Inside, Outside, page 13
PAPA: He’s not on board.
MAMA: What! It’s impossible! (looking desperately about) Did we miss him when he got off?
PAPA: His name isn’t on the passenger list.
MAMA: But I called the company. His name was on their list.
PAPA: He didn’t sail. He wasn’t on board. The ship’s officers told me that.
MAMA: They’re crazy! He’s stuck on Ellis Island. You go over to Ellis Island and get him.
PAPA (with great patience): I’m telling you he’s not on the ship’s list, Sarah. Something happened, and he never left Riga. He’s still over there. With all that money.
MAMA (close to a scream): Will you stop arguing and get on the next ferry to Ellis Island? Velvel is on Ellis Island. Maybe he has sore eyes, or a bad back. You go and get Velvel off Ellis Island, you hear? Don’t take no for an answer. If there’s trouble call Assemblyman Bloom. He gets everybody off Ellis Island. I’ll take the children home. You telephone me from Ellis Island, so I can talk to Velvel.
PAPA: But suppose he’s not on Ellis Island?
MAMA (wild-eyed): Go! GO! He’s on Ellis Island!
Ellis Island was the screening point in New York harbor for incoming immigrants. Quite a few who made it past the Statue of Liberty never got beyond Ellis Island. I have an uncle in Minsk, now about ninety-three years old, who was turned away for an ear infection; he glimpsed the Manhattan skyscrapers, and sailed back to live out his life in the Soviet Union. We still correspond in Yiddish. Only he was left alive of all the Goodkinds and Levitans, after the Germans occupied Minsk. He somehow escaped and sat out the war behind the Urals.
Velvel was not on Ellis Island. When Pop came home with this report, Mama was beside herself. Gloom thickened the liniment-laden atmosphere of Apartment 5-D, and Bobbeh turned blue. Not literally, but still spectacularly. Bobbeh’s blue spells were to become a part of life in 5-D thereafter. I’d come home from school and Lee would whisper to me, “Bobbeh is blue.” This meant that we had to steer clear not only of Bobbeh, but of Mama, and that it was no time to get in Pop’s way, either.
Ordinarily Bobbeh was a smiling, almost chirpy little old thing. Her well-groomed white hair tucked under the prescribed brown wig of pious ladies, she would busy herself around the kitchen, possibly getting in Mom’s way, but turning out some very superior coffee cakes, egg breads, noodles, and strudels, which it seemed to me Mom never properly admired. But when Bobbeh turned blue, all changed. She was a fright. A bitter disconsolate look on her face, her wig discarded, she would stump here and there, endlessly combing white hair that fell loosened past her shoulders; she would not speak, and would not answer when spoken to; or she would hole up in the bedroom, silently emanating waves of misery and liniment. This ghastly business could go on for days; and it was triggered for the first time by Mom’s obvious agitation at Velvel’s non-arrival. Until then Mom had been sweet as pie around Bobbeh, but with this blow the mask slipped, and Bobbeh turned blue.
I’ll interject here that the Velvel mystery was cleared up months later by a long letter in Yiddish which came to the Fairy Laundry from Riga. Papa read it at the supper table. Bobbeh wasn’t blue at the moment, but Mama, as she listened, turned pretty blue herself. It went something like this:
Much respected and beloved Sarah Gitta, brother-in-law Reb Elya Alexander, and children Israel David and Leah Miriam, live well and happy, amen!
You owe me congratulations, I’m a bridegroom! It was a God-thing, decreed from Heaven. I met my destined other half in Riga, while I was arranging for the shiffskarte, and I knew at once that it had to be. She comes from one of the finest Jewish families in Riga, her father is a very well-to-do dealer in hay and feed and very learned, and her mother is distantly related to the Vilna Gaon. The dowry is very generous, though we are still discussing details and I haven’t collected it yet, and meantime we have settled down in a nice little flat in Riga. Malka, that is my beloved bride, does not want to go to America, she says people are not religious enough there, so we will stay in Riga.
The letter went on and on about the bride’s family, about the flat, about Velvel’s gilded prospects of becoming a partner with his father-in-law in the hay and feed business, and about the splendid Riga Jews. There was no mention of the large sums my father had sent Velvel. That I recall, because Pop said in a puzzled tone when he finished the reading, “Isn’t it strange? And what about all the money?”
Mama barked, “Money? He’s from Koidanov!”
And so the kitchen scene fades out. There is more to tell about Uncle Velvel—this was just his first move—but all in good time.
***
There was no way anybody could snap Bobbeh out of a blue spell. She usually did it herself, by making something: an unusual pie, a complicated soup, or some major old-country recipe, like home-brewed wine. Early on she made some superb wine, jugs and jugs of it. Prohibition was on then, and the only wine one could buy was purple slop with no kick. Bobbeh’s wine was the sensation of Aldus Street. Mom passed a sample to Paul Frankenthal’s mother for Sabbath use; not that the Frankenthals did much about the Sabbath. The next day, all white-toothed smiles, Mrs. Frankenthal was in our apartment, flattering Bobbeh in her discordant Galician Yiddish, praising the wine to the skies, and dropping hints like brontosaurus footfalls that she would appreciate a jug or two, and might even pay for it. Her husband just loved it.
Bobbeh sweetly referred her to her darling daughter-in-law, for whom, she said, she had made the wine. It was all up to Mama. So Mrs. Frankenthal had to start all over, and fawn on Mom. She carried on about what a brilliant boy I was, and how Paul said that I was the star of Mr. Winston’s class, and that her husband was always after Paul to be more like Davey Goodkind, and that I was breaking the hearts of all the girls in Class 7-A because I was so handsome. Mom’s appetite for such stuff was gross and insatiable, and I rather enjoyed hearing it myself, though we both knew that it was hogwash; that—in respect to us Goodkinds—the apartment across the hall was the next thing to a Coo Coo Clan lodge, and that Mrs. Frankenthal was just sucking around for some of Bobbeh’s wine.
Her rough spouse must have ordered her not to return without the goods, because she wouldn’t leave. Mom let her grovel and crawl until she was visibly worn out. Then Mom said that Bobbeh had of course made the wine for Passover; that the whole family gathered then and drank gallons and gallons of wine; but that if any was left after Passover she would gladly give Mrs. Frankenthal a jugful. Meantime, her compliments to Mr. Frankenthal and Paul. Mrs. Frankenthal gave up and left, with a Dracula glare much like her son’s, evidently a hereditary trait.
With this wine triumph of Bobbeh’s, tensions eased in our tight quarters. Still, Mama put heavy pressure on Pop to bring his married sister Rivka, husband and all, for Bobbeh to live with. Correspondence was already going on between Pop and Rivka, but Rivka’s husband was objecting to the capitalist system, and that needed some working out. Meantime, Mom had her eye on a big vacant flat on Longfellow Avenue, several blocks away but still in the P.S. 75 district. She wanted to settle the Aldus Street lease and move there at once. My sister Lee was getting on, she argued, and I was no infant, and we couldn’t go on sharing a davenport; or a kitchen either, even though I was on the floor and Lee in a cot. But for once Pop dug in. Velvel had drained our savings, he protested. Bringing over Rivka and her husband would cost another fortune. Moreover, things were not good in the Fairy Laundry. It was no time to take on a bigger flat at a higher rent.
***
A major crisis was in fact on at the laundry, just then. A Mr. Susslowitz, a lean choleric real estate man, very religious, had bought into the laundry as a fourth partner to relieve the debt load. He soon perceived that Brodofsky and Gross were dead weights, but it took him some time to get on to Brodofsky in all his dim-witted grandeur. The matter of horses versus trucks tore the veil.
The laundry bundles were still being collected and delivered by wagons such as Jake the drunk drove. Mr. Susslowitz figured out that two trucks could do the job of all seven wagons, bring in more business, and cost less to run. He offered to advance the money for the trucks. Brodofsky resisted. His interminable and incoherent arguments boiled down to two: (a) the wagon driver Morris was his brother-in-law, and Morris was too nervous to handle a truck; (b) the stable owner, Samuel Bender, was his cousin, and Brodofsky’s cry was, “Ve not shet Sam Bender’s bloot! Ve neffer shet Sam Bender’s bloot!” One night the partners met in our Aldus Street flat, and Brodofsky kept Lee and me awake for hours, pounding the dining-room table and bellowing, “Ve not shet Sam Bender’s bloot!”
Mr. Susslowitz remained after the partners left that night, and he and Pop went on arguing in Yiddish. Susslowitz had a way of throwing around Aramaic terms from the Talmud. “They’re both idiots!” Susslowitz shouted. “Idiots! The one difference is, Gross is a common-law idiot, and Brodofsky is a statutory idiot!1 An animal in the form of a man! How can you put up with them? How have you lasted this long, without turning into an idiot yourself?”
“They started me in the business,” Pop said mildly.
“That statutory idiot goes,” fumed Susslowitz, “or I pull out.”
“We can’t buy you out, Susslowitz. You know what condition we’re in.”
“Then get rid of Brodofsky. Brodofsky goes! What kind of business is this? Morris, the nervous brother-in-law! Sam Bender’s blood! An animal in the form of a man! A statutory idiot!”
“You’re asking me to do a very hard thing, Susslowitz.”
“Goodkind, you can die young, that’s your affair. You can eat your guts out, arguing with that statutory idiot. I have high blood pressure. I go or he goes, I say.”
Susslowitz went. Pop would not force out Brodofsky. To save the Fairy Laundry, he tried the banks, the moneylenders, and finally the big downtown firm that sold the laundry its soap and chlorine. To keep a good customer going, the boss of the soap company, a German named Mr. Kornfelder, bought out Susslowitz, and became a silent partner on harsh terms; and so partial control of the laundry passed into Outside hands. One of Kornfelder’s terms was an immediate switch from wagons to trucks. It was done forthwith. Brodofsky did not bring up the question of Sam Bender’s blood. Mr. Brodofsky never did open his mouth much around the gentile partner.
Morris, the brother-in-law, took over supervision of the boiler room, and in a month or so scalded half his skin off by turning the wrong valve. The Fairy Laundry had to pay him compensation, and when he recovered he went to work in Sam Bender’s stable. Brodofsky now had a new grievance against my father, the scalding of Morris. It would never have happened, he said over and over, if Pop had not yielded to Mr. Kornfelder in that weak-kneed way, and shed Sam Bender’s blood.
Well, with the buy-in of Kornfelder the crisis was over. Mom prevailed. The move to Longfellow Avenue was on. Rivka’s husband was still having problems with the capitalist system, and Mama’s back was breaking from the sag in the davenport, so she said; and she also kept complaining to Papa that the davenport was “too public,” a description that baffled me. I asked Lee what that meant, and she replied that I was a shayteh d’ooreissa, that is, a statutory idiot. Lee didn’t understand Aramaic, but she had gathered the import from Mr. Susslowitz’s tones, and she liked the snappish sound of it.
And so I found myself leaving Aldus Street and the hegemony of Paul Frankenthal at last. With this came the cataclysm of Bobbeh’s sauerkraut.
To make her wine, Bobbeh had required a number of crocks: huge clay vessels with extra-heavy lids. Pop knew just what she needed, bought them on the Lower East Side, and one by one hauled them up the five floors. Mama grumbled all through this effort, and she grumbled more when the crocks were lined up in our hall. We had to slide along the wall just to get into the flat. Bobbeh’s activities with cheesecloth, sugar, and grapes generated some curious odors, once fermenting set in. But as I’ve said, the wine was a hit, and all was forgiven.
However, there were the crocks, now clean and empty, and Bobbeh took it into her head to make sauerkraut. She asked Pop to buy her a few dozen heads of cabbage. At that Mom put her foot down hard. Nobody in the family liked sauerkraut! She could buy all she ever needed at the delicatessen, for ten cents! So what was the point? The right thing was to get rid of those big crocks; sell them, or even give them away. Bobbeh turned blue. It was a terrible weapon. Mom caved in, and my father bought the cabbages, an astonishing pile, and stacked them in the parlor, great round objects redolent of the great outdoors and of Mother Earth, an agreeable novelty on Aldus Street.
And Bobbeh turned to making the sauerkraut.
21
The War Alarm
May 1973
Egypt is about to attack Israel. It’s set for mid-May; secret intelligence, and evidently hard fact. So I’ve sat up all night, scribbling away, trying at least to finish the great sauerkraut affair before what looks like a long break in my peace. Couldn’t make it. If those last pages seemed more helter-skelter than the rest, that’s why. The dawn is streaked pink outside the library window of our rented Georgetown house. The street lights just went out. I’ve got to snatch some sleep.
I hope this isn’t the end of my book, but I hardly see how I can go on writing, in that tumbling cement mixer of a White House down on Pennsylvania Avenue. On the other hand, if I resign and go back to my law firm—a step I’m considering—that’ll be curtains. My mind will sink again into the muck of legal English, and to attempt narrative in odd hours with such a bemired instrument will be futile.
The fact is I was beginning to love that big dark dusty half-forgotten office in the Executive Office Building, and the solitary hours of roaming in my past, piling up the pages. I imagined that by now I’d be reliving those iridescent brief years with Bobbie Webb, yet here I am, no farther than Bobbeh and the sauerkraut. Long haul, Bobbeh to Bobbie! I can only plug on, and hope to get there if I find the time and retain my wits. But for the moment, the scroll of remembrance has to roll up, while I blearily turn to the day’s abrasive realities.
Abe Herz has been called home. He telephoned Sandra very late at night, woke her up to tell her he was “going back to familiar scenery.” Abe served a year on the Suez Canal line during what the Israelis call the War of Attrition, the little-publicized but very costly border conflict at the Canal after the Six-Day War. Sandra came into our bedroom and stirred us up. I’d already heard, at the White House, and from the Israeli ambassador, about the war alarm, but I didn’t let on. Jan sat with Sandra drinking scotch and talking most of the night, while I wrote and wrote.
My troublesome daughter Sandra is twenty-one, upsettingly beautiful in a darkish way, with large overpowering eyes which I can resist only by laughing at her. She cuts men down with those eyes as though with twin-mount lasers. I don’t mean young men, I mean any men. She slops around in patched rags, looking marvellous, and if she wants to, she can groom herself up to dazzling formal chic in half an hour. To a possibly fond father Sandra looks like a Jewish entry for Miss Universe; at any rate, she is a smart tough sort, a straight-A Wellesley graduate: informed, positive, and out to make old I. David Goodkind’s life miserable, for reasons obscure. About the time I took on the tax problems of the United Jewish Appeal and became chief counsel, Sandra brought home an Arab, a Saudi attending Yale. Imagine, if you will, a young Arab in preppy garb sitting at our Friday night candle-lit kosher table on Central Park West, listening politely as we sang Hebrew songs! That gives you an idea of Sandra Goodkind and suggests her range, since Abe Herz is her current interest, though neither of them outright acknowledges it.
Well, dear Sandra does seem to have put her shapely little foot in the door, doesn’t she? There is only one way with Sandra Goodkind. Firmly but gently I shove her pretty foot back outside, and I clang the door shut. I have enough on my mind.
***
If the war does break out, I don’t see how this President can handle it. The main question about him now is whether—or indeed when—he will resign. The newspapers and the television carry almost nothing else, it seems. Every day there are new scoops, new leaks, new accusations. Small fry and medium fry have been indicted right and left, and now the hue and cry is narrowing in on this one personage. It has become a public manhunt, a colossal and eerie national spectator sport. The press is in full cry. The hounds are leaping and snarling at the quarry treed in the White House. Anything goes. The wildest rumor, the most farfetched story, gets attributed to faceless “sources” and plastered all over the front page. I’m not talking about the yellow rags but about The New York Times and The Washington Post. The TV anchormen vie for hot lead-off stories about the President. Like as not the stories turn out within the week to be exaggerated or phony, but nobody minds, nobody notices, nobody apologizes.
We lived through the same kind of hoo-ha twenty years ago, the McCarthy business; a rabbit shoot of frightened little bureaucrats who in their dim pasts had gotten caught up in depression radicalism, a few to the extent of joining the Communist party. It was all lunkheaded nonsense, first to last, kicked off by the trapping of one sizable bureaucrat, Alger Hiss, in lies to a congressional committee about his Communist past. The press and television went baying in exactly this way after every new name that cropped up in Senate hearings launched by a Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin. It was nightmarish. It had all our liberal crowd in a tizzy, not a few of them getting rid of their old copies of Karl Marx and John Strachey, just in case the FBI would come knocking at midnight. Quite a few lives and careers were blasted in all that malignant tumult. McCarthy uncovered nothing, nothing at all.
The irony of all this is that the President, then a congressman, was the very man who trapped Hiss in perjury. It made him a national figure. Of course he cheered on the McCarthy hullabaloo, right up to the moment when the Senator got condemned by the Senate and fell out of sight. Now he himself is the target of just such a hue and cry, and in my obscure office I hear wails echoing through the White House about the unfairness and irresponsibility of the media. The poetic justice of it all escapes everybody around here: to wit, that this is the Hiss-McCarthy thing in reverse, assailing the very man who touched it all off twenty years ago.
