The Auerbach Will

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “What’s so funny?” he asked in a harsh whisper. “It’s something that I thought my future wife should know.”

  “Oh … oh … Jake, I’m sorry. I can’t—” Because what she couldn’t tell him was that the most outrageous, wild mental picture had just flown into her head. It was of thin, cool Lily Auerbach outstretched across a row of garbage cans in an alley behind Delancey Street, fully clothed, legs outspread, and of plump little Louis Auerbach laboring on top of her to get his two dollars’ worth. “Oh … oh … oh,” she sobbed.

  “Essie, you’re making a scene! I don’t see why you’re treating this as some sort of joke.”

  “Oh,” she said, struggling to control herself, “it’s just … just a crazy thought I had … a shameful union.…”

  “Essie, people are staring at us.”

  She whispered in his ear, “And I suppose that’s the first thing they thought when you told them you wanted to marry me—that you and I—that I was—” She was still giggling, but now the picture in her mind was of herself sprawled in some dark place, and the figure above her was—but that picture was more sobering to contemplate. “Am I right?” she asked him.

  His face reddened. “How did you know that?”

  “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.”

  “What in the world are you talking about? Is that from the Bible?”

  She was still trying to suppress the giggling fit. “Do you know?” she said. “I’ve thought of it. Does that shock you? I’ve thought of it—a shameful union—with you. Do I have an evil mind?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I’ve thought of it, too.”

  “So let’s cheat them,” she said. “Let’s disappoint them and not be shameful—until—and let’s make our marriage—not like theirs. Let’s stay shameless and blameless.”

  “You’ve got to remember,” he said, “that when my father was younger he was a very handsome man. Maybe not too bright, but he was considered quite a heart-breaker. To give the Rosenthals credit, they’ve always been very good to Pop—and to me. And though Mother pretends not to care anything about what goes on in the store, she goes over the daily figures every night with Uncle Sol and Uncle Mort. Like a hawk.” They rode in silence for a while.

  “We won’t ever let her dominate us like that, will we, Jake?”

  “Of course not. What’s that your father says about the man being the king of his house? I subscribe to that.”

  She covered his hand with hers, and waited to feel the heat from his hand rise up to join hers. Instead, his fingers fidgeted beneath her own, and she knew that somehow she had managed to disappoint him. The streetcar lurched to a stop, and they stood up. “And speaking of that,” she said, “I’ve got to get home. The king is in his castle now. Give me a kiss for courage.” But he was still cross with her, she knew, for her reaction to his news, and when they had dismounted from the car and were on the street again, she said, “I’m sorry I got to laughing. I don’t know what was the matter with me. Nerves, I guess.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you that on a public streetcar. It was my fault.”

  “No, it was mine. Forgive me.”

  “You’ve got to remember that Pop used to be a very handsome man,” he repeated.

  “I’m sure of it. He has a very handsome son. And the quote was from The Scarlet Letter. My evil mind.”

  Then he kissed her.

  There is a side to him, she thought, that is very serious and dark, and that cannot be taken for granted.

  But why, in her excitement, in her foolishness, had she that afternoon been able to delude herself into believing that her apprehensions about her father’s reaction to her decision had been misplaced? All Essie remembers is that, walking home from the streetcar, she had suddenly been flushed with a euphoric burst of wishful thinking. All at once she was so full of confidence and resolve that she could imagine quite a different scene taking place from the other one she had been dreading. Her father would leap from his chair in happiness at her news, crying “Mazel tov!” And taking her in his arms. His only daughter, whom he wanted to marry well, was going to marry this fine Jewish boy, from a fine Jewish family—a boy with a college education, and what seemed like limitless prospects and expectations. Excitedly, she would tell Papa first about the fine Uptown house—a whole house, four stories tall, with only one family living in it—about the room all done in red damask and gold tassels, the manservant, the silver tea service, the elegant mother in her pearls, the bathroom that was not one room but three, the full-length mirror, the stacks of towels with their embroidered monogram, L.R. A. “How my little Esther is improving herself!” he would say, and perhaps he would open a bottle of the special wine that was reserved for the High Holy Days, and toast her with his blessing. There would be talk of joy! Freedom! Luck! Only in America! Then Mama would join them, and produce, from the trunk underneath her bed where it lay folded, her wedding canopy which now of course would be Essie’s. Then perhaps some of the neighbors would be invited in to share the happy tidings. Oh, there might be a little surprise at first, of course, a few questions and a few misgivings—Jake, after all, was a Deitch—but how could Papa deny her happiness? Perhaps, in her memory, if she had brought up the matter a little less abruptly, a little more delicately, it all might have turned out just that way.

  Or perhaps not.

  Probably not.

  It is foolish now to try to guess.

  Instead, she finds him in his familiar place, bent over at the kitchen table in the fading afternoon light, in his black skullcap, with his books, his prayer shawl and phylacteries. In another corner, her mother sits with a basket of mending in her lap.

  Essie sits down opposite him and says, “Papa, I want to talk to you.”

  He closes his Bible and looks up at her, blinking twice, bringing himself back from the land of Judah into the world of Norfolk Street. “Yes, my child?”

  “Papa, I’m not going to marry Ekiel Matoff.”

  “Oh, yes, Esther, it has been all arranged.”

  “But I’m not going to do it, Papa. I’m going to marry Jake Auerbach.”

  “Who?”

  “Jake Auerbach. The man from my school who used to walk me home.”

  “That Deitch? No, no, that is not possible.”

  “But that’s what I’m going to do, Papa.”

  “No, no. Your dowry has already been paid to Mr. Matoff.”

  “We hope you’ll give your blessing, Papa.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I’m going to marry Jake Auerbach, and that we both hope we will have your blessing.”

  “My blessing? You want me to bless one of the Deitch—a people who have stripped their religion to a skeleton, and left it where it is nothing but a dead thing, a corpse? No, you are foolish and ignorant. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Now leave me alone. I am busy. I have no more time to talk of this.”

  “But it’s what I’m going to do, Papa,” she says, her voice rising. “And I’m going to do it with your blessing or without it.”

  He looks at her wearily. “This is the voice of ignorance I am hearing,” he says. “No, no, I want to hear no more of this. And I want this conversation never to go beyond these four walls. Think of it—the shame, the humiliation, if it got around the neighborhood, to the others in the shul, the news that Sam Litsky has a daughter who has thought of disobeying her father. No, no. This is the end of it. I do not intend to become a laughingstock.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa, but I am disobeying you.”

  “But I will not permit it!”

  “But I’m going to do it anyway—permission or no.”

  Suddenly he stands up, the patriarch in skullcap and prayer shawl, towering over her, and points his finger at her. “If you will not listen to me, then you will listen to the Bible, the source of all knowledge! Here, I will read to you what the Bible says—”


  “I don’t care what the Bible says, Papa. I’m going to marry Jake Auerbach.”

  “What? What? This is what this Deitch has taught you—not to care what is written in the Torah? This is what he has taught you—to hate the Jews? To hate the eternal knowledge of the Holy Scriptures?”

  “What has all that knowledge ever done for you, Papa? While you pray and glory in your holy books, while Mama slaves downstairs—”

  “What? You are saying that I should have sold my religion? You are saying that God is for sale? God comes before everything—even before a man’s own flesh and blood. Are you saying that you will defy God as well as me?”

  From behind her, she hears her mother’s voice whisper, “Sam, please stop.”

  “I will not stop! I want an answer—does she defy her God as well as her father?”

  Looking up into his angry, God-stricken face, she says, “Yes, Papa. I defy you both.”

  “He’s rich, isn’t he? That’s the thing. That is why he is not a Jew. A Jew is poor, and suffers. A Jew does not live in big houses and drive motor cars. You cannot serve God and Mammon, and nothing—nothing but evil, evil and death—will come of your wicked pursuit of Mammon. What will it get you but a higher place in the Tower of Babel? What will you become? Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? You will feed your family with wormwood, and give them water of gall to drink—in your ignorance and your defiance! You will make your heart deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.… You will be buried with the burial of an ass, because you are no longer a Jew but an apostate, an enemy of your people, and Christians and Jews alike will hate you! Is that what you have chosen?”

  “I am going to marry Jake Auerbach, Papa.”

  He throws his head back and lets out a terrible scream, a scream that seems to come from some deep and mortal wound. “Then I have no daughter!” he cries, and with one hand he clutches at the front of his shirt, ripping a gaping, triangular hole in it and exposing a pale section of his chest and undershirt. Holding the torn piece of shirt in his hand, he says, “Do you see what I have done? I have rent my garments.” Now he sits down, and opens his Bible. “Now I am going to sit shiva, for my daughter,” he says, and she hears him begin to intone the Hebrew words of the kaddish, the Prayer for the Dead.

  With a violent sob, Essie’s mother jumps from her chair and runs from the room.

  Under her bed, she kept a small wicker suitcase, and now she was filling it with her things.

  “Hadassah … Hadassah,” her mother wept. “Don’t do this! Tell him you’re sorry. Oh, you’re breaking my heart!”

  “I’m sorry, Mama, but I can’t stay here any longer.”

  “Where will you go? I’ll never see you again.”

  “Of course you will, Mama. I’ll come back to visit often.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Not far. For now, the rooming house in Hester Street. You know the place.”

  “Oh, no. That awful place!”

  “Just for the time being. Until I’m married, Mama.”

  “Oh, don’t … don’t go …”

  But when she had finished packing, and gave her mother a farewell kiss, Minna Litsky pressed a small wad of bills into her hand.

  On her way out the door, she said to her father, deep in his prayers, “Good-bye, Papa.” But there was no answer.

  “We will ask Dr. Kohler to perform the ceremony,” Lily Auerbach said to her four menfolk who were gathered at her dinner table at 14 West 53rd Street. “But we’ll have it here at the house, and just the immediate family.”

  “And friends,” added Uncle Mort.

  “No, I think not even friends, Mort,” Lily said. “We can’t just have a few without inviting them all, and goodness knows there’s going to be talk enough as soon as the word gets around. You know how everybody is. If we invite the Schiffs and not the Strauses, Mrs. Straus will be on the telephone to Mrs. Schiff, wanting to know what she’s like, and there’s no telling what Therése Schiff might tell her. No, I think just the immediate family. I suppose we’ve got to ask Aunt Julie? Anyway, I gather that the Litskys will not be coming.”

  “Essie’s father took it very badly,” Jake said.

  “I was afraid that might be the case,” Lily said. “Isn’t it funny—the Germans and the Russians? East and West, and never the twain, et cetera. And I think we should have the wedding as soon as possible, under the circumstances?”

  “And get it over with,” said Uncle Sol.

  Jake Auerbach looked at his plate.

  “And tell me, Jake,” his mother said. “Do you think Esther would like any little tips from me on what she might wear—or would she resent that? I mean, she really is a pretty girl, but you must admit—that green dress—”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “I’ll ask her.”

  “Do you know what day this is?” Minna Litsky asked her husband.

  “The day is Thursday.”

  “It’s the day our only daughter is getting married!”

  “I have no daughter. My daughter is dead,” he said returning to his studies.

  “Oh, damn you!” she cried. “Oh, damn you and your Bible!” She struck his Bible with her fist. “All my life I’ve listened to you and your damned Bible. Is this what the Bible teaches you? Only hate and punishment? Where is love? Where is your heart? Where is forgiveness? It’s not your daughter who is dead, Sam Litsky, it is you and your dead heart. Is there no kindness left in your dead heart? Oh, I hate you, Sam Litsky, and I curse your damned Bible! I tell your damned Bible to go to hell and burn in the devil’s fires!”

  He stood up, closed the Bible, and gave her a sad look. “I’m going to the shul now,” he said quietly. “And I will pray for you.”

  “Go to hell with your prayers!”

  Now Minna Litsky was like a woman possessed, tearing around her apartment at full speed, this way and that. She put on her best black dress and pinned up her hair and put on her best hat. From a little drawer she removed a pair of white lace gloves that had been her mother’s, and which she had never worn. Then it was down the four flights of stairs to her shop, where she placed a CLOSED sign on the door and emptied the entire contents of the cash drawer into her patent-leather handbag. With dismay, she realized that she had never told Esther anything about marriage, what the man did, or about the laws of niddah, that a woman must not let a man touch her during the days of the month when she is unclean, nor for at least twelve afterward, and not until she has been immersed in the mikveh, the ritual bath. She had told her nothing! Then, suddenly remembering, she rushed upstairs again to her apartment and pulled out the trunk from under her bed, removed the white wedding canopy quickly, and tucked it under her arm.

  While all this was going on, Essie Litsky was saying goodbye for the last time to her rented room, just a few blocks away—a room, its wooden floors slimy with rot, its smells of fish and overripe fruit. “Good-bye,” she said, and closed the door, leaving the key hanging in the lock.

  Had either of the two women known what the other was doing, they could have made the journey to their common destination together. But that did not happen.

  Instead, for Minna, it was out—into the streets where Mrs. Potamkin had given her careful directions to a corner where she could find a taxi.

  When she found the taxi, she opened its door roughly. She had never been in such a vehicle before, a motor car with an internal combustion engine, and she was suddenly so frightened that she seemed to have forgotten all her English. She could not speak, and so simply handed the driver the address which she had printed on a scrap of paper.

  Then it was off through the alien, forbidding streets of the strange city where she had lived for fifteen years but never visited. As they moved Uptown, the prospect of the city grew taller, more daunting. Steeples and banks, God and Mammon, jostled each other for priority. Tall, dark, unfriendly buildings rose all around
her, and the streets were filled with strangers she had never met, and would never dare to turn to, or ask help from. She remembered other cities—Vienna, Hamburg, London—but none of them she could recall being so massive, so overpowering and warlike. Next to this, those older cities seemed to have been miniatures etched in glass. This city was all stone, like a prison. They turned into a street wider than any she had ever seen, and she saw a sign—Fifth Avenue.

  When they arrived at the address, and when she had paid the driver what seemed an immorally large sum of money, she got out of the automobile and hurried up the front steps. She rang the bell, and presently a tall, gray-haired man, wearing white gloves rather like her own, answered the door.

  “Mr. Auerbach?”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Auerbach—both Mr. Auerbachs—are not available at the moment, Madam. Would you care to leave your card?”

  “I want to see Mr. Auerbach.”

  “Did you have an appointment, Madam?”

  “I want to see Mr. Auerbach!”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible, Madam. There’s a family wedding going on.”

  “I know,” said Minna. “I’m the mother of the bride.”

  “… In the sight of God and this company.…” Minna took her seat in the red room.

  When the wedding was over, Essie and Jake were invited up to Uncle Sol’s oak-paneled study on the second floor, where the matter was business. How very like them, Essie thought, to save this for after their wedding, when whatever his family had to offer them she and Jake would have no choice but to accept.

  “We have written you a check,” Uncle Sol said, “in the amount of two thousand dollars. One half of this amount, one thousand dollars, is our wedding gift to you, from all of us.” He cleared his throat. “The second thousand we would prefer to think of as a loan, payable at an annual interest rate of four percent. With that loan, however, goes a provision. We have recently acquired a piece of property in Chicago, on LaSalle Street, which is considered to be an up and coming location in that city’s business district, and where we plan to open a Midwest branch of Rosenthal Brothers. Merchandise is already being shipped. This is our first venture outside of New York, and so naturally we are very anxious that it succeed. Chicago is a young city, but it is growing rapidly.… It is becoming an important rail center … Great Lakes shipping.… Money being made there, and money being spent. You may remember that Uncle Mort and I visited Chicago for the Exposition. It was clear to us what was happening there. Chicago is trying to change its reputation as a roughneck, frontier town, and wants to be taken seriously as a city where there are sophisticated ladies and gentlemen, interested in the latest fashions.…