Jew Store (8 page)

Then came the problem of dishes. The Moskowitz-provided dishes were heavy, dull yellow, chipped. Could she serve on them and let people think they were
bodlach
? she asked my father, as an image of the Nussbaums sprang into her head. No,
she could not. So she went out and bought her own two sets of dishes. These dishes, bought before I was born, remained our best for all the years I was at home; and when I left and came back to visit, there they still were—a set with roses for meat meals, and a set with violets for dairy ones.

My mother enjoyed the get-togethers. After the guests had left, she would always say, “It ain't like
mishpocheh
, Aaron, but at least they're Jewish people.”

And my father would always answer, “So was I wrong?”

M
iriam remembers that her nightly ritual of those days was to get my father's Camels and newspaper from his coat pocket after supper. On one particular night after she had performed this ceremony, my mother departed from hers—which was to immediately take the supper dishes to the kitchen after everyone had eaten. Instead, my mother sat down with my father at the table and gave him the long stare. This was a stare we all knew: It signaled a serious discussion on the way. Tonight it was about something the rabbi's wife had said. “She was talking to me today,” my mother said to my father.

“This is news?” I have no doubt that my father lit up his cigarette and opened the paper, as this was always his prediscussion maneuver. “Of all people she don't seem to have no trouble talking,” he said to my mother.

My mother could not deny that the news of the Jewish community, admonitions, advice, and recipes flowed from the rabbi's wife in a serene—and uninterruptible—stream.

This time the rabbi's wife's advice was they should take a place with two bedrooms, that it wasn't right that they should all sleep in one room. She had recommended the rooms at Mrs. Feinberg's that had been vacated when the Goldmans moved to St. Louis, where Goldman had taken a job with a wholesale house.

My father demurred. He always had his ear to “the street,” as
the uptown was called among those who toiled there, and he had noticed something astir among the Jewish merchants, something he sensed had to do with him, and whatever it was, he didn't want to create a distraction. “Why should we go moving around like noodles slipping off the plate?” he said to my mother.

This from my father? My father who was always ready for something new? Who couldn't take a walk without coming back with an unfamiliar brand of soap, a newfangled brush, a different-shaped noodle? Who would say, “Let's try it, Reba, it could be just what you're looking for,” as if my mother had been beating the bushes looking for just such a thing?

On this occasion my mother argued no more. If my father said “Wait,” it was all right with her.

The wait wasn't long. The next Sunday morning my brother opened the door to a company of six black-suited men. When they came into the room, an air of grave mission came in with them.

My father got himself busy with smiles and handshakes. My mother, instantly apprehensive, nodded briefly to each and reached out to draw Miriam close, as if they would serve as protection for each other. Miriam felt no need for protection, being only too keen for whatever was to come.

Joey stationed himself in a spot that promised good viewing. He has remembered thinking that the men looked not just grave, but downright lugubrious, as if they had just come from a funeral that had further diminished the “old-timer” Jewish population.

Joey, it turned out, was quite wrong. Despite appearances, the men were happy, extraordinarily happy, and they were about to make my father happy as well.

The drama began when a man stepped in front of the contingent and announced himself as Mr. Pomerantz. Gripped tightly in Mr. Pomerantz's hand was a long roll of paper, which he waved about. In a series of complex moves, he spread the paper
on the enamel table, put the salt shaker at one end, the pepper shaker at the other, the sugar bowl in the middle. At last seeming satisfied that the paper was holding, he propelled my father's head over it, stuck his own forefinger on a spot on the map, for that's what the paper was, and advised the assemblage that he was calling my father's attention to the northwest corner of the state of Tennessee.

Northwest corner? State of Tennessee? My mother knew she was in the state of Tennessee, but
northwest corner
? What was this
northwest corner
? Was it something she shouldn't like the sound of?

Pomerantz held his finger on the map for some seconds, up around the northern rim of the sugar bowl. My father looked at the spot. He made out the name “Concordia.”

Pomerantz affirmed this. “There it is—Concordia.” He squinted his eyes. “A town you got to have good eyes to see.”

My father waited. He knew a disclosure was coming, and finally Pomerantz disclosed it. Pomerantz said he had it “absolutely, positively, no mistake about it” that a shoe factory was going to open up in that little town, in that “Concordia.”

My father floated a little smile, weighting it with a touch of puzzlement. It was his trademark look for projecting innocence. “So what's it got to do with me?” he asked Pomerantz.

Pomerantz's hands went up for silence. He was clearly getting ready to deliver the blockbuster he had in his possession. And a blockbuster it was. Pomerantz drilled his eyes into my father's and revealed the awful truth: There was as yet no Jewish “dry goods” in the town.

Pomerantz stood waiting, waiting, for my father's expression of shock. If my father was not shocked, he was something better

—joyous. The men were talking a store here, and for him. Still, to prolong the drama, to give the men their money's worth, he thought to produce his most elaborate shrug, as if to say, So
what does it have to do with me?

Pomerantz took on the look of a witness to heresy. “Do you know, young Mr. Aaron Bronson, do you know what it means for a town to be without a Jewish dry goods?” His tone was baleful. “What do goyim know from small dry goods? From small ready-to-wear? Groceries, yes. Furniture, maybe. Hardware, definitely. But small dry goods?
Never!
”

My brother could stand it no longer. This seeming inability on my father's part to grasp the obvious was proving too much for him. He ran to my father's side. “Don't you understand, Papa? Mr. Pomerantz is . . .”

My father just put his hand on Joey's shoulder, squeezed hard, and Joey stopped talking.

And now Pomerantz came out with it. “Young Mr. Aaron Bronson,” he said, “this is a proposition that fits you to a T.”

My father didn't have to tell me that euphoric as he was, he would find it very hard to resist a joke. And sure enough, “No, it don't,” he said. “The pants is too long in the rise.” He didn't expect a laugh and didn't get one, so he shook his head in a sober way and told the men what they already knew—that he had no money for such a venture.

Pomerantz told my father not to excite himself, that the merchants of Nashville had been keeping “a eagle eye” on him. My father, he said, was in for “oh, boy, some surprise.” And then, with deference due a potentate, Pomerantz introduced “Mr. Morris Cohen, owner of Cohen's Department Store in the Number One location in uptown Nashville.”

Cohen began with words of wisdom. “Pomerantz is right,” he said to my father. “Only Jews know small dry goods. . . . Now big dry goods, that's another story.” At this point in retelling the story, my father would describe Cohen's big sigh, as if Cohen had brought to mind his competition, the posh Chappell's Department Store.

Cohen now locked my father in his sights. In a voice so authoritative that in the room only the sounds of respiration dared make themselves heard, he declared that he, Morris Cohen, was prepared to take care of my father's money problems. He waved a letter about. “When the wholesalers in St. Louis read in this letter that Morris Cohen is behind you,” he said, “they'll treat you like you was Diamond Jim Brady.” He then put the letter into my father's hands.

And soon afterward, it was over. The men had fulfilled their mission, my father had the promise of a store. The men filed back out past my father, congratulating him. “Like Papa was the bridegroom,” was the way my mother told it.

But there was no bride. My mother could not bring herself to stand there and receive congratulations. She saw what had happened not as my father did, as a chance, but as a venture fraught with peril. If, as she had been hearing, there were no Jewish merchants in this “Concourse” (the Grand Concourse in the Bronx took precedence), then there would be no Jewish people either. She took to wringing her hands. “Are you sure this is what to do?” she asked my father.

My father at this point clicked on his
BORN SALESMAN
sign and basked in its light. “Yes, I'm sure,” he answered my mother. Indeed he “guaranteed” it.

The point was, of course, that if they stayed in Nashville, there would be no store for my father. “Do you think”—and here my father always gave what I took to be a flawless impersonation of Pomerantz—“Mr. Morris Cohen, ‘owner of Cohen's Department Store in the Number One location in uptown Nashville,' is in-ter-es-ted”—as my father famously pronounced this word—“in me getting a store in Nashville?” It was a question he himself answered with a wry “Forget it.”

No, the Nashville men had a whole different idea, and it was for my father to open up a new market for the big St. Louis wholesale
houses. And why were the Nashville merchants so concerned about the welfare of the big St. Louis wholesale houses? Because, my father would tell us, the big St. Louis wholesale houses were where the Nashville merchants had big investments.

And thus, soon after that day, in an old wagon bought cheap because it had been lying useless in Mr. Morris Cohen's backyard since his image went high-toned, behind a horse named Willy bought for close to nothing from the blacksmith shop, with a bag of sponge cake and peaches from the rabbi's wife to supplement the foodstuffs my mother had already gathered, and armed with the celebrated Cohen letter, my family set out on the three-day, two-night trip to Concordia.

I
n the bedroom at Miss Simmons's, according to how Joey has remembered it, he woke up first, got Miriam up, and together they went into the other bedroom and shook my father—who came awake, he always said, with the store on his mind. They did not wake my mother. My father put the peaches and the cheese on the dresser where she couldn't miss them, and they all went downstairs to the kitchen, where Miss Simmons was sitting with a cup of coffee. Lizzie Maud was there, at the coal stove, and almost immediately a plate of food appeared on the table. Joey and Miriam stared. What was that twisty stuff on the side of the eggs? My father had eaten bacon in Savannah and knew that it brought on no dread disease. “Eat, children, eat,” he said. Attempting a Southern effect, he added, “These are some great vittles,” which, despite the drilling from the girls in Savannah, emerged as “gray twittles,” and Miss Simmons looked startled before she caught on.

After breakfast, my father wanted to ask
Miss Brookie
—the lady had requested that he call her that, and he was trying to keep it in mind—for help in finding a store, but she had first wanted to take them on a tour of the house. They had seen most
of it, but the living room, the “front room,” as it was called in Concordia, was as yet unexplored.

The furniture in the front room was what Miss Brookie referred to as her “Victorian afflictions”—hard-framed crimson sofas lacking in the slightest give and chairs that she said were not the usual easy chairs but
un
easy ones. These she had inherited, along with numerous small, curvaceous mahogany tables, from her parents. Hanging on the walls in heavy gold frames were paintings by “minor Italian masters,” which, she said, nobody in town considered fit viewing, for the reason that they weren't what folks were accustomed to—what they were accustomed to, according to Miss Brookie, being pictures of Jesus with his eyes rolling up toward heaven. Her comment on this, my father said, was, “And mercy, what he's looking at ain't anything I'm prepared to discuss.” Miss Brookie, as we found out, could use the vernacular as well as anyone in town, and it seemed to please her to use it whenever she was particularly “outdone,” as she would put it.

On this day, the more Miss Brookie described her things, the more bewildered my father became. Victorian afflictions? Minor Italian masters? Maybe it could be interesting, my father thought, but not right now. No, now he was desperate to get to his own mission and was simply trying to hold on.

At the sight of a grand piano and a harp, Joey and Miriam snapped to attention. Italian, Miss Brookie said her harp was, shipped from Italy while she was on a trip there. She expressed a devotion to the Italians and thought my father must know a lot of them in New York. “Don't you just love them?” she asked him.

My father didn't much want to talk about Italians; he wanted to talk about stores, and anyway he wasn't sure whether he loved Italians or not. He didn't know many, and those he knew were immigrants like himself, making their livings in their own way, in produce stores or shoe-repair shops mostly. “
Non
so
,” he answered the lady, making use of two of the three Italian words he knew. It meant “I don't know,” and it about covered it.

After the tour, Joey and Miriam went out to play in the yard, and my father sat on the steps of the front porch to wait for Miss Brookie to come out.

Green things—trees, bushes—were much in evidence. The crape myrtle and rose of Sharon were in bloom, and my father had a fleeting thought that if my mother would just let herself go, she might consider them a pleasure to look at.