Tiffany Street (21 page)

“But we all don’t get paid enough,” my mother said. “Why should it be for you and me, Mrs. Groshartig, always a nickel a
shtikl?
Why shouldn’t it be, let’s say, six cents a
shtikl?
”

The plump woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s what Mr. Lebenbaum always pays.”

“There’s maybe a law?” my mother said. “It says Mr. Lebenbaum he’s not allowed to pay more than a nickel a
shtikl?
”

This question was obviously beyond Mrs. Groshartig’s mental capacities, but the sardonic tone in which my mother delivered it made an impression.

“Mrs. Groshartig,” my mother said. “If somebody came to you and they said let Mr. Lebenbaum grow with his head in the earth like an onion, you come do ‘turning’ for me, and I’ll pay you not a nickel a
shtikl
but six cents a
shtikl,
what would you say, Mrs. Groshartig?”

The plump woman scowled at the table. “If it wasn’t far to go,” she said, “sure I’d say yes. I’d be a real big dope to say no. But Mr. Lebenbaum he’s just three blocks away, on Intervale Avenue.”

“Suppose to make six cents a
shtikl
,” my mother said, “you didn’t even have to go to Intervale Avenue. Suppose all you had to do was climb up three floors, from your place downstairs on the first floor up to this kitchen on the fourth floor? What would you say then, Mrs. Groshartig?”

While Mrs. Groshartig was considering this question, Seb saw me standing in the kitchen door.

“Ah, good evening, Benjamin,” he said.

My mother said nothing. She was staring at the plump woman from downstairs.

“What goes on here?” I said.

“None of your business,” my mother said without removing her eyes from Mrs. Groshartig’s face. “Hurry up and wash, and then just hurry up. Hannah is waiting.”

“Hannah?” Seb said.

“It’s a girl,” my mother said. “Every Saturday night she and Benny go to double features.”

“Not every Saturday night,” I said. “It just happens once in a while.”

“See if you can make it happen tonight,” my mother said. “Seymour and I have a lot of work to do.
Nu,
Mrs. Groshartig?”

Mrs. Groshartig scowled in silence at her nickel notebook.

“Seb,” I said. “When I saw you last Sunday, didn’t you say you were on your way back to England?”

“I thought I was,” he said. “But it seemed such a dismal prospect that I dragged my feet for a few days, and then I had a much better idea.”

“What sort of idea?” I said.

“Benny,” my mother said. There was no impatience in her voice. She always talked as she walked. With deliberation. Only someone who had known her all his life would have sensed the steel runners on which she had slid out the two syllables of my name. “Benny,” she said again. “Hannah is waiting.”

Indeed she was.

“You’re late,” Hannah said.

I looked up at the big clock over Goldkom’s jewelry store at the corner of 180th Street and Vyse Avenue. It showed five minutes after seven. The first time Hannah and I had made a date we’d set it for seven-fifteen. I arrived under Goldkom’s clock at seven. Hannah was waiting. Every Saturday night since then, for almost a year, our Saturday night dates were set for seven-fifteen. Every Saturday night for almost a year I had been arriving at Goldkom’s clock at seven o’clock sharp. And every Saturday night Hannah had been waiting at seven o’clock sharp. Tonight was the first time I had arrived a few minutes after seven. Technically, I was still ten minutes early.

“It’s only five minutes after seven,” I said.

“You’re late,” Hannah said again.

She was right, of course. Custom had replaced contractual arrangements.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Something is wrong,” Hannah said. “I can always tell.”

I was fated, apparently, to go through life surrounded by women who could always tell.

“Nothing is wrong,” I said, although I knew that something was. “It’s just when I got home from work the house was a mess, and I had trouble getting out.”

“What kind of mess?” Hannah said.

She knew my mother did not allow her house to get into a mess. My mother’s neatness compared favorably with the surgical cleanliness of the Bellevue operating room.

“That Englishman,” I said. “He showed up again.”

Hannah laughed. “I guess you’re going to sleep on the floor of the front room again,” she said.

The same guess had crossed my mind.

“Not before we see Ruth Chatterton in
Madame X
,” I said, “and we put away a couple of Gabilla’s knishes.”

We put away four. It proved to be another double feature night, so I didn’t turn my key in the lock of our front door until almost two-thirty. There was a light in the kitchen. I could hear voices. I tiptoed across the foyer and looked in. My mother and Sebastian Roon were bent over a pad of ruled paper. The sight shocked me. My mother was doing something I had never seen her do before. She was holding a pencil.

“No,” Seb was saying. “An eight is like this. Two small circles. One on top of the other. Watch.”

I had not noticed that he, too, was holding a pencil. After a puzzled moment, I saw why. Sebastian Roon was holding his pencil the way I did, the way most people hold a pencil. Nothing to strike the eye as unusual. My mother was holding her pencil as though it were a sculptor’s chisel poised against the marble, waiting for the hammer blow. In the slanting light from the electric bulb that dangled on a black cord over the kitchen table, I could see beads of sweat on her upper lip. She dug the pencil across the pad awkwardly but with determination, then with a sigh of relief leaned back in her chair. Seb leaned forward. He examined what she had done.

“Jolly good,” he said. “Now let’s try something a bit more sophisticated. Instead of making two separate circles, and setting one on top of the other, let’s do both in one easy sweeping motion.” Slowly but smoothly Seb guided his pencil across the pad. “We give it half the top circle on the left,” he said. “Then we cut across and do half the lower circle on the right. Then we go back to the left, moving the pencil upward to complete the lower circle. And finally we cut across to the right, still moving the pencil, until we complete the top circle. Let’s try that, shall we?”

With the back of her hand my mother wiped the sweat from her upper lip. She looked worried.

“That’s hard,” she said.

“Nonsense,” Sebastian Roon said. “Remember the five and the six? How they frightened you when we first tackled them?”

My mother looked at him the way I remember seeing her look at Mr. Velvelschmidt, our landlord on East Fourth Street, when the son of a bitch used to try to wheedle the rent out of her by making the sort of primitive jokes he obviously used and found effective with other tenants. My mother had never equated herself with other tenants. She hated Mr. Velvelschmidt because he obviously did.

“I was not frightened of the five and the six,” my mother said in that voice that rolled out quietly, on concealed steel tracks. “I am not frightened of anything.”

This was not true. But Sebastian Roon didn’t know that

“Then let’s have a go at the eight,” he said.

My mother took a tighter grip on the pencil, leaned forward, and started shoving. She made it.

“
Nu?
” she said with a gasp.

Seb leaned forward to examine her handiwork. “Jolly good,” he said. “Absolutely super.”

I cleared my throat. “Before you get started oh the nine,” I said, “will somebody please tell me where I’m sleeping tonight?”

My mother didn’t answer. She was leaning forward again, scowling down at her eight, wiping away the sweat on her upper lip.

“On the floor in the living room,” Seb said without looking up. Under my mother’s eight he was slowly fashioning a nine. “I hope you don’t mind, old boy.”

I did mind. I minded so much that it hurt. What I minded was not the discomfort of the hard floor. I’d just gone through four knishes and a double feature with Hannah Halpern. I could have slept on gravel. I didn’t even mind that neither Seb nor my mother looked up or answered my good night when I left the kitchen. What I minded was his easy triumph after my long failure. I had never been able to teach my mother anything.

Down on East Fourth Street, when I first became aware of her as an individual, I became aware also that she was different from the other immigrant mothers on the block. Those other mothers all went to night classes at P.S. 188. They learned to read and write and speak English. For a long time it did not seem to me to be much of an accomplishment. About the time I turned twelve, however, it occurred to me that I was ashamed of my mother for not being able to do at all what the mothers of Hot Cakes Rabinowitz and George Weitz and Chink Alberg did with ease. One night at supper, driven by curiosity, totally unaware of the necessity for prudence, I asked my mother why she did not join the other mothers of the block in going to night classes at P.S. 188.

“Eat with bread,” my mother said sharply.

To take a forkful of meat, or a spoonful of soup, without accompanying it with a liberal bite of rye bread was, in my mother’s private penal code, at least a misdemeanor and in all probability a felony.

I took a bite of bread and, around it, said: “Chink’s mother goes. George’s mother goes. Hot Cakes’ mother goes. Why don’t you go, Ma?”

My father, at the other side of the table, had a mouthful of bread. It did not prevent him from making a remark that I see now required great courage on his part. He was afraid of my mother.

“If she goes to school at night,” my father said, “it’ll show everybody on Fourth Street she doesn’t know something.”

“You use the mouth to eat,” my mother said. “Not to talk.”

She said it to my father, but I knew she also meant me. I never said another word. Not for several years, anyway.

When I became a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High, however, I came to know boys from all over the city. Many of them had parents who were not immigrants. I suffered a new attack of embarrassment for my mother’s illiteracy. I was the darling of Miss Merle S. Marine, my English teacher. The more she praised me for my work, the more terrified I became that some day she would meet my illiterate mother and realize the crudity of the bolt of cloth from which I had been cut. I decided to teach my mother to read and write and speak English. In secret, of course.

“Nobody will know,” I said to her late one night when I made my proposal. “We’ll do it here in the kitchen, late at night, after Papa goes to bed.”

She looked at me for several long moments. Even today I have the distinct impression that her eyes did not blink. I might have been a heifer whose weight she was trying to guess before making an offer for me in a stockyard.

“Why do you want to do this?” my mother said finally.

I could not, of course, tell her the truth.

“English is fun,” I said. “You’ll enjoy it, Ma.”

“You want me to have fun,” she said.

It was not a question. It was a statement. Laid out on the table like a bet in a crap game. It was up to me to fade it.

“Yes,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s start.”

I thought it would be best to start with numbers. Two things had left with me the impression that she had a good head for arithmetic. Listening to her talk about the price of vegetables in the Avenue C pushcarts, and watching her make computations of profits during her bootlegging days on East Fourth Street. After a week of late night sessions, I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that I must have been wrong. I managed to get her to pronounce the digits in English, but when I tried to teach her to write them down I failed miserably.

So I decided to abandon writing, for the time being, anyway, and concentrate on speech. She did well with nouns. She learned soon enough that a
leffel
was a spoon, a
tish-toch
a tablecloth, a
ferd
a horse. But connecting these nouns with the simplest verbs resisted her.

I don’t remember how long the struggle went on. But I remember the night I surrendered.

“Let’s stop it,” my mother said in Yiddish. “All I’m doing is make you lose sleep.” Two reactions lived with me for a long time.

One, the tone of her voice when she threw in the towel. I could not escape the feeling that she had thrown it in my face. She did not sound defeated. She sounded triumphant.

As though, in some way I did not grasp, she had beaten me at my own game.

And two, I remember my very real sense of having lost out in a struggle I had wanted desperately to win.

Four years later, lying awake on the floor of our front room in Tiffany Street, listening to the murmur of her voice out in the kitchen with Sebastian Roon, it all came clear in a wave of jealousy so unbearable that it made my mouth feel sour, as though I had been vomiting.

What I had wanted to win was what it had not occurred to me as a boy I had never had. And, until it was too late, had not missed: her love.

When I finally got around to the realization that I did miss it, and I made the attempt to win it, that inner core of metal around which she existed had given her the strength to resist the ease and comfort of speaking the language of the country in which she had come to live, and take for herself instead the pleasure of revenge.

She had led me on, as though I were a fisherman who felt he had hooked his game. And then, just as I was about to bring her to the gaff, she had with her own hand cut herself loose.

What she had denied me, she was now giving to Sebastian Roon. I was sure she would be speaking English in a matter of weeks.

My estimate was not too far off the mark.

Two nights later, when I came home from my classes in the evening session at C.C.N.Y., my mother and Seb were seated at the kitchen table with a woman named Mrs. Klockner. She looked not unlike Mrs. Groshartig. I suppose all plump Jewish housewives, wearing flowered gingham housedresses shielded by grease-spattered aprons, look, like all bald-headed men, somewhat alike. Nobody paid any attention to me. I disposed of my briefcase, hung up my coat in the hall, and came back to tackle the glass of milk and the slab of honey cake my mother had set out for me on the drainboard beside the sink.