East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (15 page)

Harry’s mother stared after him in a huge still silence, her arm rested heavily on the kitchen table. Abe didn’t know what to do. He managed to say to her, “Goodbye, Mrs. Blau.”

She made no reply, sitting at the table with her eyes closed, statue-like, her body scarcely moving with each breath. Harry pulled Abe by the arm, closed the door of the apartment after them with a ferocious bang that filled the hallway with heavy echoes.

Downstairs in the street, Harry said, “I got to get out of that house.”

Abe said to him, “You shouldn’t do and say those things to her, she’s your mother.”

“She gave me that eye!” Harry began to shout. “She and him, they did it, I didn’t do nothing, did I? Why shouldn’t I be mad at them? Why shouldn’t they help me?”

“You know they don’t have the money,” Abe said. “There’s no work, there’s no money, you know that.”

“I don’t care!” Harry shouted. “If they cared, they’d get the money!”

Harry had fought with his parents. There had been the repeated times when he had cursed his father, begged him too, asked him to have the operation done. His father, in exasperation, had asked where he was to get the money, he worked when he could, when there was work, there was barely enough to pay the rent and to eat. What do you want from me? his father had cried out. Why are you tormenting me, torturing me? Harry had answered, You gave me that eye. You and she. I didn’t ask to be born, did I? It’s your fault! There were times Harry’s mother had come between them to prevent a fist fight.

Harry and Abe had been walking slowly down the street. Abe said to him, “It’s your parents’ problem but it’s also your problem too.”

Harry suddenly began to hurry, he pushed his way between a couple who were approaching. Abe trotted to catch up, and he could hear Harry say, “They don’t care how I feel. Sometimes I feel they never wanted me. I don’t need them either.”

Abe shrugged. There was no use in being with Harry when he was raging like this. So enveloped was he by his eye obsession he didn’t listen, he was deaf too. He said to Harry, “I got to go.”

“Go. Go on,” Harry mumbled with a wave of his hand.

Abe walked away. Harry continued walking on with fast angry strides. As he passed a group of stores he slowed down staring into the plate glass windows to see his image, his eyes, that eye.

He told himself, I’ll get the money, the two hundred dollars, I will! I’ll steal, I’ll rob a bank, I’ll do something, anything! But I’ll get it!

Damn you! he said to his crossed eye as it appeared fleetingly in the store windows. You’re the whole goddammed trouble! Without realizing it, he was crying, the tears coming down from both eyes, the good and the bad one.

You—, you—, you! he said to the bad eye, You’re doing this to me. Tell me, what did I ever do to you?

The next day before classes, outside the school building, Abe saw Harry approach. Dumbfounded, Abe stared at the black patch over Harry’s eye, its elasticized string circling Harry’s head. “What—what’s going on?” Abe asked.

“Listen,” Harry replied. “Yesterday I thought about it. I can’t get that money for the operation, not right now. I was so mad yesterday I could’ve killed my mother and father and when I passed the drugstore I thought of the time I really had something in my eye and how I went in there and Doc, he took it out, you know how he does it, he lifts up that eyelid and just puts that thing in your eye so light you don’t even feel it and he gets out the dirt. And remember how if your eye is real red he puts a piece of bandage over the eye? Then I remembered that he sells these things, he calls them eye patches. And I remembered that story in G-8 And His Battle Aces, remember?”

“What story?” Abe asked.

A group of three or four classmates had formed around Harry and were all pointing at the eye patch asking, What’s that for? What’s with the eye? Harry disregarded them and said to Abe, “You know, the story about the American pilot. How he gets shot down by the German pilot, that German ace like Richthofen, who’s killing off the American’s buddies. And when the American pilot crashes—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Abe said snapping his fingers in remembrance. “He crashes but he’s in Allied territory and he gets rescued but he loses an eye and he’s in a hospital not far away from the Allied airfield and they tell him when he gets better that because of that eye he ain’t got, he can’t fly a plane no more—”

Harry, caught up in the story interrupted with, “So this American pilot, he’s wearing an eyepatch like I got on now, he mopes around, at first he feels useless because he can’t fly no more but one day he sneaks away from the hospital, comes to the airfield and when nobody’s looking he hops into a plane that’s warming up and up he goes praying to meet that German and sure enough, a little later, he sees him in his airplane with the three wings and wham! he goes after the German, they go round and round in a dogfight, the American dips and loops, goes from side to side, some of the German’s bullets slam into the American’s plane but there’s no real damage and he’s coming out of an Immelman roll and straight ahead he sees the German’s plane in his sights and he gives a burst, just one burst, tat-tat-tat-tat-tat and the German plane begins to smoke, it begins to fall and spins and crashes.”

“Yeah. You remember good,” Abe said.

Harry said, “And I figured if an American fighter pilot, someone who shot down a German ace, if he could wear one of those patches and still do what he did, I could wear one of these things too.” He tapped the outside of his eyepatch. “I’ll wear it till I can get the money for the operation. It ain’t so bad. Better than being called Cockeye.”

 THE OLD WOMAN

Outside, in the dimly-lit hallway, she sighed. A heavy sigh, quivering her body, mixing unevenly with her anger. She stood facing the door of her tenement flat. Die! she said silently, willing her thought through the door. Get killed!

From inside the old three-room flat she heard her daughter’s hurled words, “Bastard! You’re the one! It’s your fault!”

The old woman sighed once more. Shook her head in disbelief, lifted her arms slightly and let them fall heavily to her sides.

To come to this, she thought. God! God! What do you want from me?

She turned away from the door, went to the landing where the anemic light of an electric bulb poked helplessly at the gloom. She grasped the banister tightly and slowly, one heavy step at a time, began the descent from the third floor.

It was cold in the unheated hallway. Bitter. Despite the closed door at the entrance of the tenement, the winter wind howled and swept up the stairway, spilled into the halls.

Down the old woman went, plodding, her body taking an angled metronomic quality as she took each step. The tenement gargled, sighed, strained, squeaked. Water running through the pipes burbled. Here and there a child cried, a voice was raised.

Ah-h! the old woman thought. Mrs. Epstein fighting with her son.

“You can’t make me do it! I won’t!” she heard the Epstein son shout out, the words smashed through the door of the flat the old woman had just passed, the sound blotting out the other noises of the building.

As she heard Mrs. Epstein’s muted reply the old woman thought,
Ach!
You can’t make me do it! mimicking in her head the Epstein boy’s phrase.

And the things we learn to do, we have to do... she said to herself. Her thoughts went back to her daughter, up there, in the flat above. Whore! she thought. Filth!

The old woman sighed, tears sprang to her eyes as she thought of herself, widowed, alone except for her daughter, Selma. “Nachum,” she whispered into the freezing cold as she approached the heavy door leading out from the tenement. “Why did you leave me? Why?” For a moment she was silent as if expecting an answer, then she said, “God’s will. But what is God’s will? Who will tell me, what rabbi, what holy man?”

And now she thought, Who will help me, a widow for almost fifteen years? Nachum, Nachum, why did you leave me?

He had died of influenza during the epidemic of 1918 when she had been forty-eight. Now it was 1933, and she was sixty-three.

Sixty-three. Time to die, to leave this pestilential world.

She pushed the heavy door open. The wind wailed, whipped her coat and dress, billowed her shawl. She muttered to herself, To have to live and have that one... She raised her eyes to the third floor of the tenement and stared at the window of her flat.

She was on the stoop of the tenement. Although the sun shone, it was colder outside than it had been in the hallway of the tenement. Somehow with the sun came a creeping, sliding sort of courage, courage to look Mrs. Rappaport in the eye as Mrs. Rappaport, on the stoop, said to her, “A good day, Mrs. Goldfarb. And how are you? And your daughter?” Not waiting for a reply Mrs. Rappaport clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Did you hear the
geshrei,
the yelling, at Mrs. Epstein’s just before?
Ai,
it’s not good! it’s only trouble. Terrible!” Mrs. Rappaport shut her eyes, her head became a rocking pendulum. The eyes opened. “And how is your daughter, Selma?” she asked once more.

“Fine. Just fine.”

The old woman looked Mrs. Rappaport in the eye. You should be our
kappurreh,
our stand-in for all the evils that are destined to befall us, for my Selma and me, you old evil-tongued witch!

She went past Mrs. Rappaport and into the street.

It was late morning, shadows crossed the sidewalk and gutter. Here and there an automobile went by, sounding of warmth and money.

She shook her head. No! She couldn’t do it! Not this time, not again, not ever! What did they want from her, all of them? Was she made of stone, of iron, of steel?

She turned a corner and trudged past pushcarts lining each side of the street. Here and there fires crackled and leapt out of large open metal drums. The heavily-clothed puchcart peddlers yelled out their wares. occasionally one would approach a drum topped by writhing leaves of flame to warm his hands which were clutched with cold.

A sweater-layered woman standing on a wooden box behind her pushcart of stockings, socks, gloves and handkerchiefs called out to her.

The old woman plodded on, a mounting dread coming over her as she neared the end of the four or five blocks that she considered her neighborhood. After that she would be in streets that felt strange to her, the people wouldn’t know her, and she could begin.

Faces and shapes passed her. She put her frozen hands into the pockets of her shapeless coat. With each step now, inside her tightened right fist she nervously began to crush the little paper memo book in one of her pockets; the book that the grocer used to note the amounts of her purchases and what she owed him.

Now she was there. Long ago she had set up the boundary of her neighborhood as being this street. She was five blocks away, in another world. She turned at the corner, away from the people and the pushcarts and the noise.

She almost stopped, fervently wishing to go back, yet she forced herself on. Searching the street, looking. Halfway up the street she saw a man, a stranger, approach, he looked a little over thirty, about Selma’s age. She lowered her eyes, tightened her hold upon her herself, clenched her fists in her pockets and walked forward. She dare not look up, she could not, she sensed in some fashion how close to her the stranger now was.

When she was about three feet from him, she looked up suddenly and said to him, “Pardon me, are you Jewish?”

The man stopped. “Yes,” he said.

She swallowed hard and said,
“Ai
—” somehow the words were blocked in her mouth. Forcing herself she began once more, now blurting out the words, her eyes wide with a horror in them, “There is a girl, a nice Jewish girl, there on Rivington Street, 192, 192 Rivington Street, apartment 3-D. Why don’t you go up and see her, you will—”

“What!” the man shouted. “What are you—?”

“A girl, a nice girl—”

“You must be crazy,” he said hoarsely as he walked swiftly away. “My God!”

inside her coat pocket the grocery memo book was a crushed wad in her tight quivering fist.
Mishuggeh,
it’s crazy, she thought as she lowered her head, me too, a mishuggeneh, a lunatic...

She shut her eyes tightly, tears formed behind her lids, and she said to herself, Why? What do they want from me, all of them?

She opened her eyes and began trudging once more. The wind blew, tears ran from her eyes, spilled down her lined parchment face. She moved on, searching. And up ahead, another stranger, younger. Perhaps twenty-five, smoking a cigarette as he stared into the small glass display case in front of a shoe store.

“Mister, mister,” she said to him as she approached, her voice hoarse, almost breathless, her face partially hidden by the depths of her shawl. “Are you Jewish?”

“Yes,” he replied looking up.

“There’s a girl, mister, a nice Jewish girl. Why don’t you go up and visit her and—” the words spilled on, the same phrases used so many times before.

The man’s face changed from politeness to bewilderment. He shrugged at her, stared hard at her, all the while listening to her with his head cocked. And he said, “But I have no money, I have no job.”

“No money, no money,” she replied. “Go quick. On Rivington Street, number 192, flat 3-D. Go.” The man was undecided and she said in a louder voice, “Go! I swear it, no money! A nice girl, as God is my witness!” She stopped, the words were vomit in her throat, but she had to go on while the man stood still, staring at her. She said, forcing out the words, “You know the address?”

He nodded slowly. “192 Rivington Street. Flat 3-D,” Finally he shrugged and said, “Okay.”

She stood there leaden, lost, sagging inside, the iron gone from her, only water there, all water, so that she felt she couldn’t move, not ever, that she would remain there and die and not have to return to that flat on the third floor. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

God! she called out silently. Who will help a poor widow? Who will give me peace? And looking up at the clouded sky, at the sun’s rays splintering gold from the rims of the clouds, she asked, What do you want from me?

She began to walk slowly, placing one leaden foot before the other. She would go to the grocery store to shop while... while ...

But she would have to be sure. She could see the man turning the corner, she followed, going as quickly as she could yet aware that she didn’t want to be noticed. Sometimes pretending to be interested in the goods at the pushcarts, stopping once for some brief moments to warm her frost-clawed hands. But watching the man as he moved in the direction of her apartment.

She saw him stop in front of the tenement and peer up at the number of the house. Go! she willed to him. Go inside! What more do you want? She saw him shrug to himself, enter the building. Yes, she thought bitterly. Yes, now it has come to this.

She went to the grocery store. Inside the store she would listen to the neighborhood gossip as the grocer cut an eighth of a pound of sweet butter from the tub, as he placed three white eggs in a bag, as he scooped up sugar by the pound. She waited in the store, dawdling over this, pretending to be interested in that, allowing other customers who had come in after her to be waited on. Almost a half-hour later, through the plate glass windows of the store, she saw the man walking by on the street.

Now she was free. She finished with her shopping, gave the grocer her crumpled memo book in which he made his notation.

And she was out, the paper bag clutched tightly to her. Now, into the tenement. Up the stairs, each step an agony to her lungs, to her heavy feet and clattering heart.

To have to come back to this, she thought. To have children, a daughter, and to live on and on in this filth. To have only one daughter, and that a cripple, unable to walk who periodically became a howling devil, who made the house a hell, who possessed the fires of the living that had to be quenched.

The old woman was on the third floor, at her door. She knocked. “Selma,” she called out softly. “Selmaleh, is everything all right?”

“Yes,” she heard the voice reply. “Come in, mama.”