East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (11 page)

“I kill that murderer!” she shouted out, tears streaming down her face. “He do this to my son, I kill him!”

I could almost see my mother there, I could almost hear her, echoing those words. They were twins, the two mothers, born at different times, in different countries, from different families, speaking different languages, but somehow, they were the same.

“Mama,” Joey said rising from the chair. He put his arms around her and held her close. “I’m okay. Everything’s okay.”

She was sobbing, “Why he do this to you? Why? You do something wrong?”

“Joey didn’t do anything wrong,” I said to her. “Honest.”

I left them after that and trudged back to my Lower East Side. It was too early to go home, I didn’t want to have to go through explanations with my mother. She wouldn’t wait for explanations, if I came home when I should have been in school it had to mean I had done something wrong. So, instead, I went to the library and in the quietness there, picked up a book from one of the shelves, sat down at a large table and began to read.

The next morning I met Goldie outside the school building. Yussie hadn’t yet arrived. Was he coming? would he be in school today? Sure, I told myself, he’ll come, he would never want Coolidge to feel that he, Yussie, had no guts. Yussie would be in school today.

Yussie showed up a few minutes later. “How’s the arm?” I asked.

“Okay, okay,” he replied. Then he gave a huge sigh and said, “My cousins, Nick and Rosario, are coming. They’ll be here during lunch hour.” He glanced around. “Promise you won’t tell anybody about it. I swore to them I wouldn’t say a word. Promise.”

Both Goldie and I made our promises. “They’re coming for Coolidge?” I asked knowing that they were. Yussie nodded. I said, “Are they the two cousins who—? you know—”

Could I say the word, gangsters, to Yussie? I couldn’t. But I had heard from Yussie and others about Nick and Rosario. They were petty gangsters, strong-arm men, who went from store to store taking protection money from storekeepers.

And once I had been foolish to ask Yussie, “Protection from what?”

“From themselves,” Yussie had explained. “You pay protection, nothing happens to your business, or to you. Your arm don’t get broken, or your leg, something like that. You don’t get hurt. If you don’t pay . . .” his voice trailed off then he had said, “Rosario’s a wild man. But Nick, he’s quiet, he talks nice and low, but he’s even worse than Rosario. People pay, they sure as hell pay them the protection money.”

“They’re going to kill Coolidge?” Goldie asked in an amazed tone.

“Naw,” Yussie replied. “They’ll scare him.” He paused, sighed, and said, “I didn’t want them to come, I begged them to forget it. But my father when he came home last night and found out what happened, he hit the roof. He got Nick and Rosario to come to the house, he made me tell them what happened. I didn’t want to, I told them I didn’t want to, but Nick said to me that you always pay back. Always. If you don’t, they’ll do it to you again. The way they’re going to do it, a guy like Coolidge will learn.”

“What’re they really going to do to him?” I asked.

Yussie shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I said, they’ll scare him but I don’t know exactly how, what they’re going to do. I just hope Rosario doesn’t lose his temper.”

There was a silence. We looked at each other and finally Goldie, with a laugh, said, “Stocks sure as hell will be down today.” I began to laugh and a tentative smile appeared momentarily on Yussie’s face.

We couldn’t wait for our classes to end that morning.

I kept watching Yussie. At times he sat fidgeting in his seat, looking at his hands, staring into space. Several times I glanced at Goldie who nodded imperceptibly to me. Luckily Yussie wasn’t called on by any of the teachers, he wasn’t concentrating on class work at all. I know I couldn’t concentrate if I were in his shoes.

When the bell rang for the lunch hour, Yussie was ready. His books in hand he raced down the stairs. He was gone before Goldie and I had a chance to leave our seats. Gathering our things together we ran down the staircase and there, almost at street level, coming up quickly as we were descending was Yussie followed by a tall man and a squat man, both in business suits. The tall man was carrying a brown paper bag containing something. We passed each other without saying a word, Yussie’s eyes went to mine in a fleeting moment. Then the three of them went up those stairs to the third floor. Exchanging glances, Goldie and I descended to the exit.

Outside in the street, the students were spreading out into rivulets running in all directions. Some of the students went to the playground, where they ate their lunches taken from brown paper bags they had brought from home. Those who had begun to play handball would eat their lunches after their games. Other students had gone to a corner grocery store a few blocks away where they were buying a five-cent tomato herring sandwich on rye bread. A few had gone home to eat. The school building had emptied out, Goldie and I stood out on the sidewalk near its exit door and looked up at the closed windows of Mr. Coolidge’s room.

“Let’s go back up,” Goldie said to me. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

“Good idea,” I replied. We entered the building once more, ran up the three flights of stairs, arrived panting on the third floor. As we moved quietly and furtively down the corridor I was whispering to Goldie, “Sh! Sh! Let’s not make any noise.”

We stopped at the closed door of Mr. Coolidge’s room. The upper half of the wooden door was composed of small window-panes set into strips of wood. Standing near the door, at one of its sides, I glanced into the room. Mr. Coolidge was saying something to the two cousins who faced him, the tall one in front of the squat one. I couldn’t see Yussie, he was somewhere out of my sight.

“What’s going on?” Goldie whispered to me. I told him what I had seen. “Let me look,” he said.

I was still looking into the room. The squat cousin said something to Mr. Coolidge, had suddenly reached under his jacket and held out a gun. Mr. Coolidge’s eyes widened, his face fell apart, he was staring uncomprehendingly from one cousin to another.

“He’s got a gun!” I whispered wildly to Goldie.

“What? Come on, let me look,” he said. I moved as he pushed me aside. I was behind Goldie now as he stared into the room. I glanced down the hallway, it was empty. Goldie said, “The tall one, he’s waving to the small one to put his gun away. Now the big one’s saying something to Coolidge, it looks like Coolidge doesn’t know what he’s saying, and the big one’s opening the paper bag in front of Coolidge, he’s taking out something from the bag. It’s Yussie’s shirt with the blood on it. He’s waving it in front of Coolidge’s face, Coolidge’s looking away—”

I thought I heard something in the hallway and I looked around. Nothing. But from somewhere I heard a murmur of voices growing nearer, it came from the staircase.

I hissed to Goldie, “Come on, let’s go! Someone’s coming!”

We ran to the boys’ toilet on the floor. Standing inside, we caught our breaths and listened. Outside in the hallway we could hear voices, a pleasant conversation between two teachers, it grew somewhat louder, then slowly disappeared. They had passed Coolidge’s room and had walked on.

Goldie was staring at me as he said, “Coolidge, he gave the tall one some money, I saw it.”

“Yeah,” I said suddenly realizing what had happened. “He got the money for a new shirt for Yussie.”

“Gee, I wonder what’s happening,” Goldie said. “They sure looked mean, those two cousins.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the tall one’s Nick. The other one’s Rosario, he looked wild waving that gun. A gun, did you see that gun?”

“Yeah. Big,” Goldie said. “I’d hate to have that waving in front of me.”

“Let’s go down,” I said to Goldie. “We can’t stay here any-more. More and more teachers’ll be in the hallway.”

“Good idea,” Goldie said. “But I sure would like to see what’s going on.”

We sneaked down the hallway. As we passed Mr. Coolidge’s door, I glanced quickly through its panes into the room. Yussie was standing in front of his two cousins, I couldn’t see Mr. Coolidge. I went by the room, we entered the stairwell, ran down the stairs and were out in the street.

Breathing with relief, I said to Goldie, “Did you ever see anything like that?”

“Never,” Goldie replied.

We looked up at the window of Mr. Coolidge’s room. The bottom half had been raised halfway, we could see nothing else. A few minutes later both cousins emerged into the street, Yussie following them carrying the brown paper bag. The two men went off, turned the corner and were gone.

Yussie stopped at our side and I said to him, “What happened?” “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said. We walked down the street as Goldie asked him what had happened. Shaking his head Yussie said, “They came up, Nick and Rosario, you saw them. We went into Coolidge’s room. Rosario, he shut the door. Coolidge,

he sees me, he sees my two cousins, he says, What are you doing here? Get out! Nick, he says in his low voice, you know, he never sounds angry, he says, We came to talk to you about what you did to our cousin, Joey. Get out! Coolidge says, beginning to look wild. I was standing in the back, and I saw Rosario take out his gun, point it at Coolidge who all of a sudden looks like he’s going to faint.

“Nick told Rosario to put the gun away. Rosario didn’t want to, but he did. Coolidge, he was real quiet now and Nick says, First thing, you ripped the kid’s shirt, that’s two dollars. We want it now. Coolidge almost said something, but he didn’t. He reached in his pocket, got two dollars and gave it to Nick who didn’t turn around but handed it backwards and I came to get it. Then they got down to brass tacks and Nick said, You hurt my cousin, we don’t like it when you do things like that, and when he said it Coolidge was shaking his head mumbling, No, no, no.

“Rosario got wild and began to say something and Nick told him to be quiet and Rosario shut up and Nick said to Coolidge, You like to fly? Coolidge looked like Nick was crazy or something and Nick said to Rosario, Open the window. Rosario opens the window, Coolidge looks like he’s going to die, and maybe he is dying, he begins to say something, his tongue is licking his lips, his eyes are real wide and Nick says again, You like to fly? And Coolidge says, No, please don’t, please, no, and Nick is smiling now only he ain’t really smiling. He calls me over and tells me to stand in front of Coolidge. I walk over to Coolidge, he can’t control himself, he keeps saying, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, and he keeps looking at Nick who says to him, Get on your knees. I thought Coolidge was going to faint, he thought Nick was going to shoot him while he was on his knees and he begs Nick with his eyes and Nick says, I told you to get on your knees, and Coolidge gets down on his knees, he’s looking at Nick, begging him with his eyes, and Nick says, Apologize to Joey. Coolidge looks from him to me to Rosario and Nick says, I’ll say it just one more time, apologize to Joey. If you don’t, you fly. Understand? Coolidge wipes his lips with his tongue, he looks at me and whispers, I’m sorry. And Rosario says, Louder! I can’t hear you, Joey can’t hear you. And Coolidge says it louder this time. Then Nick says to me, Where’s that thing he hit you with? Go get it. I ran to Coolidge’s desk, got the inkwell, it’s filled with ink and I say to Nick, It’s got ink in it. He says, Spill it out, I want the thing. So I spilled the ink in Coolidge’s wastebasket and gave Nick the glass inkwell.

“He holds it in front of Coolidge’s nose and says, I ought to make you eat it, but I’ll do you a favor, I’m taking it away. He wraps the inkwell in my old shirt and puts all of it in the paper bag. Then he says to Coolidge, You ain’t to touch the kid again, you understand? Coolidge nods his head. Not never, Nick says. You touch him, just touch him and we come up here and you fly, oh, you will fly all right. Another thing, Nick says, Joey’s a good student. Right, Joey? he says to me over his shoulder, What kind of marks you been getting? A, I say. And Nick with that smile of his says to Coolidge, The kid still gets an A, right? Right? Coolidge mumbles a yes and Nick says, I don’t want you to take advantage of him just because you’re the teacher and he’s the student, that wouldn’t be fair, right? Coolidge nods and Rosario says to him, I didn’t hear you say, right. Say it! And Coolidge says in a kind of whisper, Right. And then we left, was I glad to get out of there,” Yussie said.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Yeah,” Yussie said slowly. “Only it wasn’t a movie, it was for real.”

 SHOOTING DICE ON CANNON STREET

Down beneath the corner street lamp, on the corner of Cannon and Stanton Streets, in the late afternoon pale sunshine, they stood in a wide circle in their form-fitting topcoats and their fedora hats as they looked down at the cement sidewalk. It was late fall and with the slow approach of evening just beginning to tinge the sky, a chill had come into the air.

When they spoke the men in the circle spouted misty plumes from their mouths. They were shooting dice, one man was bending down to pick up the cubes from the sidewalk, another threw a fluttering bill to the ground as he said, “One says he won’t make it.”

Someone else threw a bill down. “You’re covered,” he said.

Another man laughed, said to the man next to him, “He’s on a roll, I wouldn’t bet against him.”

“Yeah?” said the first man to him. “Put your money where your mouth is. I say he won’t make it.”

The few passersby avoided the group. They crossed the street to the other sidewalk, never coming close to the circle. A few young people, boys in their teens, stood on the other side of the corner, and watched the gamblers with an intense curiosity.

The gamblers themselves disregarded everyone and everything around them. The game and the other players was all to them. They laughed and joked with each other, all the time staring intently at the cubes hopping and skipping across the rough cement. Someone there bet two dollars.

Nearby, standing on the stoop of his house, Marty looked at the scene. There, there, in the circle there, near the dice thrower he thought he saw his cousin Kalman, whom he hadn’t seen at all for over three years. Kalman visited nobody from the family. Kalman, whose mother was Marty’s Aunt Tessie, she had cried when she had said bitterly that he, Kalman, only wanted to be called Cal, this was America here, wasn’t it? Not the Old Country, Kalman didn’t want those Old Country names, how did it sound to be called Kalman? He lived someplace else, not in the Lower East Side anymore, Kalman was ashamed of his name, of the place where he had lived.

Marty had almost started to go to his older cousin, but reconsidering, he had stopped. He had been warned by his father and mother never to see Kalman, never to talk to him, and if he saw him, to walk away. Kalman was a gangster, he hung out with the other Jewish gangsters, those that had become a part of Murder Incorporated, those who killed for a price, twenty-five dollars it had been rumored, to rub out somebody and drop the body somewhere in the barren wet forsaken lands in New Jersey, across the river from New York.

Marty had seen Kalman on some other occasions when the group had congregated to shoot dice under the street lamp. But he had never approached his cousin, had never spoken to him, had never told his parents that he had seen him.

Now, soon, soon, when the real cold weather came, when winter froze the city, the group would disappear from the street, probably move somewhere else where it was warm. Occasionally during the winter, Marty would see some of them inside the warmth of the corner candy store, all similarly dressed with their wide-brimmed hats, their form-fitting overcoats, their polished shoes.

Where did they get their money? he had asked himself time and time again, the details of which he couldn’t imagine. They threw away dollar bills just in gambling. One, two, sometimes five dollar bills. It was a fortune.

Once during a conversation with his mother when she had cautioned Marty not to acknowledge Kalman if he saw him, Marty had asked, “They got money all the time. When, how, did they get it?”

“From holdups,” she had replied after dry-spitting quickly three times to exorcise the evil. “From robbing people, from going into stores at night when it’s closed, from killing people, from all of that. From being gangsters, what else?
A bruch ov zay,
A curse on them.”

He couldn’t imagine it, holding up stores, businesses. All those other things. It was movie stuff, things that he had seen James Cagney do, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, George Raft. But that was the movies, make-believe. It seemed real while you were sitting in the dark movie house, but it wasn’t real. Someone wrote a story, a script, the actors were chosen, given their parts to read, the camera recorded the acting, that’s what they did.

But it was never real. Although, almost. Everything in the movies was although, almost. Those beautiful women, the cars, the apartments, the things that people owned that were real in the movies, but when you thought of it, a movie was just a screen with pictures, and pictures weren’t real.

Sure, gangsters in the movies had money, but how did real gangsters get their money? Who gave it to them? How was it gotten in the first place? He didn’t know, he couldn’t know, he couldn’t find out, nobody would really tell him. It was like a big secret in a secret society sworn to secrecy and only those inside knew.

Marty glanced at the circle of players on the corner. Kalman placed a bet on the sidewalk and was joking with the man beside him. Coming down the street, he saw the slow plodding approach of the policeman. Strung from his wrist was his club, which he swung and flipped expertly, to be caught up by his hand then repeated in his walk ritual.

Seeing the gamblers, the cop stopped, immediately turned around and walked the other way. Marty had heard that the police were paid off. Someone, one of the gangsters, met somewhere with a cop, a lieutenant or a captain, and paid him off for the entire precinct, so that none of the gangsters would be touched. So that way the police would act as if the gangsters never existed.

A small shout went up from the gamblers, someone had made his point. There were shouts of triumph from those who had bet on him, words of disappointment from the losers. Marty saw Kalman bend down to pick up the money he had won.

Marty, now twelve, remembered Kalman from years before when Marty had been six or seven. Kalman had been his big cousin. One day Kalman had fought someone who had bullied another older cousin almost Kalman’s age, a small frail sickly white-faced boy. Kalman had been unbelievably good, yes, Kalman had taken a beating but he had fought on, never stopping until the bully had begun to cry and had run away. Kalman had been the protector, the big powerful cousin with the iron fists, the brave one, Marty had looked up at him. But that was then, before Kalman had become a gangster. Before.

Marty was waiting for his mother. He had promised that he would go shopping for food with her. She was going to the pushcarts on Rivington Street to buy a few fruits and vegetables, mainly potatoes. The bundle would be too heavy for her to carry, potatoes weighed a lot, so he would carry the purchases in the large black oilcloth shopping bag she usually carried.

He turned and looked into the gloom of the tenement hallway. There, barely visible, he saw the bulk of his mother growing more distinct as she approached the door of the building. “We go,” she said to him when she was at his side. “Fast. It’s getting late.” Her breath puffed out a scant white trail.

He didn’t know what to tell her about Kalman, it would make her angry he knew. As they left the stoop he began to tell her, in hurried fashion, of what had happened at school that day. Standing beside her, hoping he was acting as a barrier so that she wouldn’t see the circle of men at the corner, he tried to keep her on the other side of the street from the group.

To divert her, he said, “I got an A in French on my test.”

“Good, good,” she replied almost abstractedly. Normally she would have been delighted. She expected and demanded A’s from him, but she had barely been listening. She had seen the gamblers on the corner, she slowed her walk and was staring intently, searching the ring of gamblers. “Kalman,” she said quietly to Marty. “Is he there?”

“I don’t know,” Marty replied not looking at her.

“You got eyes,” she replied. “See, look, is he there?”

They stopped walking. Marty attempted to block her view as he said, “They’re all dressed the same. You know, the same kind of hats, the same coats. It’s hard to tell.”

“Move a little so I can see. And you look again. Look good,” she said squinting her eyes, attempting to see better. “Kalman, is he there?”

Marty couldn’t lie to her, not anymore. “Yeah,” he finally said. “He’s there.”

She nodded violently. Suddenly her face set into a fierce rigidity. “A
bruch ov im,
A curse on him,” she said vehemently. “A gangster.
Feh!
Disgusting” she said roughly grabbing Marty by the arm. “We go across the street.”

“Mama,” Marty began to plead. “What for? We got to go shopping, yeah? It’s getting late, right? Why should we go see Kalman? What for?”

“Because I want to,” she replied pulling him along as they began to cross the street.

He stopped his resistance, began to walk alongside of her. Staring at the gamblers now, he saw Kalman in conversation with the man beside him. Someone there was just beginning to shake the dice in his hand and was blowing into his loose fist saying, “Come on, baby, come on! Give me a six!”

His mother’s grip still tight on his arm, Marty walked along with her to the rim of the gamblers circle. Some of them were fluttering bills down to the sidewalk. Letting go of Marty, she approached Kalman. One of the gamblers on the other side of the group noticed her and said, “Hey! What’re you doing here? Beat it!”

Everything stopped. All of the men turned to stare at her. Kalman, seeing his aunt, began to shake his head in annoyance. “Go on home,” he said to her as he glanced quickly at the men around him. “You don’t belong here. Go. Go.”

“Why should I go?” she said loudly. “Because you say so? You go, all of you.” Her voice was rising and she shouted out, “Go away from here!
Merderers!
Murderers! Go, Kalman! You go! I belong here, not you!”

Marty tugged desperately at his mother’s arm. “Mama! Mama! Come! Let’s go! Come on!”

She didn’t hear him. One of the men in the crowd glanced at Kalman, angrily said to her, “Go, missus. Go home. Go on. Get a move on.”

Marty turned to him and shouted, “You don’t talk to my mother that way, you hear?” He found himself shaking with fear and with anger.

The man stared at Marty. Hard. His eyes, steel agates in his face. “Listen, kid,” he finally said. “You’d better learn to keep your mouth shut. Understand?” Marty’s trembling increased, he didn’t want to show it, there was an earthquake inside of him.

Marty’s mother had begun to shout to the man, “You’ll do something to my son, hah? You think so? You don’t touch my son, you hear me?”

The man, his face still emotionless, his voice flat, said coldly, “Go, missus. Go home.” When she hadn’t moved and hadn’t replied, he said quietly to Kalman, “Talk to her. Get her going.”

Kalman was shaking his head angrily. He turned to his aunt and moved slightly away from the other men in the circle. Now, close to his aunt and Marty, he said to her, “You came to talk to me. All right. So come. Let’s go up the street, so you’ll talk to me.”

Marty’s mother disregarded him. Marty could see the heavy heave of her chest and now she yelled out, “
Momzerin!
Bastards! It’s
a shandeh farr dee Yeedin a shandeh farr alleh menschen!
A shame for the Jews, a shame for all the people!
Zulst nuhr alleh gehargit verren!
You should all get killed! Gangsters,
alleh!
All of you gangsters!” She turned her head and spit heavily on the sidewalk.

The man who had been speaking to her stared coldly at her. His face had turned nasty and he said, his lips barely moving, “Get out of here, lady, I’m telling you. Aunt or no aunt, you’re asking for trouble, a lot of trouble, you understand?”

“Come on, come on,” Kalman urged his aunt, pulling her by the arm. She attempted to wrestle out of his hold and he, still grasping her arm turned to Marty and said, “Tell her to walk with me. Come on, will you?”

Marty tugged at his mother’s other arm. “Mama, mama,” he said. “Let’s go. Please. Please.”

His mother stared defiantly at the men and said to them with contempt, “So you’ll go and kill me, hah?” She turned away from them, pulled her arm roughly out of Kalman’s grip and began to move away from the group saying, “A
schvartz yoor ov zay,
A black year to them.”

Kalman was walking at her side. Marty, on the other side of his mother, glanced at him, then in silence, looked at his mother, the oilcloth handles of the shopping bag around one of her wrists. They walked past two or three houses up the street when she stopped and suddenly said to Kalman, “You are killing your mother. Day and night she cries. Night and day.” Kalman’s face took on a look of anger. “You don’t like it, hah, when I talk like this? How should I talk to you? Should I be afraid, hah? You’ll maybe kill me too? You kill your mother, you kill your
tanteh,
aunt, yeah? You live with that
koorveh,
that prostitute—”

“Stop!” Kalman shouted. “Will you shut up!” His face had become red with anger. With great effort, he had begun to control himself and he said as he reached into his pants pocket, “You need some money? Here!” He took out a small roll of bills, pulled out a ten-dollar bill from the wad and held the bill out to her. “Here. Here’s some money. Go. Buy something.”