Potatoes Are Cheaper

by Max Shulman

  Well, as I said, we all liked Rabbi Sopkin but here’s how Ma figured and I think she was right: why spend a whole fortune to impress A. M. Zimmerman and then drag in a comedy rabbi to cock it up?

  So Ma decided to call in Rabbi Pflaum of Temple Beth El which surprised hell out of me because Beth El was the Reform shul, and Ma has always had only one word for Reform Jews: goyim.

  Still and all, if class was what Ma was after, she couldn’t have done better than Rabbi Pflaum. Class he had plenty, right down to the white piping on his vest. And what a fancy talker! He talked even fancier than Mr. Harwood, that prick adviser of mine at the University. “Esteemed lady,” Rabbi Pflaum said to Ma, “I shall be happy to officiate, for is not marriage an honorable estate?”

  Ma just gave him a look; she didn’t understand a word.

  “What stipend have you in mind?” he said.

  This she understood. “Five dollars,” she said.

  “Surely you jest,” he said.

  “Take it or leave it,” Ma said.

  “Come, madam, haggling is not seemly,” he said. “I’ll take twenty dollars.”

  “Six,” said Ma.

  “Fifteen,” he said. “The ball is in your court.”

  “Seven-fifty,” she said.

  “Where will this wedding occur?” he said.

  “By the Lowry Hotel in the Grand Ballroom,” she said.

  “All right,” he said. “Ten dollars plus supper.”

  “You got it,” she said.

  “Supper for my wife too,” he said.

  “But no kids,” Ma said.

  “Just the oldest boy,” he said.

  “How old?” she said.

  “Fourteen,” he said.

  “Then knock off a dollar,” Ma said.

  “He’s small for his age,” he said.

  “Nine dollars,” said Ma. “There’ll be cigars too.”

  “Done and done,” said the rabbi.

  “Wear a yarmulka,” said Ma.

  Finally there was only one item left: target practice for Libbie. I’m talking about the bouquet brides always throw when they leave the wedding. To make sure it hit the right person here’s what Ma did:

  She stationed Libbie at one end of the living room and at the other end she set up the dressmaker’s dummy with Celeste’s pink taffeta formal on it. Then she gave Libbie a bouquet and made her practice till she was hitting the dummy ten times out of ten. Unless somebody else showed up in a pink taffeta formal, Celeste was a cinch.

  Chapter Eleven

  At last came Sunday, November the 8th, 1936, Libbie’s wedding day. I put on a big smile in honor of the occasion but I’ll be honest with you: inside I was dying, really dying, on account of this terrible tragedy that just happened about me and Bridget. I mean this was a new tragedy, on top of all the others I already told you.

  What happened was two days before Libbie’s wedding Bruce Albright limped up to me on campus and gave a smirk and said, “Hey, Morris, take a look at my sweater.”

  “Never mind the cute tricks,” I said. “If you want to hit me, hit me.”

  “I don’t want to hit you,” he said. “Just look at my sweater is all.”

  I looked. “So?” I said.

  “Notice something missing?” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “My frat pin,” he said. “Guess who’s wearing it?”

  “You’re lying!” I hollered, but I knew he wasn’t.

  “No, Morris,” he said. “Bridget is mine now, so what do you say we shake hands and show there’s no hard feelings?”

  “Shove it,” I said. I’m not known for good sportsmanship. I walked away from Bruce and went and wrote a note to Bridget and put it in her P.O. box. Here’s what I said:

  Dear Bridget,

  I love you and I always will. That’s why I think you should know that Bruce Albright screws chickens and his father is a famous abortionist.

  Sincerely

  Morris Katz

  So I got in a final zinger, but a fat lot of comfort that was. I was really in the crapper this time, no question. Here was Bridget wearing that putz’s pin, and there was Crip still laying in a cast in Rochester and God knew when he’d get loose, and I couldn’t find anyone else to write me a poem or any safe place to steal one. So what did that leave? Gloom and misery, that’s what.

  Still, this was no time to be kvetching around with a long face. It was Libbie’s wedding day after all, even if she was getting stuck with a wrongo like Jonathan so, as I say, I put on a big smile and squared my shoulders and tried not to look how I felt. And actually—you’ll excuse me but I got to say it—I did look pretty damn good. I’m not bragging; it was my cousin You-Know-Who’s tux that did it. This was the first time in my life I’d ever worn a tux and I learned a big lesson: If you want people to think you got the world by the ass, put on a tux. Somehow it makes you seem tall and high-class and what they call debonair, even when you’re five feet six with a hook nose and a broken heart.

  Anyhow here it was Libbie’s wedding day at last. The ceremony was set for 5 P.M. so we got to the Lowry Hotel around three-thirty and Ma lined us up in the lobby and gave everybody their assignment. Libbie was to go to the room where brides get dressed and wait for Ma to come and help her. Ma was to go to the Grand Ballroom and make sure everything was ready for the wedding. I was to go along with Ma in case it was necessary to read something in English. (“I forgot my glasses,” Ma said.) And Pa, since he had nothing else to do, was to look for the hotel’s employment office and ask if maybe they were hiring some painters. “And don’t get lost,” Ma told Pa because he got such a tendency, especially when the building is higher than one story.

  So Ma clapped her hands and we all went where she she said. I walked with Ma into the Grand Ballroom which looked to me in great shape. Everything was set up for the wedding—chairs, tables, bandstand, bar, and buffet. And also the chupah which is a silk canopy on four poles that Jews get married under. Over near the doorway the manager of the hotel, a bald head named Quistholm, was supervising some flunkeys who were putting on the finishing touches.

  “Nu, Quistholm?” said Ma. “Still potchking around?”

  “We are just finishing, madam,” said Quistholm, looking at Ma like he wanted to bite her in the throat. He’d been doing business with her for the last three weeks so naturally he hated her. “Come along, men,” he said to the flunkeys.

  “Not so fast, Oscar of the Waldorf,” said Ma, grabbing him by the carnation. “This is how you fix up a room?”

  Then she had him move a few hundred things around, especially if they were heavy. It took forty minutes before she ran out of ideas.

  “Will this at long last be all?” said Quistholm. I don’t know how he could talk with his mouth so tight together.

  “Go,” said Ma. “I’ll rearrange the flowers myself.”

  So Quistholm walked out muttering old Norse curses and Ma rearranged the flowers. Next she walked over to the bandstand where Ralph Rifkin and his Rhythm Ramblers, all of them dressed in green jackets and gold pants except Rifkin who was dressed in a gold jacket and green pants, were unpacking their instruments.

  “Nu, Rifkin?” said Ma.

  Rifkin just gave a sigh. He wasn’t any happier to see her than Quistholm. Neither were the Rhythm Ramblers.

  “You didn’t forget what I told you?” said Ma.

  “No, Mrs. Katz,” said Rifkin. “For the fast numbers we play ‘Hava Nagilah.’ For the slow numbers we play ‘A Brivelleh de Mammeh.’”

  “You got it,” said Ma.

  “Please, Mrs. Katz,” he said, almost crying, “couldn’t we throw in just a little Irving Berlin? He’s Jewish.”

  “Who ever heard of him?” said Ma. “You’ll play like I said.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Katz,” he said. I never saw anybody look so unhappy in a gold jacket.

  “And be sure you all got handkerchiefs,” said Ma. “You sweat pretty good.”

  Next she we
nt over to the chupah to see Rabbi Pflaum. For him she had only one question: “You remember your lines?”

  “See here, my good woman,” he said, getting red, but Ma didn’t stop to listen. “I’ll go dress Libbie now,” she said to me. “You find Pa. He’s lost.”

  She was right. He’d made a wrong turn somewheres and ended up at a dinner-dance of the German-American Bund. Naturally he was too scared to ask anyone how to get out so he just crouched against the wall with a stein of beer in front of his face. I wasn’t too anxious to go inside myself, but I managed to catch Pa’s eyes from the doorway and he snuck out and followed me back to the Grand Ballroom. Just in time too because the first guests were arriving: my Uncle Benny and Aunt Esther and along with them, the crazy old grandmothers, Nutty Nettie and Little Gittel.

  Now, I’m sure every family got a crazy old grandmother or two stashed away somewheres, but what made Nettie and Gittel a little different was nobody knew for sure whose grandmothers they were. We knew they belonged to somebody in our family, that much we agreed, but who? There was no use trying to ask the old ladies because they were both way over a hundred years old, some said a hundred and fifty, and they’d been bughouse for as long as anyone could remember. So the family argued back and forth and finally came to the conclusion that the best evidence pointed at Uncle Benny and Aunt Esther, so that’s who Nettie and Gittel had been living with since 1920.

  From the beginning Uncle Benny and Aunt Esther kept screaming it was all a horrible mistake, they weren’t even related to the old ladies, but naturally everybody turned a deaf ear. Who wanted to get stuck with Nettie and Gittel? Believe me, they were more trouble than a pair of otters. They weren’t like your average old nutsy person who just lays around the house and maybe drools a little. No, these two were goers. That’s all they wanted—go, go, go, every minute. It didn’t matter where: a wedding, a funeral, a trip to the butcher shop; any place you took them they’d sing and dance and holler and have a perfectly wonderful time.

  The trouble came when you tried to take them home. I don’t mean they’d cry or throw tantrums; that wasn’t their style. What they’d do is grab a hold of something solid like a radiator or a doorjamb and you’d need at least four strong men to pry them loose.

  And when you finally did get them home, all they could think of was escaping. Their favorite way was hitching trucks, which wasn’t so bad if it was a local truck because generally the driver would find them when he finished his route and he’d bring them home by nightfall. But God knew how long it might take to get them back when they managed to grab onto a long hauler. In fact, that’s what finally pushed Aunt Esther to the end of her rope, the day last August when the old ladies hopped a moving van to Winnipeg. “Okay, that does it,” said Aunt Esther when the Mounties brought Nettie and Gittel home, and right there and then she crawled into her bed and announced she was going to lay there and die unless the family took the old ladies off her hands.

  Well, Ma called a meeting right away because Aunt Esther was a real hardhead and when she said she was going to die, that’s exactly what she was going to do, no question. So the family met and came to a decision: they would put Nettie and Gittel into the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm.

  This, of course, had been suggested many times before but it had never gotten off the ground because it would cost $200 to stick Nettie and Gittel in the Home and nobody wanted to kitty up their share of the money, especially since they all claimed not to be related. But now with Aunt Esther’s ultimatum, the family saw they couldn’t keep screwing around so they finally agreed to chip in, share and share alike.

  So they deposited $200 at the Home and Nettie and Gittel got put on the official waiting list. As soon as a couple beds opened up, they’d be admitted. Nobody knew exactly when that would be, maybe a month, maybe six months, because the waiting list was long and the oldies at the Home weren’t cashing in nearly as fast as we hoped. Still, for the first time since 1920 Uncle Benny and Aunt Esther finally knew that sooner or later they were going to crawl out from under, and believe me, it was one hell of a blessing.

  So anyhow here they were, Nutty Nettie and Little Gittel, in the Grand Ballroom of the Lowry Hotel, neither of them higher than my waist, both dressed in kerchiefs and black dresses that touched the floor, the same dresses they always wore even when they were robbing birds’ nests, and they grabbed me each one by a lapel and they looked up at me and grinned and giggled and batted their eyes.

  “Shaner, shaner, shaner boychik,” said Nettie to me. “You should live and be healthy. Here’s for you a fountain pen.”

  “Thank you, Grandma Nettie,” I said, taking the pen. If she thought it was my bar mitzvah, so what?

  “You got maybe a cookie?” said Gittel.

  “There’ll be lots of cookies later, Grandma Gittel,” I said. “Ice cream too.”

  “God bless you, dolly,” said Gittel. “Let’s dance.”

  “After while, I promise,” I said.

  “Look what a pretty person,” said Nettie, pointing at Ralph Rifkin. “Come, we’ll give him a few kisses.”

  And off they rushed to the bandstand.

  “Your fountain pen?” I said to Uncle Benny.

  “Whose else?” he said, taking it back.

  “Don’t touch those drums, you old bats,” hollered Aunt Esther and went running after Nettie and Gittel. So did Uncle Benny.

  Now a lots of other guests started showing up but Ma came back from dressing Libbie and took over the job of greeting. Pa and I had other jobs. Me being best man, I had to escort Jonathan to the chupah and Pa, being father of the bride, had to escort Libbie.

  So Pa and I left the Grand Ballroom and went to the dressing rooms where Libbie and Jonathan were. I looked in on Libbie for a minute to see if she had fainted again. She’d been doing it about once every half an hour since morning. Sure enough, there she was passed out cold so I waved her bouquet under her nose like Ma told me. Ma had sprinkled a good stiff dose of ammonia on the flowers.

  Just then Celeste Zimmerman, the maid of honor, came walking in with the pink taffeta formal. “Hi, there,” I said.

  Her eyes popped wide open when she saw me. “Why, Morris,” she hollered, “you look beautiful!”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s the tux.”

  “It certainly makes a terrific improvement,” she said.

  “Yes, don’t it?” I said.

  “I can hardly wait to get my hands on you,” she said. “How soon will this dumb wedding be over?”

  “Not too late,” I said.

  “I hope not,” she said. “You look beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Where am I?” said Libbie, coming to.

  “Hi, Lib,” I said. “How do you feel?”

  “Oh, Morris, I’m so happy!” she said and passed out again.

  “Here, Pa, keep this under her nose,” I said and gave him the bouquet. “Well, I’ll see you folks later,” I said and went to Jonathan’s dressing room.

  He was in a tux too and he looked even greater than I did. He sat in a chair tilted against the wall, pitching cards into a hat across the room. And not missing either. “Hi, kid,” he said, giving me a smile. “How they hanging?

  “For a bridegroom you don’t seem very nervous,” I said. “Or maybe you’ve done this a few times already?”

  “Oh, Morris, Morris,” he said, shaking his head, “will you ever learn to trust me?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “We live a long time in my family. Take Nettie and Gittel.”

  “Here’s the ring, you prick,” he said, handing me a gold wedding band full of shiny chips that might even have been diamonds. “Don’t lose it.”

  “Nice ring,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I cut off a lady’s finger in a streetcar,” he said.

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “Nu, how’s about a little pinochle while we wait?” he said, taking the cards out of the hat.

  �
��If I can deal,” I said.

  “Oh, Morris, Morris,” he said, shaking his head again, but he let me deal. He won anyhow.

  At five o’clock we heard the orchestra start “Here Comes the Bride” which was our cue, so Jonathan and I went into the side door of the Grand Ballroom and got under the chupah with Rabbi Pflaum and faced the audience. There was an aisle leading from the chupah to the main entrance of the ballroom and on both sides of the aisle sat the wedding guests, at least a hundred and fifty people anyhow, of who I knew maybe 10 per cent. The rest were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other strangers Ma had invited to give a little more class to the wedding.

  So they sat with their heads turned backwards, looking up the aisle for the bride to appear, and Ralph Rifkin kept playing “Here Comes the Bride” and by and by the procession started. First, Celeste, the maid of honor, came marching down the aisle. There were a few laughs but mostly everyone was quiet. Then came Libbie, clutching Pa’s arm. I don’t know what was whiter, Libbie or her dress, but she kept sniffing her bouquet and she made it to the chupah. Behind Libbie, holding the train of her dress, was my eight-year-old cousin Evelyn, a terrible little shit who won the Jewish Shirley Temple contest last year and now she couldn’t stop twinkling and tossing her curls.

  Anyhow Libbie got to the chupah and switched from Pa’s arm to Jonathan’s which was a good thing because Pa was about to pass out himself. Then we all turned around and faced Rabbi Pflaum and the ceremony began.

  I’d say the ceremony went very nicely except for a couple minor disturbances from the audience. One came from Nettie and Gittel naturally. The poor old things got a little mixed up about what was happening, but they could see it was a celebration of some kind so they picked the happiest song they could think of—“Jingle Bells”—and sang it all through the service. I mean loud. The other disturbance was Mrs. Zimmerman, Celeste’s mother, who took a look at Celeste and me standing together under the chupah and busted out crying. And it wasn’t the kind of crying people usually do at a wedding; it was more like a dog that just lost a beloved master. Mr. Zimmerman kept giving her an elbow in the ribs but that only made things worse because the elbow beating against her corset sounded like a tom-tom.