“What do you know about this?” my mother said.
“What I heard in the bedroom,” my father said.
“This must be your father,” Miss Bongiorno said.
“Yes,” I said. In Yiddish I added, “Pa, this is my teacher, Miss Bongiorno.”
“I know,” he said. “I heard in the bedroom. Tell her I want to thank her for training my son so good that he won the contest tonight.”
I translated for Miss Bongiorno. She smiled, stood up, and held out her hand. She did not have to walk toward my father. He did not have to walk toward her. Our kitchen was very small. They made contact without moving their feet.
“It was a pleasure,” Miss Bongiorno said as they shook hands. “You have a brilliant son.”
My editorial sense told me that a bit of toning down in the translation would not have been amiss. But the praise of my classmates on the walk back from Washington Irving High School was still ringing in my ears. Or pelting at them. I wanted to hear some more. I translated literally.
“I am ashamed that I do not have the money to buy a suit for my brilliant son,” my father said. “If he could not go on in this contest and win again because he did not have the suit, I would never again be able to consider myself a father. I am grateful to you, therefore, for your offer. I accept, and I assure you I will pay back. I don’t know how, but I will. I thank you very much. You have returned to me my pride.”
Anybody who feels he can improve on a literal translation of this speech is welcome to try. Having done it once, on that night when I won the first round of The New York Times oratorical contest, I don’t ever want to go near it again. It hurt.
“Then we will consider the matter settled,” Miss Bongiorno said. “I will go over to the bank tomorrow during lunch hour to get the money and then give it to Benjamin.”
“Thank you,” my father said. “I will take him to buy the suit on Sunday.”
It was the only day on which clothes were purchased by the inhabitants of East Fourth Street. Buying a suit or a dress was a family enterprise of major dimensions not unlike the decision of a family of Forty-Niners to sell the farm in Pennsylvania, invest the proceeds in a Conestoga wagon, and head west toward Sutter’s Mill. There were stores on Avenue B and Avenue A that were open for business at night. Most men, however, did not come home from work before seven. By the time they had put away the evening meal, known as “sopper,” it was time to go to bed so that they could get up at five-thirty or earlier to get to the Allen Street sweatshops on time. And a man would no more think of going to buy a suit unaccompanied by his wife than a woman would even contemplate buying a dress without her husband at her side. On East Fourth Street, at that time, the male or female outer garment was the equivalent of the automobile in today’s TV commercial. The family that shopped together stayed together long enough to eliminate at least one reason for screaming fights: color, style, shape, and price had all been agreed upon before the combatants arrived at home and examined the purchase.
With all five weekdays eliminated, only the weekend remained. Or one half of it, anyway. Saturday, being the Sabbath, was out. This left only Sunday, but it was enough to buy a suit on Stanton Street. It was the Savile Row of the Lower East Side.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was the Standard Oil Company of the men’s retail clothing business south of Fourteenth Street. It certainly was my first experience with what the architects of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act must have meant by the word “monopoly.” Nobody on Stanton Street said you had to come there to buy a suit. You could go uptown. To Wanamaker’s, for example, on Eighth Street. To Siegel, Cooper on Eighteenth. To Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street, for God’s sake. Who was stopping you?
Well, to begin with, it wasn’t who. It was what. And what was stopping you, if you were my father, was the fact that to shop in Wanamaker’s you had to know how to talk English, which my father did not. To shop in Siegel, Cooper you had to pay what it said on the price tag, which was an impossibility for people like my father, who were incapable of purchasing a slice of lox or a spool of thread without “hondling,” the Yiddish word for the combination boxing match, vaudeville act, and exercise in advanced billingsgate that was as much a part of the act of purchase as the Preamble is a part of the Constitution. And to shop in Macy’s, which to the residents of East Fourth Street could have been located anywhere between Bering Strait and the Grand Caymans, you needed a visa. So it was Stanton Street all the way, and on the Sunday following my triumph at Washington Irving High School, that’s where my father and I went. On foot, of course.
As I look back on those days, it occurs to me that it was in the area of transportation that the civilization of East Fourth Street most closely resembled that of Rome in the Age of the Antonines.
There were no chariots, of course, but we did have the Avenue B trolley car, which was known as the Puvullyeh Line. The Yiddish word “puvullyeh” finds its nearest Romance language equivalent in the French doucement. In English I can think of no equivalent other than a slang expression, popular in my youth, that has vanished from our culture: Take it easy; you’ll last longer. The Avenue B trolley certainly took it easy. The cars operated on storage batteries which were never recharged until they ran out of juice. They rarely ran out of juice at convenient times or places.
As in Rome, therefore, so on East Fourth Street. Forward movement—whether by a legion setting out to pacify an unruly Thracian province or a father setting out to buy his son a suit on Stanton Street—was usually accomplished by hiking. And just as a Roman legion heading for truculent Thrace would not enter the rebellious country with trumpets blaring, so my father and I did not enter Stanton Street in a manner that might be described as attention-grabbing. We eased in gently, nervously, out of Avenue B, and turned south. It was like trying to ease gently, nervously into Niagara Falls.
The long street was lined on both sides with men’s clothing shops the way the Via Veneto is lined on both sides by prostitutes. I don’t suppose the phrase “cheek by jowl” has ever worried too much about its origins. If it ever should, and a prize were offered for the correct answer, I think I would walk away with the award by suggesting Stanton Street in 1924. It wasn’t merely that every inch of space on both sides of the street was filled by the windows of a Bernstein’s Men’s & Boys’ Clothing, Inc., or a Yanowitz’s Apparel Shop, Inc. It was as though every inch of space on both sides of the street was in endless contest, a battlefield the possession of which kept changing hands from minute to minute. The troops of Bernstein, victorious just a moment ago, now retreating under the onslaught of the armies of Yanowitz, who, even as they were planting the flag of triumph in the disputed terrain, were already being buffeted and driven back by the revivified Bernsteins. This impression of a see-sawing battle was caused by an institution then known as the “puller-in.” Every store had one.
The relation of a “puller-in” to a Yanowitz’s Apparel Shop, Inc., on Stanton Street was not unlike that of a barker to a carnival. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the shop door, and he pleaded, cajoled, sweet-talked, threatened, and ultimately seized the passer-by and dragged him into the store.
“What a good-looking boychick you got there! A regular shining doll! Mister, you haven’t got a son, you’ve got eppis but a real tzaddik!”
Even under the most congenial conditions the word “tzaddik” defies literal translation. And, of course, in the realm of commercial fantasy, where conditions are rarely congenial, semantic precision takes a beating. Nevertheless, I will try. As employed by the pullers-in who worked the sidewalks of Stanton Street in 1924 the word “tzaddik” meant:
“Words are inadequate to express my admiration and awe for the incredible boy, this glowing vision, who is clearly your son, because anybody can see you’re just as handsome as he is, this golden medal you have brought to Stanton Street this beautiful Sunday morning in the hope of finding a suit that will even remotely approach the sort of garment that this marvelous
young man should rightfully wear to his bar mitzvah ceremony, or perhaps merely to the synagogue for the High Holidays, or even maybe there’s a wedding in the family and you want him to look the way a boy like that should look, and what a stroke of luck it is for all of us that here at Yanowitz’s Apparel Shop we happen to have precisely the suit that will show the world how extraordinary this boy is, and if you don’t like it, which is ridiculous, because how can any man as brilliant as you are fail to like a suit so beautiful as this, we have a dozen other suits just as good and just as beautiful, did I say a dozen, what am I talking about, I must have lost my mind, carried away by the gleaming brilliance of this extraordinary boy, we have a hundred other suits, every one of them just as beautiful, even more beautiful, step in please and take a look.”
We didn’t exactly step in, because we were being dragged, my father and I, but we managed to stay on our feet and sort of stagger in. I forget how many stores we staggered into, and I forget in which one we finally made our purchase, because all the stores seemed alike, and the procedure we went through, or were put through, in each one was exactly the same as all the others.
Puller-in, having dragged us through door from street, addresses waiting salesman: “A suit for this handsome tzaddik.”
Shove. I stagger across store and land in the arms of salesman. My father staggers and manages to regain his balance a moment before crashing into salesman.
Puller-in, moving back out to street: “Don’t worry. You’re in good hands. Monty Geschwind is the best salesman on Stanton Street. The best and the most honest. Take good care of them, Monty. You have in your hands, Monty, two absolutely and completely personal friends of mine.”
He exits to street. Monty circles my father. Monty’s lips are pursed. His eyes are crinkled in thought. His thumb and forefinger are tugging at a chin for which in all fairness the word “receding” must give way to “nonexistent.” Monty speaks: “You’re like maybe let’s say a thirty-nine short. No?”
My father: “It’s not for me. It’s we’re here for a suit for my son.”
Monty Geschwind roars with laughter. “I see you’re not a man to be fooled with a joke,” he says. “Naturally it’s for your son. A good-looking man you are, nobody can deny that, but in your family, you lucky man, nobody has to go around asking which one is the tzaddik.”
Monty goes to rack. He brings down a suit made of material not unlike that used by the tailor who made the uniform worn by General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.
“Take off the sweater, take off,” Monty says.
“It’s for at night,” my father says. “Something like a little maybe darker, please.”
“Here, hold,” Monty says. He shoves the suit at my father and seizes the bottom of my sweater. He yanks it up my torso and over my head as though he is skinning a snake. Both my ears get caught in the neckband. I scream. Monty Geschwind roars with laughter.
“You got not only a tzaddik,” he says to my father. “You got a vitzler.”
Vitzler means joker. Anyway, it used to in 1924 on Stanton Street.
“Something like maybe a little darker,” my father says.
Monty Geschwind punches my pipestem arms into the gray jacket as though he were stuffing a couple of sausage casings and he fastens the buttons of the double-breasted wings. He wheels me to the triple mirror, shoves me in front of it, and steps back. I survey myself in the mirror. So does my father.
“Perfect,” says Monty Geschwind. “It was made for him.”
“Something darker,” my father says.
He says it several times. In several stores. In every one of which, my ears smarting from being peeled in and out of my sweater, I end up in something darker. Something that seems to have been cut, not with precision but with approximate accuracy, for a skinny, knock-kneed boy of eleven. Then comes the moment.
“How much?” my father says.
“A suit like this, who can say?” says Monty Geschwind. There is, or was, a Monty Geschwind in every men’s clothing store on Stanton Street. “How can a person set a price on something so perfect like this?” all the Monty Geschwinds of this world say at this moment to my father. “How much? Who knows how much?”
“If you don’t,” my father says, “who does?”
A meek man. Shy. Not given under ordinary circumstances to the tart riposte. But all my father’s ordinary circumstances were lived in the shadow of my mother. Here on Stanton Street nobody was peering over his shoulder. Here he had his moments. If he had been able to earn the money with which to buy for me an extensive wardrobe he might have had more such moments.
“So all right,” says Monty. “You ask me how much, I’ll tell you how much. Fourteen dollars.”
My father takes my hand. “Come,” he says. “We’ll go find a store that it’s not run by bloodsuckers.”
He leads me to the door. Fortunately, I have managed to skin back into my sweater. Monty races around and heads us off at the door. He spreads his arms wide from jamb to jamb, barring our way out to the street.
“Fourteen dollars for a piece of merchandise like that?” he screams. “And you call me a bloodsucker?”
“What else should I call you?” my father says.
“A fool,” says Monty. “A man who gives away to charity. That’s what you should call me for asking only fourteen dollars for a piece of merchandise like this.”
He darts to the rack, snatches up the suit, and dashes back to the door. My father has had ample time to open it. But he has not. So he is in a position to have the suit waved under his nose.
“Look!” Monty shouts. “Feel!”
“Not for fourteen dollars,” my father says.
He reaches around Monty for the doorknob. Monty, using his hip, shoves my father’s hand away.
“So how much is it worth to you?” he demands furiously. “A suit like this? Tell a person! How much?”
My father shrugs. He looks down at the suit as though he were examining a sample of sputum coughed up by a terminal patient in a tuberculosis ward.
“If I was a fool,” he says finally, “but a really big fool, I could hear myself say maybe ten dollars.”
The effect of my father’s words on Monty Geschwind is not unlike the effect of the iceberg on the Titanic. Monty’s knees buckle. His body sinks back against the door. His free hand comes up to his forehead. His eyes turn to heaven with a look of accusation that would have made St. Peter turn shamefacedly from the gate.
“For this,” Monty says bitterly, “I hired the best schneiders. For this I bought the best cloth. For this I chose buttons like they were diamonds. For this I made a suit only a tzaddik should wear. So his father should stand there in front of me and say ten dollars.”
“I won’t say it again,” my father says.
He reaches behind Monty. This time he seizes the doorknob. He pulls open the door. He drags me through it. Monty stares with disbelief. My father and I take a step down to the sidewalk. The puller-in comes rushing across the sidewalk.
“Where are you going?” he cries.
“To buy a suit from a man he doesn’t tear the skin off a customer’s back,” my father said.
The puller-in puts his hand on my father’s chest and speaks across his shoulder. “Monty,” he says. “What have you done to this marvelous man? This father of this wonderful tzaddik?”
“What have I done?” Monty says, his voice throbbing. “I made him a present, that’s what I did. I said here, take this suit it’s worth twenty dollars, here, take it for fourteen.”
The puller-in staggers back. “Monty!” His voice adds a dimension to the word “consternation” from which in all probability it has not yet recovered. “How can you do such a thing?” the puller-in says. “For a tzaddik like this you ask fourteen dollars?” He seizes my father by the shoulders. His voice drops to a seductive whisper. “Take it for thirteen,” he murmurs.
My father shrugs himself free from the grasp of the puller-in. “Maybe eleven,” my fath
er says.
“Eleven?”
It is Monty’s scream. And as screams go, he has set a mark to shoot at.
“Shut up,” the puller-in hisses. To my father he says, “Twelve, with both pairs of pants.”
“Even a tzaddik can wear only one pair at a time,” my father says.
Monty’s head reappears across my father’s shoulder. The veins stand out on his throat like blue hawsers.
“When he wears out the first pair,” Monty says, choking out the syllables in a voice that seems to be coming up out of a bed of bubbling lava, “the jacket will still be as new as the second pair!”
“He’ll be too big then to wear the second pair,” my father says.
Monty falls back against the black iron railing. His face disintegrates. Piteously he says to the puller-in, “What are we going to do with this man?”
“Give it to him for eleven dollars,” the puller-in says.
They did, and the next day I could hardly wait to report to Miss Bongiorno. There was no elocution class on Monday, so the waiting period lasted until the three-o’clock bell. When I came into her classroom Miss Bongiorno was seated behind her desk. A short, not exactly fat but very thick around the middle sort of man was standing in front of the desk. At least that was my first impression. I was surprised to find Miss Bongiorno was not alone, so I had stopped in the doorway. Neither she nor the man saw me. While I was wondering if I should back out of the room, and wondering why I should be wondering about such a thing, a number of impressions etched themselves into my mind.
The man, I saw, was not really standing in front of Miss Bongiorno’s desk. He was moving back and forth in front of it. Not exactly pacing. Sauntering, I would say now that I have learned the meaning of this word that I did not then know. As though he had just put away a rather large dinner and he was stretching his legs in a room of his own house or, as I learned years later in London, what the Cockney describes as “walkin’ around the ’ouses.” Then I saw that the man was holding a cigar. It was not lighted. In fact, it had never been lighted. There was no ash. Yet the fact that the man was holding a cigar was shocking.
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