Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  Sugar cookies, as I had known them until that day, were pale lemon-yellow discs about four inches in diameter, with a deliciously soft, chewy center, topped by lumped little mounds of snow-white sugar. Nothing Brillat-Savarin ever put together can possibly come near what happened when a great big bite of one of these cookies from my mother’s stove met a great big mouthful of cold milk from Mr. Deutsch’s grocery store. It did not happen on that fateful day.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother said.

  She always said this when the normal routine of her rather primitive existence was in any way, however slightly, jogged off course.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  This was what I always said when questions from the adult, or enemy, world started coming through my carefully constructed barricades.

  “You’re not eating the cookies,” my mother said.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “You’re sick,” my mother said. “I’ll get the Bolls Rolls.”

  Bolls Rolls were a laxative sold by Mr. Lesser, the corner druggist, that looked like dirty golf balls, tasted like sour figs, and were used by the mothers of East Fourth Street on their children the way a salesman uses the word miscellaneous on his expense account.

  “No, don’t,” I said. “I feel fine.”

  “Then why aren’t you eating the cookies?” my mother said.

  “It’s the sugar,” I said. “It’s not white.”

  For the first time in my experience with sugar cookies, the lumped little mounds on the delicious yellow discs were not white but brown.

  “Mr. Deutsch doesn’t have any more white sugar to sell,” my mother said. “It’s the war. Don’t you know there’s a war?”

  Of course I knew there was a war. On Friday nights, when my mother always served stewed prunes for dessert, didn’t I carefully collect all the pits, wash them at the kitchen sink, dry them all weekend in the sun on the window sill, and then take them to school on Monday so that when during recess Miss Kahn marched her class out to the corner of Lewis and Houston Streets, I would have something to toss proudly into the U.S. Army collection box that Miss Kahn said was helping to supply our brave boys with gas masks? And every Wednesday, didn’t I bring a dime to assembly so that a War Savings Stamp could be pasted into my Liberty Bond Book? What I did not understand was why the war should suddenly make it impossible for Mr. Deutsch to supply my mother with the white sugar she had always bought from him for making her sugar cookies.

  “I could go for you to Leopolstadt on Avenue C,” I said. “He sells everything.”

  I had heard Henny Leopolstadt, who was two classes ahead of me in P.S. 188, say this many times about his father’s grocery store, and of course I believed it.

  “I went already to Mr. Leopolstadt,” my mother said. “And to Sheffler’s on Lewis Street. I went every place. Nobody has white sugar.”

  The statement shocked me. I did not at the time understand why. I am fairly certain that my mother’s cookies, made with brown sugar, were just as delicious as the cookies she had always made with white sugar. The answer, I think, is in the word “always.” I was only five years old, but those five years added up to a lifetime, the only lifetime with which I was intimately acquainted, and it was my first encounter during that lifetime with the sudden and inexplicable cessation of the familiar.

  Years later the father of a boy who sat next to me in Intermediate Algebra at Thomas Jefferson High School jumped out of his office window the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. I happened to mention this to Mr. Fisher, my homeroom teacher, saying I didn’t understand why a man would do a thing like that.

  “People get used to things,” Mr. Fisher said. “Like a nice steady flow of money. Then the things they’ve gotten used to, one day they stop flowing in, and it scares the hell out of them.”

  Suddenly I understood what had happened to me at the age of five on East Fourth Street. There had always been a nice steady flow of white sugar. Then one day there was no more white sugar, and it scared the hell out of me.

  Fortunately, thanks to my mother’s Uncle Berel, my terror did not last long.

  Uncle Berel was our rich relative. He had come to America from Hungary during McKinley’s first administration and somehow found his way to Waterbury, Connecticut, where he got a job delivering cases of bottled soda for a manufacturer of carbonated beverages. By the time McKinley was assassinated, Uncle Berel owned the bottling plant. At the age of five I had never yet met him, but I knew he was fond of my mother. He was always sending her presents. These rarely pleased my mother. I could not understand why. What was wrong with receiving, as we once did just before Passover, a crate containing one hundred pounds of matzohs? It’s true, they did fill the kitchen and half the front room of our three-room tenement flat, and we had to eat matzohs until long after Yom Kipper, but for a few days I was a person of some importance on East Fourth Street. Nobody else on the block had an uncle with such spectacular ideas about presents.

  “It’s because when he sends a present he doesn’t think of the person he’s sending it to,” my mother said irritably. “He thinks of himself, so everybody, when they see the present, they’ll know how rich he is.”

  This may very well have been the reason why, a few days after the change in my mother’s sugar cookies struck unexpected terror to my heart, an American Express Company truck arrived on East Fourth Street with a two-hundred-pound sack of white sugar addressed to my mother. It caused a sensation.

  At a time when nobody else could purchase so much as “half a quarter”—on East Fourth Street nobody ever heard of an eighth of a pound as a unit of measurement—my mother had two hundred pounds of the food product nobody on the block had ever before done without. Even though my mother implied there was something mysterious about this, it was actually quite simple. As a manufacturer of perhaps twenty different flavors of charged soda water, Uncle Berel manufactured huge quantities of syrup, and to make syrup you must have sugar. When the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo, my mother’s Uncle Berel had a great deal of white sugar stockpiled in his warehouse in Waterbury. When it became obvious at the Marne that the war was going to be a long one, and the civilian shortages that are always a result of long wars started to creep across the Atlantic, my mother’s Uncle Berel saw, and seized, the opportunity to make a characteristic gesture. My mother’s response was equally characteristic.

  “Two hundred pounds of sugar,” she said irritably, staring at the big fat sack standing in the middle of our small kitchen. “What am I going to do with it?”

  The question was, of course, rhetorical. My mother never asked anybody for advice. She didn’t seem to need it. I cannot remember a single instance when she even appeared to be in doubt about a course of action. She was not, as I recall, a generous woman. This statement is not intended as a reflection on her character. Generosity, at least in matters involving physical objects such as food, is almost totally dependent on wherewithal. You can’t give away what you haven’t got, and food was the item that received the most constant and troubled attention of every housewife on the block. It was not a street of rich people. I can remember only one family, a childless young couple named Mr. and Mrs. Mishig, who seemed to be free from the constant preoccupation of most women on East Fourth Street with the problem of getting three meals a day onto the family table. That is why I was so astonished by the way my mother handled her Uncle Berel’s unexpected gift.

  “Get the shep leffel,” she said to me.

  The shep leffel was a blue and white porcelain ladle with which on Friday nights—when we had our evening meal, not as on weekday nights at the kitchen table, but at the big round oak table in the front room—my mother served the noodle soup from the pewter tureen she had brought with her from Hungary. When I brought the ladle from the sideboard in the front room into the kitchen, I found that my mother had opened the sack of sugar with her noodle knife, and she was setting the pewter tureen on the kitchen floor.
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  “Get the ice pail,” she said.

  The ice pail was a flat, badly chipped, once-white enamel basin that sat under the icebox. In warm weather it caught the water as the ice wrapped in the Jewish Daily Forward melted slowly up above. Uncle Berel’s gift had arrived in March, however. Between late October and early May, foods that needed refrigeration on East Fourth Street were kept out on the fire escape. The ice pail was empty and dry. I dragged it from under the icebox and watched while my mother filled it with huge scoops of sugar from Uncle Berel’s sack. She then turned to the pewter soup tureen. When it was full, my mother rose from her knees and wiped her hands on her apron, one of several she had made by tearing apart and re-sewing old Hecker’s flour sacks.

  “All right,” she said. “You take the ice pail, and we’ll start from the ground floor.”

  I picked up the ice pail, my mother lifted the tureen, and we started downstairs from our rooms on the fourth floor. The tenement in which we lived, at the corner of Lewis and Fourth Streets, was known as a double house: two six-story structures separated by a narrow court, one building facing the street, the other facing the court. On every floor of each house there were six sets of “rooms.” (The words “apartment” and “flat” did not cross my path until I received my first borrower’s card at the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library and I started to read novels.) The sets of rooms in both houses were all exactly alike: a bedroom and a front room separated by a kitchen, all three strung out in a straight line. There were no bathrooms, but ours was considered a very desirable building because it was “with toilets in the hall,” meaning one on each floor, serving only six families. Almost every other tenement on East Fourth Street was “with toilets in the yard,” meaning in the court that separated the front building from the rear building. How many families used each one I cannot remember, but I do remember that in our building there were thirty-six families in the “front house” and thirty-six in the “back house.” Until the day my mother received Uncle Berel’s present, I believe the only person who ever visited all seventy-two sets of rooms in our tenement on one day was Mr. Koptzin, the landlord. On the first of every month he showed up early in the morning, while my sister and I were still getting dressed for school, and went from door to door, collecting his rent and scribbling receipts that were then laid away in the bottoms of bureau drawers with as much care and reverence as citizenship papers and prayer clothes. It never occurred to me that knocking on seventy-two doors could be exhausting, probably because the notion of knocking on seventy-two doors had always been associated in my mind with the way Mr. Koptzin’s pockets grew fatter and fatter as he moved up the stairs and his collections increased. Checking accounts were unheard of on East Fourth Street. All transactions, from the purchase of a penny-pack of Three-X chewing gum to the payment of the month’s rent, were on a cash basis, and every family kept its cash where my mother kept hers: in a small, tightly rolled tube tucked into the top of one of her stockings. One of the stockings she was wearing, that is. Money was never left in a place that was not within immediate reach of the family member who was in charge of its finances. The rolled top of my mother’s stocking was known in our family as Mama’s Avenue B Branch of The Standard Bank. When Mr. Koptzin showed up on the first of the month, she stepped modestly behind the half-opened door and unpeeled the month’s rent. Mr. Koptzin never seemed tired when he accepted it. Probably he did not, while making his rounds, carry an ice pail full of white sugar. Nor did Mr. Koptzin say what my mother said when the woman on whose door she knocked opened it.

  “My crazy uncle from Connecticut,” my mother said, “he sent me a great big sack of white sugar. Even for a factory it’s too much. Who can use it all? Would you like some?”

  Every woman did the same thing. She looked suspicious. Every woman then said the same thing: “How much a pound?”

  “In the grocery business I’m not,” my mother said. “I got it for nothing, so I’m giving it away for nothing. Go bring something to put it in.”

  By the time my ice pail and my mother’s tureen were empty, we had worked our way up to the third floor of the front house of our seventy-two-family tenement. We went back to our rooms, refilled the ice pail and the tureen, and returned to our tour. I didn’t realize it was hard work, even though I was aware that I was getting tired, until I happened to notice my mother’s face. We were about halfway through the back house, after five refill trips to our own rooms, when she staggered slightly. This was most unusual. My mother was not a large woman, but she was strong. I had never seen her stagger. I looked at her in surprise and saw that she looked exhausted. This reminded me of the way I felt, so I said, “Ma, I’m tired.”

  “We have only two floors more,” she said. “I want everybody in the building should have some.”

  She may have been exhausted, but she sounded cheerful. It was obvious that she was having a good time. I suddenly realized that so was I. Thinking back on it, the reason seems obvious. Neither of us had ever been in a position to give away anything of value. The opportunity to do so, watching the faces in the open doors change from suspicion to incredulity to gratitude, was heady stuff. I think when we reached the top floor of the back house, and my mother knocked on the last door, she and I were both slightly drunk. The door opened and Mrs. Mishig looked out at us.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Who wants?” my mother said cheerily. “I’m giving!” She made her jubilant little speech about her crazy uncle in Connecticut, then said, “Go get a pot or a bag and you’ll have enough white sugar till General Pershing he makes the Kaiser drop dead.”

  “Get out of here,” Mrs. Mishig said in a cold, hard voice. “We don’t want nothing from people they’re draft dodgers running away from Furtz Luchel.”

  She slammed the door in our faces. I was, of course, stunned. For more than two hours, carrying our ice pail and pewter tureen through the front and back houses of our tenement, my mother and I had been received at door after door the way—I later gathered from reading the books to which my Hamilton Fish Park Branch borrower’s card gave me access—General Baden-Powell had been greeted when his relieving column entered Mafeking. I do not actually know how my mother felt about the response of Mrs. Mishig to our generous—I don’t think the word is inappropriate—offer because I was not really thinking about my mother. I was thinking about myself. I was not only shocked. I was confused. Not by the refusal of Mrs. Mishig to take some of the white sugar every other tenant we had visited had so eagerly accepted. I was confused by what she had said.

  Furtz Luchel was the way people on East Fourth Street pronounced Fort Slocum, a U.S. Army installation not far from Manhattan to which the men were sent when they were drafted. I knew as little about Fort Slocum as I knew about the war that had brought it into existence, but I knew the name meant something unpleasant, something people on our block tried to avoid, like visits to Dr. Jacobowitz, the dentist on Avenue C. I could not understand why the words had been hurled so angrily at me and my mother, and why Mrs. Mishig had slammed the door in our faces. Above all, I could not understand why anybody would refuse a gift of several pounds of white sugar. I asked my mother.

  “She’s crazy,” my mother said, but there was no conviction in her voice. My mother sounded the way she had for the last hour or so looked: exhausted. The fun of giving had vanished. “Let’s go back,” my mother said. “Forget that crazy woman with her crazy words.”

  I tried, but it was impossible. The savage contempt in the voice of Mrs. Mishig seemed to linger in my head, like an unpleasant echo, all day. I thought my mother would tell my father about it when he came home from work that night. The conversation in our house in the evening consisted of my father telling my mother what had happened during the day in the shop on Allen Street, and my mother telling him what had happened on East Fourth Street while he had been gone. Sometimes I was asked what had happened in Miss Kahn’s class, and my sister was asked what the members of
The Blue Birds for Happiness had been up to, but this was rare. Most of the talk across the kitchen table was between my father and mother, and by listening to it, I had learned most of what I knew, it seemed to me then, about everything. Their conversation was always more interesting, to me, at any rate, than mine or my sister’s. It always contained something surprising.

  Nothing, however, was more surprising than what my mother’s conversation that night did not contain. She explained the presence in our kitchen of the now three-quarters-empty sack of white sugar, and she described the tour through the tenement she and I had made with the ice pail and the pewter tureen. She did not mention Mrs. Mishig or what had happened when we knocked on that strange young woman’s door.

  Actually, there was nothing strange about Mrs. Mishig. She was a small woman with a disapproving look who clearly thought herself much too good for her neighbors, and apparently to prove it, rarely came out of the set of rooms, top floor back, in which she lived with her husband. He was the strange one.

  He was a very tall, broad-shouldered, powerful young man with a look of sinister elegance. This was probably due to his custom-made clothes and the fierce look with which he stared out at the world through hard, bright black eyes that seemed to have no pupils. Nobody else on East Fourth Street had a mustache like Mr. Mishig, either. It stood out from his upper lip in two distinctly separated sections, like a set of miniature bull’s horns painted black to match his eyes. But it was not the custom-made suits and the striking mustache that made the people of our block feel there was something strange about Mr. Mishig. What puzzled us was that nobody could figure out what he and his wife were doing on East Fourth Street.