CHAPTER FIVE
Winter was official only when the first snow fell.
The sight of the soft flakes coming down brought a choking tenderness to Hershy’s mother. It made her remember the old country: how the snow piled up on the ground and the trees and the bushes, and remained crystal-white all winter; how the house smelled of baked things and cooked foods; how the whole family cuddled together on top of the broad oven at night; how the bright sun reflecting off the snow almost blinded one; how the sound of sleighs and bells brought cheer to one’s heart; how people gathered in the house and sat into the night spinning stories. It made her think of her parents and her brothers; and, wondering if they were still alive, she wept sadly. Winter was a time for remembering. Winter time was family time.
The father’s remembrance of winter was the death of his father; a pogrom; the going to schule before daylight and shivering over his prayers until the warmth of the stove and the candles and the closeness of other human beings took their effect. Through the falling snow loomed the remembrance of another large city, Kiev: gray, gloomy, and fearsome, where only two kinds of people existed; those who wore boots and furs, and those who wore nothing. Wintertime there was a time for darkness and loneliness, when one welcomed hard work and fatigue.
Winter cramped Rachel’s style: it was strictly an inconvenience. The only good thing about it was New Year’s Eve, if you had a date. She had a date, so the winter was going to be a success. Otherwise, the only steam she could work up over it was the steam that came out of her breath. Winter was strictly for the kids.
It certainly was. (All seasons, with the wonders and new phases of life they brought, were strictly for the children.)
It’s snowing, it’s snowing,
A little man is growing.…
Jack Frost made magic on the windows; he made magic smoke come out of peoples’ mouths; he made daggers hang from the trees and fences and windowsills; he made the milk that was left on the back porch pop right out of the bottles and gave it an ice-cream taste. It was a time for sleds and ice skates, toboggans and slides, snowball fights and King of the Hill, snowmen and igloos.
Winter was a time for cursing, too. It had no respect for a stiff muscle, a creaking bone. One could expire for a piece of daylight, the father complained. He woke up and went to work and came home in the dark. And, while waiting for a streetcar, one could almost die from the burning frost that swept in from the lake and prairies. His only comforts were a warm supper, a glass of hot tea, huddling around the stove and staring into its glowing belly, then feeling the huge warmth of the mother in bed: all of which he did not have the winter before away from home. The mother complained, too. The floors were impossible to step on in one’s bare feet. The house was impossible to keep clean, what with the ashes and the coal and the snow and the slush. And the house stank and looked like a laundry with the wash hung all over to dry. Oh, for a steam-heated flat, for a home of her own with a big basement, for a maid to do all the cleaning, like her rich sister had. Only the animals lived right; they buried themselves and slept right through the winter.
Winter … a time for Christmas and New Year’s.
It was strictly for the goyim.
For Hershy, only one thing was wrong with winter: Christmas.
Everything suddenly changed, but not for him. In school, teacher smiled tenderly. It roused his suspicions; he wondered what she wanted. Then he knew. She wanted to make a Christian out of him. Fearful of being doomed forever, he gritted his teeth to keep from singing the Christmas carols in class; he bit into the nail of his forefinger so hard that it turned black and blue and he was excused from making Christmas cards when he complained that it hurt.
On the street at night, many of the houses glowed with candles on Christmas trees and the windows were decorated with holly leaves and poinsettias. On the business street, the stores were crowded, and in the red, white, and green windows were all kinds of presents. The church bells seemed to be ringing all the time. On the carline intersection, across the street from the park, there were always a couple of Salvation Army women with tambourines; with them was a Santa Claus with runny eyes and a dirty cotton beard, who heaved his pillowed belly up and down with his hands but who never laughed. Every time he went over to warm his hands over the fire that was going in a tin pail, Hershy said: “Some Santa Claus.”
Once, he and his pals put rocks in the center of snowballs and whipped them at Santa Claus and the Salvation Army women; they ran away frightened when one of the women fell to the ground. Another time, they threw snow instead of money into the tambourines. And another time, they threw a shoebox full of snow into their pail of fire and put it out.
Among themselves, they fortified each other.
“Christmas is a lot of baloney.”
“Yah.”
“There ain’t no Santa Claus.”
“Yah.”
“The dopes. The dumb goyim.”
“Yah.”
“It’s all bushwa.”
When they caught hold of a lone gentile kid, they said: “You believe in Santa Claus?”
“Yah.”
“There ain’t no Santa Claus, you dumbsock.”
“There is too.”
“How much you want to bet?”
“All the money in the world.”
“A million dollars?”
“Yah.”
“Put up or shut up.”
“Yah?”
“Yah.”
“Okay. Here’s a present from Santa Claus.”
The kid got his face smeared with snow.
Every day the snow remained on the ground, Hershy’s mother cursed it and said: “The goyim live right. It’s their world. God is with them. They’ll have a white Christmas.” Specifically, the goyim, to her, were the Polish landlord, his beefy red-cheeked wife, and their six-year-old daughter. “The snow makes the Polack upstairs a happy man.”
One day, Hershy saw the Pole come home with icicles on his mustache and with the blood of the animals he killed at the stockyards still stained on his thick hands; he was carrying a Christmas tree. When he reached the front door he stopped and touched the mezuzah, then kissed his finger and crossed himself.
“Hey, you,” Hershy yelled. “What’d you do that for?”
“I’m not taking a chance. The snow has to lay on the ground. I don’t want your God to be mad and spoil the Christmas.”
“You’ll get a sin doing that.”
“Shahkreft, you bloody dog. Jesus Christ was a Jew, wasn’t he?”
“Yah, but you took him away from us, you cheater.”
“Shahkreft, little one, peace and good will to all men.”
“Ah, bushwa.”
A great puff of smoke came out of Mr. Pryztalski’s mouth, the icicles dripped off his mustache, he gripped the base of the tree as though he were going to whack him one with it, and Hershy ran away.
“You little sonofabitch,” Mr. Pryztalski bellowed. “I said peace and good will to all men.”
For that, Hershy wanted the snow to melt, even though it was more fun to have it on the ground.
But how strong can a child be? How long can he hold out? Even his own father couldn’t make it easier to bear the holiday. For once, after staring longingly at the frosty windows on the business street, at the sleds, ice skates, electric trains, erector sets, hunter’s knives, guns, cowboy suits, football and baseball equipment, he said to his father: “Pa, why ain’t we got a Christ?”
“Because we don’t need one.”
“Why don’t we need one?”
“Because their God wasn’t strong enough and they needed another one to help them. With us, there is only one God.”
“Can our God fight their God?”
“Yes, ours is stronger.”
“So why do we get beat up more than them? Why do we have to be more afraid than them?”
His father shrugged his shoulders, not knowing what to answer. In the old country you took your faith, your station in life, your very life itself, for granted. You asked few questions. The world seemed to have a definite order. There, you had your own religion, your own language, your own school, your own traditions: your whole life stemmed from the schule, your whole life turned inward: somehow, because you were more unified it was easier to bear the outward pressure. There was no problem there of reaching outward, of hoping to become a vital part of the community, for if you tried to poke just a little finger outward it would be crushed. So you waited, suffering, for your own Messiah. And the Jew became a symbol of eternal hope, because life couldn’t be worse for them; it could only become better.
Here, well, you came here with your eternal hope; and, to a degree, it was fulfilled, for life was better. But here, you took the chance of losing your former unity; in being able to reach outward you came into greater conflict with the world about you. You had to be more careful: for there, only your life could be destroyed; but here, your spirit also could be crushed.
Here, a Jew’s strength was slowly undermined in the changes he had to make. You had to work on Saturday to hold a job. You had to learn a new language and adapt yourself to the values of the new language. You didn’t ask too many questions about the food you ate outside the house. In the South, where there were no schules, what was one to do, create his own temple of worship? His own father would have walked miles to demonstrate his piety. But he—he had grown lazy. He had even become lazy in the old country. In a sense, he had rejected his own father. Perhaps his own child might reject him. Perhaps he (Hershy) might have to reject him so that he might become a better man.
Already the foreign seeds were blooming. The child could understand Yiddish but was losing the flavor of its speech. Instead of the biblical heroes of old the child had his own: prizefighters, ballplayers, gangsters, moneymen. In one generation thousands of years of tradition had been lightly thrown away.
Even he, himself, in his daily comparisons of there and here, felt the chasm growing wider and wider. Sometimes he, himself, had asked: what is a Jew? Why shouldn’t his son ask it? And how can one answer? If one is not wholly involved in a religion; if one doesn’t have the language of the Jew; if one, in adopting the manners about him, doesn’t even look or feel like a Jew, what can you say: that he is a part of a people, he is the carrier of a breed of oppressed people, that he must be a twentieth-century symbol proving the endurance and the greatness of a people once great, that he is a conscience, if nothing else? What can one say to a child to make him feel secure, to make him feel stronger? Could he say: We are the strongest people in the world; we prove it every day of our lives by enduring the subtlest kinds of persecution; we also prove that the world about us, with its Christ, is evil. When they stop bothering us, when they stop making us fear them, then we will know that the real Messiah has come, then all men will belong and will feel safe, all men will love each other, all our energies will be released to do good, and we will feel, for the first time since Adam, that we are fully alive? How does one put a million thoughts into the simple words that a child might understand? How does one sum up one’s whole lifetime into something a child can grasp?
“When you get older, Hershel,” he said, “you’ll understand.”
“Yah, but I still wish we had a Christmas.”
“Well, we have a Hanukkah.”
“Ah, Hanukkah. All you get is lotkes, them lousy dried-up pancakes, and a few pennies. But Christmas, all the things you can get.”
“Don’t think about it too much, Hershel.”
“I can’t help it, Pa. All the things in the stores.”
“You’ll get what you need without Christmas. If the goyim need to fool themselves, let them.”
“Yah, but I wish I had a sled and a pair of skates.”
His father knew that he couldn’t deny him these things. He had already made many concessions to life; one more wouldn’t hurt.
“All right, Hershel. You’ll get them.”
But his father didn’t buy them in a store; he had Hershy help him build them in the basement. But Hershy was disappointed in the sled; it wasn’t a real coaster. And he wouldn’t wear the skates; all the guys would call him a sissy because there were double runners on them. His father tried to distract him by getting him to help build a phonograph that Rachel wanted. But when Christmas Eve arrived Hershy felt that his heart would burst. The Pryztalskis upstairs didn’t help matters, either. Mr. Pryztalski shook the house with his thundering walk. Mrs. Pryztalski’s giggles and high-pitched voice prickled through Hershy. He felt like killing the little girl.
“So what’s Santa Claus going to bring me?” she shrieked.
“You’ll see,” Mr. Pryztalski bellowed.
“But when’s he going to come?”
“After you go to sleep. Now go to sleep.”
“First I’m going to hang up one more stocking.”
“Ho, ho, ho.” Mr. Pryztalski was practicing his Santa Claus voice. “Hang it up. Quick.”
The pattering feet. The lumbering tread. The giggles. The excitement.
Hershy’s mother sighed. “The crazy Polacks,” she said.
Then it became quiet upstairs. The wind began to whistle through the passageway. The world seemed to be blowing away. A strange, drifty hush pervaded the house. Nobody was outside. Aside from the sound of the wind, only the lamppost light creaked as it swayed above the street. And then, like thunder crashed down the stairs and rumbled into the house, Mr. Pryztalski stamped into view in a red suit and a white beard, yelling in Polish, ho-ho-hoing, and calling himself Santa Claus. Hershy almost died of fright. It was not until he was lifted high in the air and had pulled away the beard that was attached to a rubber band that he came to and yelled: “See, it ain’t Santa Claus. See, it’s Mr. Pryztalski, the gypper.” He then let the beard slap back to Mr. Pryztalski’s face and, though everybody laughed, he got crying mad. As soon as he was dropped to the floor he tried to kick Mr. Pryztalski’s shins, but he was held off by his long arm, and suddenly he stopped. Almost blinding him was a pair of long gleaming blades, a pair of racing skates, which Mr. Pryztalski had brought out from under his red blouse.
“Look what Santa Claus brought you,” Mr. Pryztalski boomed. “Ho, ho, ho. And look what else he brought you.” Mr. Pryztalski opened the door and dragged in a sled, a real coaster.
Hershy took them awkardly and stared at them. Mr. Pryztalski brought a bottle out of his pocket.
“Drink,” he commanded.
Hershy’s father drank from the bottle. Then Mr. Pryztalski took a long gulp, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, lifted up Hershy’s mother, and kissed her with a loud smack full on the lips, which she wiped and spat away, and then he left with a roar of laughter.
Everybody stared at each other. The house had grown so quiet, like a sudden storm had struck it and passed away.
Finally his mother said: “What do you say, Hershel?”
He didn’t know what to say; he was too stunned.
“What do you say when you get a present?”
“I don’t know,” he stammered.
“Nothing, after Papa spent all that money on you?”
“You mean Pa bought them for me?”
“What do you think? You think the Polack did?”
“But …”
“Papa bought them, but he wanted to surprise you. Besides, go argue with a Polack; he had to come down like Santa Claus or he’d have torn off the roof from over our heads.”
“I knew it. I knew there was no Santa Claus.”
He flopped down on the sled and felt himself coast a mile. He saw himself go slish-slash, zip-zam across the icy lagoon in the park, a mile on every glide. His whole world tumbled back in place.
“Live, boychik, live,” his father said. “But know the truth when you see it.”
New Year’s Eve was just another night. When the bells and whistles and horns sounded off at midnight, Hershy was sound asleep. His mother and father were drinking tea. They paused a moment and stared at each other and sighed.
“Last year I was asleep,” his mother said.
“This year I’m alive,” his father said.
“Next year we’ll celebrate.”
“Meanwhile, let there be peace.”
“It’s a crazy world.”
They rose and went to bed.
At that moment, in an expensive night club, Uncle Hymie was kissing a young girl, who later turned out to be his secretary; and Aunt Reva, cold sober and completely out of place, sat horrified. (Later, when Hershy heard of this, Aunt Reva cried: “What good is money, if you haven’t got love?” and Uncle Hymie said: “What good is money, if it can’t free you to make decisions?”) Uncle Irving was playing a cautious game of poker in the rear of a neighborhood restaurant, determined not to lose the ten dollars he was ahead, while his wife and two children slept at home. Uncle Ben was dreaming that he was in a world that had no automobiles and that he was a highly respected man with a flourishing harness business (a recurrent dream for him), while his wife groaned beside him. Rachel was at a house party. She had to fight off the man she was with; his breath revolted her. The following day, her comment about New Year’s Eve was: “It’s wonderful, if you got lots of money or if you’re in love.”
And so, with the holidays over, the winter settled down heavily: wheezing and whistling, creaking and crunching, biting and burning, its hard back on the streets full of crusts, its body pocked with soot and stained with refuse. Only people gave it warmth.
In the morning, Hershy’s father got up first, grated the stoves, carried the ashes into the alley, came back with a couple of pails of coal, and got the stoves hot: this, his mother said, was a healthy blessing to her heart. He’d wake up Hershy’s mother: “The house is warm, my queen, get up.” He’d wake up Rachel: “Get up, princess.” And after they left for work Hershy would be awakened by his mother: “Wake up, prince.”
After school, Hershy would always have to go to the grocer or butcher to pick up something that his mother had forgotten to buy, with implicit instructions, like: “Tell him, my ma said you should give her a big bunch soup greens for two cents,” or, “Tell him, my ma said you should give her a big soup-bone with meat on it for a nickel.” After running the errand under protest, unless he was given a penny for candy or halvah, he’d go out to the park and ice skate, flopping all over until he learned how; or he’d go tobogganing down a two-story slide in the park; or he’d settle for belly-flopping on his sled down the street; or he’d slide on the runners of ice that were made on the sidewalk. Sometimes, when it was below zero weather, he and his pals would gather in a basement that had a furnace and they’d box with open hands or with gloves on, or they’d draw lines on the cement floor and lag for buttons and corks; sometimes they’d just talk, dreaming of someday, or trying to relate themselves to the world and its mysteries.
“How come it’s so dark so much in the winter and so light so much in the summer?”
“How come? Because the winter stinks on ice.”
“Where does the winter come from, the North Pole?”
“Nah, it’s the sun going away from us, teacher says.”
“Where’s it go?”
“What, do I know everything?”
“How come you can only see the stars on the nighttime?”
“The sun hides it from us, see.”
“You mean the stars are out in the daytime, too?”
“Sure, you dope. If it was nighttime in the daytime you could see the stars in the daytime.”
“Man, a shooting star could hit you, klunk, right in the eye then, and you wouldn’t even know it.”
“Ah, you dumbsock, a star shoots only in the nighttime.”
“You think it’s colder on the moon than here?”
“Colder.”
“Boy, that’s cold.”
“You think they’ll invent a rocket to go up there?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know! We got airplanes, ain’t we?”
“So?”
“So they can go to the moon if they want, only they don’t want to yet. My old man says they got a million inventions, but they’re a secret because they could either kill us or make us too happy. And who the hell wants to see us happy, my old man says.”
“Your old man.”
“Yah? My old man knows plenty. He reads the English paper, don’t he?”
“Your old man can pitch spitballs and fadeaways, too. But if they made a rocket to go to the moon, would you go?”
“Sure.”
“You?”
“And how.”
Everybody was positive he’d go. Zoom, they rocketed to the moon with sound effects, and explored it. Then they talked some more. And as they did, not being able to sit still, occasionally one would punch another on the muscle of his arm. “That’s for nothing, see.” Somebody would walk away swimming and yelling: “The American crawl, the American crawl.” Somebody would pitch like Three-Finger Brown; catch an imaginary ball like Ted Collins; bat like Ty Cobb; punt like Frank Merriwell; shoot like William S. Hart; box like Jess Willard. But the talk went on.
“Hey, punk, where do you think you come from?”
“From the Boston store.”
“Who told you?”
“My ma.”
“You mean you asked her?”
“Sure, what do you think?”
“Boy, what a punk.”
“Yah?”
“Yah. Asking his ma. What a punk.”
“Yah? So who else am I going to ask? Who else am I going to know from?”
“From us, see. From us big guys.”
“So?”
So they told him.
“You bastards, I’ll tell my big bro on you for that.”
“Go on, tell your big bro.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“Ah, beat it, punk.”
And so, the kid in tears and kicked out of the basement, the education of a younger boy was dispensed. Then, strengthened by the younger boy’s smallness, his tears, and lack of knowledge, they’d grow alive with dreams of being older. They were vague about what they’d become, there were so many things to choose from, but somehow none of them dreamed of being like their fathers. For in them was the capacity to rocket to the moon, hitch their wagons to the comets, play tag among the clouds. Even their fathers, who couldn’t catch a ball or read the jokes or tell the score, believed this, or liked to believe it.
At night, now that his father was home, Hershy seldom had to read to his mother. Instead, his father read to her out of the Yiddish paper, and his mother would gasp and make tsking sounds over the news of the civil war in Germany, the perils of Bolshevism, the revolution in Hungary, the conflicts in Poland. The war was over but wars were still going on; it was hard for her to understand. But the part of the paper that absorbed her most was the problem and lovelorn letters that were published and answered. Then she would settle back with the full knowledge of the world’s troubles, listen to the soft falling of ashes in the stove, and, feeling secure in her peaceful flat, would say: “People. How hard it is for them to live.”
His father’s being home gave Hershy greater freedom, released him for a more active life on the streets. He seldom had to go to the movies with his mother, finding much more fun there with the guys. But sometimes, when his father worked overtime, he’d have to go with her: never to a cowboy or funny picture, always to a romance. There, every time the titles were flashed on the screen, an immediate buzz of translation would rise, with Hershy’s voice part of it. Sometimes, conversations would continue between parents and children over the meaning of what was happening, until those that had caught on quickly would yell: “Shut up.” In some language or another the answer was always: “Shut up yourself. I paid my nickel, didn’t I? I got a right.” Sometimes, fights would arise between parents and children when the children would become too absorbed in the movie to translate.
“Noo, noo, what are they saying? What’s happening?”
“For Christ sake, Ma, let me see the picture, don’t bother me.”
“Stinker, what’s happening? I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me.”
And the kid would shout out the subtitles. And, with peace attained, once again the buzz of translation would sweep the illiterate into a magic world they had never known but had always dreamed about.
Sometimes, Hershy’s mother cried there, and it was hard for him to understand.
“Cut it out, Ma.”
“Shut up, you devil.”
“What’s to cry about?”
“Everything. Everything.”
Her sniffles and sobs would spoil the picture for him and he’d stop translating. Then she’d poke him hard and whisper tensely: “Read. Read it.”
“It says: Don’t ever darken my door again.”
“No!”
“Yah.”
“You mean he’s throwing her out?”
“I guess so.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.” And a throbbing sob.
Afterward, she’d come out in the cold, red-faced and sniffling.
“Oy, what a wonderful picture.”
“Ah, it was all right, Ma.”
“So full of life.”
“Ah, it was a sissy picture.”
He was glad that he didn’t have to go with her too often. She spoiled the movies for him. When he and the guys went they saw the pictures differently; there was more fun.
During this time, something was added to the house that revealed their lives more completely than any words or gestures they could express: it was the phonograph that Hershy’s father had built for Rachel. In its carved walnut splendor it stood in the parlor as a tribute to his father’s skill.
When it was first brought up from the basement, there was a proud light in his father’s eyes, his mother ah-ed, Rachel oh-ed, and Hershy posed beside it on his hands and knees, and, with his head cocked, began to bark. Soon afterward, Hershy discovered the remarkable charm of the instrument.
He was the only one who didn’t need a record to make the machine talk and express himself. His pal Cyclops was able to make the most beautiful horses in the world: so beautiful that the sight of his Shetlands, pintos, Arabian steeds, and thoroughbreds brought a quiver to Hershy’s throat. Immediately, Hershy got Cyclops to draw them on cardboard, with cowboys and Indians and jockeys to ride them; then they cut the forms out, mounted them on the green felt turntable, started the motor, and wham, a whole new world came alive for them. At the sight of the cowboys and Indians and jockeys racing on their horses, the hoofbeats of their stomping feet and the slapping of their rumps and the sound of the whirring motor was like the rhythm section of a great orchestra; and their excited shouts, grunts, screams, whistles, and cheers were the melodies and solo flights which sent them fully into the vast spaces of their imaginations.
Everybody in the house had to cover their ears to this music. When they begged for mercy, Hershy answered: “Ah, for Cry Yike, a guy can never have no fun around here.” He was sure that he was putting the phonograph to much better use than they. At least he had fun. But they … well, look at the records they played. Rachel’s were black-labeled with gold trimmings, his mother’s were red-seal, and his father’s had green labels printed in Yiddish.
When his father played the phonograph, he’d sit down in the rocking chair and close his eyes; through the quivering, soulful chants his throat would work along with the cantor’s singing and he’d seem to go far, far away. At the end of the record he’d say: “Ay, Yussele, Yussele.” Then he’d turn to Hershy and say: “You know who that is? Yussel Rosenblatt, the greatest singer in the world.”
“Ah, he ain’t so good as Al Jolson, Pa.”
“Al Jolson? He grunts like a pig. In America there is no great singing. There is no feeling for it. There is only noise.”
“Yah? Rachel says Al Jolson makes more’n a thousand dollars a week when he sings.”
“What has money to do with feeling and singing?”
“I don’t know, Pa. That’s what Rachel says.”
“Never mind what Rachel says. Just listen to a man with a great voice and learn. Listen to a man with a soul and feel the way he can make every nerve in your body tremble. Listen to him.”
Hershy would listen but it sounded like Yom Kippur, a holiday he neither understood nor had any feeling for, since his brief experience in Hebrew school (which he quit as soon as his father went away) was marked by an unintelligible language and an old snuff-smelling teacher with a beard who used a stick to beat him. He’d listen and stare at his father, wondering at the way he’d rock in the chair with his sunken eyes closed and his bony face lax, watching the chanting of the cantor work in his throat, and feeling him go far, far away, deep into a life he had never known.
His mother’s records were different. During the war, while his father was away, a neighbor had taken her to the opera a few times. Each time, she had come home gasping and sighing, straining to express the emotional impact of the music. Now, through the phonograph, she was able to take her part in the great tragic dramas of the opera. Caruso could make the veins at her temple throb, could make her hands clutch over her breasts, could make her face look like she was having the heart torn out of her. After playing one of his records, she’d turn to Hershy and say: “That was Caruso, the greatest singer in the world. If only you could sing like him.”
“Ah, he ain’t so good as Tony the bananaman.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Tony barks like a dog. With his voice all he can sell is a banana.”
“And Caruso?”
“When you get older, my son, you’ll understand what he sells.”
Sometimes she’d play a waltz. And though she didn’t move, he could feel her go far away, dancing lightly through the distant mansions of her mind.
Rachel’s music was less confusing, much closer, more familiar to his ear, though what she felt about it, in her adolescent dreams of becoming a great dancer, was beyond him. Her music was more a part of the way he walked and ran and jumped and played, closer to the tissue paper and comb he’d learned to play, more akin to the plunk of a baseball in a glove, the clanking washtubs, the sticks clattering against a fence, the sharp whistles, the rhythmic train sounds, the cries on the street, and the explosive automobile noises. Instead of making one sit down and, with eyes closed, drift into another world, Rachel’s music was full of motion; it made you get up on your feet and move.
Sometimes the music was close to the cantor’s singing in his father’s records. Blues, Rachel called them; they made her sway and twist, look hot and melty. Sometimes they were close to his mother’s records. Waltzes, Rachel called them, but they did not have the sweep of his mother’s records; instead, they were tight and cramped, as though laced in a corset; they made Rachel go into dizzy whirls. But most always her records were filled with plunking banjos, pounding drums, skittering pianos, thumping tubas, with a clarinet winding in and out of a growling trombone, or with a piercing trumpet shooting out fiercely from the rest of the band. Rachel called them ragtime and foxtrot numbers. His mother called them crazy. And Rachel, swaying, shuffling, whirling, would say: “Listen to it, just listen to it.”
“Noise,” his mother called it. “Plain noise.”
“But that’s the real American music. That’s the real American spirit.”
“It could make one go crazy.”
“But it’s life, Ma. It’s living in a great big way.”
“Do me a favor and let me live in a small way, then.”
“But, Ma, if you don’t like this you don’t like America.”
“I don’t like bums, but they’re a part of America. Do I have to like them?”
“Ah, Ma, you just don’t understand.”
Then one night the full impact of the varied music came into play. After supper, Hershy’s father took the cardboard horses, cowboys, Indians, and jockeys off the turntable and, while his mother was finishing up the dishes in the kitchen, played some Yussel Rosenblatt records. Then his mother came into the parlor and played some operatic records. Hershy heard them but didn’t listen; he was too absorbed in trying to get three beebies that were under a glass into three tiny holes which were punched into a clown’s face.
Then Rachel came home late from work with a box under her arm. She explained that she had been working overtime. After she ate she went into her bedroom and closed the door. When she came out, Hershy looked up quickly at the sound of his mother’s gasp.
“But where did you get it?” she asked.
“I made it in the shop,” Rachel said. “That’s why I was late.”
“But what is it?” asked Hershy’s father.
“A dancing dress,” Rachel said.
“But you look so naked,” said his father. “Where can one dance in a dress like that?”
“On the stage,” Rachel said.
“And you wouldn’t be ashamed?” his mother asked.
“Are the girls in the opera ballet ashamed when you see them?” Rachel said.
“No,” his mother admitted. “But they’re artists. Besides, you can catch a cold running around like that.”
“And don’t forget,” his father added, “you’re not on the stage yet.”
“But I will be,” Rachel said. “Someday, you’ll see, I will be. This is my audition dress. Do you like it?”
Everybody stared at her.
“Say you like it,” she begged. And, when nobody answered, she said: “Say something, will you!”
Hershy finally answered for his mother and father.
“Yowie!”
For there she stood, full and tall and graceful, like a circus queen, with parts of her showing which none of them had ever seen before. Her arms were bare and her hair was wound into a tight biscuit at the nape of her neck; her plump breasts mounded out of a tight bodice that glittered with silvery spangles; the curve of her back and hips flowed into a short ruffled skirt; and her legs, which had never been seen above the ankles, were firm and shapely in pink silk stockings.
“A regular queen of Sheba,” said Hershy’s mother finally.
“I’m going to give you a free show,” said Rachel.
“Noo, let’s see already,” his mother said. “Let’s see what all your dancing lessons have done for you.”
“First we have to roll the rug back,” said Rachel.
Hershy helped his father roll the rug back. Then he sat down on the couch between his mother and father. His mother settled back with her hands clenched on her lap. His father crossed his legs and tried to look unconcerned. Hershy shifted eagerly from side to side.
“You’re sitting in the dark, see,” said Rachel. “Then, when the music starts, a spotlight’s going to shine on me. Like silver and gold, it’ll make me look. Ready?”
“Ready,” said Hershy.
“Okay, here goes.”
The blare of music startled them. His mother’s hands came up to her ears. His father cocked his head and stared. Hershy leaned forward with his mouth open, held by the glitter of her spangled breasts and jiggling body. On the second chorus he almost stopped breathing.
“No.”
“Look out, Rachel.”
“You’ll kill yourself.”
Rachel had gone into a cartwheel and jounced on the floor in a full split. Then she worked from cartwheels and full splits, interspersed with taps, into a slow backward dip to the floor, from which she rolled upward to her feet, and then into walking on her hands with her legs spread horizontally. Hershy applauded and yelled while his mother and father, terrified, kept begging her to stop it. Finally, she bounced on one toe, her cleated sole tapping to the music; her other leg was raised so that her toe pointed to her face; and, as she scolded that toe with her finger, the music ended and she ran out of the room.
“Hey, Ma. Hey, Pa,” Hershy shouted. “Did you see that? An acrobat. Rachel can go in a circus.”
But when he looked up there were tears in his mother’s eyes.
“Like Pavlowa she used to dance when she was a little girl,” she said. “Now look at her, like a wild Indian, so crazy, so ugly.”
His father tried to soothe her. “It’s the American style,” he said. “To an American, I suppose, it’s beautiful.”
But Hershy thought Rachel was the greatest dancer in the world. He suddenly saw her as a different being, a part of the charmed world of acrobats, magicians, and clowns. He was ready to fall in love with her, if only she would teach him all those tricks.
After that night he added her music to the music of his whirring motor, which sent his horses and cowboys and Indians and jockeys into action.