Jew Store Page 2

  As the thunder retreated, my father heard its rumble as threats to return if he didn’t do right. Understood, he said to himself, but right about what? Out of his choices, of which he had many, he picked the most imminent—a place to stay. The wagon one more night was not an option. But where to look? And where was his mazel—his good luck—which should be turning up right about now to point the way?

  Suddenly, not from the heavens but from the elm tree, plummeted two boys. As they stood staring at my father, they seemed to him the color and texture of the rain itself.

  Atop pale hair sat ancient Panama hats, the saturated brims undulating with each raindrop. Pants, perhaps once blue, were streaky white; white shirts, confined by suspenders, were soppy, the long sleeves, buttoned at the wrists, plastered to arms. Feet were bare.

  These were the Medlin brothers—T and Erv. As he announced their names, T, the older one and the one who spoke (Erv, six, only gazed), told my father he had been “christened” T.J. but was called T “for short”—as if, my father always said, two letters were too much of a mouthful. T was “near to nine,” although my father described him as one of those country boys who might be “near to nine” but were more like “near to” thirty. They were the sons of a cotton farmer and lived “over yonder,” T said, pointing to a peeling farmhouse.

  T was puzzled by my father’s presence. “You be the new Jew peddler?” he asked him.

  “Jew yes, peddler no,” my father answered him.

  It was clear the boy had never before seen a Jew who wasn’t a peddler. “Where you bound then?” As we got to know T through the years, we all were aware of his habit of flicking his eyes up when he was doubtful, and he did that now. “And what you got in mind?”

  When told that my father was bound for Concordia and had in mind opening a store there, the boy seemed even more confounded. Though we all liked to “do” people, I always thought my father had a true gift for mimicry, and what T said now, according to how my father told it, was, “Danged if I ever heard tell of a Jew storekeeper afore. And, law, in Concordia?”

  As the rest of the Bronson family emerged from the tarpaulin, T looked them over, commented in an aside to my father, “I see you ain’t just the one Jew,” and asked if they needed a place to stay. He had something in mind—the home of his “cudden,” Brookie Simmons, the one in Concordia who took strangers in, the one who, according to T, “loved company like a darky on Sunday afternoon.”

  My father had one question—the itchy “How much?” All the money he had in the world was in his inside coat pocket, and it was a slight amount indeed. “She charge much?” he asked T, not comfortable with the question but having to ask it anyway.

  It was plainly T’s view that everybody in the world except my father knew that Brookie Simmons was the daughter and heir of “Coca-Cola” Simmons, the bottling plant magnate and the town’s wealthiest man, and as such she would be little interested in such matters. “You don’t know nothing if you think she’s in it for the money,” he said to my father.

  My father had no alternative but to chance it. He asked the boy, “So, you’re ready to go, Mr. T?”

  “Yessir.” T climbed into back of the wagon, and Erv followed. My mother reseated herself on the perch.

  My father flicked the horse lightly, called out, “Vi-o! Vi-o! Giddyap! Giddyap! Let’s go, you Willy you!” and the wagon was back on the road. Now that they were set for the night, my father felt that he was not mucking around in the yellow mud, which, after the rain, the road had once again become, but that he was gliding along a ribbon of gold silk.

  As they neared Concordia, T leaned over from the back to give my father directions. “Left as soon as you hit the cobblestones, Mr. Jew.”

  The words flew out of her mouth, my mother said later, like a bird from an open cage. “Mr. Bronson, little boy.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the boy answered her.

  The house of Miss Brookie Simmons was on Third Street, two blocks from First. It was a little different from the neighboring two-story white frame houses in that it seemed wide rather than tall, with a roof only slightly pitched. Perched on the roof was a little rectangular construction, an attic that had ignored symmetry and simply shot itself off to one side. What the house looked most like was a shallow-tiered, whiteiced, sat-on cake.

  As the wagon pulled up, everybody except my mother jumped off and started up the concrete walk. After the rain the sun had come out full, and steam was rising from my father’s damp wool coat. Also Joey needed a haircut and his black curls hung over his forehead like a bunch of Concord grapes, and Miriam was in a dress wrinkled as if it had been slept in. Well, my mother reminded herself as she sat alone in the wagon, it had been slept in. And she thought oy, what if my father came back insulted? For the way they all looked. For being in a wagon. For being Jewish.

  She gave a long look to the house. It was a house in need of paint, sitting on pilings of cracked, often absent bricks. The steps were scuffed, the lattice under the house broken, the porch floor full of warps and waves. This was the house of the daughter of the richest man in town?

  Miss Brookie Simmons was out the door before the entourage even got to the steps. Out she came, short and round, a white cotton shirtwaist above, a long navy blue skirt below. Gold-rimmed glasses glinted as she moved; and salt-and-pepper gray hair, cut Buster Brown style with straightas-pins bangs, swung around.

  Plump she might have been, but, according to my father, she was a fast mover. In one quick circuit she had hugged T, shaken my father’s hand, run her fingers through Joey’s curls, and twisted Miriam’s earlobe. Erv’s cheek was pinched and a peck planted. The lady seemed as pleased as a hen coming upon unexpected feed. As she went whirling around, she was saying “delighted” over and over, which to my father sounded hopeful. She finally made it plain and said to him, “You can have two rooms, and you can decide for yourselves who goes in which.”

  My father couldn’t decide on the spot who was going in which, but he liked this lady. “How could you not like her?” he used to say. “A lady so busy with such a nice hello?”

  She bounded down the steps, and everybody followed. My mother watched her coming to the wagon. Brookie. What kind of name was that? The names she missed were more like Molka, Gittle, Moishe, which at this moment she feared she might never hear again. When the lady got to the wagon, she laid down a barrage of words, to my mother such gibberish she could only remain mute in the face of it.

  The lady finally reached up and tugged at my mother’s arm, and in another moment, everybody was going up the walk, Miss Simmons in the lead, a strong flow of chatter in her wake. Joey and Miriam were jumping about, and my father was talking, laughing, being happy. My mother trailed behind. She felt, as she often said, like a shoe run over by many streetcars.

  Inside, the house seemed deep and dark. My mother at once thought she smelled the mustiness she had been advised to expect in Gentile houses. Hadn’t she heard about a cleaning compound made of pig fat?

  Miss Simmons led them to two upstairs bedrooms, furnished identically. My mother’s first bit of cheer came from hearing there was a bathroom “down the hall.” She had worried that in this country town there would be only outhouses, and she had been remembering them as they had been in the old country—tiny huts in the backyard to which you dashed on hot nights, frigid nights, any kind of nights, for things the house pot wouldn’t do for.

  After a glance into both bedrooms my mother plunked down on the double bed in one of them. And there she sat.

  Miriam was already twirling around, looking, touching. The curtains held her. The bedroom curtains of her memory had been thin and straight, uninterrupted by fold or flounce, and very unlike these great white billowy things with ruffled edges swelling above their tiebacks.

  My father and Joey came in with the trunk, my father dragging from the front, Joey pushing from behind. My father figured my mother needed encouragement. “There ain’t nothing to worry about,” he told
her. “We’re doing okay.”

  How could they be doing “okay,” my mother wondered. Everything was in such a tumel—a mishmash. She didn’t even know how much they were being charged, and when she asked my father, he said he didn’t ask and didn’t know.

  And about being Jewish? Had my father told the lady?

  Again no. “You want the first thing out of my mouth should be ‘Hello, shake hands with a Jew’?” my father asked my mother. If the boys didn’t tell her—and so far they hadn’t—he wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until they were safely settled.

  My father went outside to thank the boys. They were on the walk, already leaving. “Say,” he asked them, “ain’t it written somewheres that a little child shall lead them?”

  “Yes sir,” T answered. “Isaiah 11:6.”

  In the bedroom Miss Simmons was trying to get my mother to come into the dining room. Her words were slow and carefully wrought, as if in this way to ensure comprehension. She said somebody named “Lizzie Maud” was fixing them something to eat.

  There was a mention of fried chicken and potato salad. Potato salad? That jumbled-up stuff with all the mayonnaise?

  In the end my mother didn’t go down to the dining room. She pulled back what Miss Simmons had called the “counterpane”—and had pronounced “counter pin”—lay down, and went to sleep.

  If my mother had gone, she would have been convinced at last that she was in the house of someone with money. The dining room could be said to actually glow with riches: Mahogany gleamed, silver glinted, crystal sparkled.

  When my father came in with Joey and Miriam, he always told us, he gave a look to the already-set table, to the silver pitcher in the middle, to the stemmed silver goblets, and to himself said, oyoy, could the poretzim—the Russian landowners —do better?

  After a moment the door between the dining room and the kitchen swung open, and a tall, softly contoured Negro woman came through. In one hand she bore a silver platter of chicken and in the other a crystal bowl of something neither Miriam nor Joey had ever seen before. It was, of course, the potato salad.

  Miss Simmons introduced them to each other: She was Lizzie Maud; they were the Bronsons.

  Lizzie Maud said, “How do,” and my father said, “Likewise.”

  Miriam and Joey, having never before been in such intimacy with a Negro, stared at Lizzie Maud. The woman was dark, the very color of the room’s rich woods. Above full features, kinky black hair was pulled into tiny clusters, each tied with a ragged snippet of white cloth. On her feet were broken-down men’s shoes that had metamorphosed into slip-ons. A muslin apron that (no doubt) countless washings had turned into filmy gauze covered her dress. On the apron was a circle of words, which Joey, not yet in school and with the words barely visible, struggled to read. He finally made out “Rambling Rose Flour, Pride of the South.”

  Lizzie Maud turned back to the door, as if she had forgotten something. When she pushed back through, she had a silver basket of hot biscuits loosely covered with a napkin. “Be a lots of shuffling of the dishes,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Into the silver goblets Miss Simmons poured tea from the pitcher. When the tea came out, so did pieces of ice. Joey and Miriam have remembered staring. Ice in tea?

  Miss Simmons put the pitcher down, and all at once the word Jewish was in the air. “Have I got that right?” she asked my father. “Aren’t you folks Jews?”

  It was out. My father managed a nod. The lady said she thought so, had known it almost at once. According to how Miriam has always told it, Miss Brookie Simmons said, “I confess I had an inklin’ when I saw those ravishin’ black curls on the little boy and glimpsed a certain look here and there, and I thought, ‘Unless my brains have turned to rhubarb after all my years in this town, these people are Jews.’” We always expected a quote from Miss Brookie Simmons to be requoted, and in Miss Brookie Simmons’s distinctive style, by Miriam. At doing Miss Brookie Simmons, Miriam was matchless.

  What finally had convinced her, Miss Simmons was saying, were the accents.

  Accents? She heard accents? And she saw certain looks? My father was nonplussed. Did my mother and the New York relatives have it wrong when they said he talked “just like a Yankee”? And didn’t everybody say that with his light coloring he didn’t look Jewish? He didn’t fidget over it. The lady was taking the Jewish thing okay, and that’s what was important.

  She was not only taking it, she was charging ahead. Now she was wondering if my mother hadn’t joined them because she was “kosher.” “If she’s kosher, I reckon she wouldn’t touch chicken fried in bacon grease with a ten-foot pole,” she said to my father.

  How could this country lady know so much about Jewish curls and accents and certain looks and kosher? But so easy was my father feeling, he chose not to ask. Joey and Miriam were eating, my mother was resting, there was a roof over their heads, the lady didn’t seem to mind that they were Jewish. He told her not to worry, that my mother had a rule to see her through and, very important, one that carried the imprimatur of the rabbi’s wife. It was she who had given the word that in an “alien situation,” you were allowed to eat nonkosher. “A rule’s a rule,” my father said to Miss Simmons, “and women don’t never hear a rule they don’t follow.”

  “But having to confront this overbearing old lady doesn’t help,” Miss Simmons answered him.

  She wanted to know what had brought them to Concordia, and my father wondered if the answer would surprise her, as it had the boy. It didn’t. She knew about Jew stores, and my father’s spirits went soaring when she said Concordia needed one, though they came down a bit when she expressed a “bit of concern” over whether Concordia would take to one.

  Joey and Miriam had finished eating long before, and the conversation had lost them at about the same time. My father figured they wanted to go to bed, and he steered them into the bedroom next to where my mother was sleeping. He had it on his mind that my mother hadn’t eaten, and he went out to the wagon and got some peaches and cheese. When he came back in, he tried to wake my mother, but she wouldn’t wake, just kept on sleeping hard. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment re-thinking the day. How about that mazel of his? Like a good sport it showed up just right, led him to the boys and to this house. He wouldn’t let himself think of that thing the lady had mentioned—about whether the town would “take to” a Jew store. He got undressed and lay down beside my mother; and though the room was hot, “hot like a boiler was in it,” my father said, he put his arm over her and drifted off.

  CHAPTER 2

  AVRAM PLOTCHNIKOFF’S NEW NAME

  My father used to remind me that the small town of Concordia, Tennessee, in which I was soon to be born, was actually larger than the town in which he grew up—Podolska, in Russia. This was his shtetl near Kiev, in the Ukraine. As far as my father was concerned, all the advantages were on the side of Concordia, which whatever its social and cultural limitations, was not like Podolska—a place, he told me with a straight face, where even the field mice ran away, there being so little in the fields to tempt them to stay. It was because he was born in Podolska, he often said, that I was born in Concordia.

  In Podolska he had the added misfortune of being born at the onset of the typhoid epidemic that swept the country in the late 1800s and in due course claimed his mother, father, and grandmother. When his grandfather rose up from his own sickbed, most of the family was in the nearby Jewish cemetery, and he was faced with caring for an infant—my father. I never knew my great-grandfather, but when my father told of him, of a man able to nurture despite new woes heaped upon an already hardscrabble shtetl existence, I grasped even as a three-year-old that he was, as my father said, a mensch, a man who knew his duty and did it. I also grasped why my father knew early on that if a way out was to be found, he had to find it himself.

  In his first uncertain steps toward this end, at the age of eight he begged a job from a Jewish merchant in the village. If getting the job might seem
a mixed blessing in that a full work-day ruled out an education, it should be remembered that in any case there was no provision for public schooling for the Jewish children of the village. Still, there was the cheder, the Hebrew school. But being deprived of cheder was to my father of little consequence, as he would not have traded his job for all the cheders of the world. What served him therefore as education was a bit of schooling in the evenings with his grandfather, enough to get him through the necessities for the bar mitzvah, the ceremony that marked the entry of thirteen-year-old Jewish boys into manhood.

  My father’s bar mitzvah turned out to be a small event taking place after Saturday services in the tiny hut that was the shul. My father handled the readings competently but found himself hard-pressed in the obligatory speech of gratitude to name people who had helped him thus far in life. In the end he was able to come up with only his grandfather and his boss. For becoming a man, a rite of passage marked by the giving of gifts, my father’s entire take was a penknife (from his grandfather), a ruble (from his boss), and a few kopecks from the few others in attendance. Afterward the guests repaired to the dark dwelling that was my great-grandfather’s house for tea and sponge cake.

  If a conventional education was denied him, an education in salesmanship was fully provided. His boss was a good model, and my father discovered that he was a good mimic. He watched and he listened, and soon he knew better than his boss how to fit the customers, how to banter, how to soothe. It was a talent that came early and stayed late, all the way through the Concordia days, indeed the thing chiefly responsible for the living he made there. In Podolska it is no wonder that with such industry and enterprise he was called a geborner ferkoifer, which he translated for me as a “born salesman,” an accolade that stuck in his head and occasionally lit up like a storefront sign.