Til the Real Thing Comes Along (24 page)

The Seaview. Rosie loved it. The smell of it, a combination of Coppertone and fresh laundry, would stay in her memory forever.
There were six hotel rooms on each floor. Each had a bed, a dresser, a tiny closet, and a ceiling fan. There was a bathroom
at the end of the hall that everyone on that floor shared.

“Such a view of the sea The Seaview has,” Louie teased, looking out of the window of the hotel room at the window of the hotel
next door. The Seaview was on a side
street three blocks from the boardwalk. Itzy Friedel raised his eyebrows.

“Shmendrick,”
he said, with mock anger at Louie, then winked at Rifke and Rosie. “Come here and lean out the window and I’ll hold your
foot so you shouldn’t fall,” Itzy said. Then Louie gave a wink at Rifke and Rosie, and he leaned. Itzy held his foot.

“Nothing doing,” Louie yelled back in the window.

“Shmeikel,
lean further,” Itzy yelled back out the window.

“Oy,
no!” Rifke said, and laughed so hard she started to cough.

“Now, if you please, my boy, look toward the boardwalk,” Itzy said. “And
zug mir. Vus zeystu?”
Tell me, what do you see?

Louie was laughing now, too. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Now that you mention it, I think maybe out there I caught a liddle glimpse
from the ocean.”

“Dat’s right,” Itzy said pulling Louie back into the room. “And that’s vy I’m called The Seaview.”

Rosie loved seeing her parents laugh. They had both been in wonderful moods for the last few days since Joseph Katzman, her
father’s boss, had told Louie he really ought to take a vacation. That he “richly deserved one” were his words, which God
knows was true, and Louie’s family deserved it too. The minute she heard about the vacation, Rifke, probably figuring unless
she talked about it Louie would change his mind, told everyone who would listen about the vacation. Where they were going
and when they were leaving. Especially her brother Shulke, whom she had to tell so he could give her time off from her job
of managing the grocery store to make the trip.

“And Katzman himself said he so richly deserves it,” Rosie heard Rifke saying into the phone in a voice that had awe in it.
After all, she was talking about the big boss Joseph Katzman, and she was talking to her older brother Shulke.

“And why so richly?” Rifke was never a woman to brag, but today, even though she was speaking on the phone, Rosie noticed
her mother stood taller with pride in her husband. “Because he worked so hard and never took a vacation before in all these
years.”

Work was the only thing Louis Rabinowitz believed in taking the time to do. Eating was something you did in
order to refuel for work. Sleep was a way to gain enough energy to work the next day. The only maintenance the old Plymouth
station wagon ever had was when he took it to a gas station, where they washed the windows while they were filling the tank.
Many times the car would run on empty for a few days, because he hated to take the time away from work to stop at a gas station.

He was a group worker in a settlement house. That’s what Rosie wrote on forms where it asked for
FATHER
’
S
OCCUPATION
. Over and over she had heard Louie tell the story about how he wasn’t even planning to be a social worker. He had wanted
a graduate degree in architecture. In fact, he had been on a scholarship majoring in art at Carnegie Tech, and after he got
his bachelor’s degree he would go on to get his M. Arch, degree. Meanwhile, he was earning his tuition by assisting at the
local settlement house. The Gelman Family Center was a place where the Jewish immigrants who lived in the Hill District were
able to congregate and socialize as well as commiserate about this strange place called Pittsburgh. Louie moved easily among
them. He spoke their language, literally and figuratively. Not only could he converse in Yiddish and Russian and English,
but he had been a stranger himself not so long ago. He saw the fear in their eyes turn to hope when he showed them by example
that soon they would settle in and be happy here. It was in 1922 that Joseph Katzman had called the boy into his office that
first day.

“Pop,” Katzman said. Louie was surprised to hear the boss call him by the nickname the Settlement kids had given him. Although
the job was temporary, he had taken it seriously and become a wise fatherly organizer and friend, and he couldn’t remember
who started it but every kid in the place now called him Pop.

“I’d like to propose that instead of going on to graduate school, which I hear is what you’re planning to do, you come here
and work for me full time.”

Being around Joseph Katzman always made Louie nervous. The man was American-born, and his wealthy family were friends of the
Gelman family who had founded the settlement house. He wore fine suits and had buffed nails and lived in a beautiful neighborhood
with his wife and children.

“Your work with the Jewish community impresses me, and I’d hate to lose you to graduate school.”

Louie wasn’t planning to leave his after-school job as an assistant. He needed it to stay in school and to help out at home.
But Katzman sounded as if he wasn’t talking about after school.

“I’d like you to come on as a full-fledged social worker as soon as you get your bachelor’s. Now I want you to know that if
I announced that this job was available, I’d have a hundred applicants in my office by this afternoon. But because I see the
way the kids take to you around here, I’m offering it to you.”

Louie was torn. Social worker. Architect. Both wonderful professions. But if he chose social worker, he would have a job immediately
and not have to go back to school. He could start making money and contribute more to his family, and maybe even meet a nice
girl and settle down. Rosie liked the part of the story where her father was so confused about what to do that he walked all
the way to downtown Pittsburgh and stood looking into the river for hours. His own father, a peddler, had bad feet because
of diabetes and worked only one or two days a week. More and more of Louie’s earnings were going to the family household.
There wasn’t a day when he didn’t worry if he would have enough for tuition for graduate school. The people who came to the
Settlement needed him, knew he was on their side. It was hard to make an adjustment to living here. Not so long ago, many
of them had lived in Russia in houses with dirt floors. It made him feel good to take these people through the marble halls
of the Settlement House to the big swimming pool and the cafeteria and the theater and to tell them: “This is all yours.”

Standing by the Monongahela River that day, Louie decided to tell Joseph Katzman yes. He would forget about the degree in
architecture he had wanted so badly and work at the Settlement House full time. Art and drawing could be a hobby for him instead
of a career. Then, instead of going back right away, he walked to Frank and Seders and bought himself a straw hat. A social
worker, he decided, should have a hat.

“I think you’ll make a fine addition to our staff,” Joseph Katzman had said, shaking Louie’s hand.

Louie was more than fine. When the Irish boys in the
neighborhood accused the Jewish boys of putting blood on their matzos, Louie found a former boxer to coach the Jewish boys
in self-defense. Many of the neighborhood kids in those days worked long hours in the stogie factories or shirtwaist factories
to help their families eke out enough money to survive. For those teenagers Louie organized dances, so at the end of a grueling
workweek they could relax and socialize, and feel as if they were still kids, though many of them looked like haggard, overworked,
world-weary adults. And for the little children he helped institute the “milk well,” a nutrition program that served them
milk and graham crackers and allowed them to weigh in to make sure they were growing big and strong.

He formed dozens of teams for neighborhood athletes and gave them the chance to play in first-class facilities with quality
equipment and the best volunteer coaches he could find. He formed a theater group called Thespians, which he pronounced “tezbeyintz”
in his Russian-accented English. Most of the people who signed up wanting to act spoke only Yiddish, so the plays they put
on were in Yiddish.
Di Mishpoche,
and
Der Vilder Mensch
were two of his favorites. Louie was at every rehearsal and every performance of every one. He was glad he had decided not
to be an architect.

Especially when he was chaperoning a dance and he met Rifke Kaminsky. Rifke was one of nine children who had come over from
a Little
shtetl
near Kiev. “Come over” is what she called it. What she meant was “escaped.” Her family home in Russia had been one large
room with a straw roof and an earthen floor. Rifke’s mother, Chaike, kept chickens inside the house behind the brick oven
and a goat outside, and fed her nine children as best she could with the eggs and the milk. Sometimes they could buy a few
extras with the money brought home by Rifke’s father, who worked for a miller. In 1914, Rifke’s father left Russia to go to
a place Rifke and her sisters laughingly called Pittsburgh Pa. He promised to send money and tickets for the family within
months. But then came the Great War, and the remaining family learned that immigration was closed. There was no mail from
their father. No news. No money. No tickets.

For the next seven years their life was a nightmare. Not only because of their dire poverty, which Chaike managed stoically
to rise above, but from the bloody pogroms of the
Russian civil wars. Rifke watched her best friend’s father shot to death. Played with a little boy one day, and on the next,
found his body in the street.

In order to survive, Chaike and her son Shulke built a still in the earthen floor which they covered over during the day with
a rag rug. When the night curtains were drawn, they brewed moonshine whiskey to sell to the goyim. Of course. Who else would
drink such garbage? Years later Rifke still had nightmares about the night the soldiers broke into the house and beat her
brother Shulke so badly, when they found the still, that when the vile monsters left they were certain that the boy was dead.
The very next night after the still was destroyed, Shulke, bandaged and limping in pain, helped Chaike and the other children
bury themselves under straw in a wagon headed for the border.

Rifke loved the Settlement House. She loved everything about America. It was exciting to live in a house that had wood floors,
running water, and an icebox. To walk down the street on pavement instead of dirt. To borrow her older sister’s dresses and
go to the dances wearing them. She spoke very little English, and most of what she knew was from popular songs. Her favorite
was “Always” by Irving Berlin. Only because of her accent, she called it “Alvays.” Rifke’s sisters said Pop Rabinowitz was
too old for her, because she was nineteen and he was twenty-eight, and her older brother Shulke threatened to come and beat
Pop up if he tried to date her, but Rifke was flattered by the attention of such a “big shot” in the world of the immigrants,
and when Louie gave Shulke a complimentary membership to the Settlement House to appease him, he agreed they could be married.
It was 1926.

Two years later they had a son, Eugene. Eugene died of pneumonia when he was three. Rifke tried for many years after his death
to get pregnant again, but she couldn’t. Her mother, whom everyone called Bubbe because by now she had ten grandchildren,
told her:
“Folg mich, mayn kind.”
Listen to me, my child. “When you least expect it you’ll conceive again. After all, you did it once before.” Rifke had given
up on children. Her life was happy anyway. She studied English at night school, though she rarely used it, since her sisters
and her mother were her friends and they all spoke Yiddish, and Louie spoke Yiddish at home too. Rifke was very much in love
with Louie.

By the early forties the colored people were moving into the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and many of the Russian immigrants
moved from there to Squirrel Hill. Among them were Rifke and Louie. For the two of them, however, it wasn’t an upward move.
It was so that they could live in the tiny apartment upstairs from her rich brother Shulke’s grocery store, where Rifke worked
full time as the manager. Shulke paid his sister a meager salary and charged them very little for rent, which was good because
Louie, who suddenly found himself working in an interracial community, was making little more than the salary he’d started
out with at the Settlement House, and life was far more expensive. The arrangement had served Shulke well by giving him a
place to put Bubbe instead of having her live with his wife and children, who were embarrassed by her old-world ways.

In 1944, when Rifke was thirty-seven years old and reconciled to being Aunt Rifke but never Ma—as Eugene, her poor precious
Eugene had always called her—she became pregnant and gave birth to Rosie.

“So vere’s da bading soot?” Itzy Friedel asked Rosie, a twinkle in his eye. “I got us some sanoviches packed up and ve’ll
go to da beach.”

Rosie’s father changed in the bathroom down the hall, and Rosie and her mother changed in the room. Rosie wore a navy cotton
suit with white polka dots and a little skirt, and it was kind of stretched out because it had belonged to her cousin Ruthie,
but not too bad, and she knew she looked cute in it, her long black hair cascading almost to the line of the suit at her thighs.
Her mother wore an electric-blue one-piece elasticized suit borrowed from Aunt Chana, over which she wore a white terry-cloth
beach robe borrowed from Aunt Sasha. Rifke’s huge breasts bubbled over the elastic at the top as if they were trying to escape.
Rosie noticed for the first time that her mother’s legs were covered with blue bulging veins.

Her father wore plaid trunks that were Itzy Friedel’s, and the same shirt he’d worn in the car on the road from Pittsburgh,
and the same shoes and socks too. They met Itzy Friedel on the porch of The Seaview, where he stood waiting,
dressed in a flowered shirt that matched his flowered bathing suit. He was carrying a giant black inner tube on his left shoulder,
and a smaller bright-green one with a sea horse’s neck and face rising from it on his right shoulder. The day was bright and
hot and the four of them made a strange parade as they moved up the street toward the boardwalk. Rosie couldn’t wait to see
it. “On the boardvalk in Atlantic City, ve vill valk in a dream.” That was another song they had sung in the car. “On the
boardvalk in Atlantic City, life vill be pitches and cream.”