Inside, Outside, page 38
In any case, I will now tell you what really happened at Aunt Faiga’s wedding. It was nothing like Quat’s raunchy fantasy, yet lively enough, in all truth.
51
Aunt Faiga’s Wedding
Faiga and Boris had requested a small parlor ceremony, but Mom had ended up inviting the entire Mishpokha, in all its Bay Ridge and Bayonne ramifications. Otherwise, she argued, those left out would feel that the high-flying Manhattan Goodkinds were snubbing them, and the wounds would fester for life. Boris’s relatives were also a sensitive clan; so he informed Faiga, and Faiga informed Mom; therefore all of them had to be asked, too, and the thing expanded to a large unwieldy affair.
More problems cropped up as the big day approached. There was the matter of Pat the doorman. Late in the game Boris casually mentioned that many of his kin spoke only Yiddish. How, Mama worried, would they communicate with Pat? Of course, Pat might well have sent all unidentifiable Jews to the Goodkind apartment, but such guesswork was not for our Pat. His job was to announce all visitors, and he was rigid about it. Moreover, to everyone’s amazement, after cutting us dead for years, Uncle Yehuda had sent a last-minute acceptance. Here was a special worry! Aunt Sophie called Mama to warn her that Yehuda had grown a long white beard, that he wore a cast-off collegian raccoon coat and looked like a lunatic, and that he fully expected to be insulted and turned away by his rich brother’s West End Avenue doorman. When this happened, he intended to call the police. No anti-Semitic downtown goyish doorman—so Uncle Yehuda was expostulating over the telephone, to everyone in the family but Mom—was going to push him around.
To calm Uncle Yehuda, and take care of Boris’s relatives, it was decided to post me in the lobby downstairs. My sister Lee’s Yiddish was much better than mine, but the wedding had become a high-tension issue with Lee, and nobody dared propose that she do anything about it. This was entirely Mom’s fault. Mom had taken to loud sighing that if only she were doing all this for SOMEONE ELSE she would be the happiest woman in the world, but why for Faiga? Each time some new difficulty or expense cropped up, Mama would complain that she wouldn’t mind at all if it were someone else’s wedding, but just for Faiga it was intolerable; and lest she be misunderstood, every time she said someone else she would turn melancholy cow eyes at my sister Lee. One evening Mom declared she would have to hire a caterer, after all. It would cost a fortune, which she would gladly have spent for someone else’s wedding, but it annoyed her to have to throw the money away on Faiga. If it were someone else’s wedding, Mom said, she would have happily gone to all the trouble in the world. She would even have stuffed a kishka with her own hands, the longest kishka ever stuffed in America.
“I wouldn’t advise that, Mom,” snapped Lee. “Someone else might wrap all forty feet of that kishka around your neck, and strangle you with it.” Whereupon she threw down her napkin and left the table.
“Go easier on her,” Pop said to Mom.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mom. “Everybody in this house is becoming a nervous wreck, and all for what? For who? For Faiga. If only it was for somebody else!”
Just to keep Mom off her back, Lee had been going out on dates with Holy Joe Geiger, and even E. F. Kadane. They bored her and she intended to break off with both of them, but meantime Mom invited them both to Faiga’s wedding. Poor Lee! She listened for the arrival of the mail every morning, hurriedly looked through the envelopes, and wilted as she cast them aside. She was languishing and dimming by the week. She hardly ate.
On the wedding day, as I lurked in the lobby, shepherding Boris’s bemused uncles and aunts past the deadpan Pat to Jesus’s elevator, and lying doggo for Uncle Yehuda, I had my own problem. The ceremony was scheduled for three o’clock. Dorsi and I were going to a party in Great Neck that evening—Puss Puss Ohlbaum’s birthday party, in fact—and I was to call for her at six. The wedding might drag on for a couple of hours, I figured, but surely I could get out of the house by five. Close, but manageable.
Well, wouldn’t you know, that day there was a big storm all along the eastern seaboard. At three-thirty, when only a handful of guests had showed up through driving rain, the elevator man brought me a note scrawled by Lee: Stay in the lobby, heavy snow in New Jersey, ceremony put off to five. Five! Good God! How late would I be, calling for Dorsi? How angry would she be? Unquestionably, she had already laid out her clothes, perhaps was in the tub; Dorsi’s lead time for a date was three or four hours. There was no way I could break that date. So I hung around that grandiose lobby, on the watch for lost-looking Jews, and for a raccoon coat and long white beard approaching through the rain; smiling at the guests and directing them to the elevator, explaining in a mutter to Cousin Harold, and later to Peter Quat, what on earth I was doing, and all the while my wristwatch showed the time melting away. Four! Four-thirty! Dorsi Sabin was out of the tub by now at her mirror, her nakedness imperfectly filmed by lace-trimmed peach lingerie—my head whirled at the shimmering picture—putting the last touches on her hair, which would take only an hour or so. The wedding would never even start at five, the way the guests were straggling in.
“Meestair David, telephone for you,” called Jesus, the elevator man. I rode with him upstairs, and alerted Lee to watch through the window for Uncle Yehuda.
“David? It’s Dorsi. David, I think I’ve got the flu. I feel awful. Don’t I sound awful? I’m croaking like a frog.”
Dorsi did not sound sick, not to me. She sounded as though she were trying to croak like a frog, and doing a piss-poor job of it. What a relief! I knew very well what was up. Dorsi had a big history exam the next day, and she was an obsessive pursuer of A’s. The weather was lousy, it was a long way to Great Neck by subway and train, and she had decided to stay home and study.
“Oh, come on, Dorsi, you sound just fine.” The Vicomte de Machiavelli, master womanizer, seizing lightning advantage of this development. “Take an aspirin. I was just leaving. I’ll see you at six.”
“David, I can’t possibly go to that party.”
“You’re breaking our date? Again?”
She had broken one just two weeks ago. A nice Jewish girl didn’t break two dates in a row in those days, not unless she was discarding a fellow.
“Don’t put it like that. I feel terrible about it.”
“All right, then, Dorsi, will you come with me to the Junior Prom?”
“What? The Junior Prom?” Taken unawares, Dorsi forgot to croak. “Why, that’s months away. I don’t even know what night it is.”
“It’s February seventeenth. I’m on the committee.”
Dorsi hesitated. The Prom was as steep a commitment as New Year’s Eve. She had already turned me down on that one. Fish or cut bait? Drop the underage but glittery Vicomte, or hang on?
“Davey, I am really in a ghastly state.” (Croak, croak.) “Give me a ring next week.”
“Look, Dorsi, if you don’t want to see me any more, just say so. You’re too old for me, maybe, or the chemistry is wrong, or—”
Lee shouted, “Here comes a raccoon coat!”
“I don’t like you when you’re this way,” exclaimed Dorsi in angry clear bell-like tones, “but all right, I’ll go with you to the Junior Prom. Satisfied?”
“Marvellous, Dorsi! Bye.” I hung up, and dashed for the elevator.
***
It was unmistakably Uncle Yehuda out there under the canopy; raccoon coat, white beard, and all, with Aunt Rose beside him, quite gray but still pretty. Yehuda was not making a scandal, however. Unless I was seeing things, he and Pat the doorman were having a friendly chat. Pat spied me. “Ah, there’s your nephew, Rabbi,” he said. “He’ll escort you to the wedding. Enjoyed talking to you, sir.” Pat smartly touched his gold-braided cap with two fingers.
“Can you imagine? That goy took me for a rabbi,” said Yehuda to me in Yiddish as we walked inside. “Say, I could have been one if I wanted to. A very fine goy.”
It was the raccoon coat. It had to be. Pat knew Zaideh was a rabbi. Zaideh had that fur-lined coat, with fur collar and cuffs. Yehuda’s coat was all fur, and I guess the long white beard did the rest. Pat the doorman had solemn respect for men of God.
“A rabbi,” said Aunt Rose, as we rode up in the elevator. “That’s a hot one. The Porkville Iluy.”
Uncle Yehuda growled something rude in Yiddish at Aunt Rose, and Yiddish expressions can be very rude, so I leave it untranslated. Pop was waiting at the door to embrace his brother. Uncle Yehuda submitted to the hug with good grace, all things considered, though muttering indistinctly about promissory notes and victrolas. Lee caught my hand and pulled me aside. “Big panic,” she said. “There may just not be a wedding today, and I’m not kidding.”
“What now, for God’s sake?”
I followed her down the hall toward a wild commotion in the master bedroom. We could not get in. The room was jammed with women. So was the hallway outside. Because these were old-country Jewish females, they were mostly small, so I could see over them. At the center of the hullabaloo were Faiga and Mom, their voices rising over the babble. Zaideh towered out of this mass of noisy femininity, between Faiga and Mom. In a blue silk dress, and a blue veil pushed back on her head, Faiga looked lovely, though excessively red in the face. Mama, all gotten up in jewelry, lace, and satin, seemed calmer than Faiga, though not at any cost in audibility.
“No candles!” Faiga was shouting.
“Now, no more arguing, Faiga, do you hear?” Mama shouted back. “It’s getting late. I’m paying the caterer by the hour, and it’s costing me a fortune.”
“No candles, I say!”
“There’s nothing wrong with candles. I got married with candles, and so will you.”
A number of women in the bedroom, including Bobbeh and assorted aunts of both families, were holding tall unlit white tapers, and glancing uncertainly from Faiga to Mom.
“Faigeleh, be a good girl and come along,” Zaideh put in. “Everything is arranged, Sarah Gitta has made you such a fine wedding. You look so beautiful. Who gets married without candles?”
FAIGA (in frantic Yiddish): NO CANDLES! Boris and I have put up with enough of these crazy old superstitions. I draw the line. NO CANDLES!
MAMA (in Yiddish, distinctly louder than Faiga): This is MY house! I’ve made you a wedding fit for a princess! You haven’t lifted a finger! I’ve never seen such ingratitude. You’ll come along right now, it’s a shame and a disgrace the way you’re holding up the wedding. And you’ll come WITH CANDLES. (To the women) Light the candles and let’s go!
FAIGA (in Yiddish, top of her lungs): I’M getting married, Sarah Gitta. YOU’RE not. (English, fortissimo, to the women) If you light those candles, I take off this veil and go home. That’s final! Let hell freeze over!
What I’m not conveying here is the tone, the antagonism reaching back through the years and across the seas. It was Mama against a daughter of Koidanov, and this time it was to the death. Faiga had already agreed to march around Boris; why then make an issue over the candles, a usual part of the custom? But in the pre-ceremony hysterics, lifelong resentments had surfaced over this trivial detail. It had become the Bloody Nose Ridge of Faiga’s wedding.
Lee murmured to me, “This is bad, and getting worse.” She shouldered her way through the women. “Listen, Faiga,” she cried, in pretty good voice herself, “I couldn’t agree with you more. You’ve been an angel of patience. You’ve put up with a lot more primitive nonsense than I would have. I don’t blame you for not giving another inch!”
Faiga clutched Lee’s hand. “Thanks, Lee. God bless you, and thanks!”
“What is she saying?” Zaideh asked Mom. “Leah-Mira, don’t talk Turkish, please.”
“Who asked you?” Mama yelled at Lee. “If this was somebody else’s wedding, you might have a say. Since it is not, you just butt out!”
Lee snatched a candle from a Boris aunt and lit it with a flip of her cigarette lighter. The taper flared, and all the women suddenly shut up. It was a remarkable effect, that silence. It couldn’t have been done better on the stage. Lee said to Zaideh in her perfect Yiddish, “Nu? How many candles must there be, Zaideh? Twenty? A thousand? Here’s a candle. Is it enough?”
Zaideh looked from Mom to Faiga. Both were struck dumb. He clapped his hands, and exclaimed in jubilant tones, “Come! Let me marry off the daughter of my old age!” He started for the door, and the women gave way before him with joyous shouts and hand-clap-ping. The burning taper in one hand, her other arm through Faiga’s elbow, Lee followed him. With a last unyielding glare at Mom, Faiga allowed herself to be dragged out of the bedroom, escorted by the entire mass of singing, applauding, rejoicing women.
Well, after all that cliff-hanging foolishness, there was something eerily impressive about Faiga’s seven circuits of Boris, with Lee beside her holding one lighted candle. The small canopy of purple velvet was hand-supported on four wooden rods by four men Mom had chosen: Uncle Hyman, Uncle Yail from Bay Ridge, Holy Joe Geiger, and E. F. Kadane. There were sixty or seventy people there, but our big living room might have been empty, so silent was everybody. Faiga, her face obscured by the veil falling to her shoulders, paced around and around her groom, who stood there grim and white-faced, a yarmulka perched precariously on his wild bush of hair. Four, five, six, seven times. I had expected both these unbelievers to smirk if not to giggle during the circuits, but not a bit of it. Faiga’s eyes were glittering through the veil, and her lips were pressed in a hard line, as she halted beside her groom.
Zaideh’s masterstroke of tact was to give the long difficult Seventh Blessing to Uncle Yehuda. To Aunt Rose he might be the Porkville Iluy, but Yehuda, like Pop, retained all the old melodies of their shammas father. He chanted flawlessly:
Blessed are you O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who created gladness and joy, bridegroom and bride, merriment, song, happiness and gaiety, love and affection, peace and neighborliness.
Soon, O Lord our God, may there be heard in the cities of Judea and the streets of Jerusalem the voice of jubilation and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voice of grooms celebrating from their canopies, and the young men from their feasts of song.
Blessed are you, O Lord, who gladden the groom with the bride.
Through the white beard, as he was chanting, I could perceive as never before on Uncle Yehuda’s face the lineaments of my own father, who stood nearby, pale and happy. Holding a stick beside Yehuda was Uncle Hyman, and there were those same lineaments, blurred by fat, and sagging with hard luck. In those three faces I was catching a glimpse, I realized, of the shammas of the Soldiers’ Shule in Minsk, whose melody I was hearing, the other zaideh whom I had never known.
Boris smashed a paper-wrapped glass under his heel. CRUNCH! Oh yes, old Boris went through with the whole works. The place exploded. Cousin Harold jumped at the rosewood piano and banged out the traditional wedding song, just a few Yiddish words, “Bridegroom, bride, good luck, good luck,” endlessly repeated; and our Mishpokha one and all, old and young, including Lee and me, surged to sing and dance around the couple in a disorderly hand-holding ring. Boris stood grinning in a befuddled way, the yarmulka gone. Faiga, veil thrown back, clutched his arm, tearfully laughing. Boris’s family, by and large antireligious socialists like him, and I daresay not feeling at home in the fancy apartment, stood aside looking on. Standing aside too were E. F. Kadane, Holy Joe Geiger, and Peter Quat, in a separate cool clump of three, commenting to each other as they watched us; E. F. Kadane fiddling with his bow tie and staring, Holy Joe with folded hands beaming sacerdotally, and Peter Quat taking it all in through narrowed eyes. Ordinarily I might have felt embarrassed by Peter Quat’s chilly scrutiny of my tribe in action, but now I didn’t give a damn.
The eating, drinking, dancing, singing, toasting, joking, and general whoopee went on and on. The caterer’s men pushed back the furniture and rolled aside Mom’s Persian carpet, baring a ballroom expanse of newly varnished floor. The wine, whiskey, and food loosened up the Boris clan, until most of them, too, were dancing in circles, not a yarmulka in the lot, but spirits high. Damned if E. F. Kadane himself didn’t at last select a plump little Boris cousin of eighteen or so, and go thudding around with her, his face frighteningly crimson but very jolly.
My sister Lee inveigled Holy Joe Geiger into a so-called handkerchief dance. Out of modesty the Orthodox boy and girl are not supposed to touch each other, so they hold a handkerchief between them and step around. Holy Joe shed his ministerial poise to shake a mean leg, and Lee flashed much more silk-clad shank and thigh than is called for in this dance. Everybody else—except Peter—stopped dancing and formed a large ring around them, laughing and singing and cheering. When Holy Joe quit, puffing hard and guffawing, they got a round of applause. Peter leaned against a wall, just watching it all through those narrowed eyes, a pink caterer’s yarmulka aslant on his head like a funny little party hat.
From the piano Cousin Harold called, “Now! The bride and groom!” Boris and Faiga waltzed out by themselves and clomped about. Everybody in the ring clapped hands, and various aunts wiped their eyes.
Faiga exclaimed, halting by Mom, “Now Sarah Gitta and Alex.” The half-sisters seized each other’s hands, looked in each other’s eyes, kissed, and embraced. Pop came and took Mom in his arms. Boris and Faiga fell back into the circle, and Cousin Harold began to play a Mishpokha waltz tune of our childhood. Some Tin Pan Alley writer once put words to this same tune, and made of it a standard called “The Anniversary Waltz,” but it is really a very old Jewish melody. I don’t even know if it has a name. Mom and Pop danced to that waltz at Faiga’s wedding, in the big living room of the new apartment, with the whole Mishpokha and Boris’s family, too, applauding. I mean everyone, even Uncle Yehuda. If only for that fleeting moment, everybody was admiring them, wishing them well, forgiving them for making it to West End Avenue.
