A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  The salary—ten or twelve dollars a week—could hardly be called liberal, bearing in mind that the girl's typical day, repeated six times weekly, began at seven in the morning with the preparation of breakfast and ended at nine in the evening when the last dish had been dried and the youngsters in the family had been coaxed into bed.

  But there were compensations. The girl, accustomed to sharing a room at home with perhaps four or five sisters and brothers, was now reduced to a single roommate or, if she were lucky, she might even have a room all to herself. And then there were three meals a day, one of which always featured meat or fowl. Often there was a large family-size bottle of orange or cola-flavoured "Kik" on the table, a beverage that had originated as a Sunday-lunch luxury but eventually became as indispensable as a mezuzeh in the average Jewish home.

  This was the life to which our new maid could look forward.

  Except on Sundays, we ate all our meals in the kitchen. The maid always ate with us. My mother and father seldom lingered over breakfast or lunch. Both worked in the family clothing store downstairs and had little time for second cups of coffee and idle chit-chat. Even in these dreary doldrum days, they seemed possessed by a sense of commercial urgency. There might be whole days when barely a customer came into the store, yet they had to be there. There were "things to do," always "things to do."

  It was the same on this February Saturday afternoon. Lunch had been eaten quickly, then my parents were off downstairs again, my father calling to my mother, "Come, there's things to do ..."

  We were alone —the girl and I—at the table.

  "Do you like being a maid?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I guess it's alright." Her voice was flat and she played with her fork, jabbing it into the mound of untouched cottage cheese and sour cream on her plate.

  "Did you go to school before you came here?"

  "Yes. I was in grade ten at Tech, but I had to quit."

  "You going to get married?"

  "No." She thought for a moment, then added, "Maybe someday, I guess. I'm going with a boyfriend."

  "What's his name?"

  Reticently the girl looked down at her plate, prodding her cottage cheese with her fork into a compact mound. "Pete. Peter Lisanti. My folks say they'll kill me if I ever marry him. He's Italian, that's why." I nodded wisely, pretending to understand.

  The following day—Sunday—the girl had been given the afternoon off to spend at home with her family. My father drove her to her house in Bayview. On his return he stamped his feet and clapped his hands trying to generate warmth in his limbs.

  "I went inside their house for a minute," he told my mother. "My God, how can people live like that?"

  He described the cardboard patches on the walls, the wood-burning stove that served as the central heating system, the dilapidated furniture, the bread crumbs and finger smudges.

  "And kids everywhere," he exclaimed. "Wherever you look there's a kid. I just don't know how people can live like that. We shouldn't be paying these girls, they should be paying us. We're actually doing them a favour when we take them in."

  "You have to feel sorry for people like them. Look at it that way," my mother said. "Besides, I couldn't be in the store six days a week without a girl in the house, you know that."

  My father said nothing; he knew she was right. But his thoughts were still back in that house, that broken-down frame cell situated at the dead end of a bleak street in Bayview. He had seen these houses many times over the years, but he would never grow used to the sight.

  "Pheh!" was all he could say. Shaking his head sadly, he repeated it quietly to himself, over and over again, "Pheh!"

  That evening, after Annie had returned, she came into my room—which was now "our room"—carrying a paper shopping bag. I was already tucked away for the night but had stayed awake waiting for her. Whispering so my parents wouldn't know I was still up, I called to her.

  "Annie?"

  "You still awake? Shame on you. Don't you know it's almost ten o'clock?"

  "What's in the bag?"

  "The rest of my clothes."

  The room was dark except for a sliver of light coming through the door that had been left slightly ajar. "You can turn on the light if you want to," I said.

  "It's okay. I can see what I'm doing." She withdrew her belongings from the shopping bag and pressed them into the drawer. "There," she said, sounding satisfied, "that's everything."

  "Why didn't you bring all that in the first place? There was enough room in your suitcase, wasn't there? Did you think maybe you wouldn't be staying?" I asked.

  "Goodnight nosey," she whispered back. "Go to sleep."

  I heard her in the dark undressing and putting on her pyjamas. A couple of minutes later I called to her again. "Aren't you going to brush your teeth?" She didn't reply. She was sound asleep.

  On the following morning, the official training program began.

  Even before she had sat down for her first meal at our table, Annie had been instructed very emphatically to remember at all times that there were two sets of dishes on the shelves, one "meat," one "milk;" she was never to mix or confuse the two. Already aware of this peculiarity from gossiping with other "Annies," the girl nevertheless politely pretended to be impressed with what my mother termed "Lesson Number One." This lesson also offered a twominute course in Hebrew dietary laws—again unnecessary since word of our bizarre food conventions and eating ceremonies had been circulated throughout Bayview by other girls who had ventured eastward into Jewish dwellings. Still my mother felt bound to remind Annie of the various prohibitions that surrounded the shelves, stove, icebox, and anything in the place that had to do with victuals. Annie responded on this Monday morning by burning the porridge and letting the coffee boil over. My mother fretted; my father said it was nothing, the kid was nervous, that was all.

  In the ensuing weeks, as she had done with the girl's predecessors, my mother played Professor Higgins to Annie's Eliza Doolittle.

  "Annie, don't say 'youse,' it's you, just you ... what would you like for ·lunch, not what would youse like" ... "Annie, be sure you tie a kerchief around your head when you're preparing food; last night my husband found a hair in his borscht" ... "Annie, when you make a bed, always be sure to tuck the bottom sheet well in, like this" ... "Annie, when people call on the phone, always say 'Hold the line, please,' not just 'Wait a minute'..."

  Like Eliza, Annie learned well. In fact, so uncommonly well did she learn that my mother was toying with the idea of adopting several little housekeeping touches which, hitherto only the wife of the wealthiest Jew in town had dared institute.

  "I was thinking,'' my mother said one night, eyeing my father cautiously, "I was thinking maybe we should have Annie wear a uniform. Nothing fancy, just a plain black dress with a white collar and apron. Instead of a house dress. It would be so much nicer when we have company."

  My father was silent, hidden behind his Jewish newspaper. "And I thought maybe we should get a little bell for the dining-room table. It's nicer than calling her, or having to run into the kitchen to get her when it's time to serve another course."

  My father's reaction, predictably, was immediate, clear, and final: "No!"

  At that point—just short of uniform and summoning bell—the reshaping of Annie-Eliza stopped. But if Annie's growth as a maidservant had achieved its maximum, her relationship with me was still reaching for its highest level. Indeed, our relationship blossomed daily. She taught me more Ukrainian words, opening up to me narrow but very entertaining horizons of· Slavic obscenity. She hadn't known the lyrics of "Red Sails in the Sunset" that first day. No matter. Pete Lisanti, who called for her every Saturday night, took her to all the musical movies at the Algoma Theatre and she and I together learned just about every song that came out of those wonderful, dreamy, fantastic films of the day-songs crooned by Dick Powell, Fred Astaire, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby. On the third day of Passover, when I could no longer bear the sight and sound of unl
eavened bread, she smuggled an 0 Henry bar into my room and there, while she stood guard at my door, I huddled in the dark, devouring my favourite confection, eternally grateful to my Ukrainian benefactor, and not giving the slightest thought to harder times when my people were slaves under Pharaoh.

  She became my confidant, I became hers.

  My confidences were, of course, entirely juvenile. They concerned teachers whom I planned to assassinate, quarrels with other kids and suitable revenges, lost nickels and dimes, newly-won friendships with girls at school, and a myriad of petty likes and dislikes.

  Her confidences were far less childish. Of her affection for Pete Lisanti she spoke often; how she admired his dark complexion and his shiny wavy black hair, how marvellous he looked in his hockey outfit when he played right-wing for the James Street Aces, how much he yearned to get out of the steel plant in a year or two and try out for the Detroit Red Wings. She was sure he would make it. Then they would marry and move to Detroit and she would accompany him on the road and journey to ·cities like Boston and New York and Montreal. They would never have to live in a place like Bayview. And her parents, seeing what a famous athlete and loving husband Pete was, would put aside their hostility and accept their Italian son-in-law with open hearts and arms.

  We respected each other's confidences. When crossexamined nightly by my father about how long I had practised the piano, I would lie and say a whole half-hour, which was the prescribed period, when in fact I had shaved the time down to twenty minutes. Annie could always be counted upon to bear witness for me. "Oh yes, I checked the clock and he definitely practised for half an hour like you told him." For my part, I never so much as dropped a hint to my parents about Annie's and Pete's intentions for fear they would report these to Annie's parents, thus triggering a wholesale race riot in the West End.

  Often we talked in the darkness of my room, long after I had been put to bed and she had dragged herself into her bed exhausted from the day's labours. Sometimes, instead of talking, we hummed the latest hit tunes from the movies, doing so quietly to avoid detection by my father and mother. I had developed a deep affection for Annie, as well as a fierce loyalty. After all, were we not in a sense co-conspirators?

  One night, as we lay discussing the state of our respective worlds, Annie confided something new to me.

  "Promise you won't say anything to your folks?"

  "I promise. Cross my heart."

  "Well, you know what I can't figure out? I can't figure out why they won't eat anything but kosher meat at home because it's against your religion, but when they go out to a restaurant they eat meat that isn't kosher and they have bread and butter with it and things like that. Why is that?"

  I thought about it for a moment. "Gee, I don't know. Maybe it doesn't count if you eat it in a restaurant. Whenever we go to the Chinaman's place across the street, my Dad lets me have bacon. Bacon comes from a pig but he lets me have it anyway. In fact, sometimes he has bacon, too."

  "Do you like bacon?"

  "I'm crazy about it!" I said.

  Annie said no more on the subject that night. The following Saturday night, after supper, my parents announced that after the store closed—which would be about ten o'clock when the last potential customer on Queen Street had finally wandered home-instead of coming directly up to bed, they would be going to a house party and wouldn't be back until about midnight. As soon as they had disappeared downstairs, Annie went to the icebox. "Look!" she said, holding up a small cellophane-wrapped package she had extricated from under a pile of larger parcels at the bottom of the icebox.

  "Bacon!" I cried excitedly. "For me?"

  She fried it the way I liked it, crisp and crinkly, so that it tasted delicious even when it had cooled. Together we consumed the whole package. Then we scrubbed the frying pan and cutlery and even the dishes with cleanser, and checked and double-checked the stove and kitchen counters to make certain that every possible tell-tale sign of God's unchosen meat had been eliminated. To that extent the exercise in deceit was a success. There remained, however, one problem: even a person with one nostril would be able to tell in a second that bacon had been cooked here. The smell of hot bacon grease clung to the apartment and everything in it. It clung stubbornly, tenaciously. We opened doors and windows. We burned brown sugar in a saucepan. We waved towels and even blankets in the air, hoping that this crude form of agitation would rid the· apartment of the odour. All to no avail. By midnight ·enough of the smell of bacon still resided in the apartment to indicate to any normal person with two nostrils that evil deeds had been committed involving pork in some form or other. There was nothing to do but go to bed and pray that the Angel of Forgiveness would descend and fill the place with some magical scent, before my parents arrived home.

  Unfortunately, the Angel of Forgiveness was on holiday that weekend. The next morning, Annie was obliged to undergo a stern refresher course in Lesson Number One. As for me, there was very little hope.

  "This is how it all begins," my father shouted. "First you eat bacon in your own house; the next thing you know you're bringing pork chops to the table, the next thing after that it's saying grace and going to church. You might as well marry a schiksa now and get it over with!"

  Considering that I was at that time still in public school, the thought of marriage to anyone, let alone a Gentile girl, had never crossed my mind. What did marriage have to do with crisp crinkly bacon? Why was it permissible to eat "traifs" across the street at the Chinaman's but not here, in my own kitchen? What had Annie done that was so dreadful? "I don't understand," I said that night to Annie in the privacy of my bedroom.

  "Neither do I," she admitted. "But never mind. One of these Sundays I'll take you home with me on my afternoon off. Maybe my mother'll make bacon for supper, and you can have some with us."

  Many Sundays came and went after that, and I waited patiently for the important invitation to accompany Annie home to Bayview. At last, one Saturday night as she waited for Pete Lisanti to call for her, she said to me, "Tomorrow, if you like, we can go to my house for the afternoon."

  "Can I have some bacon?" I asked.

  "All you want," she promised.

  My father hadn't exaggerated. Annie's home in Bayview consisted of a paintless, frame house slouching on a narrow wasteland of cinders. A few weeds grew there by mistake; otherwise, everything was dying, oblivious to the fact that it was late spring. Inside the small house, every comer declared the family's near-bankruptcy.

  Annie's father—a stocky, unkempt man who carried half the steel plant under his long, black fingernails—greeted us with a heartiness that belied his poor surroundings. He bent down, laughing in my face, saying, "So this is the little Jew who likes pork, eh!" A strong odour of beer gusted into my nostrils. I knew at once the source of his good cheer.

  Standing behind the head of the house, Annie's brothers and sisters—all younger than she—stared at me as if I were little Lord Fauntleroy, making me feel both unique and slightly uncomfortable.

  The woman of the house—Annie's mother—was an older version of Annie: same full face and wide cheekbones, same thick legs and wide hips. She wore a hairnet and a sleeveless, cotton housedress cut with wide openings around the neck and shoulders, more for ventilation, I assumed, than for style. Her skin resembled boiled chicken. Apart from a perfunctory grunt in my direction, she ignored me completely and busied herself at the wood stove cooking something in a large soup pot.

  The father motioned to a chair in the centre of the kitchen. "Sit down, sit down, little boy," he urged. He poured himself a glass of beer. "Beer!" he said, holding up the glass and grinning.

  "None for me, thank you," I said.

  "Oh no, not for you, beer not for little boy." He laughed very hard. "Beer for me. No give beer to little boy. Police come. Big trouble, eh."

  He downed the beer in one gulp, and began to pour himself another glass.

  As he did so, his wife swung round from the stove and, spat something at h
im in Ukrainian. In a flash his expression changed to wild-eyed rage and he slammed the glass down upon the kitchen table, spilling beer across the printed oilcloth. Vehemently he flung some expression in Ukrainian back at the woman. Suddenly she, too, was transformed. What I took to be a taciturn and rather feckless old woman in an instant had become a human blast furnace, spewing foreign words all over the kitchen like molten slag. For emphasis she kept banging a heavy ladle against the soup pot on the stove, while her husband resorted for his special oratorical effects to slamming that remarkably durable beer glass down upon the kitchen table again and again. Bang went the ladle, clink went the beer glass. Bang-clink-bang clink-bang-clink—in a riotous duet not unlike Verdi's "Anvil Chorus." I couldn't understand a word the two said, but the tempo and the volume of the argument were clearly augmenting. I began to resign myself to the fact that my long journey here by streetcar and on foot would probably prove to be in vain when suddenly Annie's mother pointed her soup ladle at me and let go another barrage of words in her high-pitched voice.

  I turned to Annie. "What does she want?"

  "She wants you to sit down. Supper's ready."

  With the exception of Annie's mother, we all sat down. The father, calm again, even a little genial, presided over the table. Like a king he helped himself to the food placed in bowls before him: boiled potatoes, steamed cabbage (unstuffed), some green onions and radishes. With an ironworker's grip he clasped a horseshoe-shaped garlic sausage to his chest, carving off small chunks and letting them fall into his plate the way one slices a banana. Then he pushed the bowls of food toward his wife. She saw to it that everyone's plate was filled before she took the leftovers for her own plate and sat down at her place. We ate in silence broken only by the smacking of lips and the clatter of dishes and cutlery. I kept looking over at Annie, not daring to say with my voice, but trying desperately to say with my eyes, "Haven't they forgotten something?" But they hadn't forgotten, for presently Annie's mother withdrew from the oven of the wood stove a pan of bacon which had been fried earlier and placed there to keep warm.