What with Bronson’s Low-Priced Store fast becoming a fixture in Concordia—and what with the Rastows having a house—all at once my father was agitating for a house of our own. He put it to my mother. “We ain’t poor, so why should we live like we are?”
My mother sent up a wail. “Leave Miss Brookie?”
One thing my mother kept hold of: There was to be no buying, only renting. “It ain’t as if we’re here forever,” she said to my father.
Places to rent in Concordia were scarce. Houses in the “good” section of town were passed down through families, or, if not, were bought, not rented.
Carrie MacAllister took my mother to see a house that was on the rental market. It had been built six years earlier by two men who had come from Memphis to open an antiques shop. Before they moved into it, they had lived at Miss Brookie’s. Miss Brookie had enjoyed them and admired their artistic bent. When the men gave up their shop and left Concordia after about two years, the house had stayed empty.
The house was more than unusual. It was one story (the men had no doubt been caught up in that period’s craze for bungalows) and had yellow stucco exterior walls. Over an open, concrete-floored porch were several brown wooden beams, one of which supported a chain-hung swing. In Mexico it would have fit right in, but not in Concordia.
Mrs. MacAllister was keen to share what she knew about the house. First of all, the men were not “interesting,” as Miss Brookie would have said, but “plain peculiar.” Though they were friendly to one and all, they never dated any of the local girls. Carrie summed them up as “the flat-out oddest people you’d ever meet.”
Like the Bronsons, my mother thought. Still, she agreed with my father that we should take the house.
When my father came home from the lease signing, I was sitting on the front porch swing, across from Miss Brookie. She wanted to know how it went.
“There wasn’t nothing to it,” my father told us. “Herman Tucker directed his teeth at me, said ‘But, but’ a few times, not too loud, and that was that.” He eased into the seat next to me and looked across at her. “Seems those teeth of his are chewing on butter and honey with me lately. Must think I’m making money.”
The late-afternoon sun was in Miss Brookie’s eyes, and she shielded them with her hand to look at my father, exactly as she did in that snapshot of mine. “No doubt,” she said to him.
“So it’s all set.”
Miss Brookie said, “I sure hate it that y’all are going. Still, I know you got to.”
“That’s right, we do.”
Miss Brookie thought my mother needed to make some friends other than “an old maid and a Nigra servant and the Daily Clarion,” meaning Carrie MacAllister. “Anyway,” she said to my father, “y’all aren’t going to Mars.”
I knew we weren’t going to Mars, we were going two blocks away. And Miriam would still be taking piano lessons. “But,” Miss Brookie wanted to know, “who’s going to wake me up mornings with sounds of mortal combat with the harp?”
The house had almost enough room for us. My sister and I were still together in one bedroom, but my brother had his own—one that stuck out from ours like a wart on a finger.
What was supposed to be the dining room, behind French doors opening into the front room, became my parents’ bedroom.
The furnishings my mother chose for the bedrooms were simple and utilitarian. She hung straight marquisette curtains at all the windows, though in the matter of color, Lizzie Maud had prevailed. “You got to get you some color on them,” she said to my mother. “These look like stuff you lays out the dead in.”
My mother, having spent long hours hemming the curtains by hand, went into full protest. “Enough’s enough with the curtains,” she said, and hoped it was the last word.
In the end Lizzie Maud tea-dipped them, giving them a color that was “kindly red and kindly got some sun in it, too.” As she hung them back up, she said to my mother, “The thing is, if y’all got to leave us, we wants to be proud of y’all, don’t you know.”
All the furniture in the minuscule front room was newly purchased. A gray mohair sofa and two matching easy chairs sat cheek by jowl in front of the red-brick fireplace. With their identical curving backs and rotund arms, they had the look of a well-fed family having a cozy chat. An iron floor lamp was behind the couch, and, at the side of each chair, a smoking stand.
In the space next to the fireplace sat a cabinet with a windup phonograph, which had been liberated from storage in Miss Brookie’s basement. On the long wall were two windows facing the street, both curtained with lengths of white lace, with which Lizzie Maud had no quarrel.
Positioned squarely in the middle of the fireplace mantel, in a blackish-brown tortoiseshell frame, was the portrait of my mother’s family—a studio photograph flanked by a vase of wax lilies of the valley and the nine-branched menorah for Hanukkah, which had come with the family all the way from New York.
There was one other chair in the front room: a way-too-big bentwood rocker Miss Brookie had brought down from her attic and sent around. There was only one remaining space—the doorway of the little square central hall, which housed the formidable presence that was the space heater—and a route had to be planned for going around it. But since Miss Brookie had sent the chair, we planned it.
Joey’s room was very private, perhaps because of the way it related to the house or perhaps because of its modest dimensions, which allowed accommodations for only a narrow bed and a skinny chest of drawers. We had taken out the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Since, according to Carrie MacAllister, the men had gardened and put things up, we’d assumed the room had been used as a pantry. At any rate, its ceiling was so low that T, who was undergoing a growth spurt, could barely stand up. Still, Joey’s erector and chess sets fit nicely under the bed, and the books sent by Uncle Philip were in reach on the slim shelf above.
With the dining room in service as my parents’ bedroom, it fell to the breakfast nook—a table and benches tucked into a little alcove in the kitchen (a sure sign of modernity, according to my mother)—to serve for eating.
The kitchen was remarkable only because the sink had not a pump but a spigot. Otherwise, it was the usual: a dominating coal stove; two tables, both wooden—one on tall legs next to the sink and the other an all-purpose one in the middle of the room; and an icebox on the minute screened back porch.
My mother’s most favored thing in the kitchen may have been the coal scuttle, a black metal open-spouted pail for bringing in coal from the shed attached to the back of the house. It spoke to my mother of America’s wonders. In Russia, coal, treasured like gemstones, had been brought in piece by piece, in hands. And here my mother had coal in great heaps, could fill the scuttle to overflowing, use it as extravagantly as she chose. Not that she ever would, but the choice was there.
The neighbors immediately came to call. They came in all manner of attire, some in gingham “wash dresses” with gardening sunbonnets still in place, some gotten up as if for church. Each came bearing a gift—a pie or baked apples or a few jars of home-put-up something from their gardens. (In Concordia things weren’t “canned,” they were “put up.”) One, a young bride from across the street, placed into my mother’s hands a slice of country ham wrapped in newspaper.
My mother thanked each one and tried to say more, knowing they all wanted to chat, but words stuck in her throat. The talk went quickly strained and soon trailed off. In just moments there were formal, self-conscious good-byes.
My mother put aside for Lizzie Maud not just the ham but the jars of vegetables as well. “Seasoning meats,” she said to Lizzie Maud. “These ladies never heard of vegetables without no fatback.”
To which Lizzie Maud said, “And you think that be worse than chopped-up livers with chicken grease?”
There came the day when the young bride—Miz Reeves— perhaps having learned of her folly in bringing us a housewarming gift of ham, dropped off a cutting of her “big inch” plant. This my mother accepted gladly. When the other neighbors brought cuttings, she accepted them gladly as well.
With the offering of plant cuttings, my mother found she could speak. She asked instructions, she listened, and as soon as the ladies left, she did as told.
It wasn’t long before she stood before her own plants and snipped off cuttings for the neighbors. In short order there were visits where the conversation revolved not only around plants but around children, and school, and even cooking.
It was the neighbors who had urged my mother to take the step of planting a garden. They said it was easy, nothing to it. They recited a poem: “Just seed it and weed it, wet it and get it.”
So out from under the sycamores and elms, on land where the sun shone most of the morning, my mother made a plot for spring bulbs and one for summer flowers, the latter, in the fall, to become a patch for chrysanthemums. Another one was set aside for vegetables.
Almost every day she did something in the garden. She planted, she pulled out weeds, she dug the earth around the bulbs. And almost every afternoon Miss Brookie stopped in and offered encouragement. “Your four o’clocks are going to bloom fit to kill,” she’d say, and she often ended her visit with, “You do have a way with plants, Reba, indeed you do.” No matter how often my mother heard this, she never tired of it, never tired of any compliment from Miss Brookie. As my mother would say, “It was more music to my ears than music.”
My mother was so well acquainted with every square inch of her garden that when she came across a growth a couple of inches high that she had never seen before, she was truly surprised. How was it possible that it had gotten so big behind her back?
She asked herself if it was going to be tsores or naches. Trouble or joy.
At first she decided it didn’t belong, that it was a weed to be pulled out. But when she looked more closely, she was unsure. It was dense with leaves—small, deep green, sturdy leaves, not weedlike in the slightest. She hesitated. She knew she had not planted it, but it clearly had more menschness, more substance, than some errant growth. She withheld action until Miss Brookie had been consulted.
When Miss Brookie appeared, the two women strolled to the backyard and brought the little green shoot into their sights. On hands and knees, skirts trailing in the dirt, they peered from all angles at the tiny growth.
Miss Brookie finally rose back up, clapped her hands to dislodge the soil, and issued one of her “vows and declares.” After entering a disclaimer—“If I’m not a demented old lady”—she vowed and declared that in my mother’s garden an azalea had volunteered.
It came to my mother that she had heard something about Tennessee being the Volunteer State. “You mean it only grows here in Tennessee?” she asked Miss Brookie.
Miss Brookie explained that no, a volunteer plant meant a plant that wasn’t planted, wasn’t invited, and appeared entirely of its own accord.
My mother’s decision was made. It could stay in there with the bulbs. “It’s been growing so hard, it would be a shame to do anything bad to it,” she said to Miss Brookie.
Miss Brookie took off her glasses, pulled her handkerchief from her pocket, and gave them a wipe. Message time. Volunteers, according to Miss Brookie, had ideas of their own: If they’d a mind to come up, up they’d come; but once they were up, they had to be well cared for. “Then they can be as pleasing as anything in your garden,” she said. She had a caution: Sometimes, for what would seem no reason at all, they would just “turn up their toes.” She said to my mother, “Volunteers are always a teensy bit different from cultivated plants. Or so it seems. Anyway, that’s what makes them so fascinating, don’t you know.”
My mother decided she’d just wait. “I can always pull it out later if I have to,” she said to Miss Brookie.
As time went on, the relationship between us and the neighbors grew closer and closer. They lent and borrowed, we lent and borrowed. We exchanged little gifts. If we sent around items from the St. Louis magic, they sent us pies and cakes (carefully unlarded in deference to my mother’s sensibilities). My mother crocheted soakers for new babies; the neighbors sent around aprons and tea towels, which they had “run up” on their sewing machines. And they were Bronson customers to the core.
I was a creature of the neighborhood. Betty May Nipper and Ouida Kimball went with me to the Sunshine Girls, and when we got to be school age, we walked together to Westerly, where we were in the same class. I scooted on the scooter of Chloe Campbell, who was a year older, until I got one of my own. It was her brother who provided me with my first glimpse of male embellishment, when we peeked through the bathroom keyhole while he was in the bathtub. Since there were no riding academies or even riding stables in Concordia (it not being that kind of town), if you wanted to ride, you went to somebody’s backyard, and I went to Lois Stanback’s and rode her Peaches (our Willy didn’t understand about somebody on his back). At the house of Rosemary Buffaloe on the corner, she and I climbed her crab-apple tree and threw crab apples at squirrels.
Miz Reeves across the street finally had a baby, and I visited him every afternoon. I felt I was indispensable since Miz Reeves depended on me around the baby’s bath time, to fetch talcum powder and such.
One day I found in the house across the street Miz Reeves’s niece Dorissey, from Jackson. Miz Reeves explained that as her niece, Dorissey was the baby’s cousin. Dorissey was my age and a cousin to somebody real! I knew I had some cousins, but they were in New York and might as well have been on a page in a book.
Dorissey said she had something to show me and led me to a bedroom closet, from which, standing on a chair, she withdrew a dress of bright yellow organdy, circled by a sash so white it shimmered. She laid it on the bed, went over to the dresser, and opened a drawer. From it she extracted a tiny reticule of ivory satin gathered together with a silky cord—a miniature of the accessory that accompanied ladies to elegant occasions. She put it beside the dress on the bed.
In what breath I had left, I managed to ask whose they were.
“Whose do you think? Mine, of course,” Dorissey said, I stared. “What are they for?”
Dorissey played with the ends of the sash. “I’m fixing to wear them this Sunday.”
“Where you going this Sunday?” I asked her, not wanting to hear the answer.
I heard it anyway. Dorissey slid open the reticule drawstring and drew forth a dainty mirror. She looked into it and, crinkling her eyes and pursing her lips, said, “To church.”
“Everybody around here goes to church,” I said to Dorissey.
“You don’t,” Dorissey answered.
My voice declined to a mumble. “It ain’t so much anyway.”
“It is when you go for something special.”
“What something special?”
Dorissey tossed her head, and her straight, dark blond hair leapt about. “We’re sprinkling the baby this Sunday.”
Sprinkling the baby? Was he, like my mother’s garden, in need of regular watering? “I know it,” I lied.
“You don’t know nothing of the sort.” Dorissey’s blue eyes appraised me. “Why’s he getting sprinkled if you know so much?”
I didn’t know so much. “Why?” I asked miserably.
“To make him into a Methodist, that’s why.”
My chin trembled, my lips quivered against each other. I let out a loud wail, and Miz Reeves came running in.
She took in the scene in one glance. “Run, Stella Ruth,” she said. “Run ask your mama can you come with us.”
I ran. “Mama! Mama! Miz Reeves wants to know can I go help sprinkle the baby!”
“‘Sprinkle’? What means ‘sprinkle’?”
“It’s something they do in church!”
“Oh. Church.” My mother began to turn away.
I grew frantic. “But it’s for babies, Mama! And little children are supposed to be there!”
This seemed to make an impression. “Oh, it must be Sunday school,” my mother said.
“Yes! It must be Sunday school!” Was this a lie or, hopefully, just a fib?
My mother might have thought about Miz Reeves and the plant cuttings and the sweet baby and the fact that the Reeves family traded at Bronson’s, but whatever the reason, in the end she said I could go. “But only to Sunday school,” she cautioned me.
I went with the Reeveses in a pink organdy dress with a green sash. On my arm hung a pink sateen purse.
The Reeves kin were at the church. Miz Reeves’s granny was there—a small, wrinkly lady with veins on her hands like tree roots raising up in the ground. “My, what a nice little girl,” she said to me. “Are you a Methodist, too?”
I could see Miz Reeves, standing to one side of me, frantically shaking her head. “No, Granny,” she managed to say, “she’s the little girl from across the street.”
“The Jew child? Oh Lord Jesus have mercy,” her granny said.
The preacher threw drops of water over the baby’s head, repeated his name several times—Loomis Joyner Reeves—and held him while he said a Jesus prayer.
I came home. I waited for my mother’s questions.
“Did the baby enjoy it?”
“Guess not. He screamed his head off.”
This seemed to be all the questioning there would be.
I went to Sunday school the following Sunday with Dorissey. After Dorissey left, I made Sunday school rounds with a selection of Baptists and Presbyterians as well as Methodists.
How do I explain my mother’s acquiescence in this? My mother, who winced at the word Jesus? Who quailed at the sight of a cross? There’s no ready answer other than that she had it in her head that Sunday school had nothing to do with religion or perhaps that my being born Jewish automatically immunized me against untoward influences. I think, however, it was chiefly that in the matter of religion for the children, my mother stressed only Joey’s need to have a bar mitzvah.
Well, what was Sunday school? It was hearing a lot of Old and New Testament Bible stories and coloring a lot of pictures of Jesus and Mary (which I was careful to leave behind in church). Maybe I was vaccinated at birth, but these Sunday schools meant to me only more ways to play. Given my mother’s focus on Joey and my father’s disregard of religion, I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to the subject. Still, like most early experiences, these Sunday mornings have no doubt turned up in one form or another (perhaps through the poet’s “wandering vegetative dreams”), sometimes to bite me and sometimes to give me a nice little nuzzle.
So Joey was my mother’s target, and religion for him meant religious training. She said so often that Joey needed to go to Hebrew school, that all of us, not just Joey, were tired of hearing it.
Joey always protested that he knew a lot of Hebrew. On one particular day, as my mother sat on a chair crocheting, he was doing his protesting from the floor, where he was playing with his erector set. In his hand was one of the perforated metal pieces for an elevator he was planning, one that would actually go up and down by means of the string and wheel provided in the set. “The whole alphabet,” he said to her.
This did not impress her. Joey should be learning lessons. Exactly what he should be learning my mother wasn’t clear about, but whatever it was, it had to be learned in the Hebrew school. “You need to go to cheder,” she said to him, her crochet needle going in and out furiously.
My father interrupted. “So what do you want the boy should do? You act as if something could be done about it.” He rattled his newspaper, a sure sign that irritation had set in.
Maybe, my mother thought, she had been too quick to dismiss Gladys’s Nashville suggestion. She put it to my father.
The paper rattled wildly in my father’s hands. “What? If that ain’t the limit! You might as well say New York!” No, he needed his “stockroom boy.” What would he do without his right hand on Saturday mornings?
He went back to the Sentinel, turning the page to find the Bronson ad. Lately he had been doing this with some want of confidence: Three weeks earlier the paper had left out the R in the ad banner that was supposed to read BIG SHIRT SALE. “So you’ll stop already, Reba, yes?” he asked my mother.
My mother rose, and leaving her needle and crocheting in the chair, motioned Joey into the kitchen, to get away from my father’s rattling paper. She slid into the breakfast nook and Joey slid in across from her.
Joey tried to say that everything he needed to know was in history books. He tried to impress my mother with all the learning that was in the books Uncle Philip had been sending—not just general history, but Jewish history as well, and the philosophy of Jewish scholars through time. But though my mother accepted without argument that the books were full of important information, learning from books was not the point.
She tried to make the point. “You can read till your eyes fall out, it won’t do you no good for bar mitzvah,” she said to Joey. The point was her dream, her dream of the bar mitzvah ceremony, where my brother would stand with a lustrous white satin yarmulkeh on his head and a magnificently embroidered prayer shawl on his shoulders and read from the Torah in exquisitely enunciated Hebrew.
She suddenly began to see that there was really only one way out: Joey must go to New York. What my father had intended as a joke was taking hold in her head.
Taking hold also was one of her headaches, and she slid out from the bench and went to lie down. As she lay on the bed, she was thinking that soon she would have to talk to my father. And when she did? His blue eyes would go dark as if in sorrow for her wrongheadness. She closed her eyes, but there was no relief. In a few minutes she went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with sliced raw potatoes.