Lee came down the gangway of the Mauretania on a cold blustery October morning, looking wild, sunburned, and strange. Her eyes had an exhilarated, almost crazy, light. She wore a soiled shaggy sheepskin coat, her hair was long and disorderly, and she was clutching a bottle. On hand to meet her were Mom, Pop, myself, Zaideh, and Aunt Faiga. Zaideh was anxious for news of his son, Uncle Velvel, so Aunt Faiga had brought him to the dock. As we all drove back to our new West End Avenue apartment in our twelve-cylinder Cadillac (I’ll explain about that), Lee regaled Zaideh with Uncle Velvel’s latest doings. Lee speaks perfect Yiddish to this day; seldom uses it, but can roll it off like Molly Picon if she has to. That one baby year in Minsk did it.
Lee talked in a breathless wandering way, blinking around at New York as though waking from a deep dream. Uncle Velvel was now out of orange groves, she reported, and into soda bottles. He and his orange-grove partner were suing each other, both of them were suing the Zionist land authority, Velvel’s wife was suing him for divorce, and since his father-in-law had come to Palestine, Velvel was suing him all over again about the hay and feed business in Latvia. Legal costs were mounting up, and Velvel urgently required a cabled money order of fifteen hundred dollars; otherwise he might be compelled to come to America, family and all, to teach Hebrew in Los Angeles. He expected great things of his venture in soda bottles, but at the moment his children were in rags and crying for bread. Pop assured Zaideh, who took this report hard, that he would send off the fifteen hundred at once, and you can bet he did.
As for the bottle business, this is what Lee told us. A British soft-drink company operating a branch in Palestine had been paying for returnable bottles. Uncle Velvel had piled up a lot of these, figuring to turn them in all at once. Then the firm had announced a change of policy: bottles not wanted, no more payment for returns. Uncle Velvel considered this a moral outrage and a breach of contract. He was planning to sue the company for damages, as well as for the value of his bottles, and he was accumulating more and more bottles, convinced that there was a fortune in them. Nobody else had any use for them, and by the time Lee left Palestine Uncle Velvel had amassed some forty thousand bottles. I think that was the figure, though it does seem high. Four thousand, maybe.
Anyway, Uncle Velvel’s flat in Tel Aviv was an extraordinary sight, Lee said. Glittery soda bottles were stacked floor to ceiling in every room and hall, with only narrow passageways through the glass to the beds, the kitchen stove, and the toilet; and the small yard out back was solid soda bottles, as high as a man could reach. Possibly Lee was stretching things, in her fashion; yet without a doubt Uncle Velvel had the Palestine corner in nonreturnable soda bottles, and was confident of making a big killing. But the law was slow, hence the interim request for fifteen hundred dollars.
Well, to look at our twelve-cylinder Cadillac, you’d have thought that Pop had at last hit it big, and Velvel’s request was a mere bagatelle. Not so. Remember Brodofsky’s brother-in-law, Morris, who scalded himself in the boiler room of the Fairy Laundry? It had been his Cadillac. Morris had married a young wife, and had taken to drinking, gambling, and generally living it up on borrowed funds. He had been riding around in this second-hand Cadillac when his brief fling ended in bankruptcy; and the Fairy Laundry got the car in lieu of money which Brodofsky had nagged Pop into lending Morris. It was a thing of beauty—long, sleek, tan, gleaming—but its insides were a mess, for it had been through all sorts of automotive hell. Pop took it over because it seemed to go with a West End Avenue address.
Luckily he kept his Model A Ford, because that was what he continued to drive. When the Cadillac wasn’t up on blocks for major internal overhaul, it was in the body shop getting a fender unbent, for Pop could never get used to driving the dreadnought. Repair bills were murderous. The whole frame was out of whack, so that the car wore down fresh new tires to the white cords like a grindstone. After a while Pop tried to give the thing back to Morris; who, according to Pop, laughed “like a crazy one” and said his downfall had almost been worth it because he had unloaded the Cadillac. Eventually Pop did give it to a garage man, as payment for a back-breaking bill for a new transmission; and he had to sweeten the deal with a hundred dollars or so, to get the monster off his hands. But that was later.
Mom loved that Cadillac. Just to be able to meet my sister Lee at the Cunard dock in that ailing dinosaur justified for her the trouble Pop was having. I was crazy about it, too, and couldn’t wait to become old enough to drive it. We once travelled to Florida in it, and had to take the last part of the trip at fifteen miles an hour; anything faster caused an infernal smell of redhot iron and melting rubber, and tumbling black smoke from the twelve cylinders. But Mom arrived at the Miami hotel in a Cadillac.
About the new apartment, though, there was nothing illusory. We leaped to true high style: a canopied entrance with gilded ironwork doors, a carpeted lobby walled in marble, doormen and elevator men in brown uniforms gaudy with gold braid, wood-panelled elevators, and a service elevator for the lower orders. What a change from that slow small whining self-service lift in Pelham, crowded with vulgar people like our former selves, carrying bundles of groceries! You never saw that in a West End elevator. Mama caught on fast and had her groceries delivered, at prices doubling those in Pelham. She was a canny frugal shopper, but she was not about to brave our Irish doorman—actually named Pat, with an intimidating square red face, and a thick brogue—by walking into the building with her arms full of brown paper bags. Here was a woman who in the Bronx could brain a man with a brick; yet before the haughty look of a West End Avenue doorman, her “moxie” failed her.
Or maybe that is unjust. Mama has never lost her fighting spirit, not really. Only a couple of months ago I sat with her while she crushed an IRS agent; a mean little ferret with a sneaky face and a nagging whine, who kept his black raincoat on in her flat as he went over her return. I myself would have let him disallow all my deductions, to get the creep out of my house. Not Mom. She kept arguing, and explaining, and forcing him to add up his figures over and over, until he plain quit; went cringing out of her apartment with his black raincoat dragging, whipped by an ancient lady. I wanted to cheer. I invited Mom to a kosher Chinese restaurant on the spot.
So, on second thought, in the matter of Pat, the Irish doorman, I suppose Mom decided she was now a Manhattan yoxenta, and wouldn’t carry bundles. She remained quite capable of clouting even Pat with a brick, should the occasion arise.
***
Pat’s eyes bulged as Zaideh got out of the car in his ankle-length black coat and round black hat; and, stroking his broad beard, contemplated the facade of the temple across the street, with its Hebrew legend carved in stone over high bronze portals, THIS IS THE GATEWAY TO THE LORD, THE RIGHTEOUS SHALL ENTER HERE. My parents had joined the temple. My father had been elected a trustee. Zaideh was not pleased.
“O dos iddess? (That’s it?)” he asked my father.
“Dos iddess,” said Pop.
The expressions of my grandfather staring at the temple, and of the doorman staring at Zaideh, were much the same: hostile wonderment, more or less controlled by good manners.
“Nu,” said Zaideh.
“Nu” is a brief Yiddish word of infinite extension. This “nu” said: “Well, such things actually exist, I see. It’s really true that Jews spend fortunes to build them, in crazy America. Enough already.”
With an eloquent shrug, he turned to enter the building. Pat held the door open with belated deference, having meanwhile correctly sized Zaideh up as a Jew priest. In marched my grandfather. By his bearing, he could have been Randy Davenport’s grandfather, so at home did he appear, entering those splendid alien surroundings. But then Zaideh always appeared at home everywhere, however exotic he might look to others; possibly because he knew God was everywhere, and he was at home with God; or to come off that high note, maybe it stemmed from being so utterly himself, from not trying to “make it,” because there was nothing to make, and nobody to make it for. He had a kindly smile for the astounded elevator man; and as we all rode up in the gilded car with a full-length mirror he kept saying, “Panski! Panski! (Aristocratic! Aristocratic!)”
My sister Lee was a different story. She looked strange too in that shaggy sheepskin coat from Palestine, with her long hair all wild, and the bottle under her arm. The smile she returned to Pat’s haughty stare was half-defiant, half-apologetic. In the lobby she looked around and said, “Wow, Loew’s Boulevard,” wanting to sound unimpressed, but betraying herself with a weak giggle. She tried chumminess with the short dark elevator man. “Hi, what’s your name?”
“Jesus,” he said. Lee blinked as though he had thrown something at her. Even Zaideh gave a slight start, but that was the man’s name all right. He was a South American. I never quite got used to it.
Zaideh touched the mezuza on the doorpost of our new apartment and kissed his fingers. Proudly, Mom opened the door. “Come, Papushka. See how Sarah Gitta lives!”
“Panski! Panski!” Zaideh kept exclaiming, as Mama showed him, and Faiga, and Lee, through the place.
The rooms were twice as large as those on Longfellow Avenue. There were four bathrooms, counting the maid’s little toilet. Gross luxury! We had come a long way, we Aldus Street Goodkinds. A chair or two retained from Pelham looked lost in this apartment, which Mom had furnished handsomely, arguing that when fine young Manhattan fellows came calling on Lee in a palatial apartment, they couldn’t very well sit around on old Bronx sticks. The Aldus Street tables, chairs, and beds which had moved along with us for years were all gone. I heard much concerned talk, as my parents went over the bills. But Pop summed it all up late one night, in a resigned Yiddish byword: “Once you’re eating pork, let it drip from your chin.”