My husband, Abraham Tarcher, was born in 1888 in Bialystok, which was then in Russian Poland. If he was alive today, my Abe would be a hundred and three. Think of that. He was named after his grandfather, whose name was Avram Tarniskovsky, but Tarniskovsky was I guess too much for the immigration people and so it came out Tarcher on the official papers, and my Abe told me his parents were too scared of the authorities to try to change it back again to what it should have been, so they settled for Tarcher, the way it was on the papers.
My Abe had two sisters, one older and one younger. The older one was murdered. When he was only nine years old, my husband was forced to watch as his older sister was raped by a gang of Russian soldiers. After that, they cut her stomach open, and he was forced to watch that too. Think of it. He used to have nightmares about that, even years later, after he and I were married and our own children were growing up. His younger sister died earlier, from some childhood disease I think it was, so when the family came to America there were just the three of them, Abe and his parents. That was in 1902, when Abe was fourteen.
It was decided that he was too old to go to school—to start all over again in an American school, which would have meant going to first grade—so he started the way everybody else did in those days, with a pushcart on Hester Street. There were other streets on the Lower East Side, of course, but Hester Street was the main one. It was where everybody shopped. It was where all the pushcarts were. Sometimes you could hardly walk down Hester Street because of all the pushcarts. What you did was, you built your own. My Abe built his pushcart out of an old wooden crate and a set of old baby-buggy wheels he found in an alley. He started out selling borscht, which is a soup made with beets and sour milk that his mother made on her own stove. His mother was famous for her borscht. The secret was cow parsnips. She told me that after he and I were married. She boiled cow parsnips and added that to the beets. It was delicious, if I do say so. Anyway, he started with the borscht, and later he added fresh bagels, which his mother also baked in her own oven. Still later, he branched out into undershirts and buttons, and when I met him he was selling watches, ladies’ and gentlemen’s watches. Nice watches, too. Anyway, that was Hester Street.
I have a good title for your book, if you want one: “From Hester Street to Heather Lane.” What do you think of that?
My own family was of a cut above. We were considered to be of a better class. My parents came from Hungary, which is considered to be a better place to come from than Poland, and I was born in the United States, which made a big difference in those days. My family had a better name, too: Roth. My father used to say that we were probably related to the Rothschilds. He said Rothschild means Child of the Roths. He was full of baloney. It means Red Shield, but I didn’t know the difference. Anyway, we considered ourselves superior types. My mother nearly died when I said I was going to marry a Polack, and my father sat shivah for me when I married him—think of that! He tore his shirt in ribbons and sat shivah for seven days, as though I was a dead person, all because I was a native-born American and my husband was a greenhorn with an accent.
Of course, when my father saw how successful my husband would turn out to be, what a good provider he was for me, he changed his tune—but fast! Times are different now, but back then it was a very bad thing for a girl to marry against her father’s wishes. But I was always a very independent type. I said to my father, “This is America! The land of the free! I’ll marry whatever man I want to!” And I did.
So. Where was I? Oh, yes, my family background. We were considered a cut above. My father was a scholar of the Talmud; my husband’s father worked in a shoe-repair shop. All this background is important, you’ll see, when you try to understand my son Solly—or Silas Tarkington, as he called himself, after all that other business happened.
Oh, I’m not saying my family was rich. We weren’t rich at all. I suppose we were as poor as everybody else, but I never thought of myself as coming from a poor family. I was very strictly brought up, and we always seemed to have enough to eat. We lived on the Lower East Side too, at number fourteen Henry Street, in a little apartment—they called it a railroad flat—one room in front and one in back; the toilet, it wasn’t even a bathroom, was on the floor below, and we shared that with four other families. Baths were in the kitchen sink. It was a sixth-floor walk-up, but I didn’t mind the stairs. I thought we lived in the lap of luxury. Living here now, in an elevator building, really in the lap of luxury on what they call the Gold Coast of Florida, remembering that two-room apartment on Henry Street, I think, Oh, my!
It’s funny. They talk about what a bad place the Lower East Side was to live in, but I didn’t think it was all that bad. It was the smells of Hester Street that I liked best, wonderful smells. There was always the smell of food cooking, delicious smells of onions, cabbages, carrots, fresh-baked bread. There was also the smell of the sea, like there is here, because the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t very far away. The smell of the sea would be mixed with the smell of a brisket boiling—salt and cloves—and then there was the smell of people, because Hester Street was always filled with people. But even though nobody took baths that often, I don’t remember any bad people smells. The people smelled as sweet as newborn babies. I remember my mother’s skirts always smelled of starch, and my father always smelled of cigars and mustache wax—my father had this great, black, bushy mustache that used to tickle me when he kissed my cheek. But I’m getting away from my story. Back to my mother, who is really a very important part of the story of Solly Tarcher. You’ll see how she fits in. Without her and without me, Solly Tarcher would have been nothing but a schlepper, or maybe even worse.
My mother was a seamstress, a beautiful seamstress. She taught me to sew when I was just a little girl, and after a while she began letting me help her with her sewing. There wasn’t anything my mother couldn’t do with a needle, but her specialty was hats—beautiful hats that she designed and made herself, hats with embroidery and sequins and silk flowers and feathers, lacy veils and ribbons and all sorts of trimmings—and I used to help her, and by the time I was in my teens Leah Roth’s hats were quite famous. So while my father studied his holy books, my mother had a nice career of her own.
A lot of uptown society women heard about my mother’s work and started ordering hats from her. No two were alike, of course, and I remember when I was eighteen I started delivering hats to the great Mrs. John Jacob Astor, who lived in a great big house on Fifth Avenue and whose husband went down on the Titanic. Mrs. Astor only wanted black hats, because she was in mourning for her husband, you see, but even her black hats were awfully pretty. I used to just hand the hats in their boxes to the butler at the front door, but one day I met the great Mrs. Astor herself. She was just a little thing, just a girl, really, and she didn’t seem much older than myself. That surprised me, somehow. I had thought Mrs. John Jacob Astor would be an enormous woman, but here was this tiny little creature, with a whispery little voice. “Oh, how lovely,” she whispered—like that—as she lifted the hat out of its box and tissue paper.
All this is important; you’ll see, when I get to that point in my story. Because I used to tell Solly about how I’d met the great Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and it stuck in his mind. It influenced him.
Anyway, about that time I met my future husband. I was walking home from school one afternoon with my books, and some older boys started to tease me. There were six or seven of them, and they gathered in a circle around me and wouldn’t let me through. I was pretty in those days, believe it or not, and I was a little frightened. The boys kept pushing closer, asking me to give them a kiss. Well, my future husband saw what was happening, and he pushed right into that crowd of boys with his pushcart, and the boys went flying. Then he got a friend to mind his pushcart, and he walked me home to Henry Street.
It was love at first sight, or so it seemed at the time. He wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t very handsome, but he had nice dark eyes, and every afternoon he’d wait for me outsi
de school and walk me home. Sometimes we’d stop at Mr. Levy’s drugstore where they made good egg creams, and I think we both knew we were in love, though we didn’t talk about getting married. I knew my father would not like the idea of me marrying a man who was seven years older and sold watches from a pushcart. Abe only mentioned marriage once. He said, “In America, when you’re twenty-one years old, you can do as you please. You don’t have to ask your parents’ permission for anything.” I knew what he meant. That was proposal enough for me.
On my twenty-first birthday, Abe Tarcher and I went down to City Hall and got married, just like that. That was when my father screamed and raged and carried on, tore his shirt into shreds, and said “My daughter is dead!” He said he was going to sit shivah for me and told me never to darken his door again. I didn’t care. I was that independent. I had my new husband now, with his own place to live. I just stuck out my tongue at my father, marched out the door, and slammed it in his face, expecting never to set foot in fourteen Henry Street again. My Abe was waiting for me on the street downstairs. “We’re free!” we kept saying. “We’re free!” And we held hands and skipped down the street like children. That was in 1916.
My Abe had rooms in Norfolk Street, number thirty-five, which was really not that many blocks away, and I was very happy keeping house for my new husband. Oh, we were very happy, and I loved tidying the rooms while he was off on the street at work. In the corner of the front room, he kept a pile of old magazines. Sometimes I would pick up one of those magazines to read, which made him very nervous, and I wondered why. The magazines—Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, and so on—were all very old, and there wasn’t very much of interest in them, and one day I said, “Abe, why don’t we throw all these old magazines out? They’re just taking up room.” “No!” he cried. “Don’t ever touch those magazines!” Then he showed me why.
At the bottom of the pile, the magazines were stuffed with lots of dollar bills: ten-dollar bills, twenties, even fifties. That was where he kept his money. He didn’t trust banks, and he figured no burglar would be interested in running off with a lot of old copies of the Saturday Evening Post, you see. It made a certain amount of sense. We counted out the money that he had saved there. It was more than a thousand dollars! It seemed like a fortune at the time, but that was what he had saved from his pushcart business over the years.
Well, it made me a little nervous having all that money lying around the house, you’d better believe it. But I also made sure the news got back to number fourteen Henry Street that my new husband had savings of over a thousand dollars, though I naturally didn’t say where he kept it.
Oh, my. You’ve never seen such a change come over a man as came over my father when he heard that! Suddenly he forgot all about sitting shivah for me. Suddenly it was shalom, shalom! Come for dinner! Come for the lighting of the shabbat candles! Suddenly my new husband was like his long-lost son. He was always full of baloney, my father, but I did love him, and I loved my mother, and it was nice that we were all one big happy family again. That thousand dollars was all it took to do it.
It was during these family gatherings that both my mother and my father got interested in my new husband’s business methods, and my new husband got interested in my mother’s millinery business and the good customers like Mrs. Astor. It was my father who suggested that my husband might take some of his savings and open a little shop where my mother could sell her hats. Abe liked the idea, and that was how he got rid of his pushcart and we all got into the millinery business. You see how it all hangs together now, don’t you? Because it was in the millinery business that my husband made his real money.
At first, our shop was also on Norfolk Street—just a little place. But it was so successful that we soon needed more room, and so in 1920 we rented space on 14th Street, just off Union Square, which was still the fancy shopping area, where all the rich women bought their clothes. By then, my mother mostly just designed the hats. I helped too. But we had four girls in the back room who did the cutting and the sewing and the trimming. My husband ran the store and kept the books. My father pretty much kept out of our hair—too busy scribbling questions in the margins of his Talmudic texts, arguing with God.
Nineteen-twenty was also the year that Abe’s and my first child was born. We named him Solomon Tarcher, in honor of my husband’s father, Samuel, the shoe repairman, who had died the year before. People often did that. The first initial of the baby’s name was in honor of a relative who had recently died. So that was the birth of the man who became Silas Tarkington. “Born in abject poverty,” the obituary said. Ha! When my baby was born, I had both a nursemaid and a wet nurse for him. My milk was short. With both my children, my milk was short. All the women in my family have had that trouble, I don’t know why.
Oh, he was a beautiful baby! Once when I was wheeling him in his carriage, a strange woman stopped us and said, “That is the most beautiful baby in the Bronx! That is the most beautiful baby in the Bronx!” She said it twice. I forgot to tell you that we’d moved to the Bronx by then, to a beautiful apartment in a new building right on the Grand Concourse. My husband was certainly a good provider. And Solly was such a well-behaved baby. He hardly ever cried. And when he was old enough for school, he did so well. He brought home such wonderful report cards, always with wonderful comments from his teachers. It was only after his sister Simma was born that he began to change.
I’m not saying it was Simma’s fault. Perhaps it was because I waited nine years to have another baby. I’ve often thought that. But he was terribly jealous of the new baby. Perhaps that was natural, because he’d been the kingpin so long—like the only child—that he couldn’t stand having to share any of my attention with a baby sister. But a new baby just does take more time and care and attention than a nine-year-old boy. There was just no way I could pay as much attention to Solly as I had before. It used to frighten me. He’d be with her, and I’d hear her screaming, and I’d rush into the room. “I was only playing with her, Mama,” he’d say to me, but I worried that he wasn’t playing with her, that he was hurting her, and after a while I decided I couldn’t leave the two of them alone in a room together. I was terrified that he’d try to harm her in some way. And she was a sickly, colicky baby, too.
Right about that time, his grades in school began getting worse. His teachers would write me notes, saying, Solomon needs to apply himself more. “What does that mean?” he’d ask me. “What does it mean, apply myself more?” “It means you’ve got to work harder, study harder. Have you done all your homework for tomorrow?” “Of course I have,” he’d say. But still the notes came home. Solomon’s homework assignments were incomplete again. Again! He’d been lying to me, but what could I do? By then it was the Depression, times were hard, and my husband and I were working harder than ever in the shop, trying to make ends meet. And times kept getting worse. Women weren’t willing to spend fifty dollars on a hat. They weren’t even willing to spend five dollars. Mrs. Astor had died, and there didn’t seem to be any more women like her left in the country, let alone New York City.
Yes, I think it was waiting those nine years that did it. If his sister had been more of a contemporary, less of a rival, it might have been different. But during those nine years I was so busy helping my husband build his business I couldn’t even think about having another baby. Those nine years … and then the Depression hit us. Oh, my.
Solly began hanging around with a different crowd of boys, an older crowd, a tough crowd from the East Bronx, a crowd I didn’t like and I told him so. It went in one ear and out the other. The Bronx was changing. It was not so nice anymore. Even the Grand Concourse was not so nice. In our building, apartments were getting robbed. The shvartzers were moving in. “Should we move?” I asked my husband. But moving is just about the most expensive thing you can do. Our nice new building was getting to smell bad. There was rubbish in the streets. It was getting worse than the Lower East Side ever was.
Then I dis
covered that Solly had been playing hooky. The truant officer came to our door. “Your son has not attended school for the last three weeks,” he said. He’d been going off each morning with his books, supposedly to school, but he’d never gotten there. God knows what he’d been doing, running around with that fast new crowd of his. Some of those boys had cars—stolen cars would be my guess. I spoke with him. His father spoke with him. We pleaded with him. It all fell on deaf ears.
At thirteen he was supposed to be bar mitzvah. He refused. He had refused even to go to shul. And at sixteen he announced that he was going to quit school altogether. His father and I begged him not to do this. “What are you going to do?” his father asked him. “I’m going to work,” he said. “I’m going to make a million dollars.” “You can’t work for me,” his father said. “I can’t afford to hire any extra help in the store.” This was 1936, the Depression was at its worst, three of the four girls in the back of the store we’d had to get rid of, and we were down to just one. My mother had developed Parkinson’s, and just the three of us were doing everything—the one girl, my husband, and me. “Yes, where are you going to work?” I asked him. “Nobody’s hiring anybody.”
“What about your famous friend, Mr. John Jacob Astor?” he asked me, kind of freshlike. “How did he make his money?” “In furs,” I told him. “Then I’ll go into the fur business,” he said. “Just see if you can find any job, Mr. Know-It-All,” I said to him.
Well, I must say, he made good on that promise. He did find a job, schlepping furs on a rack for a manufacturer on Seventh Avenue, and for the next few years we didn’t see too much of him. He’d found a place to live, he told us, somewhere on the West Side near his job. And I must say he seemed to be making good money. I didn’t know there was that much money to be made schlepping furs on a rack, but whenever he showed up he always seemed to have plenty of money in his pockets, plenty of nice new clothes. “I’m on my way to making my first million,” he used to say, showing off the fat bankroll in his billfold. Well, his father and I thought, times were beginning to get a little better. Once, on my birthday, he turned up at our place and gave me a solid silver tea set: teapot, hot water pot, sugar, and creamer on a solid silver tray. Once, for his father’s birthday, it was a solid gold Bulova watch. “Well,” my husband said, “maybe he’s becoming a success after all.”
Carriage Trade Page 24
