Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  “Now he’s going to say watch the steps,” my mother said in Yiddish.

  “What did she say?” the young man said.

  “What did he say?” my mother said.

  “He said what did you say,” I said in Yiddish.

  “Don’t tell him,” my mother said.

  “You heard me, kid,” the young man said. There was no mistaking the threat in his voice. “What did she say?”

  “She said was I okay,” I said.

  “She sure worries a lot about you,” he said.

  “She has to,” I said. “I’m the only one in the family talks English.”

  “Well, watch the steps,” the young man said.

  They were worth watching. They looked like the floor of the toilet in the American Movie Theatre on Third Street. Black and white marble tile. At the top of the stairs the young man shoved the flashlight into his pocket and opened a door. He held it wide for me and my mother and, as we entered, yelled across our heads, “Hey, Pa!”

  In through a door at the other side of the room came a tall, heavy man with almost white hair. He was yawning and rubbing his eyes with one hand. In the other he carried a steaming white kettle from which the enamel was chipped here and there like small blue bruises. He wore carpet slippers and a quilted bathrobe, both not unlike my father’s, but newer. My father never bought anything new. Everything he owned he had already owned the day I was born. The heavy man needed a shave. So did the young man, but it wasn’t this similarity that made me realize why, when he opened the street door, the young man had looked familiar. It was the way he had yelled, “Hey, Pa!” Alone, he had been a tough-looking wise guy in an uptown suit. In the same room with his father, he became part of a team. They looked like all the Italians who lived on Ninth Street.

  “Look who’s here,” the young man said.

  The old man looked, then said, “Who’s the kid?”

  “Her son,” the young man said.

  “Oh, Jesus,” the old man said. “That means she wants to talk.”

  “I told you last year you better learn Yiddish,” the young man said. “You want me to get her out of here?”

  “No, no,” the old man said. He sounded tired but not unfriendly. “She’s the only one we got on Fourth Street.”

  “We got that other one,” the young man said. “You know. The fat Polack with the hair.”

  “Yeah, but she don’t go no further east than Avenue B,” the old man said. “I’ll talk.”

  “You want me to wait?” the young man said.

  The old man said to me, “Ask your mother, kid, ask her if she wants to talk to me alone, or is it okay my son hears?”

  I translated for my mother.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  “My mother doesn’t care,” I said.

  “Maybe then you better stay,” the old man said.

  “Okay,” the young man said.

  He pulled out the four chairs that surrounded a table in the middle of the room. He did it slowly, with great care, as though he were one of those butlers in the movies preparing the places for a conference of diplomats.

  “Sit, please,” the old man said.

  My mother and the old man sat down facing each other. He set the steaming kettle in front of him and dipped down toward the spout. As I took the chair on my mother’s left, and the young man took the chair on her right, the old man pulled a thick towel from around his neck and put it over his head to form a hood.

  “Jesus,” the young man said. “I never realized before, Pop, she’s pretty good.”

  “Shut up,” his father said, sucking in gulps of steam from the kettle spout. “The kid.”

  The young man took his eyes from my mother and said, “Yeah, I forgot.”

  “People who forget,” the old man said, “they go early.”

  “I’m sorry, Pop.”

  The old man said to me, “What are you looking at, kid?”

  I was looking at the kettle and the towel hood from under which he was speaking, but I thought my staring had annoyed him, so I said, “That thing.”

  I pointed to a huge white enamel box against the wall behind him. On top of the box a flywheel as big around as a basketball was humming. The wheel was attached by a leather strap to a motor on the floor as big as an automobile tire. The sounds from the motor were louder and more irregular than the smooth hum from the flywheel.

  “It’s a refrigerator,” the old man said. “Give the kid a drink.”

  The young man stood up, went to the white enamel box, and with a grand double-handed gesture, opened the two doors the way Mr. Seaman, the undertaker on Avenue C, opened the back of his hearse. The inside of the box was lined with wire shelves. They were loaded with bottles and the kinds of strangely shaped and oddly packaged foods that hung in the windows of the Italian groceries on Ninth Street. The young man lifted out a dark bottle. He slammed the white enamel doors shut. He pulled the cork from the bottle by hooking it into and twisting it out of a gadget fastened to the wall near the refrigerator. He took three glasses from a cupboard. He emptied the contents of the bottle into them. He did all this like a juggler. No pause between steps. I had the feeling he thought of us as an audience. He slipped the empty bottle into a wooden box between the cupboard and the refrigerator. He brought the glasses to the table. He set them before me, my mother and himself. He sat down. I wondered if we should applaud.

  “What is it?” my mother said.

  The old man clearly understood the Yiddish question. He did not ask for a translation. He pulled the bathrobe up around his neck, hunched himself more deeply into the towel hood, and said to me, “Tell her not to worry. It’s Moxie.”

  Go explain Moxie to my mother. A woman who had never put anything on her table except milk and sink water.

  “Ma,” I said, “it’s like milk or sink water.”

  “Milk is white,” my mother said. “Sink water is no color.”

  The old man obviously sensed from the tone of my mother’s voice that she had no confidence in the refreshment his son had served us.

  “Tell her to take a taste,” he said to me. He took a deep, heaving, sucking inhalation of steam from the kettle spout. In a choked voice he said again, “Tell her to take a taste.”

  I told my mother to take a taste. Cautiously she lifted her glass and took a sip. Her opinion was obvious from the way she set down the glass. I did not bother to translate her one-word comment: “Pishachgst!”

  “Well, anyway, all right,” the old man said. He sounded as though he were talking underwater. “I’ve got this thing in my chest,” he bubbled. “The doctor says I should stay in bed. Tell her to say what she has to say. I have to get back in bed.”

  He coughed into his cupped hands while I translated for my mother.

  She said, “Ask him what it is with the Shumansky wedding.”

  I did as I was told. The old man nodded and rubbed his eyes as he wiped his cough-spattered palms on the bathrobe.

  “I know,” he said. Again tired. But also again friendly. “It’s a big order,” he said, sucking in steam. “Eighteen quarts. My sons and I, we must fill the order direct ourselves.”

  “Why?” my mother said.

  The old man sighed. A wheeze, really. It started him coughing again. He clutched the towel over his head with both hands. I had the feeling my mother was annoying but not surprising him. It was as though, in spite of his illness, he had been induced to go to the theater, perhaps because his family had said getting out of the house would do him good, and when he got to the play he found he knew all the jokes before the entertainers uttered them.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “Small orders, a bottle here, a bottle there, fine. This you can handle. And you’ve handled it for us very good. But the Shumansky wedding. Eighteen bottles. For a woman it’s too much.”

  “Why?” my mother said again.

  “Why?” the old man said. “Think why. It’s eighteen bottles. Just to carry alone, it’s im
possible for a woman.”

  “I have a son,” my mother said.

  The old man parted the flaps of the towel to look at me. I had a feeling I should stand up and flex my biceps. Or push out my arms to show the spread I could achieve. He was looking at me as though he had just become aware of my presence. I found this embarrassing. I had been talking my head off, translating like crazy. I thought he had grown accustomed to my presence. All of a sudden I felt like an intruder.

  “He’s a kid,” the old man said finally. He paused to inhale a large gulp of steam. “I can’t take a chance,” he said. “He’s a nice boy. I can tell. I know nice boys. I’m glad you got one. But I can’t take a chance on a kid. He—” The old man’s voice stopped. His chest went on working. As he caught the explosions of phlegm in his palms, he huddled deeper into the towel hood and examined me more closely. Finally, on a series of low gasps, he said, “What’s that he’s wearing?”

  “My scout uniform,” I said. “I’m senior patrol leader of Troop 244 in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House.”

  “Jesus,” the old man said. He turned to his son. “Like the cops?”

  “No, no, no,” said the young man. “It’s like—oh, Christ.” He scowled at the glass of Moxie on the table in front of him, then said, “Like the Boys’ Club? On Avenue A and Tenth?”

  “The Hannah H. Lichtenstein House,” I said, “is on Avenue B and Ninth.”

  “I know, I know,” the young man said irritably. “I’m just trying to explain.” He turned back to his father. “It’s like to keep them off the street, Pop. They play games. They make bandages. They tie knots. It has nothing to do with the cops.”

  “You sure?” the old man wheezed.

  “Positive,” the young man said. “You want more hot water, Pop?”

  The old man shook his head. He reached out and patted my hair. He did it as though he was testing it for springiness. It was springy enough. In those days I grew a skullcap of tight little kinky black curls.

  “A nice boy,” the old man said. “He’s working yet?”

  I translated as though he were talking about Chink Alberg or Hot Cakes Rabinowitz.

  “After school,” my mother said. “In Lebenbaum’s candy store on Avenue C.”

  “Very nice,” the old man said. “Very good. How old?”

  “Fourteen,” my mother said.

  “Good,” the old man said. “Very good. All of mine, the whole four, I started them the same age. It makes them understand.”

  “He understands,” my mother said.

  “What?” the old man said.

  “He understands it’s a family,” my mother said. “Everybody has to help. If I tell him to carry, he’ll carry.”

  “He’s carried before?” the old man said.

  “No,” my mother said. “Up to now I didn’t need help. One bottle, two, anybody can carry. But the Shumansky wedding, eighteen bottles, he’ll help me.”

  The old man was taken by a yawn. His body shook. The shaking ended in a belch.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s this thing in my chest. Like a load of cement. I have to go to bed. Listen. About the Shumansky wedding, I’m sorry. We’ll fill the order ourselves. Other things, you can do like always. All right?”

  Before I finished translating, my mother stood up.

  “No,” she said.

  “What?” the old man said.

  Not a question. Another explosion.

  “She said no, Pop,” his son said.

  “You shut up,” my mother said to the young man. “To talk for me, I brought my own son.” She shoved my shoulder. “Tell him, the stupid idiot.”

  Something told me something else: it was wiser not to tell this old man what my mother had said.

  “My mother says,” I said to the young man, “you should she says please let me do the saying of what she says.”

  “Jesus, all right,” the old man said. “But what’s there to say?”

  I translated with nervous care. The low hum from the flywheel on top of the refrigerator, and the louder noise from the motor on the floor beside it, suddenly seemed to be filling the room like the raging waters in the picture of the Johnstown Flood that hung on the wall of Mr. McLaughlin’s office in P.S. 188.

  “There’s this to say, Mr. Imberotti,” my mother said. The name came as a relief. I had not realized until now that I was troubled by the gap between what it said on the window downstairs and the fact that this father and son looked like all the Italians on Ninth Street. Italians were not called Meister. Imberotti was more like it. “A bottle for a bar mitzvah,” my mother said, “two bottles for the schul on Purim, for this I’m good enough. But for the Shumansky wedding, because it’s eighteen bottles, where a person could make herself a dollar, for this I’m not good enough.”

  The old man waited patiently for my translation, then said, “That’s not the way to look at it.”

  “I work for you to put bread on the table for my husband and son,” my mother said. “Now there comes a piece of cake, so you take it away from me. How should I look at it, Mr. Imberotti?”

  “Like this,” the old man said. “You’re a person we like. You’re a person we trust. For three years we’ve worked together like friends. Why should we stop being friends?”

  “We shouldn’t,” my mother said. “To stay friends, all you have to do is let me take care of the Shumansky wedding. I’m entitled to it.”

  The old man shook his head sadly. The towel flapped. Mr. Imberotti caught the ends. “I can’t,” he said. “The order is too big.”

  “You mean the profit is too big,” my mother said.

  “Listen, Pop,” the young man said. “This broad is getting off base.”

  I didn’t translate that. I pretended I hadn’t heard it. I was beginning to worry.

  “No, she has a right,” the old man said. “But her right doesn’t change that she’s wrong.” He patted my head again. “Tell that to your mother.”

  I did, and my mother did a surprising thing. She also patted my head. Exactly the way the old man had patted it.

  “It’s time to go,” she said.

  I stood up and came to her side.

  “You’re angry?” the old man said.

  “No,” my mother said. “I’m going home to bake you a lekach.”

  “Will you still be working for us?” the old man said.

  “You’ll find out,” my mother said.

  She took my hand and led me toward the door.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” the old man said.

  My mother gave him the kind of look I’d seen her give my father every day of my life, but she didn’t give him the dialogue that usually followed that look.

  The old man came up out of his chair on an explosion of wheezing. “What are you going to do?” he gasped.

  “You’ll find out, you Italian bastard,” my mother said.

  I didn’t translate that, either.

  “Help them get out,” Mr. Imberotti said to his son.

  His voice rasped. I wasn’t surprised. The word “bastard” needs no translation. Its meaning wallops around for all to understand in the sounds that send it out into the world. What little I could see of the old man’s face through the towel hood indicated he understood. The sounds he made in reply made my stomach churn. My mother, I knew, had made a mistake.

  “Mario,” the old man said, and that’s all he did say before the coughing fit hit him. But at least I had finally learned the name of the young man in the Rogers Peet suit. “Mario,” the old man said again, and before the coughing fit floored him, Mr. Imberotti managed to get this much out to his son: “We got a bad one on our hands, Mario.”

  3

  PERHAPS THEY HAD. I say perhaps because the words had no precise meaning for me. I’d never thought of my mother as a bad one. Perhaps she even was a bad one, whatever the words meant to Mr. Imberotti. Whoever he was. But none of it held my attention for very long. I had other things on my mind. More precisely, one
thing: what had happened in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House the night before.

  Catastrophe. It was for me a totally new experience. My first earthquake, so to speak. I didn’t know what to think about it, so I didn’t think. I stewed. I don’t recall that I had ever until then had a sleepless night. Perhaps that one wasn’t actually sleepless. But I did an awful lot of tossing and turning. In the morning, when I left the house for school, I felt rotten. As though the earthquake had ended but the threat remained. The rumbling underfoot had stopped. Masonry and shattered glass had ceased falling. But what was I going to do about the fires crackling all around me? What was I going to say to George Weitz and Chink Alberg and the others?

  Luckily, the first one to whom I had to say anything was Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. I met him near the Avenue C corner as he came out of his tenement with his schoolbooks.

  “Hey,” he said, “you missed it.”

  I had a sudden vision of a lynching party setting out to find me and coming back empty-handed. Should I sigh with relief? Turn and run? Or brazen it out?

  “Missed what?” I said.

  “We won,” Hot Cakes said.

  I didn’t believe him, of course. But it seemed sensible at the moment not to say so. Calling Hot Cakes a liar could lead to only one thing: a denunciation for the role I had played in the troop’s defeat. Besides, Hot Cakes was not a wiseguy like George Weitz. Hot Cakes was a quiet kid with thick glasses and no sense of humor. He never laughed unless he was tickled. Hot Cakes was what we then called a yoineh. Today the nearest equivalent to a yoineh is a square. I did not think then, and I do not feel now, that either word is pejorative. It is a label. Hot Cakes did not make jokes. They were made about him. Mainly because his real name was Ira. The name vanished from East Fourth Street the day his mother, on her way out to the Avenue C pushcart market, left her son doing his homework at the kitchen table with instructions to keep an eye on two honey cakes Mrs. Rabinowitz had going in the oven. Ira forgot his mother’s instructions. The honey cakes burned to a couple of inedible crisps. And to the kids of our block, Ira Rabinowitz became Hot Cakes Rabinowitz.