Inside, Outside, page 15
What follows now should be told in Yiddish. The word for “mutter” in that language—boorcha—exactly reproduces how the crocks sounded next morning. In a steady quiet way, they were going boorcha, boorcha. Again, the noise was not disagreeable, just unusual. To a nervous or touchy person—certainly Mama’s state, for she was packing up for the big move—I daresay it seemed threatening. She confronted Papa at breakfast.
“Die kroit boorchet,” she said; that is, “The sauerkraut is muttering.”
“Muttering?” Papa said absently, drinking coffee with the strained, abstracted look that meant trouble at the Fairy Laundry.
“You can’t hear it? You’re deaf?”
The soul of patience, Pop put down his coffee, went and listened, and returned. My sister and I, heads down because of Mom’s nerves, were hurrying through our oatmeal. “So it’s muttering,” he said with a shrug.
Mama would not let it go at that. “And why is it muttering?”
“Sarah,” Pop said, “I’m not making the sauerkraut, and I have to go to the laundry.”
“Go ask her.”
Her was Bobbeh. She and Mama were hardly speaking, since Mom had lost her battle against the kraut. Papa was their interlocutor. Things were not good just then in Apartment 5-D.
“Muttering? Of course it’s muttering,” we soon heard Bobbeh’s querulous shout from the bedroom. “What is she, a gentile? Didn’t her mother ever make sauerkraut? How do you tell it’s working, if it doesn’t mutter?” (A weak approximation of Bobbeh’s vigorous Yiddish. I’m doing my best.)
Papa returned to the kitchen. “She says the muttering is a good sign. It’ll be the finest sauerkraut she ever made.”
“I heard what she said. She said that I was a gentile, and that my mother was a gentile. And you didn’t answer her a word! Do you realize that makes your children gentiles? Go tell her to apologize!”
This was an unserious rhetorical demand. Papa left for the laundry, and Lee and I slunk out past the crocks (boorcha, boorcha), to go off to school. I seem to remember already detecting a whiff in the hallway, as we passed through, of a new and very horrible odor; but I may be inventing that. By the time I got home in the afternoon, though, the emergency was definitely on. The smell was reaching clear down to the stoop and out into the open air, and kids were gathered on the sidewalk talking about it; talking, too, about the green truck parked at the curb, with NEW YORK CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT in big gold letters over the city seal.
I am trying to reconstruct something that happened half a century ago. Who summoned the health department? I’ll always believe it was Mrs. Frankenthal, taking her final revenge on the departing yoxenta. Certainly she was there on the fifth-floor landing with Mama, Bobbeh, and the lady from 5-C with her daughter, whose bare behind I had inspected years ago, all of them yammering at the health inspector. The smell was really awful when I pushed my way up there through the curious neighbors crowding the stairway; the stench of hell itself, if we’re to believe Dante, though the door to our flat was closed.
I took aside Bare-behind to try to find out, through the discordant din, what was going on. She was now a stout plain girl, incidentally, with a stout plain well-draped rear, and we were just good neighbors. I gathered that whoever had called the health department had used her mother’s name. Her mother was angrily denying that she had made the call, and was accusing Mrs. Frankenthal of the deed; Mrs. Frankenthal was accusing her of lying, and also complaining about the smell; and Mama and Bobbeh were protesting the inspector’s visit in two languages, while he, a big red-faced kindly man in a green uniform, was trying to pacify the ladies in an Irish brogue like a third language. The whole thing was approaching vaudeville, but at the time it was harrowing. My mother seldom yelled, but she could outyell Mrs. Frankenthal without even turning up the volume, and she was in a mood for yelling; it was a real outlet for her dangerous head of steam. Mom might in fact have been glad to see the crocks condemned as a health hazard—a broken sewer line leaking gas wasn’t in it with that sauerkraut—but she was embarrassed, naturally, at the way it was happening.
I vividly remember all three fifth-floor women stabbing their fingers at each other and simultaneously screeching, “She—she—SHE—” while Bobbeh, who wasn’t quite in the picture, kept shouting in her weak voice that of course the sauerkraut had to boorcha, if it didn’t boorcha it wasn’t sauerkraut, and were they all gentiles? And what was this big gentile with his big red face doing here anyway?
At last Mom brought the inspector into our apartment, and we all went sidling in after him past the muttering crocks: Bobbeh, Mrs. Frankenthal, Bare-behind and her mother, and I. The inspector sniffed around and lifted one of the lids, releasing some yellow growling vapor; whereupon he burst out laughing and closed the lid tight. He didn’t say these words, but this was the tenor: “Faith and begorra, sure ’tis only that the puir auld soul is making sauerkraut, and divil the foin sauerkraut it looks like to me and I’ll take me oath to that, bedad and bejabbers.” He went off down the stairway laughing fit to kill.
Well, the jeers Mom had to endure from the neighbors, above all from Mrs. Frankenthal, were devastating. All her yoxenta prestige in that apartment house, accumulated over years of fanatical housekeeping, good neighborliness, and blowing her horn about her pedigree and her David, were going up in the mad stink of Bobbeh’s crocks. Said Mrs. Frankenthal on one occasion, “My husband still has his gas mask from the war, dollink, if you need it.” Stuff like that. It didn’t call for wit. Any neighbor could raise a laugh at Mom’s expense just by saying something about the price of sauerkraut. Poor Mom!
And it went on to the last. Even when the two vans arrived and the movers were carrying out our furniture on a bright cold morning in March, the neighbors, huddling on the sidewalk to watch and to bid her goodbye, couldn’t resist sly digs about the health department, sauerkraut, and mothers-in-law. For Mom it was not just a move, it was a defeat, a rout; and presiding over her ignominious downfall, in a new squirrel coat and muff, was Mrs. Frankenthal, white teeth gleaming in the morning sun shafting down Aldus Street.
“Well, dollink, we’ll miss you,” said Mrs. Frankenthal, “and we’ll miss your smart boy, Davey, and of course we’ll miss your mother-in-law. But anyway, whenever she makes sauerkraut over on Longfellow Avenue, I know we’ll think of you, because we’ll smell it.”
How can I ever forget the words, or the burst of laughter among the neighbors, or Mama’s speechless choked response, a sniff and a toss of her head, as she went on with her orders to the movers, swarthy burly Italians gabbling at each other and piling our household goods into the vans? Never before had I seen the big yoxenta so utterly put down.
That morning Pop had to go to the laundry as usual, and Lee had to be in school for an exam. I was elected to stay home and assist Mom. My job was to escort Bobbeh to the new flat in a taxicab. For this I was entrusted with a stunning one-dollar bill, a green fortune. My instructions were to give the driver a dime tip, “And don’t you dare to keep any of the change, do you hear? I know just how much a taxi costs to Longfellow Avenue, to the penny!” Thus Mama, flushed and wild-eyed and mussed up, as she climbed in beside the driver of the first van. I don’t know why there were two small vans instead of one big one. Maybe Mom planned it that way. Or maybe this was just a small cheap moving company.
Anyway, off Mom went in the first van, to begin getting our things into the new flat. The two men of the second van were still grunting down the stoop with our old leather davenport, which looked very queer in the sunshine: cracked, shabby, a different color from what it was in the parlor. Bobbeh and I stood on the sidewalk, watching. My orders were to find a cab and come straight to Longfellow Avenue, but of course I wanted to enjoy the loading to the last. The sweating and groaning of the men, and their guttural Italian yells as they wrestled our furniture into the truck, were as good as a movie. When one got behind the wheel and the other chained up the rear door, I started off to Southern Boulevard to find a taxi, but a feeble wail in Yiddish from Bobbeh brought me up short.
“What about my sauerkraut?”
I had quite forgotten the crocks. Without a doubt they had not been brought down. They were still sitting up on the fifth floor in the emptied flat, muttering. Bobbeh hobbled over to the boss mover at the rear door, shook his arm, and in Yiddish—screaming at the top of her little old lungs, to help him understand—she pleaded, “My sauerkraut! Go back and get my sauerkraut!”
He wrinkled his bristly face at her and at me. He wore a ragged red sweater and a knitted cap, a cold cigar was stuck in a corner of his mouth, and he looked like Al Capone. “What’s-a she say, kid?”
I told him.
“She’s-a mistake,” he said. “That stuff-a no go. You tell-a her.”
I translated to Bobbeh. She began to cry. That seemed to disconcert Capone. He yelled something in Italian to the fellow at the wheel, a swarthier and still more bristly character in a leather windbreaker. This gorilla jumped down, came to Bobbeh, and said to her in flawless Yiddish, “What’s the matter, Grandma?”
I couldn’t have been more astounded if a real zoo gorilla had spoken Yiddish. Yet it was really not strange. A simple sort like Jake the drunk, he had evidently gone to work as a mover, so he had learned to bawl in Italian the phrases that movers use. His name was Hymie, and he was as Jewish as Bobbeh, and could talk to her better than I could. Here was the hole in Mama’s plot, if it was a plot; the one thing she never foresaw. From then on my problem was mainly to keep up with the rapid-fire exchanges between the boss, Hymie, and Bobbeh.
What came out was this:
The boss had told Mom that getting the full crocks down all those flights would take an extra hour and would cost accordingly, yet he couldn’t guarantee against spilling or breakage before delivery to Longfellow Avenue. Whereupon Mama had told him that, as a tip, she was making him a present of the valuable crocks. He could pick them up as soon as the move was finished. She had no interest in the sauerkraut. He could keep the stuff, pour it in the Bronx River, flush it down the toilet, whatever he pleased. He sensibly told that part to me in English, while Bobbeh stared bright-eyed at us, wrinkling up her tearstained face in suspicion, trying to understand.
Belying his looks, Capone now revealed a heart of mush. He kept glancing at Bobbeh, and ended by shouting angrily at Hymie that his own mother was just like this, crazy; these old ladies were all crazy; imagine, crying over some shitty sauerkraut! He would bring the shitty crocks down and not charge for the extra time. Hymie told the decision to Bobbeh, leaving out the obscenities. She kissed him and then, smiling through a stream of tears, hobbled over and kissed Al Capone. Capone said never mind-a that shit, and began to cry, and went tromping up the stoop with Hymie, cursing in Italian and wiping his eyes on his sweater sleeve.
I found a cab, and Bobbeh and I took off for Longfellow Avenue. The new flat was only six or seven blocks away. We could easily have walked it, except for Bobbeh’s short leg. This handicap, by the by, was not a birth defect, according to family legend. Rather, in the wealthy home in which Bobbeh had been born, a maidservant had either dropped the newborn baby, or poured scalding water on her, I’m no longer sure which. Growing up deformed, she had been married off to a learned but lowly shammas, and had raised four children in that one log-walled room. So Bobbeh was entitled to her blue spells. The wonder was her usual good cheer. My father was responsible for that. Pop could make his mother laugh with his random drolleries until she was helpless, and he was always working to keep her amused. He could make Mom laugh, too, but he knew when there was no use trying. He hadn’t been jollying her much since the arrival of the cabbages.
***
The new flat was a knockout. I had never seen it before. My first impression when I walked in was a flood of sunshine on dazzling white walls and brilliantly varnished floors. The next was the remarkable change in my mother. Her mood was as sunny as the apartment. She had shaken the dust of Aldus Street from her feet, moved far up in the world, and that was that! Mom actually threw her arms around Bobbeh and kissed her, and they exchanged Yiddish incantations of good luck. Mom proudly led Bobbeh through this vast sunlight-drenched apartment smelling delightfully of fresh paint, to a back bedroom. This, she said, would one day be Lee’s room. Meantime, it was all for Bobbeh. A new bed was already in the room, and Mom had unpacked Bobbeh’s things and hung them in the closet. All disarmingly solicitous and very canny, for this was the flat’s remotest chamber, and Bobbeh was out in Siberia. Yet she was all smiles and Yiddish compliments, as she at once prepared—at Mom’s suggestion—to take a nice hot bath in the big glossily tiled bathroom. Bobbeh bathed every morning before applying her liniment. She had missed her bath in the move, and had groused about it very bluely. Now she went hobbling into the bathroom in the highest spirits.
Mom resumed ordering the movers to “put the table here, no, let’s try it there,” female fashion, while I wandered through this new abode in an exalted daze. She must have worked on the place before the move, because new curtains and draperies were already up. With much of our furniture already in place, it was really a home, our old home, the cramped dark Aldus Street fifth-floor back, miraculously expanded into a spacious radiant front apartment; much nicer even than the Frankenthal flat, because it was so bright. It looked out on vacant lots, not on another tenement front. Except for billboards and a cigar store, the view was sunshine and green fields. Splendid! Magnificent! Lordly! Farewell to Aldus Street, to Izzy, to Frankenthal! So I was thinking, as Hymie and Al Capone came grunting into my bedroom, a huge white empty space, carrying the davenport.
“Pretty nice place, huh?” I said to them, but they only grunted and went out.
I must now ask old readers to recall, and young readers to imagine, the worst moment in the most frightening movie ever made: the silent version of The Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney. It comes when the beautiful young singer sneaks up behind the masked Phantom, who is sitting at the piano coaching her. She flips off his mask. Wow! Chaney leaps up, glaring with a face that is no face but a gruesome living skull, and the girl screams and screams and screams. A generation later, Alfred Hitchcock recreated the moment, in Psycho, when the girl touches the old lady’s shoulder, the chair swivels around, and the old lady is a skeleton in a shawl and a gray wig, and the girl screams and screams and screams.
Well, Mom was in the big front room, still ordering the furniture moved around, when Al Capone and Hymie came groaning into our glorious new apartment, each with a sloshing crock full of sauerkraut slung on his back. I was there. I observed it all, and I’ll never forget it. Mom saw the crocks. Her face distorted in the exact horror-stricken expression of the girl who pushed off Lon Chaney’s mask. She screamed and screamed and screamed. I had never heard my mother scream before, and it really made my hair stand on end; I could feel it stinging and rising. The boss mover and Hymie stopped where they stood, and the boss hurriedly but carefully lowered his crock to the floor. Hymie tried to do the same, but Mama’s screams shook him up so that he couldn’t help staring at her. His crock hit the floor at an angle. The top slithered off, and a bubbly mess sloshed out on Mama’s newly varnished floor. Hymie caught and straightened the crock, and clattered back the lid, but the damage was done. The apartment filled with the explosive stink of an overturned privy; and there on the sunny hall floor lay a spreading puddle of yellow-green vegetable slop like camel puke, and little blisters were forming in the varnish at the edge of the puddle, in some malignant chemical reaction. What a disaster, and Mama’s own fault! What on earth was the point of those mad screams?
And her poor face, suddenly gone pale and distracted! She pounced on a telephone, called the Fairy Laundry number, and began wailing and bellowing at my father in Russian. Meanwhile, the boss mover and Hymie, who shrewdly gathered that she was a little upset, rushed out and rushed in again with bundles of rags. All four moving men began mopping up the spill. They did get it up, and where the stuff had been, they left a broad eaten-away blotch of leprous bare wood. The apartment still smelled frightful, and Mama started struggling to open a window, but it was stuck by the new paint. So the helpful moving men began wrestling with windows, and one of them fetched a crowbar and gouged a lot of paint off a sash, and Mama screamed at him, “Stop that, STOP THAT!” At this point Papa arrived, looking pretty pale and wild himself.
He had made good time. He tried to tell Mama that an auxiliary boiler in the laundry had burst so he had to go back at once. Mama overwhelmed him with a torrent of angry Russian, in which three English words kept incongruously recurring: “old age home.” Papa’s placating Russian responses were getting him nowhere. He briefly disappeared, then reappeared with a grumpy dusty man he called “Superintendent.” I knew at a glance that this was a janitor, a wrestler of garbage, who would whomp a boy with a stick as soon as look at him. So, on Longfellow Avenue a janitor was a superintendent! We were truly rising in the world.
Just then through the sauerkraut miasma came wisping a suggestion of liniment. Bobbeh had finished her bath, and would soon be joining the discussion! My beset father ordered me out into the street to play. What would ensue, he probably felt, might not be entertainment suited to minors. I was not sorry to get out, but I hadn’t dared move across Mama’s range of vision in her berserk mood, past those crocks and the horrid hole eaten in the new varnish of the hallway floor.
