East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (14 page)

Again Danny protested and looked into his father’s face. His father said to the owner, “We want to talk together for a minute.”

“Sure, sure,” the man said. He walked away, into the depths of the store where his partner was servicing a customer Goldie had recently escorted in. The first owner motioned to his partner who excused himself, approached his partner. There was a short huddled conversation between the two of them.

Now, Danny, his mother and father stood together near the rack. “That blue suit—” his father began.

“I don’t want it,” Danny said.

“I like the gray,” his mother said.

“It’s maybe two, three dollars more,” his father said to her.

“But he don’t like it,” his mother said in an exasperated tone. “What’s the use buying it if he don’t wear it?”

“He’ll wear it, he’ll wear it,” his father said. “For that extra three dollars I can buy a pair of shoes for the little girl.”

“I’ll work for the three dollars,” Danny said clutching his father’s arm. “I’ll pay you back, you’ll see, I will, honest. I don’t want the blue.”

“You got money already for shoes for the
kinder,
children, yes?” his mother asked his father who nodded. She said, “Danny says he’ll work for it, maybe he’ll find a job like Goldie, it don’t have to be in a suit store, maybe someplace else. Buy the suit, the gray one.” She turned to Danny and asked, “You like the gray one best?” Danny nodded. “See?” she said to her husband.

His father put his hands out in a helpless gesture and said, “Ai. You think I don’t want Danny to have the suit he likes? What am I, a stone? That I don’t know that he wants the gray one? But there’s the other
kinderlach,
children, too, we have to get them new things too. And there’s us, yes?”

“Ah,” his mother said softly. “It will work out, you’ll see.” A pause, then, “The gray one, yes?”

“Let it be the gray one,” his father finally said with a great sigh of surrender. He looked down the depths of the store, motioned the owner to return.

Now both owners approached, the first one saying to Danny’s father, “You’ll take the blue one, it’s a wonderful suit.” He turned to his partner as he plucked the blue jacket out once more from the rack, said, “Morris, a wonderful piece goods, no?”

Danny was saying, “No, no!”

Danny’s father said, “The gray one.”

“The gray one,” the first partner said in a flat tone of voice. He glanced at his partner who shrugged his shoulders and returned to his customer at the rear of the store.

“How much? The cheapest price,” Danny’s father said. “Twenty’s too much.”

Danny felt a great happiness. Almost from the beginning he had felt that finally, he would have to capitulate to all of them, to agree to the blue suit. But his parents, his father, his mother, they had understood. The blue suit was hideous, it was something he could not bear to wear, but if his parents had bought it, he would have had no choice but to wear it. Detesting it, he would yet have to wear it.

He smiled at his parents who were listening carefully to the owner who said, “Twenty is too much? Tell me, mister, what do you want to pay?”

“Nothing,” Danny’s father replied. “I would like to have it, if I could, for free.”

The owner gave a false high laugh. “Don’t talk
narishkeit,
foolishness, excuse the word. You got to live? I got to live too. I got expenses with the store, I got to pay your cousin, Goldie, out there. How much do you want to pay?”

Danny’s father glanced at his wife, finally said. “Twelve dollars,” he said.

The man lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Twelve dollars?” he said in mock astonishment. “Mister, I run a store I got expenses, I got to live, I can’t give the suit away and lose money.”

“Let’s go,” Danny’s father said.

They began to move towards the door of the store. “Wait!” the owner called out. “What’s your hurry? Listen, because you’re Goldie’s cousin, I’ll make it special for you, eighteen dollars.”

“Twelve dollars,” Danny’s father said. They stood, motionless, and finally he said to his family, “Let’s go.”

They went out into the street, Danny was certain that they had lost the suit, that he would have nothing, that perhaps it would all end up with his having to accept the blue suit, but he didn’t want it. Now Goldie sidled up to Danny, asked what had happened. Danny managed only to shake his head and mumble an unintelligible sound.

The owner was at the door, he called out, “Come back for a minute. What’s your hurry? Come back.” Danny stopped momentarily, his father urged him to walk on and the owner called out to Goldie, “Bring your cousins back! What’s their hurry?”

Goldie said to all of them, “Why don’t you go back? He wants to talk. What’s the harm in talking to him?”

“All right,” Danny’s father said. “So I’ll talk.” They returned to the store, the owner put on a wide sales smile. Goldie had stopped at the doorway and was leaning against one of the side windows. Danny’s father said to the owner, “So talk.”

“Sixteen dollars,” the man said with a serious expression on his face. “Not a penny less.”

“Let’s go,” Danny’s father said.

The three of them were outside now, the man appeared at the door and he said, “Fifteen.” Danny’s father shook his head and the man said, “Mister, I can’t sell it for twelve, I can’t lose money. Make it fourteen.”

“Thirteen,” Danny’s father said.

The man sighed. He clapped his hands to his sides in a futile gesture. “My partner will kill me,” he said almost in a whisper. Then, “All right. Thirteen. So it’s thirteen.”

Danny had been watching all of this, certain this his suit was gone, vanished, that it wouldn’t be bought, that it couldn’t be bought, that in the end he would have to settle for that other terrible colored suit. But now, suddenly, the good suit was his. Somehow it didn’t feel real.

His mind returned to the store once more, the owner called out to his partner, “Morris, come over, take the measurements for the boy’s suit, “Danny knew, at last, the gray suit was his.
‘”A, yai,

yai,”
the owner was now muttering to himself as he hung the jackets of the unwanted suits on hangers.
“Mein mazel,
My luck, that Goldie should have such cousins.”

 THE EYE IN THE MIRROR

He was staring into the mirror once more. How many times had he told himself not to do it, to hell with the damned mirror, he didn’t want to look into it, never, not again, to see himself, always staring at the eyes, one of them crossed, cockeyed, that was the terrible word, damn it all! Cockeyed!

He couldn’t bear to look at that eye, yet he did, forced by some compulsion to take that rectangular mirror in its peeling green-painted wooden frame, to pick it up from the shelf over the kitchen sink in that tenement flat and to look into those mismatched eyes again, once more, again.

Why? Why him? What had he ever done to deserve this? What awful crime? What terrible thoughts had he had that deserved this kind of punishment? What had he done? If only someone could tell him. Tell me, tell me.

Nothing. Nothing. It wasn’t his fault, how could it have been? He had been born with it, he had always had it ever since he could remember, it wasn’t his fault. His parents were to blame, they had done something wrong to cause this. He wore that crossed eye as a stigma that would go on forever and there were times when studying that eye he felt that he could pick up a small razor-sharp knife from the table drawer and with one decisive stroke cut something there at the side of his eye, or maybe in back of his eye, the eye would become straightened, that curse, that heavy burden would be lifted from him once and for all.

Cockeye, they called him. He had a real name, damn them! His name was Harry. Harry Blau. If only they would call him that, or Heshy, that would have been wonderful, but no, they called him that damned word, that cockeye, something he could not bare to hear.

Sometimes when he passed girls on the street, girls gathered together on a stoop of a tenement, girls he didn’t know, they would whisper to one another, they would suddenly begin to laugh. He knew, oh, how he knew! He told himself bitterly those many, many times, they were laughing at him, all laughing at that crossed eye, while he was secretly crying.

on innumerable occasions he had fought with boys at school or on the streets when they called him that damned name. And fighting, he had lashed out at those tormentors, those sneering lips, at that laugher. And lashing out as well at that eye that mocked him. He would show them, he would show them all. Wait and see! Just wait!

once, a few years before, he had taken those automatic pictures in the special booth with its black heavy curtain in the Five-And-Ten. He hadn’t moved at all during the process, he had just sat there posing full-faced forcing his eyes to remain open during the first three blinding flashes of light, but he had not been able to maintain it and had shut his tear-brimmed eyes on the fourth flash.

When it was all over he had waited for the strip to be processed and disgorged from the slot in the machine. For a minute or two he had stared at those pictures, those first three, the fourth was a failure showing him grimacing, his eyes shut.

When he had gone home and was alone he had meticulously cut out a small pattern of an eye on white blank paper, inked in a pupil in its center matching as much as possible its twin, the other good eye, and had pasted the manufactured eye on the photograph over the bad one.

There! That was how he looked, how he would look, should look. That person there was someone else yet still Harry Blau, someone who looked like every other human being, not like some freak in a sideshow in Coney Island. Someday, damn it all! Someday. . .

He had done the same thing with the other two good photographs and had discarded the fourth one, thrown it into the garbage after he had cut it into small pieces. He had kept one of the photographs in his worn wallet, and occasionally, when he was alone, took it out of wallet to stare at it.

The other two he had hidden in one of his books and had used one when the first photograph had become frayed and tattered with handling. Now, years later, he carried the third and last good photograph in his wallet. When that became worn he would make himself a new set.

His mother was out when he came home from junior high school that day. He imagined she was out shopping for food but he didn’t care, to hell with her, his father too, they were the ones who had caused this to him. When they were gone, when he was alone in the tenement flat, that was when he felt the best that he could, considering.

He wanted nothing to do with them, they were the worst of his enemies. The others, those in his class at school, except for the too few who didn’t call him Cockeye, he hated them too. All, all, with a terrible hatred, a long hatred, one that had grown over time.

And this, the mirror. If only he could rid himself of this cursed compulsion. Every time he passed it, it was a huge magnet drawing his eyes to it. Damn! Again with the eyes!

Outside on the street when people weren’t watching he always found himself looking into the plate glass windows of the stores staring at his pale phantom image there marching along with him, always studying his eyes, his eyes looking back at him and always that damned eye.

Why had his parents done this to him?

There was a knock on the door of the apartment. “Yeah?” he called out as he hastily replaced the mirror on its shelf. “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Abe,” came from behind the door. Harry went to the door, opened it there stood his friend, Abe, one of the very few who called him Harry. Abe entered the flat, asked as Harry shut the door, “What you been doing? The exercises?”

“Yeah,” Harry replied. “My mother wasn’t home so I did them.”

Some time before, a half year at least, Harry had picked up somewhere a copy of a magazine, was it Amazing Stories or As tounding Stories? Maybe it was G-8 And His Battle Aces, a magazine with short stories about the Allied and German airforces during the World War. Having finished reading the stories Harry had noticed the full-page strip ad of Charles Atlas, about the 98 pound weakling on a beach somewhere who had had sand deliberately kicked into his face by a burly stranger and because of fear had done nothing about it. But later, after having bought Charles Atlas’ home body-building program, had come back to the beach and scared off his oppressor.

The ad had shown Atlas, with his powerful physique, his broad chest, his arms tight and flexed showing his bulging steely muscles, he had won a title of some sort. And Harry, thin and rangy, had over months hoarded his money until he had been able to buy the Atlas course.

Despite Abe’s initial skepticism, Harry had begun to fill out, his chest had broadened, his arms began to show more muscle.

Abe said to him, “You know something, Harry? You’re beginning to look good, almost like in the ad.”

“I do it every day,” Harry said, “without fail. I’m going to have a body like Charles Atlas.” He couldn’t stop the flow of words, “And I’ll kill them all who call me that—that name and who laugh at me. And I’ll get my eye straightened out too. You wait and see.”

“But the doctor told you it was around two hundred dollars for the operation, didn’t he?” Abe said.

“Yeah. Maybe two hundred dollars,” he said, “I’ll get it some way.” Now stressing the words, “I won’t let it stop me.”

Harry and Abe had become friends after school when they had discovered they each liked to make model airplanes. Harry had made one of the Red Baron’s, The World War German ace, Baron von Richthofen, whose plane had triple wings, while Abe had carefully put together a Spad. They both read G-8 And His Battle Aces whenever they could afford to buy a copy or to borrow one or swap one. Except for Harry’s rampages about his bad eye, which Abe had always tried to ignore whenever possible, Abe had found Harry to be a good friend.

At least a year before Harry had asked Abe to go along with him to the clinic. “What for?” Abe had asked. “You ain’t sick.”

No, no, Harry had replied. He would be going there for his eye. And Abe, confused, had said, What for? Harry had said he would make his eye red, real red, and go in the clinic for treatment, see if they could help him, maybe they would operate on the bad eye and straighten it, they could help him, weren’t they there to help people? Harry had to do it, he had to have his eye fixed and the way things were now they wouldn’t do anything at the clinic to fix it, they didn’t do things like that. Abe had said, Maybe they’ll help you. They sure as hell will, Harry had said.

Abe had seen Harry take a few pinches of sand into his hand from a paper bag and begin to rub it into his eye. Abe, startled and alarmed, had said, What’re you doing? you crazy, or what? The sand was in Harry’s eye, he was groaning in pain he was still rubbing away.

When Harry had finally finished, he was holding his hand to his eye and they had walked on towards the clinic. You’ll come with me? Harry had asked. Yeah, yeah, Abe had replied, I’m going with you. And Harry, his hand still at his eye like a fleshy eyepatch let Abe guide him along the way.

Entering the clinic, Abe had been struck by its medicinal smell, the sharp odors that always reminded him of the times he had gone there when he had been sick. Harry had gone up to the desk, had groaned with pain as he cried for help, His eye! His eye! Help! Help! When finally a nurse had led Harry into a nearby room Abe had been able to hear the conversation between the doctor and Harry.

How did you get it? What happened? The wind blew something in my eye and I tried to get it out and I rubbed it and it hurts, it hurts! Harry had replied. The doctor and nurse had worked on Harry who had cried out in pain and when they were almost finished Harry had asked the doctor were they going to operate on his eye, could they straighten it out? And the doctor in a sort of surprised tone had replied that he was there only to take care of emergency cases and that Harry’s irritated eye was being attended to. He gave Harry instructions what to do to speed its recovery.

Harry had begged, cried out, The operation! The operation! The doctor had replied that that was another matter, nothing the clinic could handle, it would have to be handled by a private doctor, a specialist, while Harry had repeated over and over again, Fix the eye, please! It has to be fixed! The doctor had replied, go to a specialist, but it’ll cost money. Money? How much? Harry had asked, the doctor hadn’t wanted to say but Harry had persisted and finally the doctor had said it would probably be around two hundred dollars, maybe a little less or a little more.

Abe sitting there in the waiting room, having heard this, had thought, It’s a fortune, all the money in the world!

Now back in the kitchen of the flat, there was a rapid knocking on the door. “Open the door,” Harry’s mother called from behind it. “I got a lot here, it’s heavy. Open!”

Harry shook his head. “Okay, okay,” he said angrily. “I’m coming.”

He opened the door for his mother. She entered wearily carrying an oilcloth shopping bag filled with potatoes. outside in the hallway propped up against the frame of the door she had deposited another smaller shopping bag containing onions and two large cabbages. She was breathing heavily, sagging into herself as she deposited the bag of potatoes on the kitchen table.

“Harry, go get the other bag,” she said to her son. Harry didn’t move. He stared stonily at his mother, said nothing and finally Abe went to the door, picked up the bag and brought it to the table. Harry’s mother glanced contemptuously at her son, looked at Abe and said, “Abeleh, you’re a good boy. Thanks.” Glaring at her son, “And you? What’s the matter with you? You can’t move, hah?”

“What for?” Harry replied furiously. “What do you do for me?” He pointed to his bad eye and said, “You won’t pay for the operation, why should I do anything for you? Or for him?”

“Him? He’s your father, who works for you, who goes out looking for work so you can have something to eat and a bed to sleep in. What is he, an animal, you should call him like that, hah? What am I, an animal too,
schlepping,
dragging all this to make
essen,
food for you?”

“Only for me?” Harry said mockingly. “Don’t you eat too? Don’t he?”

“I don’t want to hear he, him, you hear that! He’s your father, I’m your mother! I don’t want to hear words like that in this house.” Glaring at Harry she removed her coat and sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs. She turned and looked up at Abe and said plaintively, “You hear that? Is that the way a son talks to his mother, I ask you?”

Abe wanted desperately to leave. He glanced at Harry and slowly began to walk to the door. “Don’t go. Wait,” Harry said to him. And to his mother, “I asked you a thousand times. I asked both of you. It’s two hundred dollars for the operation. I want that operation, I got to have it. You don’t care, he don’t. But I care!” he began to shout.

“Mein Gutt!
My God!” His mother said frantically looking at Abe. “Two hundred dollars! Who has it? What are we, millionaires? We don’t have two extra dollars. What should I do, steal, maybe rob a bank, hah?”

“I don’t care,” Harry said not looking at her. “Go rob a bank. Go. Do anything! I want that operation!”

“He’s crazy, a
meshugganeh,”
Harry’s mother whispered to herself. “He don’t know what he’s saying.” Rousing herself, she turned toward her son, looked up at his icy stare, and said, “You go get the two hundred dollars, you think you’re so smart. You think it’s so easy, hah?”

Harry bent over, his face near his mother’s. “I will!” he said between tight teeth. “I’ll get it and when I do you won’t see a penny from it, not one, you hear me? And you won’t ever see me again!” He straightened up, turned to Abe and said, “Let’s go. I’m getting out of here.”