East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (27 page)

She would move into his three-room apartment on Morton Street, she would still work for him of course, work would be work,

it was understood that their true personal lives would not intrude upon the functioning of the store.

Despite the admonitions of her two women friends who shared the apartment, who warned her to be cautious, everybody in the Village knew Frankie was wild, that he was a notorious womanizer, she would only bring grief to herself, Edie moved out of their shared apartment and went to live with Frankie.

She was behind the counter of the store arranging a display of newly-designed pins, Frankie was at his workbench, at work on a pair of earrings, when the man entered. She barely noticed him, she was busy arranging the display and still looking down at the pins had said mechanically, “Yes? Can I help you?”

When she glanced up the man was staring at her. He stood stock-still, his stare never wavering. There was something... No, now she suddenly knew it, it was impossible! How could it be? It was her father. After all these years, how could he have found her? After fifteen years, how? How?

Staring grimly at her, he approached the counter, she noticed that his black Van Dyke beard was now totally gray. His eyes were puffed, deep circles of flesh beneath them. His face was the face of before, of long ago, only older, lined and creased.

Now at the counter he said, “Itteh, Itteh, it’s you?”

She couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t true. Why this? Why to her? “I can’t talk to you,” she whispered hoarsely to him. “Please go. Please.”

“I go nowhere. I stay here,” he said his voice beginning to rise. “I want to talk to you.”

“Something wrong?” Frankie, bare-chested, called out from his bench. “Is everything all right?”

Edie glanced wildly at him. “It’s nothing. Nothing’s wrong,” she said in a rush of words attempting to control herself. And to her father in a whisper, “I can’t talk to you.”

“You talk to me here,” he replied, his words deliberate. “Or you talk to me someplace else, I don’t care. But you will talk to me, you hear? I’m not going away.”

“S-sh!” she whispered crazily. Glancing quickly at Frankie who was staring at them she called out to him in a false cheery voice, “Frankie, I’m going out for a few minutes. Be right back.”

Without waiting for a reply, she hurried from behind the counter, went to the door, was out in the street, her father following her. She wished him gone, she didn’t want him beside her, she didn’t want him to talk to her, especially on the street where people might see them together. She began to run to a nearby coffee shop, entered, hurried to a table lost in a far corner. When she sat down she saw her father at the door of the shop, breathing heavily.

Staring at her, he approached the table and sat down. There was a heavy silence. She didn’t know how to begin, what to say. This was an inconceivable meeting, how could she force time to fly by so that all this would be over with, how to make this nightmare disappear?

The waitress appeared, Edie said mechanically to her, “Coffee.” Without looking up her father nodded to the waitress.

The waitress was gone, the terrible leaden silence between Edie and her father remained. Shifting his chair so that he was now closer to the table he cleared his throat and said to her, “So this is who you are. So this is what you do. So this is what you are.”

Edie made no reply. Long long ago when she had been a member of the family she had learned to armor herself against the fear of them, both her mother and her father, but especially her father. She had vowed to herself never to show them her pain, she would never never react to their barbs, she had sworn she would never cry, at least when they were present. Not show them anything, not fall into the trap of saying what they wanted to hear or see. She would live her own life, in her own way, according to her own wishes, not the one they had designed for her.

“Why are you here?” she finally heard herself say in a strange foreign voice.

“Why shouldn’t I be here?” she heard him say. “I’m your father. I have a right to talk to my daughter. Is there a law against it?”

The waitress arrived, placed the cups of coffee in front of them. When she was gone, Edie forced herself to look at him, attempted to make her voice seem calm and normal, said, “There’s no law against it. What do you want?”

Her father gave a great quivering sigh. “I want to find my daughter,” he said at last. “It’s fifteen years, Itteh.”

“I’m not Itteh,” she snapped angrily looking squarely into her father’s face. “Itteh’s dead, do you hear me?”

He shut his eyes tightly, “So Itteh’s dead,” he said flatly. “So who is my daughter now? Tell me.”

She could almost feel the bottled anger behind his words. Shaking her head she stared down at the brown liquid in her coffee cup, forced herself to look at him once more and she said, “I’m Edie. That’s my name. Do you understand?”

“Ah!” he whispered, laughing scornfully. “So now I have no daughter, hah?”

“You should’ve had no children,” she said turning away from his stare.

“We should’ve had children,” her father said. “And we should’ve had a daughter who wasn’t ashamed of herself, either. Or ashamed of her parents, maybe how they looked, how they acted, of how they spoke. Someone not be ashamed of what she was.” She attempted to interrupt him but his words trampled on angrily. “What are you now? A Gypsy?” He began to laugh bitterly. “Oh, my God, my God,” he said. And finally his face close to hers he asked, “Why that? Why not something else? Why not Irish? Or Italian? Or Greek? Why a Gypsy?”

“You would’ve complained if I had chosen anything,” she said angrily.

She stared hard at him and he nodded. “Yeah. Sure,” he replied. “I certainly would’ve. But, why? Why choose anything? Why not just be what you are?”

“I did it,” she said deliberately, “because I wanted to.”

“Because I wanted to,” he mimicked Edie’s voice. His eyes slitted in anger, said, “Like a three-year-old wanting everything, wanting nothing, just wanting. Like a baby throwing a tantrum,” talking now in a childlike voice, “because I want, because I want.”

There was an intolerable silence and finally she said angrily, “You want what you want, I’ll want what I want.”

“Ah!” he said shutting his eyes, shaking his head sadly.

Edie looked away, stared into the mirror above the counter of the shop. They sat angled so that she could see their images in that long mirror. She could see her father’s face as he spoke, his mouth moving, the words coming from a different direction than that from that mirror. Staring at the mirror she felt it was totally unreal, it was not her father speaking but a flat picture that pretended to be her father and she heard him say, “ exotic, you

wanted something exotic, something new. But nothing is new forever, it becomes the usual, a habit, the exotic becomes commonplace. Then what? Another passage to another thing? And then one after that? Never thinking about what you are, who you are.” He shook his head and mumbled, “A-a-i.” He stared down at his hands and said softly, “To have it come to this. To this.”

“I didn’t ask to be born,” she said in a furious whisper. “Who asked you to have me? You wanted to do that—that thing with her. That’s why you had me.”

“That’s enough!” her father shouted. Across the room of the shop, the waitress, startled, stared at them. Edie shrunk within herself, she had never been able to withstand his anger, had always been afraid of it. As she was now. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” her father roared out. “To one of your friends, hah? I’m—”

“Get out! Get out of here, you hear me?” she began to shout, not looking at him. She half-arose but her father was out of his chair, his back to her, he was striding furiously out of the coffee shop. The door was now closing, he was gone. She sat down in her chair once more, stared out at the room seeing nothing, telling herself not to cry, she would not cry, she would never cry. Go! Go! And don’t come back, ever, she said silently to the door of the shop, to the emptiness there. Slowly she ran the back of her hand across her nose.

It had been almost two years since she had last seen her father. She had wondered how he had come to find her that day he had

appeared at the store. And she had suddenly remembered. A Saturday night before his appearance when the store had been busy and some couples, obviously visitors to the Village, had entered. The women had approached the counter, the men stood in a small huddle near the door, and Edie had looked up at the men, there was something vaguely familiar about one of the faces. It was a fleeting thought to her then.

Later, when she had asked herself over and over again, how had her father known where she was, it had come to her. One of the men was her cousin, yes, Norman, it must’ve been Norman, and although she had known him when he had been ten or twelve, the face was almost the same, only older. She had noticed his fixed glance on her, but the store had been so busy, there was a constant flow in and out, and almost an hour later, when the customers had thinned out, she had looked up and they were gone.

So it had been Norman, possibly indecisive in his discovery of her, probably later he had come to realize who she was and had gone to her father and told him. It was funny, funny in a sort of crazy way, that for fifteen years her father hadn’t been able to find her although they had been no more that a half hour away from each other. You could bury yourself in the city and not be found. Why had Norman come along and spoiled it all?

Now and then she thought of her mother and father, those thoughts cruelly creeping into her mind. She would battle silently to erase them, to exile them to some deep remoteness, bury them in a deep crevasse of her mind, a place that would be lost to her forever. But there was no such place. The thoughts came, and when they did, she occupied herself with useless things to do, anything, to dispel them.

And they triggered off other thoughts, of the time at a party with Frankie and some of their friends when one of the men speaking of a recent business transaction, in conversation with Frankie, had said, So I jewed him down, got a better price, saved myself a nice little bundle, not bad, eh? She had involuntarily stiffened at that phrase, the usage of that word. And Frankie hadn’t said anything.

he didn’t know its meaning to her, he would never know. It was nothing to him. Yet why hadn’t she let it slip by, why remember it, it was only a word. Damn him! Damn that word! Damn everything that made her react in this way!

At the shop she had allowed herself to take notice of Frankie’s reactions when some pretty women entered the store, his quick admiring glances at them as he surveyed their figures and faces. She told herself that he worked bare-chested at his bench to attract the women who came into the shop. Maybe, she told herself, she was imagining things, maybe she was making something out of nothing. Maybe. Maybe not.

She worked in the shop. She was still the Gypsy princess except for that brief painful interlude with her father. But that had been almost two years earlier. She probably wouldn’t see him again. And those other things that had plagued her since his visit, of who she really was, of what she had been before she had become a Gypsy, of what would happen to her in the future, all these thoughts had slowly begun to fade away. She was Edie Romany, that was who she was, what she always would be. That was all. And that was that.

That night she was alone in the apartment. Things were slow at the shop, Frankie was scheduled to attend a meeting of some sort, she had decided to come home earlier than usual to work on the bills of the business while he remained at the shop until it was time to close. There was a knock on the door. She looked up from the ledger she was working on. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Me,” the voice said faintly.

She arose, went to the door. “Who?” she asked.

“Me. Me,” the suddenly familiar voice said.

“Go away!” she said quickly. “Just go away!”

From behind the door her father’s voice said, “Open the door, you hear? I won’t go away. Open up!” There was the heavy banging of his fist on the door. “Open up! Open up!” his voice shouted out.

The door shuddered under the pounding of his fist. She thought of the neighbors, it was impossible for them not to hear the clamorous banging on the door. There was no alternative. She was defeated.

“Stop!” she called out. “I’m opening the door. Just stop!”

The banging ceased. With a great sigh of despair she opened the door. And there he stood, her father, he looked much older than that other time two years before when she had last seen him. Without a word he entered the apartment, went up the hallway to where the light shone over the table Edie had been working on in the living room. She glanced quickly out into the hallway to see whether any of the neighbors had opened their doors to see what had been going on. No, all was quiet, and quickly Edie closed her door, locked it, stood for a moment as she invisibly armored herself against what was to come.

When she entered the living room he stood there and said to her, “This is how it is, eh? That I must bang on the door and yell, to be let in by my daughter, the Gypsy, yeah?”

He glared at her and she approached the table. He sat down in one of the easy chairs and she, still standing, said, “What do you want?”

“Ah!” he whispered looking up at her. “Such a gracious welcome—”

“No, no, no,” she said. “I won’t listen to that. What do you want?”