Up From Orchard Street (36 page)

The Polish service was held on a Wednesday. I skipped school to attend the service with my grandmother. Abe drove us to the church on Avenue C but refused to enter, superstitious about the Christ figure, afraid of bad luck.

So few people attended that Bubby propelled me to the first row. “You don’t have to cross yourself,” she whispered. “The priest will understand.”

The church smelled of mold, the ceiling dampened by years of neglect and covered with brown water stains. Nothing of beauty enhanced the small space. No stained-glass windows, no icons, just wooden benches and a pulpit covered with a faded red cloth. A few elderly parishioners, women with woolen scarves on their heads, sunken cheeks, mouths empty of teeth, cried quietly. Mr. Yang’s white flowers beautified the altar and momentarily helped us forget the bitter cold. A broken window or an unlatched door let in the sharp wind. Bubby held my hand throughout the short service.

The priest, wrinkled, shabby, himself the victim of intense poverty, spoke in Polish and possibly for our benefit added in heavily accented English, “Our sister is in heaven with the angels.”

At the end of this brief service the others rose and touched the closed coffin resting on a wooden table before they filed out.

In her new black coat with its black Persian lamb collar and cuffs and her fur-trimmed hat, courtesy of Aunt Bertha, Bubby looked like a Balkan aristocrat, a landowner who dropped into a rural village church as a courtesy. The priest came down the steps to shake her hand. He shed a few tears as she greeted him in Polish. He repeated in English that the deceased was at peace in heaven. We hastened outside.

Abe was waiting for us on the windy sidewalk, stamping his feet and blowing on his gloved fingers. The sky was low, black with impending rain. The wind cut into our necks and backs.

“Short and sweet,” he said.

“Short, yes, but bitter. Not even black bread. Not a drop of wine. A mouse who crept inside that church would die of starvation. It was a shanda. I didn’t think to bring food.”

“Forget it. It’s over and done with. Home, ladies?”

“No, let’s eat. At Emil’s.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. Emil’s. Let’s see what the tsimmes is about.”

Parking on upper Canal Street wasn’t a problem and though I hated to admit it, Abe was right in exclaiming, “It’s the cat’s meow.”

Lights blazed from immense chandeliers. The walls glowed with murals depicting happy peasants carrying baskets of fruit and flowers. White-jacketed waiters bustled amid the white-clothed tables. As we entered, a hostess in a short black skirt and white ruffled blouse handed us a printed menu and intoned, “Welcome to Emil’s. Let me show you to your table.”

The hostess was supplanted by a portly man in a blue pin-striped suit.

“Manya! Manya! Who could believe it’s you?” he cried.

She stared at the fringe of black hair encircling his oval head, the front tooth trimmed with gold. “Rudnick from the shoelaces? The Odessanik with the black beard?”

“The same, the same. Now I am Emil. This is my restaurant. Come, come, the best table in the house for you. Manya, you are still a krazavitz. A beauty. And today you’re dressed like a czarina. Where are you coming from?”

“You shouldn’t know from it.”

“From the Polachka? The worst anti-Semites.”

“This person had no hate in her.”

Rudnick nodded at me. “Your Bubby, she fed me for years. I was one of her schnorrers. Read the menu, read, read. No, I’ll order for you.”

He paused and acknowledged Abe. “I hear you have a new machine. What, you work for the mob?”

“Does Manya and her granddaughter look like the mob?”

Rudnick’s eyes ricocheted around the table.

“For you, Manya, scrambled eggs with cream cheese and lox, our number-one seller. For the young lady a waffle with hot syrup and whipped butter and for Abe a steak sandwich with sautéed onions. Sounds good?”

He left us for a moment before seating himself on the fourth chair at our table. He brought a basket with assorted breads, rolls, bagels and bialys that he lathered with butter and shoveled into his mouth. “Taste, taste.”

True to the sign that read In and Out in 20 Minutes, the food appeared not only quickly but on hot plates. “I learned from you, Manya. Always hot plates.”

The waffle was a novel experience: crisp, sweet, the butter served in a fluted paper cup, the syrup in a miniature pitcher.

A pang of envy swept through me. I wanted us to own a restaurant with murals, with customers waiting to be seated. I wanted Bubby to be applauded for her work, rewarded for her talent. I hated Rudnick, his gold watch, gold chain and gold tooth.

“So, Rudnick. How did you come by the money for this restaurant, from shoelaces?”

“Investors. First I managed the shoelace factory, a dump on Houston Street. I heard someone else was after this property. A Gold-stein, Goldberg, a Goodman, something like that. I grabbed it right away. Six of us put in a little cash, but enough to open. The name, my idea. Something classy, like French. We have a gold mine here.” He paused. “You still in business, Manya?” As if he didn’t know.

“Mostly catering,” I answered boldly. “We have several Wall Street accounts.”

His eyes flashed up to his flashy chandeliers. “How did you get the accounts?”

“My mother works at Saks Fifth Avenue,” I answered defiantly. “She meets a lot of professionals.”

I hated myself for playing my parents’ game, but I wasn’t bad at it.

Rudnick winked at Bubby. “You want to come work for me? Who can cook like you? Who? Nobody.”

“Thanks,” she smiled. “The business I have right now, it’s perfect for me. Not too much, not too little.”

“You’re still cooking four-course meals?”

“Out of style,” she admitted, “but we do takeouts. Clayton delivers.”

“He is still with you? I’ll send him lunch.” Rudnick ran off again. Abe wolfed down his steak sandwich, in a hurry for us to leave. We ate very fast, lower-class Jewish style, utensil to mouth, no pauses until done.

“Rudnick, the check please.”

“For you, Manya, never. It is my pleasure, my pleasure.” He held out two boxes. “One is filled with desserts. The apple strudel we sell twenty-five pieces a day, maybe more. Tell Jack and Lil they should come for dinner. That’s what they call the evening meal, dinner. I want they should have a beautiful evening.”

Abe hurried us out and we sped home. “What do you think?” Bubby asked him.

“You know yourself. It’s a mishmash. Jewish, American, Italian steak sandwiches, but that momser has it right. It’s a gold mine.”

The moment Clayton heard us on the stairway he called out with relief. “Where have you been, you’re so late!” Like my father, Clayton suffered acute anxiety when Bubby left the apartment. She handed over the boxes. Lil, just awakened, strolled in. “What’s in the boxes?”

“You remember Rudnick from shoelaces? He’s Emil’s.”

Without washing her hands or brushing her teeth, my mother bit into an apple slice covered with a thick crust and white icing. She quickly spit it out. “It’s canned, not fresh apples. It tastes like Mrs. Wagner’s nickel pies.”

“Clayton,” Bubby asked, “any orders?”

“The lawyers called. Lunch for Friday. What did they have at Mrs. Rosinski’s service?”

“Nothing. Not a drop. I can’t bear to talk about it.”

It started to rain, heavily, the sky murky as dusk. We listened to the rain beat against the windows. The day was over for us.

“When Willy finishes school, we’ll make night early.”

The storm would keep any potential customer away from our door, let alone the news of a suicide in our building. My mother crept back into bed. Every electric heater was blazing, but none of us felt warm.

Without discussing it, my parents began their search for a different apartment. On their day off they walked to Battery Park to the complex where Mathias, the hat man, had moved. “Not for us,” Jack announced.

Their fall-back position was Dr. Koronovsky’s apartment at the Amalgamated. He consistently repeated his generous offer of free rent for a year.

New buildings with fancy facades began to change the landscape of the Jewish quarter. Like a hero out of a Horatio Alger novel, my mother was consumed with ambitions. “Do you realize that we never had a sofa, an armchair, a living room set?” she exclaimed. “Only beds and dining room chairs. Is that how stock should hang?” The last was a quotation from Mr. L., who inspected his clothing every morning and if one of his garments was askew, roared, “Is that how stock should hang?”

A tacit understanding existed between my parents and my grandmother: no discussions about apartments until they found a suitable one.

One Friday my parents returned from their search and broke their silence. “There’s a new building on Grand Street, not far from here, beautiful, with an elevator. We thought we saw Orloff, the silk man, out in front. What would he be doing there?”

“You went inside the building?”

“No,” Lil answered. “It will be finished in a week or two. They tore down an old grocery store and built this tall skinny building.”

“Not skinny,” my father corrected, “narrow, with high windows. The architect was standing on the sidewalk, supervising everything. Imagine, an architect on Grand Street.”

Bubby went right on rolling dough for taglach. We couldn’t tell if she accepted this information seriously.

A week later however, Orloff himself telephoned. “Manya!” he shouted. He regarded speaking into the phone from a distance of three blocks as a transatlantic call.

“Manya,” he repeated, “I have a surprise for you. On Friday I am coming with my machine to drive you to Grand Street. The whole family should be there at 3:30. New York time, not Jewish time. Tell Jack to call me.”

“Who was that?” Jack asked, looking up from the racing form. He and Lil had walked their feet off searching for apartments with no results.

Jack returned Orloff’s call immediately. He said, “Jack Roth here” and then three “yeses” in a row. My grandmother dropped chunks of dough in boiling honey. “I’m dying for those taglach,” Jack said. “Hot out of the pot is the best.”

My father invariably ate food out of sequence, so it was not unusual for him to start with honey-coated pastries that he retrieved with the slotted spoon. He winked at Lil lasciviously before he walked her to Pandy’s for her weekly shampoo and set.

The following Friday Jack took it upon himself to keep us together. “Ma, change your dress. Nothing fancy, just not your cooking outfit.”

It wasn’t like Bubby to acquiesce without asking questions, but her son exuded such enthusiasm that she washed her face, recombed her hair and slipped on a wool dress without protest. The entire family stood in a row like schoolchildren, waiting for Orloff. His face was shining with pride when he drove up.

We crowded into his car and drove the half dozen blocks to 444 Grand Street. There, a tall slim man with unruly auburn hair was waiting for us on the sidewalk. He had an uptown accent, wore a tweedy coat and no hat. He extended his hand to Jack. “I’m Peter Peterson, the architect.”

My father held to several provincial attitudes. One of them was that men who didn’t wear hats were Communists or at the least Socialists. He eyed the architect warily because his hair tumbled over his eyes and his striped wool scarf circled his neck like a barrier against a sore throat.

“It’s a secure building,” Peterson explained without preliminaries. “You buzz and if no one answers, you stay out.” Orloff grinned widely, opened the door with a key and we trooped inside.

The building was indeed narrow. But its elevator held four of us, so Bubby, Jack, Peterson and I went up first and got off at the fourth floor. Willy, Lil and Orloff followed.

“Only one apartment on each floor,” Peterson explained. “The walls are noiseproof and insulated. This apartment is the best one. Mr. Orloff had your needs in mind when I designed it. He insisted on space for folding tables.”

We entered into a long hallway, which Peterson referred to as a “foy-ay.” Self-conscious, we hesitated before walking on the polished wood floors with their intricately patterned inlays. To the right at the end of the foy-ay was a large kitchen with blond wood cabinets, a double sink, a contemporary refrigerator and a restaurant stove complete with a griddle and two ovens. Across the length of one wall there was a highly polished counter, installed in place of a table, where Bubby could chop, slice, beat and mix food. Its surface was impervious to heat, so she would be able to remove roasts directly from the oven to the counter.

“A half-bathroom.” Peterson opened the door of a white-tiled room with a white commode and a small white sink. We understood the meaning of
white
for the first time; it was as dazzling as a jewel.

The prize of the apartment, however, filled us with awe. This was an immense room, divided by what Peterson referred to as “Dutch doors,” a few feet in height but high enough to separate the dining area from the living room. In the living room, the floor-to-ceiling windows gave onto a view that encompassed not only Grand Street, but because this was the top floor, glimpses of the spires of the financial district.

The sun broke through the winter sky and flooded the apartment with a golden aura. My father heralded this as a lucky omen. On either side of the central space were bedrooms, each larger than our entire Orchard Street flat. Only in the movies had we observed anything like the master bathroom, with a massive tub and a separate enclosed shower. “Nothing on West End Avenue or Riverside Drive equals this bathroom,” Peterson announced.

My mother, who had not once in her life gone to an art museum, an opera house or any cultural center, was overcome by the beauty of her surroundings. This vision of how life could be lived, not in some distant reaches but close to recognizable streets and people she knew, moved her to tears.

With lips trembling and eyes brimming she implored Bubby, “Ma, please don’t say no to this.”