A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  Though he paid little more than lip service to his own religion, he took great delight in mocking Christians. On Sunday mornings he would turn up the church-service broadcast on the radio to full volume and join the local Baptists in "Onward Christian Soldiers," marching up and back across the kitchen with a broom, singing the hymn in a high, tremulous falsetto, and eventually collapsing himself (and me) with raucous laughter. Then, suddenly, while I was still laughing, he would frown fiercely and, pointing an angry finger at the radio, would declare between clenched teeth, "Goyim! Listen to the sons-of-bitches, not a mensch among the whole goddam bunch."

  His strongest venom was reserved for Polish Jews. It was his contention-based upon "all my years of experience"—that on mankind's scale of goodness and uprightness they, the Polish Jews, ranked at zero. "Never trust a Polock"— again the angry finger, the clenched teeth—"they're the lowest, the shrewdest, and they'll cut your kishkes out for a nickel!"

  As for his views about physical appearance, the "Rules and Regulations" read as follows: freckles were a sign of impurity and careless personal hygiene; clear white skin only was acceptable in good social circles. Height was a sign of authority and portliness a symbol of prosperity; therefore, little was to be gained by association with short, skinny people. Small eyes spaced narrowly apart indicated a sneaky personality but a person with large wide eyes could be trusted with your last dollar. He also disliked red hair, dark skin, and any kind of deformity. There were, of necessity, occasional exceptions to the rules; after all, he couldn't live in a vacuum, allowing in from time to time only those who met his requirements. One had to bend one's rules to make a living and to get along socially. Privately he would express to me his distaste for someone who represented a deviation from his standards. "Did you see the freckles on her arms? ... Did you notice how every rib sticks out on his body? . . . Pheh!"

  So much for racial and physical characteristics. When it came to economic status, it may be observed that his own years of struggle, and the universal hard times of the thirties, had not mellowed his outlook. It wasn't a case of his merely disliking poverty; the fact is he wasn't particularly fond of the poor either. Schleppers—the Jewish word for people who lag behind, who have no sense of style, who are losers—is the designation he gave to the poor. Give him the company of overdogs anytime. Only the· smell of success was welcome in his nostrils.

  It was a lucky thing for mankind that God chose not to delegate to my father the task of designing and manufacturing the human race. The product that would have emerged from his assembly line would have resembled Henry Ford's early masterpieces—one model, one colour, and no substitutes.

  Why then such forbearance for Jimmy Lee, a man who met none of my father's rules and regulations? Was there something in common between them, some thin thread that tied them together in this world? Except for the fact that my father landed in Halifax, he and Jimmy Lee had arrived in Canada more or less in the same fashion—penniless, without influence or benefactors, completely mystified by the English language. But what was so extraordinary about that? In that same manner other "untouchables" had arrived: the freckled, the short and skinny, the Polish Jews, the schleppers, the swarthy and dark-skinned of Europe and Asia; yet he showed them no special understanding, offered them no special clemency.

  No, whatever invisible bond joined these two men had nothing at all to do with social and economic causes and effects. It had to do with one thing, and one thing only: women.

  As a conscript in the Russian army, my father had left behind in Odessa a girl to whom he had become bethrothed shortly before his induction. From her photographs in our family album, it was obvious she fulfilled his criteria of beauty; moreover, she had a bosom that was ample enough to comfort a regiment. But she troubled him, for inside her handsome head was a lively brain that nourished itself on poetry and politics and philosophy. Not for her the customary domestic prisons in which other young Jewish women willingly incarcerated then1selves—the kitchens, the nurseries, the sewing circles. Nor would she hold her tongue in the company of men, dutifully serving them poppyseed cookies and glasses of tea and then resuming her place in the corner like a fixture ·until summoned forth to serve again. She thought freely, but worse still, she spoke out freely. This trait especially jarred her soldier-lover. As the youngest child of his large family, my father had been the favoured, pampered by his mother, protected by his older sisters, doted upon by his father. He was a small sun around whom the lesser planets of his family circulated worshipfully. But this young woman had a solar system of her own; she was not likely to go into orbit around him.

  At last he wrote her from a battlefront station in Austria. "I don't know which is more difficult, to face the enemy in the trenches, or to write this letter, but I have decided that we are so far apart in so many ways ..." He realized, he wrote, that the letter amounted to a breach of promise to marry. What would she demand by way of compensation? In due course the girl's rabbi replied in her behalf. The girl was grief-stricken, to be sure. "Nevertheless," the rabbi added in the same breath, "her grief is capable of being compensated, praise be to God!"

  It required as many rubles as my father could lay hands on—and then some—and it is a fair assumption that a goodly portion of that sum found its way into the rabbi's purse by way of commission. Within a month a document arrived, written in a small, fine Hebrew hand. "You are hereby forever and completely released and forgiven," the girl's spiritual representative began, ending several hundred words later with "Praise be to God!" Praise be to God, indeed; one good release deserves another, my father said to himself. And with that, one night when the battlefront was momentarily calm, he released himself forever and completely from the Russian army. Goodbye Russia. He would never look eastward again, except to pray or to watch the morning sun. He was off, heading westward in search of peace, the good life, and the perfect woman.

  These he found in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or thought he found.

  The year was 1926. He was a boarder in the home of a tailor on Selkirk Street, teaching Hebrew to unenthusiastic little Jewish boys, striving himself to remain above water in the endless swamps of the English language, earning just enough coin of the realm to pay for his lodging and keep a shine on his shoes. The girl this time was the older sister of one of his pupils. Born in England, she barely spoke a word of Yiddish, knew absolutely no Hebrew, and knew nothing about Russia except that Russian Jews ate great quantities of herring which they brought home wrapped in damp newspapers from fish markets. This young woman was no Russian-style beauty, far from it. Still, she had great appeal: clear skin, soft, wide-spaced eyes, a quiet voice, genteel manners. Her English was, of course, excellent. In fact, she was secretary to a member of the Manitoba legislature. Her father's credentials were just about impeccable too: born in Russia, well-educated in Talmud, once Reeve of West Kildonan, after that a magistrate, a man of property and some political influence in the city.

  She found her suitor to be a bit of a dandy; he wiped the dust from the toes of his shoes by rubbing them along the backs of his trouser-legs from time to time as they strolled along Portage Avenue; he checked his pencil-stripe moustache regularly in the reflections in shop windows; to avoid creases, he always unbuttoned his jacket and gave a slight tug at the knees of his pants when he sat.

  A good deal of the time she didn't understand the greenhorn Hebrew teacher. Often he would grope for the right English expression and come up with something that was entirely out of context. When that happened the poor girl would try bravely to suppress laughter, but occasionally her best efforts failed and he would shake his head from side to side, impatient with himself, offended by her laughter, frustrated by the language of the land. And yet she was intrigued by this strange greenhorn because he was so different from the local young men. He traded Hebrew quotations with her father, matched the older man proverb for proverb, shone at family gatherings with the older relatives who regarded his yeshiva education as a prime attribute in
life. There was a kind of old country quaintness about his manners with women-shy and formal publicly, ardent privately, always to some degree a poseur.

  At the appointed hour of their wedding he walked with military bearing down the aisle toward the chupah, this greenhorn thousands of miles removed from his natural habitat, in possession of nothing by way of assets save his high aspirations, his energy, and the carefully pressed suit on his back. She walked down the same aisle a moment later, a woman very much living within her natural habitat but doing a strange thing. As they turned to face each other under the wedding canopy, each must inwardly have asked: what am I doing here?

  A few weeks after their marriage he discovered .a letter she had written to a girlfriend. "He's not much to look at and has no money to speak of," she confided, "but he made love like a caveman and I guess I simply caved in ..." How did that letter come to be left exposed to view? Did she intend him to see it? What possessed him to eavesdrop on her secret communications? No matter; the letter was never mailed. Instead my father confiscated it and thereafter it remained among his most private papers where, like a malignant tumour, it grew and grew, spreading its incurable cancer throughout the heart and limbs of their relationship.

  Everything about my father's Great Canadian Dream now began to turn sour. Perhaps it was that fatal letter, perhaps it was the similarity in personality between bridegroom and father-in-law, a case of like forces repelling after a brief, initial attraction. Perhaps it was the immediate proximity of my mother's large family, with its ubiquitous aunts and uncles and cousins, that threatened to strangle the newlyweds. What the marriage seemed to call for was a change of venue, a fresh start in a fresh locale.

  The fresh locale became a bed-sitting room with a kitchenette and shared toilet at the rear of a secondhand furniture store on Queen Street in Sault Ste. Marie, operated by a Ukrainian and his fat, good-natured wife. But the fresh start—the rekindling of the old flame, or the kindling of a new flame—had yet to occur. Gone from sight and sound were the ever-present relatives, the domineering father-figure, but still there was the letter ... always the letter. The cramped confines of the bed-sitting room that might have drawn them closer to each other only served to broaden the distances between them. Each day they discovered in those poor surroundings less and less to rejoice in.

  In 1927—the year Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and gave birth to trans-oceanic flight—my father crossed his own Atlantic-that vast and stormy space that separated him from his wife—and nine months later I was born.

  If, in the magical moment of insertion that spawned me, my father and mother shared any faint notion they were creating a bond that would unite them indestructibly, they were woefully mistaken. It quickly became apparent that my arrival on the scene was precisely what that union didn't need! Not only were three a crowd in those quarters behind the secondhand store, but the third occupant wailed day and night, so much so that at last the fat, good-natured Ukrainian landlady knocked on the door and said, hesitantly, "Please missus, you understand, my man and me getting too old ..." and it was time to find a new bed-sitting room somewhere in Sault Ste. Marie.

  What was more serious was that my birth had aggravated my mother's pre-existing kidney problem so that it now took on all the pains and attendant fears of a full-scale disease.

  Then came the days of total struggle—the mid-thirties; struggle to survive the barebone days of the Depression and keep the small clothing business afloat, struggle on my mother's part with the ever-increasing agony of her kidney disease, struggle on my father's part to pay for the doctors and medications her condition demanded, struggle on the part of both husband and wife to find some logical answer to the question "What am I doing here?" that nagged each of them from that first terrifying moment under the chupah.

  In the end my mother's sickness defeated them both.

  The afternoon of July 12, 1936, was so hot in Winnipeg that a newspaper reporter was photographed frying an egg on the sidewalk at the corner of Main and Portage. Five miles from downtown, in a cemetery in West Kildonan, on that blistering day, my mother was buried. We sat shiva in my grandparents' living quarters over their grocery store. The windows were opened as wide as they would open and electric fans had been placed near the windowsills. Humming steadily in the prairie heat, the fans blew out that stuffy apartment the smells of gift roses and salmon sandwiches, and Part One of my father's Great Canadian Dream.

  Part Two began a year later precisely where Part One ended—in Winnipeg. I had spent the year after my mother's death living with my grandparents in West Kildonan while my father carried on with life in Sault Ste. Marie. "It's no way to live," his friends told him. "You must find yourself another wife." Everyone knew one woman or another who was just right for a widower in his early forties and for his skinny, bespectacled ten-year old. The most impressive candidate turned out to be a Winnipeg school teacher of thirty-five. A spinster, she was pleasant-faced, lively, articulate, and had a good figure. I was particularly impressed because she owned an Auburn sedan with headlights the size of full moons. One day, in the Auburn, she said to me, "How would you like me to be your new mother?" "Fine," I responded instantly. This was the final seal of approval; we celebrated, she and I, over hamburgers at a drive-in stand. Soon after, she left Winnipeg for Sault Ste. Marie to marry my father. I was to follow her right after their honeymoon, and I began counting the days until my return to my old room, my old school, my old friends. Several weeks passed, a month, two months, and more. I began to complain: what was taking so long? Not until six full months had gone by was I sent for.

  I stood beside my old bed unpacking. My new stepmother stood in the open doorway of my room, smiling, asking me questions about the two-day journey by train, enjoying each boyish observation about my trip east as if it contained some enormous pearl of wisdom. My father appeared in the doorway. Smiling still, she looked up at him and touched his face with her hand. He turned his face away brusquely, at the same time pushing her hand aside. Her smile froze. Quickly she looked over at me as if to say, "It's really nothing, it's all right, everything is all right."

  Late that night, as I lay in bed unscrambling memories of past nights and speculating about future days, I heard the sound of voices coming from the office at the rear of my father's store, which was directly beneath my bedroom.

  "You must go back to Winnipeg." "I can't go back to Winnipeg."

  "But I don't want you here. I didn't want you here from the first minute."

  "I can never face all those people again."

  "I don't give a goddam what you've got to face. I can't stand the sight of you in my hous·e anymore. Just get the hell out of my life."

  "I'll kill myself before I go back."

  "Then kill yourself!"

  It was the first of many such bitter dialogues I was to overhear following my return home. They quarreled—he raging, she pleading—in every forum and on every occasion imaginable. No one knew precisely the cause for all this enmity; everyone fell back upon trite, empty observations: "Second marriages are just repeats of first marriages only everything is worse; they never work out." Or, referring to my father: "You know Russians—stubborn, hot-tempered, always painting life and themselves black." Or, referring to his second wife: "She's a big-city girl; maybe she expected something better; she really had nothing in common with him to begin with." Volunteer marriage counsellors sprang into service everywhere. Had they been professionals—trained, skilled, experienced—it is doubtful that their resources would have been up to the task. As amateurs, relying upon mere guess-work and old-country gut feelings, they failed miserably and often only inflamed the situation by siding with the weaker of the contenders, my stepmother.

  Three years and hundreds of battles later, she lay hospitalized, suffering from colitis. Gravely, her doctor shook his head. "It was bound to happen," he told my father. "Nobody's system can stand that much constant anxiety and aggravation ..." My father, noting the implied accusation, a
dded the physician to his blacklist. Her condition grew worse, his blacklist lengthened; the doctor eventually moved up on the list until he occupied the top position. It was as if my stepmother had conspired with this medicine man to torture my father's conscience and drain his finances at the same time. After each nightly visit to her hospital bedside—a short, dutiful attendance during which few words or gestures were ever exchanged—my father would recite what became in time an unvarying catechism of hate: "Why did I ever come to America? I must have been out of my mind ... Why did I need another woman? Enemies, that's who talked me into it ... What did I do to deserve this? There must be a devil in my life."

  This went on for months while my stepmother grew weaker and thinner, and still there were no clues as to how it all began, only the never-ending flow of my father's selfpity and vituperations. I began to pray that she would die.

  But she did not die. In the hospital room, that smelled of ether and starchy bed-linen and human waste, she hung on, becoming yellowish and staring blankly at the ceiling.

  One evening, in the autumn, instead of the expected catechism came an unexpected news bulletin: "They think she should go to Winnipeg," my father said, pulling out of the hospital driveway as he always did, quickly, almost impetuously. "There's a specialist there ..." A few days later, I saw her off. Because the train trip from Sault Ste. Marie was an arduous stop-and-start affair, it was decided that she should travel by passenger steamship to the lakehead, thence to Winnipeg by train. She was put aboard the ship on a stretcher, and my father went aboard with her. A minute later he was back in the car and we drove away, I turning to look at the ship which remained still moored at the dock I looked at my father. His face was stone-gray. "Aren't we going to wait until the boat leaves?" I asked. "What the hell for? That's how she came, and that's how she's going, and that's all there is to it," he said, barely moving his lips. "What do you mean?" "Never mind. It's not important." I looked back as we drove along Bay Street and up Elgin. Only the red, white and black funnel was still visible.