MORTY
One afternoon in late January 1930, Morty, late to meet Rudy, ran down the stairs to the street and out into the world. Their new apartment was on a street lined with brick buildings and small front courtyards where the women clustered to gossip in the hot summer nights and the little kids played ball and jump rope until bedtime. Around the corner was the main street, Pitkin Avenue, where life opened up. It was one of Brooklyn’s shopping avenues, with grocery stores and butcher shops and dairy shops selling cheese and bagels and lox, and bakeries with their smells of sugar and cinnamon drifting out the doorways. Even with the hard times, some people could still buy what they wanted.
Rudy was waiting for him at Solly’s corner, a look of excitement on his face. “You’re late. I thought you wasn’t coming,” he said.
“Sorry. Just finishing my homework.”
Rudy gave him a disgusted look. “I’m done with all that stuff. I got better business now.” He grabbed Morty’s arm and walked him away from the corner where some of the other boys were hanging out. “I got big news,” he said. “Adler asked me if I wanted to collect for him.”
Morty stared. “Collect? Collect what?”
“Don’t be a dumbass. Collect from the shops. For protection. He’s been watching me. He gave me and Paulie little jobs at first, and now he thinks I’m ready for bigger stuff. He told me I should go with Little Jiggy, who’s collecting the money for him, so I could see how he does it, and then Adler would give me a chance to do it too. It’s easy money. Just go to the clients’ shops, pick up what they owe, and deliver it to Adler. They pay good.”
Morty was shaking his head. “What do you mean, owe? They don’t owe Mickey. For what? It’s robbery.”
“Don’t be such a schmuck, Morty. They owe money, the collectors pick it up. That’s all.” Rudy’s voice was harsh.
Morty hated this business—protection money. When he thought about going into the stores and businesses and demanding payments, he felt his insides clench. He knew that when his father had worked as an apprentice in Manhattan, one of the Italian gangs would collect money from them. And now that Ben had his own store in Brooklyn, Morty knew that first Abe Reles and then Mickey Adler’s boys were picking up protection money from Ben’s storefront the way they had at Mr. Hansen’s store. There didn’t seem to be any way to get around it.
“It’s awful business, Rudy. Don’t get into it. It’s always hard times for people like us. People are out of work; stores are fighting to stay in business. And what if they refuse? Are you going to have to beat them up?”
“Nah,” Rudy said. “They don’t refuse us. If they do, we bring in the big guys. They’re the ones that beat them up.” He laughed. There was a trickle of hysteria in the laugh, and Morty felt his heart freeze.
Rudy kept looking at Morty. “Come on, Morty. I’m just watching. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m going to follow Little Jiggy and see what he does. You know Little Jiggy? The guy who’s always jiggling his legs when he sits?”
Morty knew who Little Jiggy was, a tall, skinny guy who couldn’t keep still. Morty had never seen him smile. He nodded.
“Maybe later I can get you a job too.”
Morty shook his head. “I don’t want that kind of a job.”
“Well, I’m going with him Friday night,” Rudy said. “We meet at four o’clock when the stores start shutting down.”
Morty didn’t say anything.
“Aren’t you going to wish me luck?”
“Good luck,” Morty mumbled. “I hope you don’t get caught.”
Rudy stared him down. “Don’t come begging to me later, when you’re all poor and need some money,” he said. And he turned and walked away.
Friday afternoon, while Morty did his homework, he kept thinking about Rudy, wondering what he was doing and feeling a little sick to his stomach with worry for his friend. He kept thinking about what his father had said at the dinner table the night before. The newspapers were calling it the Great Depression. They wrote about the businessmen, the giants of industry, who moaned about the huge losses for their businesses. Some had lost everything and committed suicide.
It was true it didn’t mean much to Morty and his friends. They had been poor before, and they were still poor. They certainly didn’t know anything about the stock market. They didn’t have savings in the banks; they kept their money in the house, in safe places, like the jar in the kitchen cabinet where the Feinsteins had been saving for Morty’s college fund. But the world was changing. Everyone was scared about money, and Morty didn’t like what his friends were doing. He had made up his mind. This was one activity where he wouldn’t be following Rudy. He was very glad to be off the street.
At supper that night, after his mother lit the Sabbath candles and his father blessed the wine, they sat at the dinner table eating soup. Morty, very hungry, shoveled food into his mouth. He knew his mother prided herself on her cooking and liked it if they savored the food and complimented her on it. “This is good, Mama,” he said, his mouth full of food.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she said to him. But she smiled, and he knew she was pleased.
His mother sat at one end of the table, his father at the other. She ate carefully, spooning the soup away from her. Papa sipped his, tipping the bowl toward him. Eight-year-old Sylvia clattered her spoon in her bowl and sometimes lifted it and slurped the soup without the spoon.
Morty looked at his mother, feeling sorry for her for a minute. She tried so hard to dress nicely, but there was no money for clothes for her even though she made beautiful clothes for rich women. Like today she was wearing the same old blue flowered dress she wore most days, neatly washed and ironed but tired looking. He had seen her scrubbing their clothing on a washboard in the bathroom and hanging them on a clothesline out the window. She tried hard to be proper, but it wasn’t easy. Their apartment was bigger, but everything else was the same.
After dinner, after the dishes were washed and put away, Golda worked on her embroidery, pulling a basket of linen and cotton and wool and spools of colored thread beside her easy chair. Morty watched his father walk by, touch her shoulder, and smile. She looked up at him and smiled back before returning to her needlework. Morty wondered if this was what love looked like when you got old. Did they love each other? Sometimes, Golda would hum as she stitched. Sometimes he thought he saw tears in her eyes. Morty watched her and wondered what she was thinking.