Jew Store (9 page)

In various spots were plaster cherubs and, on the branches of the trees, rusted hanging baskets. The yard could be said to reach a kind of clutter climax at the side, where an arched trellis thick with indeterminate vines opened up to a clutch of furniture—a love seat, two armchairs, and a tiny table—contrived of bent willow so green all the legs had sprouted.

As my father had sensed, if anybody could point him in the right direction, it was Miss Brookie. There was something about the lady, as there had been about the boy T, that made him feel he was in good hands. Even the little one, Erv, though he did nothing but stare, stared not with suspicion but with simple curiosity.

My father's intuition had not misled him. Miss Brookie was just such a person. When my family first came to her, she was fifty-eight years old and had been a presence in the town for all those years, toiling in the Concordia vineyards to bring forth enlightenment. She had aspirations for the town. Still, little went on of even a trivial nature that she didn't know about, so chances were good that she would have a lot to say on the state of the current Concordia real estate market.

Miss Brookie came to the steps and in a whoosh of skirts sat down next to my father. Out of her “crush of kin,” she told him, she ought to be able to think of somebody who could do him some good. “Lord,” my father remembered her saying, “I have kin going in every front door in the county, plus a few unidentified
ones who are obliged, owing to our quaint customs, to go in and out of the
back
one.”

The name she came up with was a cousin, Tom Dillon. He was the town's leading property owner. And he had an empty store right on First Street.

A Jew store on the main street? It was a prospect my father had not entertained even in his sweetest dreams. What he didn't know yet was that First Street was Concordia's one and only business street, so if you had a store, it was, ipso facto, on First.

Meanwhile, Miss Brookie was making it clear that she had little influence with her cousin Tom. No, she said to my father, agreement between her and Dillon came just twice a year: In winter they “concurred” that it was cold and in summer that it was hot. Tom Dillon was very difficult—“disputatious,” she called him—and, since in the past so many dry-goods stores had gone bust, he was very particular about what he would allow in his properties.

It was Miss Brookie's view that those failing stores had made the fatal error of wanting to sell the latest thing from Paris. “Rue de la Paix stuff,” she said to my father.

Thinking to echo the lady, my father said, “Rudy LaPay, sure thing,” and Miss Brookie looked startled again.

The important thing, my father was thinking, was that she should know that his store would be very different, that he intended to serve the workingman and the farmer. He had one other category he intended to serve but hesitated to say it, not sure of what term the lady used. He chose one and hoped for the best. “And the coloreds,” he said to her.

Miss Brookie was nodding, so my father figured the word was okay. But now, now what was she doing? It was something my father had seen only flappers do, and Miss Brookie was no flapper: She was plump, not skinny; had no red spots on her cheeks; nothing dangled from her ears. But here she had reached
into her pocket and brought out
a pack of cigarettes
. A woman smoking? And right out here on the front porch steps with nothing to hide her? Carrying cigarettes around and thrusting them at him?

My father said he was so startled, he took one of her Chesterfields in a sort of reflex and stuck it between his lips.

Miss Brookie stuck one between hers. She reached into her pocket again and this time came out with a wooden match, which she struck into flame on the step. Holding it under my father's nose, she lit his cigarette, then lit hers and puffed away, sending great clouds of slaty smoke over the yard.

There was a store like the one my father had in mind in a town not far away, Oliphant by name, she told him between puffs, but it too had gone bust. It seems
their
fatal flaw had been that they had too many clerks and never the right sizes.

Goyim, my father said to himself.

“I used to turn up overall sizes until my hands were literally dyed blue,” Miss Brookie was saying. “Don't you know my language was even bluer?” As my father found out, the overalls were for the yardman, but what “blue” language was remained a mystery.

“Get that vision,” she said to him. “A crush of clerks and one itty-bitty store.”

This was not a worry for my father. All he would need was one good clerk and a little help from my mother on Saturdays.

He wanted to convince the lady that she should have no doubts about him, that he knew how to do. He was impatient to tell her about being “a born sal-es-man.” “My bosses all said I could take the place of two men,” he told her. Whoa, too much bragging, he warned himself, and added, “Uh, maybe they meant each man had one arm in a sling.”

Miss Simmons was abruptly ready for action. In my home I have a box of snapshots from those Concordia days, my share
from the big box my mother kept, and among them is one of Miss Brookie standing in a half-turn at the top of her steps, looking into the sun and shielding her eyes with her hand, giving whoever is taking the picture a look that says “All right, you've got me; snap the fool thing and let me get on with what needs doing.” And what needed “doing” at this moment was to telephone her cousin Tom.

A
“misdriven nail” Miss Brookie had called Tom Dillon, and for good reason, my father was finding out. Here was a man to whom he could say nothing right.

It was immediately clear that Tom Dillon hated Yankees and hated Jews, so a YankeeJew, which he pronounced as one word, was no doubt as abominable a creature as he could imagine— not, I suppose, that he knew all that many. “I'm not sure our folks will want a store run by a YankeeJew,” he informed my father.

Tom Dillon was a large overweight man about fifteen years younger than his cousin Brookie. Extra poundage, a grandmother, and college degrees—hers from the University of Chicago, his from the University of Tennessee—were about all the cousins shared, except for one personality trait: Both were bent on prevailing. Still, what they hoped to prevail
in
were vastly different. If Miss Simmons struggled to bring enlightenment, Tom Dillon gave his all to maintaining the status quo. Miss Brookie, who was perhaps the only one in town who knew the word, called him a “xenophobe,” which in Tom Dillon's case meant that he was suspicious of anybody who wasn't Southern, white, and Protestant. As Concordia's leading property owner and a
longtime pillar of the church, he was one of the town's biggest big shots, and though Miss Brookie prevailed occasionally, his score for prevailing was probably somewhere around a hundred percent.

Dillon had an especially heavy and moist face, and as he came out with his objections one-two-three, a handkerchief gripped in his hand swiped at it. If there was indeed a Southern tradition of civility, as my father had observed there was in Savannah, Tom Dillon did not subscribe to it. He again expressed the thought, without any discernible attempt to gussy it up, that there hadn't been any Jews to speak of around Concordia and he wasn't sure the town was going to want any.

My father held up his hands as if to physically block Dillon's objections. Hoping to banter with the man, he said, “Why don't I take that worry off your hands? Why not say it's
my
worry?”

What did my father mean—
his
worry? Dillon wanted to know.
He
, Tom Dillon, was the one who stood to lose if the store failed. About the extras my father wanted, hellfire, they cost dollars,
his
dollars. Adding the upstairs my father had talked about, for instance, meant calling in “Poindexter and his bunch of idiots” to put a door in, and then after Poindexter put it in backward, he, Tom Dillon, that's who, would have to fight with him over who was to pay to turn it around. And, anyway, an upstairs in a Jew store was just “by damn, showing off,” wasn't it?

Dillon's store was narrow and dark, with a single display window for natural light and a ceiling too high for electric lights to help out much. It had all the appeal of a cave. My father said to Dillon, as diplomatically as he could, that the store “ain't too big, as I'm sure you know,” and outlined how he planned to put the men's suits and men's dressing rooms upstairs, away from the women's department downstairs. He also had the hope, unexpressed, to have dressing rooms that were better than the ones at Edelstein's, which were two humble cubbyholes separated from the store and each other by curtains, with pinned-on hand
printed paper signs reading
WHITE MEN
on one and
WHITE LADIES
on the other.

My father's hopes did not extend to dressing rooms for Negroes, as he had learned that in the South Negroes did not try on in stores; they tried on at home. Still, unlike in better stores, where returns from Negroes were not tolerated for any reason, in Jew stores the owner would at least meet a Negro customer at the back door and arrange there for a return or exchange.

My father said that at the words “ain't too big,” Dillon took an annoyed swipe at his big, sweaty face, at the overloading beads of perspiration, and, as if sincerely seeking information, said to him, “Tell me something—why in hell did you Yankee-Jews come here anyway?”

A
momzer
, my father thought, a real, no-doubt-about-it bastard. And was he supposed to take the bastard's question seriously? Ponder it and give an answer?

No, Dillon seemed neither to invite nor require a rejoinder. It was Brookie Simmons's business, he was saying, if she wanted YankeeJews in her house, but the town had done fine without them and he expected it would continue doing fine. My father kept trying to interrupt, but Dillon just raised his voice and continued on. He was now letting my father in on the fact that YankeeJews spoil a town. “You know that, Bronson?” he said, as if he had been doing research on the subject.

My father wondered if the bastard expected him to agree, even give a few huzzahs, to shout “You said it!” and then do him a favor and leave town. Out loud he said, “You think so?”

Dillon answered soberly that he did and gave reasons why this was so. “A YankeeJew merchant comes and turns First Street into a cutthroat place and pretty soon everybody in town is miserable,” he explained. He fell silent and shook his head, as if his vision had left him completely depressed.

So where did that leave my father and the store? “About the store,” my father said.

“Oh, yeah,” Dillon said, coming out of his gloomy trance. “I'll think it over and let you know.”

A
s I have understood it, my mother had come out on the porch at the very moment Miss Brookie had used the phrase “Jew store” on the telephone with Tom Dillon, before my father's meeting with Dillon. Miss Brookie had used it as shorthand for the kind of business my father had in mind, had used it with Dillon because, as an owner of business properties, he would know the expression and it would tell him that this was not to be another Dalrymple-Eaton's, which was a store for the well-to-do, of which one was enough, there not being all that many well-to-do in Concordia. But all my mother knew at that moment was that Miss Brookie had said the unsayable—had said “Jew store.” “How did I know?” my mother asked in later years. “How could I know she wasn't always big with the ‘Jew' this and ‘Jew' that?”

In my mother's mind the word
Jew
used all by itself, nakedly, as it were, was not a word but a curse. She believed it was used only by people who hated Jews. If it had its three letters—its “-ish”—on the end, ah, that made the difference. If I said that someone was a Jew, my mother would ask me, “So what is he? A no-goodnik? A gangster?” On that day, however, when she had heard “Jew store,” she had not protested. She could believe she was back with the girls at the table in the factory.

Before Miss Brookie had come back from the telephone, my mother had plunked down on the step next to my father, and he had said, hoping it was true, “Like a baby you slept, Reba.”

My mother could only think it would be terrible if a baby slept as she had.
Oy
, such dreams she had had—dreams of her long-dead grandmother running around with hair “wild like an animal's” and screaming that everybody and everything had gone crazy.

On the porch with my father, she had wondered if Joey and Miriam had eaten. “Don't tell me what,” she had said, and my father had replied that his lips were pasted shut. And who had made their breakfast? And when my father had answered “Lizzie Maud,” my mother had remembered that the lady had mentioned somebody with this name the day before.

“Miss Brookie”—my mother had heard my father call the lady this and knew that she must too—had come back from the phone and now sat down below them on the steps. After telling my father that Tom Dillon would meet with him, she had begun addressing my mother in a blue streak, her words, my mother said when she told this story, like “flies that wouldn't light.” Miss Brookie had wanted my mother to go with this Lizzie Maud to some place called the U-Tote-'Em—where she could buy her own “wherewithals” and then use the kitchen.

My father had thought my mother should go, but my mother had thought no, she didn't want to go to the U-Tote-'Em. The only place she had wanted to go was back to bed.

In the end, while my father had gone to meet Tom Dillon, my mother had gone grocery shopping with Lizzie Maud.

M
y mother had had an unnerving morning at the U-Tote-'Em. First of all, Lizzie Maud had turned out to be a Negro.
Oy
. She had to shop with a Negro and she would have to cook next to her, too. Then, when she had looked at the meats in the grocery store icebox, just like one in a house except bigger, although she had known not to expect kosher, where was the lamb, the veal, the calves' liver? Didn't they know there was other meat in the world besides
pork
? This was not exactly a fair question, as there were certainly beef and chickens in the box, not to mention kid. But when my mother had asked the butcher—not really a butcher, just the man who ran the grocery store—for a brisket, he had looked at her as if she had brought into his store the word for the flesh from a newly evolved animal.
The man had said, “Don't have no call for that, Mizriz . . . Mizriz . . . Bronson, ain't it?” “Mizriz,” as my mother would find out, was for many Concordians the pronunciation of choice for “Mrs.” but now sounded to her only like
misery
.