm attempting somehow to minimize the pain. He was really a nice guy, a good friend, I liked him. Sometime ago he had told me that he wanted to be a lawyer and I looked at him in amazement. I hadn’t determined what I wanted to be. To me, commitment seemed ages away. For me, it was enough that my family and I just got through each day.

A lawyer? I had said. Yes, he had replied, I don’t want to have to live like we all do now, there’s got to be something better, I look around and see what we have and then I think about what we don’t have. Don’t you? I don’t want to be a bricklayer, a cement worker like my father. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. But I don’t want to have to beg for work. Do you know what it’s like to get that kind of work today? You got to know somebody, you got to kiss behinds, that’s what you have to do. And then when someone does you that big favor and lets you work, you got to do him a favor, someday. I don’t want to have to go to people and beg, I want people to come to me. They do that when you’re a lawyer.

And I had said, they come to you because you’re a good lawyer, a great one, yes? And he had said, Yes. And I had asked, But what about the ambulance chasers, didn’t some of them want to be great lawyers too? Yussie had smiled sadly and said, At least I’ll try, I got to try. If you don’t try, you die, you’re kissing behinds all your life.

We walked through the neighborhood, Yussie winced with pain every now and then, his hand clutched his arm. Now we were out of my immediate neighborhood, into another area of the Lower East Side. It was still Jewish, but I rarely went there, I remained mostly in the few blocks around my house. I ventured out only to visit a friend on the other side of Delancey Street, on the other side of the bridge, or when I went down the teeming business section of Delancey Street with its shops, its restaurants, its movie houses. Or those few times when I went to visit relatives in the Bronx or Brooklyn.

But when I went to study at Yussie’s house in the part of Little Italy that was at the edge of the Lower East Side, it was really a different world, it was a completely foreign world to me. The tenements looked the same, but the stores were different. The pork stores, we didn’t eat pork, it was forbidden, we had no pork stores on the Lower East Side. The cheese stores with their sharp pungent smells reaching strongly to me, I could not become used to it. The restaurants, different from ours, each with a small painted statue of a cook with a chef’s hat in the window, his one hand holding a tray of pizzeria, the other holding up almost at the figure’s eye level, a string of ropey cheese rising up from the tray to the fingers of that upheld hand. The words on the stores were different, the speech there was different, native Italian or English spoken with Italian rhythms. The gestures of the people there were different too, we had our distinctive ones and they had theirs.

Every time I had gone to Yussie’s house to study, his mother would offer me a dish of spaghetti. I liked the spaghetti but the sauce was too tart and spicy for me. Whenever I could I didn’t take any cheese with the spaghetti, it was too strong for me. “You like the spaghetti?” she had asked me.

“Yeah,” I had said sipping up the strands, their ends flopping at my mouth.

“You mama, she make the spaghetti?”

“Well,” I had said wiping my lips. “We don’t eat spaghetti too often. Just sometimes. We eat something like it, noodles, we call it
luckshin.
We eat wide noodles like when you eat spaghetti. We eat fine noodles when we put it in soup.”

Yussie’s mother had been nodding her head. “And the sauce when you eat the noodle, you mama, she make it like me?”

“Well,” I said. “When she makes it with sauce, she buys it in the grocery store.”

“In the grocery store?” she had said perplexed. “What can you buy in the grocery store?” Her shoulders had gone up in a huge shrug.

“Del Monte tomato sauce,” I had replied. “In the little cans. My mother uses that.”

“She use the can, what she buy in the store?” Yussie’s mother said in wonderment. “I make my sauce, that what make the spaghetti, the sauce.” She had become silent for a moment then she had asked, “This Del Monte, they are Italian?”

“I don’t know,” I had replied. “They put all kinds of things in cans, fruits, vegetables, fish, tomato herring, things like that.”

Yussie’s mother’s head had gone back and forth in a puzzled motion and she had said, “We no buy things like that. Maybe
tonno.
You like tonno?”

“Tuna?” I had asked and she had nodded. “No, we don’t eat that. We buy salmon in cans. Bumble Bee.”

His mother had shrugged once more, picked up the plate I had just finished and gone to the sink. Yussie had been watching me, an amused grin on his face. I had smiled at him and he had whispered to me, “I was lucky. Your mother didn’t put me through that. Lucky she thought I was Jewish. Maybe what you ought to do is become Italian.”

We had both laughed at that. Yussie’s mother had turned to stare at us then returned to her work at the sink. “You want the fruit?” she had asked the both of us over her shoulder.

“No, thanks,” I had replied. As it was I had been embarrassed to eat in a stranger’s house. And strange food at that.

We had gone back to studying, Yussie and I. Now and then his mother had stopped to listen and look at us. Once she had said, “You smart, you two. Be smart. You be something good, you understand?”

Once, only once, his father had come home when I had been there. Seated in the kitchen, Yussie’s father had turned to both us, listened to our studyings, our replies. He had said something in Italian to his wife and she had replied in a quick rush of unintelligible sound.

Although I had tried to learn Italian, I hadn’t understood it at all, not a word. I had envied Yussie and his quick grasp of foreign languages, I had yearned to be able to do what he did.

“You no understand?” Yussie’s father had said to me.

“Italian? No,” I had replied.

“Why not? You smart, no? Why you no understand?”

“I never learned,” I had said to him.

“What you learn now, what I hear you say, that make you smart?” he had asked. I had not replied, I sensed it was a rhetorical question. “No,” he had said. “What make you smart is what you do with what you learn. But don’t get so smart, you forget you family. I see it happen. That’s no good, no good. Family, that’s what count. You understand? You, Joey’s friend,” he had said to me, “you get so smart you forget you family?”

I hadn’t known what to say. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I finally had said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“You think about it,” Yussie’s father had said. “Think about it good. You no hurt you family. Study, learn, be somebody, that’s good, but no leave the family, that’s no good. Understand?”

Later I had asked Yussie what his father and mother had said in Italian. Yussie had laughed. “He asked if you were the smart one, the one with the brains. And my mother had told him, yes, then she told him not speak in Italian, you didn’t understand, it wasn’t nice.”

That had been some time ago and now I was walking into Yussie’s world, still an alien world to me, the pork stores, the bakeries, the grocery stores with their windows stacked with cans of imported olive oil, the dairy stores with their sharp-smelling cheeses, the fish stores with their strange wares. The language, foreign, and still foreign to me, a rush of words I couldn’t understand.

Yussie had dropped his hand from his wounded arm. A young man stopped and asked him as he looked at me, “What you doing home so early? Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”

Yussie became Joey, replied in his Little Italy English, “We got off, the two of us. We’re doing some special thing together.” The young man went off and Joey said to me, “He’s one of my cousins.”

We passed older men seated and standing clustered in front of a restaurant. One of them called out to Joey, Joey waved at the group, said something in Italian. Some young men in good suits also stood outside the restaurant, watching us. One of them called out, How ya doing, Joey? Joey replied with a smile and a wave of his hand.

Women, tending their baby carriages, sat in the street, at the same time watching the doings of their older, pre-school children who were yelling and running and milling around. Some of them called out to Joey. All eyes followed us as we walked down the street, comments were made in Italian. Joey and I just walked on.

We entered the gloomy tenement and Joey’s hand went back to his wound. We climbed the stairs, the smell of cooking surrounded us. To me the odors were different, entirely different from those where I lived. Here were sharp smells, ones I was not accustomed to, and the smell of olive oil, fish in olive oil, everything in olive oil.

Joey went slowly up the stairs. He said to me, “You can’t walk down the street here without everybody watching you. They know what you’re doing, who your friends are. They gossip and gossip. I think,” he said with a laugh, still holding his arm, “I’ll tell them your name’s Leonardo, they’ll like that.”

I laughed. “Hell,” I said. “Yours is Yussie, back there. Mine could be Leonardo, back here. Why not?”

Just before we reached the fourth floor where Joey’s family lived, Joey stopped. I, too, stopped on the staircase and he said to me, “My mother’s going to go haywire when she hears what happened. I can’t tell her. How can I?” He looked at the door to his family’s flat. “I wish everybody would forget it. It’s over.”

I had been looking at that flat’s door. “Listen, Joey,” I said. “You don’t have to. I’ll tell her.”

“You kidding? You think you can do it?” he asked eagerly. “You mean it?” I nodded. He put his hand down from his arm, took a deep breath, smiled weakly at me and said, “Okay, let’s go. Let’s get it over with.”

I knocked at the door. Inside Joey’s mother called out something in Italian. Joey replied. There was the sound of a quick shuffle of feet to the door, Joey’s mother opened it quickly. She stood staring at Joey, her eyes darting from him to me, she said something to him in Italian, she stared at me and asked, “What’s-a-matter? What happen? You don’t have no accident, no?”

“No accident,” I said to her in a soothing tone of voice. Her eyes were scanning Joey, looking for something, a wound, a scrape, something, anything. At the same time she backed away from the door. I entered, Joey followed me in and I said to her as Joey went to a chair at the kitchen table, sat down, and looked away from his mother, “No accident, honest.”

“Why you here? Why you no in school? You do something wrong, eh?” she asked her son.

“There’s nothing wrong, Joey did nothing wrong, “ I said to her. She turned towards me and I went on with, “We got some time off.”

“No, no, no,” she said shaking her head. “I know something is wrong. What? Tell me, what?” When I told her, her eyes went back to her son. As I told her about the hurled inkwell and Joey’s wound she slapped her hands to her cheeks, her eyes widened and stared up at the ceiling and she called out, “
Mama-mia!
They hurt my Joey? Where? Where?” She bent towards her son who began to remove his shirt.

When she saw Joey’s bandaged arm, she began to cry out, “They hurt my Joey! They hurt my Joey!”

And for an instant I could hear my mother. If I had come home with Joey’s wound, I could hear her in a different voice and a different language, in a different English, crying out similar words.

“He’s not hurt,” I said to Joey’s mother trying to calm her. “I took him to the drugstore, Doc took care of him, he fixed him up, said it was okay.”

“
Mama-mia!”
she screamed. “Look at that!” she shouted hoarsely pointing to the bandage around Joey’s arm. “That murderer do that to you?” she asked her son.

“Coolidge did it,” Joey replied. Looking up at her said, “He didn’t mean it, it was an accident.”

“Acc-ci-dent?” she said almost uncontrollably. “You call that accident?”

“I’m okay, mama,” Joey said. “Honest. See. It’s all bandaged up good, it’ll heal in a couple of days. It’s okay, mama.”