Evergreen (9 page)

His father, heavy and slow-moving, sat all day behind the sewing machine. When he stood up he was stiff, he moved awkwardly, grunting and shuffling to the back rooms where they ate and slept, and to the toilet in the yard. On Saturday he shuffled to the synagogue, came home and ate, lay down again on the cot in the kitchen and slept the afternoon away.

“Shh!” Ma would admonish when Joseph banged the door, “Your father’s asleep!” And her warning finger would go to her lips.

At night Pa would move from the cot to the bed where he slept with Ma. Where they would—? No, not decent to think about that. You couldn’t imagine him doing—He was so quiet. Except now and then when he fell into a terrible rage, always over some trivial thing. His face would flame, the cords stand out on his temples and in his neck. Ma said that someday he would kill himself like that, which was exactly what happened. Much later, of course.

The house smelled of sleep, of dullness and poverty. There was no
life
in it, no future. You felt that what had already been done there was all that ever would be done. Joseph spent as few hours there as he could.

“What, going out again?” Pa would ask, shaking his head. “You’re always out.”

“A boy needs companions, Max.” His mother defended
him. “And as long as we know he’s in good company—He only goes to play at the Baumgartens’ or over to your own cousin Solly.”

Solly Levinson was a second or third cousin of Pa’s, only five years older than Joseph. Joseph could remember him in that first brief year after his arrival in this country at the age of twelve, that first and only year when he went to school, before he began to work in the garment trade. He had learned English astonishingly quickly; he was bright and timid, or perhaps only gentle and hesitant. Strange how he metamorphosed after five children and fifteen years of working on pants! As different from what he had been as the caterpillar is from the butterfly. Strange and sad and wrong, Joseph thought, remembering Solly teaching him to dive in the East River, Solly playing stickball, wiry and fast. He had come from a very rural place in Europe, had swum in rivers, had known how to move and run. Such a brightness in him! And now all quenched.

Anyway, Joseph had liked to go to Solly’s. The rest of the time he lived on the street.

His father complained. The streets were dangerous, full of bad influences. He heard his parents talking, often in his presence, more often from behind the drawn curtain that separated his cot in the kitchen from their bed in the back room.

“Bad influences,” his father said again. Gloom and foreboding. Joseph knew he was talking about the boys who had gone socialist and worse, the boys who stood in knots on the sidewalk, lounging on the synagogue steps to taunt the worshipers, even smoking on the Sabbath, while the old men with their derby hats and beards looked the other way.

“Joseph is a good boy,” his mother said. “You don’t have to worry about him, Max.”

“Show me a mother who doesn’t say her son is a good boy.”

“Max! What does he ever do that’s bad? Be sensible!”

“True, true.” Silence. And then he would hear, how many times had he not heard? “I wish we could do more for him.”

Now Joseph understood, but even then when he was a child he had begun to understand, to pick up truths about his parents and the life around him. He knew that his father, like most of the fathers, was ashamed of doing even worse for his family in America than he had done in Europe. He was ashamed of not speaking the language, so that when the gas man came to ask a question about the meter, an eight-year-old son had to interpret. Ashamed of the meager food on the table toward the end of the month when the money was being scrimped together for the rent. Ashamed of the noise, the jumbled living in the midst of crowds and other people’s scandals. The Mandels upstairs, the terrible screaming fights and Mr. Mandel leaving, disappearing “uptown,” Mrs. Mandel’s bitter weeping and scolding. Why should a decent family be subjected to the indecencies of others? Yet there was no escape from it.

The father was ashamed too of the dirt. He hated it. From him Joseph knew he had inherited his extreme love of cleanliness and order. For a man to love those things in a place where there was little cleanliness and no order!

They used to go to the baths together once a week, Pa and Joseph. In a way the child dreaded it, the smell of the steam and the press of naked men. How ugly old bodies were! And yet, in another way, it was the only time they ever talked together, really talked, there in the steam and later on the five blocks’ walk home.

Sometimes he was subjected to homilies: “Do right, Joseph. Every man knows what right is and he knows too when he has done something dishonest or unjust. He may tell others and himself that he doesn’t know, but he does know. Do right and life will reward you.”

“But sometimes wicked people are rewarded too, aren’t they, Pa?”

“Not really. It may seem so on the surface, but not really.”

“What about the Czar? How cruel he is, and yet he lives in a palace!”

“Ah, but he hasn’t lived his life out yet!”

Joseph considered that doubtfully. His father said with firmness, “When you do wrong, you pay. Maybe not right away, but you always pay.” And then he said, “Would you like a banana? I’ve a penny here, and you can buy two at the corner. One for your mother.”

“What about you, Pa?”

“I don’t like bananas,” his father lied.

When Joseph was ten Pa’s sight went bad. First he had to hold the paper very far away. Then after a while he wasn’t able to read it at all. Joseph’s mother had never learned to read. In the Old Country it wasn’t essential for a girl to learn, although some did, of course. So Joseph had to read the paper in the evening, because his father wanted to know what was going on in the world. But it was difficult; Joseph didn’t read Yiddish very well and he knew his father wasn’t satisfied.

For a while Pa had struggled on in the tailoring shop, hunching lower and lower in the yellow flame from the gaslight, for even at noon the daylight was shut out by the fire escapes outside the window. When it was evident that he could work no more they had closed the shop and his mother became the unacknowledged breadwinner.

The store was the square “front room,” with the counter running across the back and the large brown icebox standing at one side. In the two rear rooms separated by a dark green cloth curtain, they lived, their arrangements the same as they had been in the tailor shop two blocks away. The kitchen table was covered with oilcloth once blue, now a spoiled gray. Here they ate and here his mother made the potato salad and the coleslaw that went into the brown refrigerator in the store along with the soda bottles and the milk. Bread was stacked on the counter; coffee, sugar and spices stood on the shelves; crackers and candy were in boxes and barrels on the floor, along with the pickles floating in their scummy brine. A bell jangled when the door
was opened. In the summer you didn’t hear the bell because the screen door’s spring was broken. His father never knew how to fix anything, so the door hung open. Curving bands of yellow flypaper hung from the ceiling fixture, and huge black flies collected on it, disgusting flies, black and wet when they were squashed, bred in the horsedroppings on the street.… Strange that his father, who was so fastidious, didn’t seem to mind them, Joseph thought, until he realized that the old man didn’t see them.

From six o’clock in the morning until ten at night his mother stood behind the counter. Not that they were so busy; it was just that one never knew when someone might come in to buy. Sometimes the jangling bell would ring past ten at night.

“Oh, Mrs. Friedman, I saw the light, I hope it’s not too late. We’re out of coffee.”

For the neighborhood it was a convenience, a place where one could go at odd hours to pick up something one had forgotten, after the markets had closed and the pushcarts were covered with tarpaulins and guarded for the night. A small convenience. A small living.

“Max Friedman,” read the sign above the door. It should have read, “Katie Friedman.” Even at the age of ten Joseph was able to understand the tragedy in that.

He had a snapshot of himself sitting in front of the store, the first picture taken of him since his infant portrait when he lay naked on the photographer’s fur rug. He was twelve years old, in knickers and cap, high shoes and long black stockings.

“How solemn you were!” Anna said when she saw it. “You look as though you had the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

Not the weight of the world, but a great one, nevertheless. For that was the year when he went from childhood to adult knowledge in one night. Well, make it two or three nights, at the most.

Wolf Harris came into the store one day where Joseph
was helping after school. He was some very remote relative of Solly’s on the other side of Solly’s family. He was eighteen and aptly named. His nose was thin; his large mouth was always drawn back in a scornful smile.

“Want to make some money, kid? Mr. Doyle wants a kid to run messages for him.”

“Doyle?” Pa had come from his chair next to the stove. “Why should Mr. Doyle need my son?”

“Because. He needs a boy he can trust to deliver stuff on time, not to lose things. He’ll give him a dollar and a half a week to come in after school every day.”

A dollar and a half! But Doyle was rich, Doyle was from Tammany Hall. He was Power, Government, Authority. Nobody knew exactly what he did, but they did know you could go to him for anything. He had no prejudice. Astonishing America, where the government didn’t care whether you were Chinese, Hungarian or Jewish! If you needed money for a funeral or a ton of coal or somebody in the family was in trouble, you could ask Doyle and he would take care of it. All you had to do in return was to mark the square he told you to mark on election day.

Pa went inside and Joseph heard his parents talking for a minute or two. Then Pa came back.

“Tell Mr. Doyle,” he said to Wolf, “that my son will be happy to work for him and we thank him, his mother and I.”

Doyle had a dignified office near Tammany Hall on Fourteenth Street. Every day after school Joseph went over through the front room where a row of girls sat at their typing machines and down the corridor to the back where he knocked and was admitted. Doyle was bald and ruddy. He had a stickpin in his tie and a ring on his finger which Wolf said was a real sapphire, “worth a fortune.” He liked to joke. He would offer Joseph a cigar or pretend to hand him a coin: “Go down to Tooey’s Bar and get yourself a beer.” And then he would always give a treat, an apple or a chocolate bar, before sending him on his errands.

Doyle owned a lot of property. He owned two houses on
the street where Joseph lived, as a matter of fact. Sometimes Joseph had to deliver papers to plumbers or tinsmiths and others having to do with Doyle’s houses. Sometimes he had to take envelopes to saloons, or pick up papers there that felt thick, as though there might be money inside. He learned to go right in at the front door and ask for the proprietor, who was usually behind the bar, behind the bar with the glittering bottles and the painting of a naked lady. The first time he saw a painting like that his eyes almost popped out. The men at the bar saw what he was looking at and thought it was very funny. They told jokes that he didn’t understand, and he felt uncomfortable. But it was worth it. A dollar and a half! Just for walking around the city carrying envelopes!

One day Mr. Doyle asked to see his handwriting. He got a sheet of paper and said, “Now, write something, anything, I don’t care what.”

When Joseph had written very neatly,
Joseph Friedman, Ludlow Street, New York, United States of America, Western Hemisphere, World, Universe
, Doyle took the paper away and said, “Very nice, very nice … how are you on arithmetic?”

“It’s my best subject.”

“Is it, now! Well, what do you know! How would you like to do a bit of writing and arithmetic for me? Would you like that, you think?”

And as Joseph looked puzzled, he said, “Here, I’ll show you. See these two ledgers? Brand new, nothing written in them? I’ll show you what I want. I want you to copy down in these from the lists that I’ll give you. See here, a list like this, with names and doll—numbers, never mind what it’s for, you don’t need to go into all that.… Just copy all the names in this ledger with these numbers, see? And then put the same names in the other ledger with these other numbers, see? Think you can do it?”

“Oh, sure, sir, I can do it. That’s easy.”

“It’s important to be accurate, you understand. Take your time. I don’t want any mistakes.”

“Oh, no, sir, I won’t make any mistakes.”

“Good. So that’s what you’ll be doing from now on. You’ll work at the desk all by yourself in that little room next to mine, and nobody’ll brother you. When you’re finished you’ll hand the ledgers back to me. And Joseph, one other thing. You’re a good religious boy, aren’t you? I mean, you go to synagogue regularly, don’t tell lies?”

“No, sir, I mean yes, sir, and I don’t tell lies.”

“You know God punishes you when you do wrong.”

“That’s what Pa says.”

“Of course. Then I can depend on you to keep your word. Never to talk about what you write in the books. Never to mention the books to anybody at all. It’s just between you and me. Government business, you understand.”

Doyle was very pleased with him. Wolf told him so. And one day when Doyle was in the neighborhood he came into the store and talked to his parents.

“Your son’s a very smart boy. Dependable, too. A lot of kids, you can’t count on them. They say they’ll come to work, then they go play ball or loaf around and forget.”

“Joseph’s a good boy,” Pa said.

“What do you plan to do with him? What’s he going to be?”

His father shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s young yet. He should stay in school, maybe go to college. But we have no money.”

“He’d make a topnotch accountant. And there’s always money around for a smart boy like him. When the time comes, I’ll see that he gets a chance. He could go to N.Y.U. Just tell him to stick with me.”