Inside, Outside, page 7
The Frankenthals had more money than we did, right to the moment when Frankenthal père went up the river, leaving his family to wait for him in a fine private house off the Grand Concourse. So what on earth did Mrs. Frankenthal have to be envious about? She was a pretty woman with shiny dark eyes, curly black hair, and a nice white-toothed smile. However, she was no yoxenta, and the man with the mustache was no yoxen. Maybe that was it. There was an absence of breeding about the Frankenthals. Paul Frankenthal drank coffee. My sister Lee and I obeyed the doggerel rule Mama had taught us,
M is for milk
And you should drink plenty
But not tea, or coffee
Before you are twenty.
But Mrs. Frankenthal just across the hall tried to tempt me, leading to my second memorable beating.
We were in her kitchen, Mrs. Frankenthal and I. Paul came in, panting from running up five flights of stairs, sweaty and thirsty. She offered him milk. “With coffee,” Paul ordered. His mother gave it to him, half and half. Paul drank it off, eyeing me with contemptuous triumph, and out he swaggered, back to his street game, full of that rich tan abomination.
Mrs. Frankenthal offered me milk. I accepted. Cookie. I accepted.
A white-toothed smile. “Coffee in your milk?”
“No, thanks, Mrs. Frankenthal.”
“Paul likes it.”
“I’m not allowed.”
“Oh. Well, bring your milk and cookie to the parlor.”
I followed her into the front room with the street view, carrying the milk and a lovely marshmallow-filled chocolate cookie out of a box. I could get these only at the Frankenthals’, which may be why I was hanging around that kitchen. Mama baked her own cookies. Store-bought cookies were bad for your teeth, and anyway might have lard in them. I was rapidly learning not to worry about abominations where candy or cookies were involved. Wicked America.
“So, your mother is very strict about coffee,” said Mrs. Frankenthal, settling down beside me on a long soft sofa.
“Oh, yes.”
“Just about coffee?”
“Oh, no. Also tea.”
“Really! About other things, too?”
“Sure. About lots and lots of other things.”
“What else are you not allowed to have, David?” inquired Mrs. Frankenthal, smiling like Grandma in Little Red Riding Hood.
Locking my fingers behind my head—something I had seen grown men do—I leaned back in the corner of the sofa and proceeded to tell Mrs. Frankenthal all about the austerity of the Goodkind household. My main point was that Mom starved us to improve our characters. Mrs. Frankenthal kept mentioning various foods and beverages, and I kept saying that why no, we couldn’t have that, or that, or that; and at each forbidden item she grew more humble and impressed at Mom’s moral grandeur. How exalting it felt to sit there, leaning back with my hands behind my head, fascinating this adult with every word!
“And does your mother let you eat bread?”
“Well, maybe one slice a week.”
“Really! One slice of bread a week! You’re sure? No more?”
“Sure. Sometimes not even that.”
The whaling I got afterward has sort of blotted many details from memory. Yet to this day—and the thing happened fifty years ago—if I happen to catch myself leaning back and locking my hands behind my head, a warning red light flashes in my brain, and a hollow computer voice intones, “You are about to make an asshole of yourself.” So the beating clearly took hold. But it did not catch up with me at once. I played all day outside. Only when Lee came to fetch me did I gather that trouble was afoot.
Lee still complains, by the way, white-haired and arthritic as she is, that it was a rotten imposition on her to have to go out every night to fetch me home for supper. “Day-veed! Day-veed!” she would scream all over the neighborhood, she says, and in the back yards, and in the vacant lots, sometimes for an hour. She gives me a pain, Lee does, with her hoarded ancient grudges. That one is ridiculous. I was at home and ravenous for dinner most nights, long before Pop returned from the Fairy Laundry. Lee thrives on her grudges; I guess they generate adrenaline, which is good for her arthritis, and it’s free, unlike cortisone, which costs like the devil. At any rate, on this occasion she didn’t have to come far. I was sitting right there on the stone stoop of our Aldus Street tenement, talking to the other kids. With a funny look, Lee said, not that it was supper time (we called dinner “supper” until we moved to Manhattan), but just that Mama wanted me.
Well, I trudged up those five flights of narrow stairs sensing that I was in for it somehow. I found Mama at the kitchen sink in great wrath.
“Yisroelke!”
“Yes, Mama?”
“Mrs. Lessing told me that you told Mrs. Frankenthal that I starve you.”
(Oh, God.)
“She did?”
“One slice of bread a week. One slice! Is that what you told Mrs. Frankenthal? Is it or isn’t it?” Thus Mama, glaring at me from the sink, and continuing to peel or slice or wash something. She seldom wasted time, and could stage a heavy emotional scene while picking the eyes out of a potato. Mrs. Frankenthal, it developed, had spent the day spreading the story of the starving Goodkind children through all five stories of the tenement; and over into the house next door, where dwelled Mrs. Lessing, one of Mama’s old friends from the Bunch.
Well, I had to admit it. Nor could I plead that I’d been bamboozled, by Red Riding Hood’s grandmother next door, into believing I was praising my mother. I didn’t understand this myself. I was just trapped. Childhood is a sequence of such traps, basic training in the dreary facts of life.
“Why did you lie like that? Why are you always telling such big lies? Don’t you know what happens to liars? Don’t you get plenty to eat in this house? Just wait till Papa hears!”
“Mom, please don’t tell Papa.”
But when my father came home he was recruited by Mom to wallop me for the crime of telling lies. Young as I was, and much as it hurt when Pop struck me, I could see that he was suffering more. He went through the beating as though he himself were being flogged. It was the ice-cake episode, reprised a generation later. We Goodkind men are not built to hit our kids. I can’t bear to think of the one time I struck my daughter Sandra, and as for my sons—well, to hell with all that. I crawled off crushed and bawling to the davenport in the parlor, which Lee and I would unfold and sleep in at night. There I lay down on the cold imitation leather to weep myself out. Soon Lee came and laid a hand on my shoulder. I looked at her. She was offering me, half-concealed in her palm, a chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie.
It was one of Lee’s great moments. I would have understood her gloating over my disaster. Instead this offering, and the soft look that went with it, and the wetness of her eyes, told me much about what a sister is; much, in fact, about the feminine heart. It made up for the snowstorm episode, my one dimly persisting grudge against my sister, and it revealed that Lee too was bending the rule against outside cookies. I divined that Paul, not his mother, must have given Lee the cookie, and that instead of devouring it instantly like any rational person, she had saved it, from some grotesque girlish motive.
And as I sat up, much comforted, drying my eyes and wolfing the cookie, while Lee noisily set the supper table in the kitchen, and Pop and Mom talked as usual in there about the Fairy Laundry, my mind cleared, and I realized that I had been unjustly drubbed. Sure, I had lied. But hadn’t an adult gulled me into it? Mama wasn’t all that upset about the lie, she just didn’t like being made to look silly by Mrs. Frankenthal. The lady in 5-A had done the big yoxenta in the eye, and she had ordered my father to take it out on me. It was that simple. Why, it was on the level of the bickering between Lee and myself! My tail still warmly throbbed from poor Pop’s open-handed whacks, but I found myself feeling sorry for him, and resentfully superior to my mother. I had gotten a lot older in one day.
***
Now for the snowstorm story. I’ve never once thrown it up to Lee. I’ve not forgotten it, either.
I was in the first grade, and Lee in the third or fourth, in a school about ten blocks from home. We would walk there in the morning together. On this day the weather looked bad, so Mama gave Lee an umbrella. Of course I tumultuously demanded an umbrella, too, but there was only one in the house. All the way to school Lee flourished the umbrella, and kept talking about it, and said she felt raindrops though the sun had come out, and she opened it, and complained that I was crowding her under it, and altogether made an unbearable nuisance of herself about the umbrella. I resolved that, one way or another, I’d get hold of that umbrella to walk home with, or die.
The weather worsened during the morning. It began to snow. Early in the afternoon a wonderful announcement: school cancelled! Nickels distributed by the teachers, free for everybody, for carfare home on the trolleys! By this time a gale was blowing, the snow was whirling down thick and white, and it lay piled on the streets. In the line of bundled-up kids at the trolley stop I encountered Lee with Paul Frankenthal, and he was eating an unkosher hot dog, which cost a nickel. I’m not making any of this up, I can see Frankenthal standing there just as plain in his snow-flecked plaid jacket, gobbling that hot dog from the vendor’s cart. And Lee is giving me some complicated story about how he has lost his nickel; and wouldn’t I like to walk home with the umbrella, and lend Paul the carfare? Then he’d pay it back, and I’d have a whole nickel to spend.
You can argue that I was a fool to make the deal. But she was my big sister, wasn’t she? Oh, she assured me, what fun walking home with the umbrella would be! Why, there I’d be under it, no snow would fall on me, and all that. So I said okay, we did a swap, Lee and Paul boarded the lamplit trolley, and off I marched into the white storm with the umbrella.
Well, I was blown this way and that by the wild wind, staggering and tacking on the slippery sidewalk, hanging on for dear life to that black round mainsail with both hands; until a gust whirled me clear around, and in an eyeblink turned the umbrella twanging inside out. It was just as well, otherwise I might have sailed up in the air like Mary Poppins. I struggled to put the umbrella right, but the wind tore it clear out of my hands and it fluttered off upward, into the sky and out of this story, and there I was about eight long blocks from home, trudging head-down through a blizzard in a foot or more of snow, amid drifts taller than myself.
The going was easier without the umbrella. I plowed along, sinking deep into fresh snow with every step, rather enjoying the huge footprints I was making; only, getting colder and wearier and not much closer to home. Soon I was making not footprints but round holes in the snow, since with each step I went in up to my thighs. I became a bit scared. A blue twilight was descending, and the street lamps in the snowfall, mere lines of blurry yellow haloes, confused me. I was getting drowsy, too, from the fatigue of pulling up one leg and the other, and plunging them up to my hip sockets in chilling snow. I decided to lie down on a snowbank and rest; rather a mistake, if you know your Arctic narratives, which I didn’t.
There in that snowbank, half-covered with freshly fallen snow, I was found by a Fairy Laundry wagon driver, Jake the drunk. He woke me with a shake, and a blast of breath like ignited Sterno. It was black dark. Jake picked me up, put me into the wagon, with its familiar mixed smell of horse manure and dirty laundry, and brought me home. Such rejoicing! Pop, Mr. Brodofsky, and all the drivers had been out looking for me, and the police had been called. I was given tea with rum to drink, stripped, and put into a hot tub. During the welcoming commotion, while Mama was mixing the tea and rum, and Papa was pouring a second slug for Jake the drunk, Lee managed to whisper to me, “Don’t say anything about the umbrella.” My parents had asked Lee plenty of questions, and she had improvised a cock-and-bull story which a word from me could have shattered.
Now I admit I was a chronic pain in the neck to Lee; a blatant competitor, a shameless upstager. I took for granted the extra petting and treats I got just for being “my David,” as Mama knew nothing of impartiality. If Lee had taken an ax to me, it would have been an understandable bit of testiness. Yet at least I did not tattle on Lee; not then and very seldom, if at all; and there was much occasion to do so, for mendacity came naturally to Lee. It may be in the nature of the female predicament; Bobbie Webb was probably as big a liar as I ever knew. We will come to that, but meantime we move beyond Aldus Street and the Frankenthals, to the very matrix of my long destiny: the Mishpokha.
12
The Tribe
By now I hope you’ve grasped that in this tale inside and outside don’t merely mean Jewish and non-Jewish. Nothing that simple. Paul Frankenthal was Jewish. So was the little girl who bared her behind for medical evaluation. So was almost everybody in that neighborhood, aside from teachers like Miss Regan, Miss Dickson, and Miss Connelly, who were of course aliens from outer space. In our little street gang Paul Frankenthal spoke of non-Jews as “Krishts.” He knew obscene songs and jokes about Krishts which at first baffled me, because I didn’t even know what they referred to, so encompassingly Jewish was our part of the Bronx.
The old neighborhood is now a desert of abandoned burned-out tenements. Hoe Avenue and Faile Street look like wartime Stalingrad. Of the hundreds of synagogues which dotted the South Bronx in those days, only one survives: the Minsker Congregation, founded by my father and a very religious man named Morris Elfenbein. They just about financed the start-up between them. Elfenbein was the haggling giant of the Lower East Side clothing district, before he made his mark in West Bronx real estate. In due course I must tell you all about Elfenbein and the Purple Suit, a combat adventure right up there with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Anyway, as a small boy I laid the cornerstone of that shule, slapping on the plaster with a gilded trowel engraved with my name, which Mama still has somewhere in a closet. I went up there last year after the shule was vandalized again, and talked to the cops, and gave my Aunt Ray money for heavy iron grates on the windows and doors. So far, she says, they’re holding.
Aunt Ray has the key to the synagogue. She lives in the one inhabited building in a long burned-out row, where the black glassless windows stare at you like eyes in skulls. Every Saturday morning Aunt Ray creeps to the shule and opens it for the ten or twelve old Jews who chance getting mugged and come tottering to pray. We’ll have a scene or two in the Minsker Shule’s heyday, but first you have to meet my Mishpokha. (There’s the old unspellable guttural, the Indian “ugh” sound with no English equivalent. Call it mish-pugh-a, and you’ve about got it.) The word is classical Hebrew, taken over into Yiddish, and what does it mean exactly? Well, let’s have a look right now, shall we, in my big Lexicon of the Old Testament, edited by the Reverends Brown, Driver, and Briggs? Here is how the Reverends define Mishpokha:
1. CLAN. Family connexion of individuals.
In a loose popular sense, TRIBE.
In a wider sense, people, nation.
Okay for Brown, Driver, and Briggs, Krisht lexicographers! Right on.
Our Mishpokha had settled in the South and East Bronx, with outposts in Brooklyn and New Jersey. The tribe comprised Papa’s Goodkinds and Mama’s Levitans, with all sorts and conditions of cousins, uncles, aunts, and in-laws. When Zaideh came over, bringing Koidanov’s daughter Faiga, that activated a whole new connection of Koidanov kin, whom Zaideh, a total Mishpokha man, quickly tracked down. A far-flung tribe, with the Bronx as its base, its new Minsk.
In the Bronx, close by, were the families of Uncle Hyman and Uncle Yehuda. Pop had brought both his brothers over and set them up in business. Uncle Hyman limped through life in a dry-goods store, but Yehuda never quite got the hang of Goldena Medina commerce. He started out with a music shop, selling victrolas, records, and sheet music; a thing I never understood, since Uncle Hyman was the music lover, while Uncle Yehuda cared no more than a clam about music. Moreover, Yehuda was a low-spirited misanthrope, unsuited to retail business. He even had a Mr. Deering mustache. Customers sensed that besides knowing nothing whatever about music, Yehuda disliked people, and wished they would leave him alone. So they did. You never saw a place as deserted as Uncle Yehuda’s music store. It was spooky, those rows and rows of dusty new victrolas, those neat stacks of unsold records and music sheets, and in a corner behind the counter on a stool, Uncle Yehuda glowering at his vacant emporium and stroking his mustache, as though plotting a new scheme to bilk Pearl White of the diamond mine.
Yehuda married a fetching American-born girl, Aunt Rosie. It was a lightning match. They met, fell in love, and wedded, all within two weeks after Uncle Yehuda opened the store. Rosie had no pedigree, she was irreligious, she was penniless, she didn’t work—so Mama reports—but she certainly was an eyeful. Mama never liked Aunt Rosie. This Rosie happened into the music store a few days after it opened. She saw the array of shiny victrolas with which my father had staked Yehuda by borrowing from a bank, and she figured that Yehuda must be rolling in money. So she cast a hook for the surly greenhorn and hauled him in, no sweat. Marry in haste, you know; Aunt Rosie had plenty of leisure to contemplate those unmoving victrolas, those untouched stacks of Caruso and Galli-Curci records, and to perceive that she had been had.
By a transference that your friendly neighborhood psychoanalyst can perhaps explain to you, Rosie’s reaction was to conceive a deep animosity, not for her husband Yehuda, but for my father. She couldn’t forgive him for all those misleading victrolas. Yehuda she more or less ignored for the rest of her life. They are still together, Rosie and Yehuda, shuffling past each other in a Miami flat. After a long period as a Yankee-Doodle atheist Yehuda has turned religious. Whenever I encounter him at tribal bar mitzvas or weddings, he pours hot scorn on the evil ways of Wicked America. Aunt Rosie goes right on eating the swine, the abomination, and the mouse, seeing no reason to change her infidel ways because of her husband’s nutty regression, as she regards it. Uncle Yehuda (his outside name, by the way, is Gerald) has got himself a milk pot and a meat pot, cooks his own food, eats off paper plates, and spends most of his time in a little storefront synagogue as a shammas. Full circle for Uncle Yehuda. Not an ideal couple, but there they are, still yoked after fifty-nine years.
