A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  The thing about these Saturday night meals—sweet and sour tzimis, tongue sandwiches on dark pumpernickel, kasha mit varnishkes, schmaltz herring, “book steak,” matza brie—was that my presence seemed not in the slightest to inhibit the women. Either they felt confident a twelve-year-old didn’t catch the double entendres or, on this their special evening, they simply didn’t give a damn.

  Entering my teens, I was catching on to something the other Rockets probably grasped from the cradle as part of west side ecology: prostitution was a workingwoman’s second job. I felt stupid not having realized that part-time hookerdom was apparently taken for granted by everyone but me. Putting the puzzle together from the hints dropped at Carl’s restaurant, I deduced that most local whores did it mainly on a barter basis, that is, goods, not cash, for services. This was distinct from the full-time professional prostitutes in established brothels who had their own peculiar arrangements with the local police which, like all systems, occasionally broke down. We Howland school kids knew all about that, because in the middle of one school day, Mr. Kelly, the math teacher, was busted in a vice raid probably triggered by a missed payment to the police watch commander. In full view of us at recess he was led out, sheepishly, in a file of Johns to the paddy wagon, a subject of adolescent jokes but not of community censure. And he kept his teaching job.

  The raid was exceptional because if the routine was working correctly nobody messed with cribs which operated under the protection of Capone’s west side Cicero mob composed of marquee names like Johnny Torrio, Frank Nitti, Machine Gun McGurn, Greasy Thumb Guzik, Schemer Drucci, and Hymie Weiss, who were as recognizable to us as Babe Ruth and Clark Gable. As familiar, say, as the legend of the Jewish mobster “Nails” Morton, who, adopting the social manners of the city’s WASP aristocracy, took up horsemanship but was killed when his mount threw him on the bridle path, causing his “boys” the next day to go to the stable and assassinate the offending horse in classic gangland style.

  Sex and the City

  Love, oh love, oh careless love

  You worried my mother until she died

  You caused my father to lose his mind….

  —old blues song

  The Riga-Baltic Progressive Ladies Society was rooted in a sisterhood of pride, but also of shame. In some measure, Jennie and her ladies accepted that each had done something less than honorable in losing her man, and that life was forcing them to walk alone, each to make her her own arrangements for pleasure and survival.

  I looked around the table at Carl’s Restaurant with the eyes of an adolescent whose idea of sexual beauty was Rita Hayworth and B-movie cheesecake queens, most of them slim and blond. Was it even remotely possible to a twelve-year-old that the Riga-Baltic’s high-busted low-hemlined stoutish women with their corsets and girdles were in the same league as Hollywood starlets? Was it conceivable that they ever “did it,” that is, opened their legs for a bunch of radishes? Absurd. Even entertaining the thought that women my mother’s age had sex, or that men found them available and attractive, was so foreign as to be almost un-American.

  Yet once I heard the rumors, I couldn’t take my eyes off these Baltic ladies.

  Jennie enforced the same rule at Riga-Baltic meetings as for herself and me: no crying, no outward expression of inner anguish. Grief, sorrow, or anger was impermissible past a certain point; after that it was self-indulgent. Self-pity left you weak and victimized; self-control was the ultimate—perhaps the only—virtue. An example: a few weeks after Aviva Zaretsky’s husband died, she began without preliminaries to weep in the middle of the gedempte fleesh at Carl’s, great pendulous tears soundlessly splashing down her rouged cheeks, making a sad clown effect. The other women quietly put down their forks and knives to look to Jennie for guidance, and when Mrs. Zaretsky’s tears continued to roll without letup, Jennie, in a voice like God’s, split through the uncomfortable silence, “Sadie!” Her tone implied, You will not break now after all you’ve been through, you will not let yourself down, you will not make a spectacle of yourself. Immediately Mrs. Z’s hand darted at her eyes with a lace-bordered hankie and she made a successful effort to pull herself together, furtively glancing at the Baltic Ladies in apology that she had, even for a moment, opened the floodgate of heartache.

  Ma did her job as emotional policeman perhaps too well. When Joe Franklin expresses his feelings, by sobbing or laughing too loudly, despite myself I sometimes command him, “Tone it down, kid.” And he gives me this look that says, What’s wrong with you, Dad?

  Well, what is?

  Dark, Spanish-looking Aviva Zaretsky was—I realize now—a very attractive woman. She was in her mid-forties, with a high smooth forehead, brown, oval, almost Egyptian eyes, jet-black hair tied tightly in a bun, and a body that, unlike Jennie’s, did not look as if she wore too many girdles and corsets. Until her husband Eddie fell dead on a beach outing, she had been the Riga-Baltic lady most full of pure fun and off-color jokes. She and my mother were bonded also by self interest; Aviva’s apartment over a mom-and-pop pickle factory on the same block as our store had its own private bathroom with a full-size bathtub which she let me use from time to time, an unparalleled luxury for someone used to squatting in a fifteen-gallon galvanized zinc tub. So, on hot summer days, with Aviva Zaretsky’s permission, I’d tuck my towel and toy wooden boat under my arm and scamper upstairs to her place while she was out, let myself in without a key, and loll about in the bathwater, finger-flipping my boat around the tub pretending I was the admiral of the USS Dreadnought.

  One glorious afternoon, alone in the Zaretsky’s tub, I let the boat nudge my penis, which sprang erect. As Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes might say, “Hmmm, and what do we have here?” Wow, I had invented something. Every week from then on I looked forward to getting into the tub for my boat hard-on. Edison didn’t stop with the incandescent light, and soon I devised a wind sail out of a toy balloon for my penis battleship. If I blew up the balloon and tied it with a string to the mast with a certain twist, the boat moved by itself as the air slowly whooshed out of the balloon. Science proceeds by accidents, and on a fateful day, as auspicious for me as Samuel F.B. Morse’s first telegraph message (“What hath God wrought?”), the balloon-powered boat brushed against my penis, which exploded into a flower of sperm. My first ejaculation. The sheer awfulness and grandeur of its scattered milky-white tentacles in the dirty water stunned me, and I lay back and imagined Marcella Goldberg’s breasts touching my cock and poff! it went off again—and again. I was dying, exhausted, pale, and sapped, but couldn’t stop. Scared, full of dread and joy, I had embarked on a lifelong sex trip.

  Then, like the poor schmuck in David’s painting, “The Death of Marat,” I got trapped in the bathtub.

  It happened like this: I was coming to a climax, spouting like a sperm whale, when I heard a noise. I couldn’t stop exploding but hastily covered up when the sound turned into voices from the front of Mrs. Z’s long narrow apartment. Panic. My clothes were a mile away on a nearby chair. I stood up in the bath and tried pushing open the grimy bathroom window but it stuck. In the middle of my exertions, Aviva Zaretsky stuck her head in. “Pssst, Kalman!” she hissed, gesturing for me to get out of the tub and follow her quietly. I hesitated. Jennie and the Cook County visiting nurse were the only women who had ever seen me naked, and I still had my erection. Past embarrassment into total terror, I climbed out of the tub and gathered my clothes in front of me as a shield. “In here,” she whispered and pushed me into a dark hall closet and flung my towel in after me before shutting the door. “Aviva!” the man’s voice called from the front room. As I was quickly dressing, the closet door opened again. Mrs. Zaretsky whispered. “Don’t be scared. I know him. It won’t take five minutes.” She shut me in again.

  Even though the closet was hot and stuffy, I was shivering. I kept thinking of my slimy sin that I had no time to scrub from the tub.

  I had to get out of there. Carrying my gym shoes and wet towel wrapped around t
he wooden boat, I crept out into the long hallway and headed for the back door when I stumbled over a grocery bag, spilling the contents onto the kitchen lino. Just then I heard the front door open and shut and Mrs. Z, calmly fixing her hair, entered to find me frantically scooping stuff back into the grocery bag. “Here,” she said, “sit, I’ll do it. Glass of milk?” I shook my head. She got up from the floor and stacked the items neatly on the table. They were mainly lending library books authored by best sellers Fannie Hurst, Pearl Buck, Sholem Asch, and John Marquand. There was also a large blue tin of ex-lax and a package of Feenamint (“for constipation”) gum, and also a bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Compound. The label read, “For Female Discomfort—40 proof.” Sherlock Sigal deduced the things probably came from Berman’s drug store on our corner. Mr. Berman? Whose only joy in life was chasing me away from his magazine rack of “naturist” and health magazines with naked ladies posing on seaside rocks?

  Aviva Zaretsky sat across the table and weighed me with her eyes. I said, “I take that, too.” Her eyes opened wide, “Lydia Pinkham?” I blushed, ex-lax, I said. “Does the job,” she said, “though personally I like the Feenamint. Care for a stick?” I shook my head again.

  She didn’t seem ill at ease or awkward as she reached for my hand then thought better of it. “Take it easy, Kalman. It’s nothing. You saw nothing.” I gathered my toy boat and towel, and she opened the back door to the porch for me, suggesting, “Maybe this one time you go out the back way.” As I was easing out she added, “Come for a bath any time.” I understood she was making a west side deal to buy my silence.

  But I was wrong. A few nights later, at supper in the store, Jennie said, “Aviva tells me there was a traffic problem the other day.” What else had Mrs. Zaretsky told Ma? I was afraid to ask. Jennie drew out a Pall Mall cigarette, lit it, and slowly blew the smoke out in a ring. “She didn’t touch you, did she?” Absotively no, I said. “You’d tell me?” she persisted. I cried, “For chrissake, Ma—what do you think I am, Mister Berman?” And could have bit my tongue, but it didn’t bother Ma in the least. She said, “Aviva is a wonderful person. She lost her man, you know,” as if that explained anything.

  Nothing much changed after that except that I was marginally less welcome at Friday night meetings of the Riga-Baltic Progressive Ladies Society, Jennie tactfully suggesting, “Tonight you feel like the movies, take a dime from the register.” Eleven cents with federal tax now, I said. “Smart guy,” she said and handed over the coins.

  I should have felt relieved of the obligation to spend my Friday nights with a bunch of chattering ladies, but I’d come to like being “one of the girls.” They had privileged me to see something—I wasn’t sure what—that I was eager to know more about. For example, Aviva Zaretsky and Mr. Berman. What was that really about and who was there to explain it?

  Oh, yes, one other thing. Jennie did stop me going for my weekly bath to Mrs. Z and instead, on most Sunday mornings, before our promenade along Roosevelt Road, hauled our zinc tub to the middle of the room at the back of the store and ordered me to undress and scrunch down in the water—I hardly fit any more—to hose me down from the kitchen sink. That first time, wielding a bar of P and G White Naptha Soap and a stiff-bristle brush, she furiously rubbed my naked body until the flesh was raw-red. “Go easy, Ma!” I yelled. Timing her remarks to her movements, she applied more elbow grease to my already gleaming flesh.

  “Schmootzik—in—this—family—is—not—acceptable. We—are—not—dirty—people.”

  And that was that.

  Protection Racket

  Before Joe Franklin was born my wife told me that everything “below the belt,” meaning the penis, was my province, which of course in due time has led to the Dreaded Talk.

  “Dad!” he protests in acute embarrassment, “I know all that.”

  Okay, I retreat, I’ll try again at the next solar eclipse.

  Protect yourself at all times, Dad used to warn before knocking me flat in our sparring sessions. Ma now came up with her own version.

  When I was just a little older than Joe is now, instead of a bar mitzvah my mother delivered the long-delayed Dread Talk.

  First came out the Pall Malls, a match struck, curling blue puffs of smoke over the oilclothed kitchen table. Then Ma reached into her apron pocket and placed an object on the table between us.

  A small blue and white tin of Trojan brand condoms. Rubbers.

  My neck felt hot enough to melt, Ma’s face was so red her freckles vanished.

  She used her fingernail to flip open the small box and withdraw a single wrapped rubber. It lay, like a Capone-murdered corpse, in its distinctive figure-eight shape on the table. I could not believe my mother knew about “protection,” a subject of smashmouth hearsay among us Rockets, let alone she was about to demonstrate it to me.

  Our eyes refused to lock.

  The condom stared up at us. The guys and I had horsed around with new and used Trojans and Sheikhs for years, fitting them on each other’s hard-ons, masturbating in them, and swinging the sperm-filled translucent bags around like shillelaghs. But this was different. This was about sex.

  I jumped up, “I got a ball game—”

  “Sit,” she said. I sat.

  “Ma,” I whined.

  “Embarrassed?”

  “C’mon, I know all that.”

  A tone like tempered steel. “From who may I ask do you know “all that”? From Albie or Chaim or Isaac? I’ll run tell their mothers.”

  This was heading where I didn’t want to go.

  “Syphilis,” she declared. Yipes.

  All over our neighborhood you still saw ex-World War I soldiers who had come back from France with untreated venereal disease and progressed into paresis, the “stumblebum” syndrome of blindness and motor dislocation. Kids knew about it because sometimes we’d help them cross the street.

  “Pregnancy,” she followed up. “Knocking somebody up,” she added as if I didn’t understand simple English.

  “Jesus, Ma.”

  “You’re old enough to father a child,” she insisted.

  “I am not,” I declared. The idea was absurd.

  Ma lit another cigarette and looked affectionately at me. “Tell that to your bedsheet, comrade.”

  Oh no. She knew.

  “Don’t interrupt,” she commanded. Then it poured out of her, the lecture she’d been saving up, a virtual medical history of the twentieth century: Margaret Sanger, Dr. Ehrlich’s magic bullet, planned parenthood, Emma Goldman, free love, contraceptives, fallen women and contaminated men, heartbreak, anguish, indescribable wounds, amputated limbs, white slavery, prostitution, shame, regret, abuse, surgical wards, wayward girls—a history, too, of herself if I’d had the wit to really listen.

  She drew a big breath.

  “It only needs one,” she said.

  “What?” I blinked.

  “One sperm,” she said flatly. “Below your belt. Half a million each time. Five hundred thousand. It only needs one.”

  I didn’t know that and began to do the math.

  “You know how to use this?”

  I glanced away. “Yeah.”

  “How do you know?” she persisted.

  “Ma, let it be.”

  “Have you used one?”

  I looked her square in the eye.

  “Fuck,” I said defiantly, using that word for the first time to my mother.

  She sat back, stubbed out the ciggie in an ash tray, and folded her arms thoughtfully.

  Then, quite deliberately, she reached out to unwrap the Trojan in a practiced gesture and grasp it, rolling it down her two upraised fingers then holding her now joined fingers for me to inspect.

  She wiggled her fingers inside the sheath. I laughed. She pushed the Trojan tin over to me.

  “Protect yourself at all times, Kalman.”

  I took my shot. “Did Dad ever use one?”

  “No, never.” Her eyes misted over slightly as she reached out to
take my hand in hers. “You were my gift to myself.”

  One out of five hundred thousand. I figured the odds were on my side, and went out to play ball.

  The Shandeh Gives a Dinner Party

  I am going on thirteen. Jennie, in exile from her New York-based family because she ran off with a married man, rarely speaks of her brothers, sisters, and cousins because the memory of them makes her eyes mist up. So I have a poor sense of “family,” which I define as my mother and whatever is happening on the street. But one day, Persily relations descend on us for a surprise visit. She is surprised and delighted, and determined to do right by them.

  The visitors are the two grown sons and teenage daughter of her most beloved brother, Arkeh Persily, the brother who most stood by her when the other brothers vowed terrible revenge on “the animal Sigal” for hijacking their sister, whom they feel they lost to a predator. I don’t yet know all the ins and outs of this powerful tale of blood and intrigue, but tonight it’s important that Jennie put up a reputable front despite the glaring absence of a man in the house.

  Just as she is serving dinner in our living quarters in the Family Hand Laundry, her dream of a quiet family reconciliation shatters along with the store’s plate glass window.

  “Come out, you damn whore!”

  A woman’s shriek is followed by the loud crash of a second brick through the other front window.

  My mother sits like a stone at the head of the table she has meticulously laid in the back room.

  Her nephews, Arkeh’s children, Charlie and Joe-Davie and teenage niece Esther, sit immobile and speechless.

  Somebody has to break the silence. I get up from the table and, seemingly unconcerned, stroll out to the front of the store to inspect the busted windows. A bareheaded woman in a cloth coat stands under the street light. We meet each other’s gaze. She shouts: