I had plenty of playmates and, except for a few inconsequential things they did that I didn’t—like going to church—our lifestyles were similar. I was disconcerted—and envious—only when there were visits to or from relatives. It was one thing I couldn’t get in on. My family talked a lot about our New York relatives, and letters went back and forth (those that came to us always started, “How are things in ‘the sunny South’?”), but I was almost four before I laid eyes on any of them. The occasion was a visit from my mother’s sisters, my Aunt Sadie and my Aunt Hannah.
The visit was part of that scenario of my mother’s in which Aunt Hannah and Manny Rastow would meet, fall in love, get married, and settle down in Sidalia. Each time she saw Manny, her conviction that this was a wonderful idea was reinforced. She finally broached the subject to my father. “Here’s a man would work out perfect with Hannah,” she said to him.
My father gave a jokey answer. “You mean they’re both so short they could stand on the wedding cake themselves?”
My mother said wasn’t it funny that she and my father both had been thinking about them getting married.
“So that’s what I was thinking?” my father answered her.
My mother decided to go ahead and write to Aunt Hannah and send money for the ticket. And just mention Manny. No fuss about him. And no announcements in Concordia. Her sister was coming and that’s all anybody had to know. “Ain’t we entitled to a visit from somebody in my family?” she would say.
When word came back from New York, Aunt Hannah and Aunt Sadie were coming. My mother said she should have known. And how could she tell Sadie not to come? One word from her and Hannah wouldn’t be coming either. “You could believe me,” she said to anybody listening.
Oh, boy, my aunts were coming. Nobody else had aunts from New York. And one of my aunts might get married and live here!
The impending visit became the pivot and focus of our lives. Logistics and support apparatuses were worked out as for a World War battle. Sleeping arrangements had my aunts in our room, and us in Joey’s room, bedding down on the skinny bed feet to head, as my mother and Hannah had done as girls. This dumped Joey on our sofa. Yes, yet again a sofa for Joey.
If Joey could be relegated to the front room, his erector set, which he and T played with almost daily, could not. In the end it was posted to the front porch.
To honor the aunts Joey and T dedicated themselves to a construction to represent New York and went out onto the cold porch every afternoon to build the old Washington Bridge, which crossed the Harlem River from Manhattan to the Bronx, where, Joey told T, the aunts lived. The geography books from Uncle Philip were brought out, and the bridge pinpointed.
T was intrigued by the name “Bronx,” and took it upon himself to research it in Joey’s Book of Knowledge. Pleased that he was able to impart some “book” information, he told Joey that it had come from a Danish family named Bronck who had owned most of the land. When T spoke of New York matters in his rural Southern accent, it was no doubt marvelous to hear, and on this occasion, T explained that “the Bronx” had evolved from “the Broncks.” According to Joey, the way he told it was, “Like as not, them Manhattan folks would say to one nother, ‘Y’all reckon we ought to go up yonder and pay a call on the Broncks?’”
Lizzie Maud had been borrowed from Miss Brookie for two full days extra. It had been an awkward negotiation, taking place on the telephone. When it was over, my mother had hung up the receiver slowly, feeling the heaviness in her chest. She’d sat for a moment at the little telephone table and then gotten up and put two begonia plants on the windowsill in Miriam’s and my bedroom.
Finally, they were here: Aunt Sadie, her longish nose bridged by rimless glasses, and Aunt Hannah, littler even than my mother. I felt like Erv Medlin: I could scarcely speak, only gaze. These were my aunts, my relatives.
Aunt Hannah, full of dimpled smiles, was obviously glad to be with us. “Oy,” she said, “how I been looking forward.”
Aunt Sadie, on the other hand, let us know that the trip was a burdensome thing for which Aunt Hannah was to blame. “Hannah nagged and nagged,” she said to us. “So could I let her come by herself? How she loves to be on the go is nobody’s business.”
My mother tried to figure out how Aunt Hannah could be “on the go” when surely she went only to work or to the relatives. Or was it “on the go” to visit the cemeteries in Brooklyn or Queens, a cruel schlep, in which on your day off you rose at dawn, negotiated a maze of subway and trolley connections, milled around the cemetery trying to find the graves, and had time only to glance at them before they closed the gates? Still, with Hannah, you never knew.
Actually Hannah was the family “darling,”which was a category. Hannah looked like a darling—small and soft with thick curls the color of new pennies; she acted like a darling, always trying to please, worried that she might dis please. Too much worried, my father always said. In the family she was called Hovvah-leb. Hannah-dear.
She was the youngest daughter and, having finished high school, worked as an assistant to a bookkeeper. Still, as with all darlings, her life was her family. She was especially close to Philip, the youngest sibling, and indeed the family called her his second mother. It was a title that pleased her very much.
“Anyway, so here we are,” Aunt Sadie said. “But I ain’t making no promises.”
My mother struggled to project innocence. With Aunt Sadie the modus operandi was never to suggest you had an idea that she didn’t have first. “Promises about what?” she asked her.
In answer Aunt Sadie gave a look that said, Are you trying to kid me?
The aunts’ Gladstone bag—of yellow leather stiff as a wooden crate—held presents: hand-knitted scarves from my grandmother; books from Uncle Philip; boxed chocolates; a whole box of Hershey bars just for me; a string of amber beads for my sister; a gossamer shawl with wide satin ribbon borders for my mother; and, for my father and brother, shiny embroidered white silk yarmulkes, though we all knew that despite my mother’s pleadings, they no longer wore caps even on Friday nights.
In our room Aunt Sadie immediately vetoed the begonias (“They smell funny”), and at the first meal, which starred pot roast, Aunt Sadie wanted to know if the meat was kosher.
My mother knew her sister was just “trying” her, as the neighbors might say, since she knew very well it wasn’t kosher. She told Aunt Sadie to do as she did, which was not to think about it. “Keep it out of your head,” she advised her.
“How can I keep it out when it’s already in there? Nu, do you expect me to eat traif?” she asked my mother, and gave the word that she and Hannah would eat only dairy. “Just eggs and cheese and whatever else you got in the dairy line,” she said, adding serenely that, after all, she and Hannah were not used to eating what we ate, we being “regular traifnyaks.”
When Aunt Hannah tried to smooth things over, said, “I don’t mind, Sadie, whatever we eat is all right with me,” Aunt Sadie answered, “And you, you stop jumping up for anything new.”
When Sadie said this, my mother, doing her best to stay focused on why her sisters were in Concordia in the first place, brought Manny instantly to mind. Could Manny not be considered new? Of course he could. My mother, unlike her sister Sadie, wished with all her might for Hannah to jump up for this something new. “Jump up, Hannah,” she said silently. “Jump up and grab him.”
Though Aunt Sadie was a trial—always acting like a boss whose workers were talking strike, my father said—the Bronson aunts (“aints” in Concordia) were instant celebrities. By virtue of living near them, the neighborhood children became celebrities in their own right and visited often to maintain status. They all had aunts of course, but theirs were too much like their own mothers to be intriguing. And, boy howdy, one of the Bronson “aints” (Aunt Sadie) wore black all the time, and they spoke in what could have been tongues.
The neighbors came to call, and after they left, Aunt Sadie would say, “What you see in them ain’t worth talking about. They’re just so goyish.”
What made them so goyish I didn’t know. That they said y’all instead of youse? That they either had very straight hair or got it curled at the Cinderella?
I could not believe that Miss Brookie would not want to meet the aunts from New York, so I ran and got her. She said she had been planning to come. “Think I’d pass up a chance to visit with some New York people?”
My mother was all open arms. “It’s been so long,” she said to Miss Brookie. My mother thought this was the moment when a peace treaty would at last be signed.
Sadly, it wasn’t. Miss Brookie declined to grant forgiveness, just gave my mother a cool “Hey, Reba.”
She sailed into the kitchen, joined the aunts in the breakfast nook. My mother put a glass of tea in front of her, and Miss Brookie, no doubt from the years of watching my parents, knew just what to do. Her only misstep was in swallowing the whole sugar cube at once. When she had got the sip down, she said, “What’s doing in New York, ladies?”
Aunt Sadie said, “Same old thing,” and gave a shrug.
Miss Brookie said you could say “same old thing” about Concordia but not about New York. She thought New York “totally irresistible.” Miss Brookie’s “take” on New York, as they say now, was very different from that of the rest of the Concordians, who thought New York was the next worst thing to a sugar ditch.
“Never mind irresistible,” said Aunt Sadie, who, though she had always made clear that New York was the only place to live, was not about to agree with Miss Brookie. “I can resist it plenty.”
I suppose by now it had come through to Miss Brookie that these were not the “New York people” she had hoped for. She finished off her tea, said, “Have a nice stay in Concordia,” slid out of the nook, and, having sailed into the house, she now sailed out of it.
One night, in an effort to divert our guests, Joey and Miriam and I decided on a soiree like the ones at Miss Brookie’s. We would get up acts.
After supper the audience was ushered into the front room, while we prepared. As the youngest performer, I insisted that it was my prerogative to go last.
Joey did his tumbling act first, dashing through the door of the space-heater hall and throwing himself into a contained (of necessity) somersault. He segued into a backbend, and walked a foot or two like an upside-down spider. Everybody applauded.
My sister went out next. She danced energetically to a record on the Vic and, when it came to an end, kept dancing to her own humming and pretty soon was out of breath.
I wasn’t ready. Miriam rested a bit and then did some more dancing and, when needed, some more humming.
I still wasn’t ready. Joey brought in his bridge model and gave a little lecture. Everybody applauded some more, though the volume was weakening. My father yelled out, “Enough already, Stella Ruth. You got your customers complaining.”
I finally glided out. My upper body was draped with the Spanish shawl that had formerly draped Miss Brookie’s piano, before being cast aside in favor of one with a more ponderous fringe. A paper rose drooped behind my ear; my mother’s fox fur piece, its teeth gripping its tail, encircled my neck; my sister’s rhinestone earrings (hitherto hidden from my mother) dangled from my earlobes. Laughter and applause greeted me.
Like the lady I had seen at the recital in Chautauqua, I placed the palms of my hands together and lay them alongide my cheek. I opened my mouth to sing. Unfortunately, the song I had chosen was “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
I knew the word Jesus was not employed at our house, but this was a song, one in much demand at backyard bird interments. On this occasion, however, its opening lines made everything go ka-boom.
My father took the coward’s way out and shot out of the room, impacting several chairs on the way. My mother shrieked “Stella Ruth!” and Miriam slipped from her chair to the floor, her dress flying up and bloomers coming into view.
Aunt Sadie jumped up as if a bug had bitten her sharply on her bottom. “Reba!” I heard her shout. “Is this child saying what I think she’s saying? Is she? Is she?”
In a moment Joey had rushed up and clapped his hand over my mouth as if to stanch a broken hose. Over his thumb I saw Aunt Hannah hiding a grin and my mother clutching at her heart.
Joey put my shawl around me and dragged me out of the room.
Aunt Sadie stayed on it a long time. “Church songs! Christian hymns! That my ears should hear such things!” There were sudden, similar bursts all evening. “Is this the way you bring up Jewish children? Is this what these children have been learning, Reba? Are you crazy?”
My mother tried to answer with apology, justification, reason. Finally she said, “It’s so awful hard down here. You don’t know how it is with no nothing Jewish. Can I keep my eyes on them every second? They’re out playing. How can I know every little thing they’re doing?”
“And who are they playing with? Tell me with who.” Aunt Sadie glared. When she had glared at everybody in turn, she stomped off to bed.
Miriam and I made for bed as well. But if the excitement in the front room was over, in Joey’s bedroom it was not. No, in Joey’s bedroom a little more excitement began when Miriam was undressing on the bed, yanked her dress up over her head, and, with her head completely enclosed, began to sing. And what was she singing, softly to be sure? Nothing other than the first verse of “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” It seemed to me the most delightful thing in the world, a siren song, so tempting, so inviting that all I could do was pull my own dress up over my head, scrunch over, and join my voice to hers. And what could Miriam and I do but sit with our heads together, dresses up over them, and sing verse after verse and laugh ourselves silly?
It was time to implement the main plot. My mother had made a long-distance call to the Rastows, in which she’d mentioned as casually as she could that she wanted them to come to dinner on Sunday to meet her sisters. When Gladys had asked for some sort of facts about the sisters, my mother had broken it off with, “So you’ll come on Sunday and you’ll see for yourself.” Gladys had said “Delighted” in the way that meant she wasn’t delighted at all.
As the visit neared, my mother’s hidden agenda was completely exposed. The aunts understood it all plainly, and Aunt Hannah at least had no objections. But she had plenty of questions. “Is he . . . uh, handsome?” she asked Miriam.
“Very,” Miriam answered her.
“Handsome” could mean something besides pleasing features, well arranged. Did it also mean Manny was tall?
Miriam had to say that he was not exactly tall, but tall enough for Aunt Hannah.
Aunt Hannah’s level of expectation probably took a steep drop. She said in a rueful voice, “A midget in the circus is tall enough for me. . . . I suppose he has kinky hair, too?” She was now fearing the worst.
When she heard that Manny’s hair, though dark, was straight and parted in the middle, she brightened. “Like John Gilbert?” she asked Miriam.
“You know, he does favor John Gilbert.” Miriam wanted Aunt Hannah to know that Manny was full of fun. “He’s just a bear for cutting the fool,” she said.
“Cuttin’ the fool?” Aunt Hannah always tried her best to imitate Southern talk. “Ah ’clare, your Manny sounds purely scrumptious, hear?”
Aunt Sadie had my mother on the stand, first to find out what kind of living this “boyfriend” of Hannah’s made.
“Sadie, stop!” my mother cried. “You know he ain’t no boyfriend!” But she was happy to be able to inform Aunt Sadie that Manny made a lovely living from a lovely store. And in a nice little town. Nice little town? What was she doing, my mother, flopping around in these strange waters?
Aunt Sadie crinkled her nose, as if getting a whiff of a thing too long in the icebox. “And a shul? They got a shul?”
“You know they don’t have no shul.”
My father tried to float my mother a life preserver and reminded her of the mohel.
Aunt Sadie was not impressed. “So a mohel comes in, gives the putzel a cut, and leaves. And the baby grows up an ignoramus singing Christian hymns.”
“Well, at least he’d be singing circumcised,” my father said.
It was a snowy Sunday the day the Rastows came. At the door Gladys Rastow immediately took in Aunt Hannah’s finger—the third finger, on the left hand—which, my mother said later, must have looked to her as bare as a dogwood branch in winter.
Gladys Rastow greeted both aunts coolly. Aunt Sadie returned the favor. When they spoke to each other, it was as if they were biting off tough crusts of rye bread.
My mother had improvised a table that could seat the whole crowd. When dinner was announced, Gladys rushed to a chair on one side of Aunt Hannah and sent Delores to the other. Manny managed to foil her by seating himself directly opposite Aunt Hannah and not taking his eyes off her.
After things had been passed, Gladys pointed to Aunt Hannah’s plate. On it were some lonely-looking garden peas. Gladys looked at them and asked of anyone whose attention she could enlist, “Can it be that these Bronx ladies eat only peas?”
It was a remark that led Aunt Sadie to expound a principle: that if you’re a Jewish person, you don’t make exceptions. After she had expounded it, she said, clearly addressing a lesser person, “That’s the way we live, Mrs. Rastow, Hannah and I.”
Suddenly all eyes went to Aunt Hannah. As if the copper of her hair had descended into her cheeks, her face was agleam. And then she had bent her head over her plate. She might have been saying, Please God, please make them stop talking.
In another moment she had risen from the table and, murmuring “Excuse me, I got something to do,” was running for the front door. I ran after her.
Aunt Hannah and I were sitting on the swing, not talking, just being cold, when here came Manny.
“Such arguing ladies,” he said. “They might be having a good time, but believe me they’re spoiling my appetite.” He sat down across from us. “Yours, too?”
In case he was talking to me, I said yes, and Aunt Hannah said she wasn’t really hungry anyway.
Manny ran to his buggy. He grabbed up a blanket from the back seat, brought it back, sat down between Aunt Hannah and me, and tucked the dark green plaid over us. “So you’ll warm up a bit,” he said.
Aunt Hannah said how surprised she was to find cold in “the sunny South.” There it was again: “the sunny South.”
He took hold of one of Aunt Hannah’s hands, and she didn’t take it away. I sat there aware of every nuance of speech and movement, and if someone had asked, I could have said when they used each other’s first names and which of their fingers were interlocking. Manny said for Aunt Hannah to wait for him next Sunday. “You hear me what I’m saying, Hannah?” Where they were going was to Deerfoot Lake.
I was delighted. Deerfoot seemed to me ideal for a courtship or, for that matter, for any kind of good time. In summer it served as our spot for picnicking and swimming, although it had ragged gray trunks of trees sticking out of it, reminders that Deerfoot had once long ago been not a lake but a forest.
Deerfoot was good in winter, too. It was shallow and froze fast, perfect for ice-skating. If you fell in, you couldn’t fall too deep, and lots of people were there to pull you out.
I pictured Manny and Aunt Hannah driving around the lake, walking on the ice close to shore, holding hands.
They were going to eat in the restaurant at Deerfoot. “Just the three of us,” Manny said to Aunt Hannah.
Me? My heart was beating fast.
Sadly, the three turned out to be Aunt Hannah, Manny, and a widemouth bass. Bass, along with the crappies, flourished in Deerfoot. “Only a widemouth different than the ones in the house, believe me,” Manny said.
Gladys Rastow came charging out, Irving and Delores and Sheldon behind. She eyed the blanket, as if the function it was performing was not only unauthorized but illegal. She snatched it up. “We’ve got to go,” she said to Manny.
Manny got up slowly. He bent down over Aunt Hannah. His lips were right on her ear. “Don’t forget next Sunday.”
Aunt Hannah nodded, and Gladys watched. And so did my mother. And so did Aunt Sadie. Well, so did everybody.
Aunt Sadie spilled out to my mother, my mother used to say, like an open fire hydrant. Gladys Rastow seemed to be her main target. “I wouldn’t wish that sister-in-law on my worst enemy, never mind my own flesh and blood. Oy, what a yenta.” (I always thought Gladys would rather have been called a yokel than a yenta.)
My mother was trying to keep her plan on track. “What are you making such a fuss? Nobody’s marrying Gladys.”
“And in that little Southern town yet,” Aunt Sadie said.
“I’m in a little Southern town and I’m still alive,” my mother answered her. “Things ain’t perfect, but—”
Aunt Sadie was ready. “But you ain’t permanent. That makes the difference, right?”
On Sunday Aunt Hannah awoke in a fever of excitement that heightened as the morning went on. She dressed right after breakfast, even to her green wool tam, stationed herself in the front room, and dashed back and forth to the window. “I could have sworn I heard a buggy,” she’d say. She’d sit down again, get up, sit down. As she darted about, the scallops around the hem of her white wool dress caught the light like newly minted silver coins. She looked beautiful.
Around eleven Manny clip-clopped up and in a quick jump was out of the buggy. Aunt Hannah ran back to her chair and sat down, jamming the tam on her head, firmly, as if it were a device to keep her from jumping up again. Miriam opened the door.
In came Manny, calling out greetings, dashing from one to the other of us, being playful as usual, seizing a handful of Joey’s curls, bowing to Miriam while he kissed her hand and clicked his heels, pinching my freckles and pretending to hold them in his fist. Aunt Sadie watched from the kitchen doorway.
Manny wondered if Aunt Hannah was going to be warm enough. “Anyways, we got the blanket in the buggy, that big important blanket,” he said, smiling at me as if I was a co-conspirator. “So let’s go.”
Aunt Sadie came walking in. “Don’t be so quick, Mr. Buggy Ride. She forgot something.” She handed Aunt Hannah a brown paper sack. “This is for you while Mr. Sidalia, Kentucky, is eating in his restaurant.” Aunt Sadie referred to Manny only by a made-up name or “he,” as if using his real name would make him a real person. “I don’t want you should get sick while I’m in charge.”
When Aunt Hannah looked stricken, my father took the sack from her hands. “She won’t need this,” he said, handing it back to Aunt Sadie. “They’re not in business to make people sick.”
Manny grabbed up Aunt Hannah’s coat, and then he took her hand, and pulled her out the door. On the porch they stood for a second while Manny put her into her coat, and then they both laughed and ran to the buggy.
When Aunt Hannah came in, if she was sick, it was more like lovesick. Manny plucked off her tam, and her hair flicked up from the dry air, shooting out a little, as if from the sheer joy of liberation. He unwound her scarf, and told something of how the day had gone, looking all the while into Aunt Hannah’s face. Aunt Hannah had apparently done a bit of the driving, and Manny said, “This girl with the reins in her hands—some sight.”
“A city girl don’t know from horses,” Aunt Sadie countered promptly.
Manny said he was a city boy and certainly knew from horses. On his wagon, he said, there had been two horses and six legs: “Him with his four and me with my two.”
Aunt Sadie grabbed the scarf and tam from Manny’s hands. “So thanks for the buggy ride. Hannah enjoyed.”
Manny laughed. “Looks like I’m saying good-bye.” He touched Aunt Hannah on the arm, his fingers lingering. “I’ll be seeing you. Soon.”
Aunt Hannah nodded. “Yes, Manny. Soon.” After Manny left, she stayed looking out the window for long minutes.
“See?” Aunt Sadie muttered. “Now we got some job to do!”
Aunt Hannah may not have even heard. She had grabbed up the tam and scarf, plunked the tam on Miriam’s head, and flung the scarf around her own shoulders. In a moment she was pulling Miriam around the room in a movement half dance, half ring-around-the-rosy.
Aunt Hannah’s eyes squeezed shut, then flew open. She took Miriam close in her arms. “Oh, baby girl, you should have been there! Everything so quiet! And the snow white, white, white!”
She swung Miriam into a twirl, and Joey began singing a current tune, one that might have been written for the occasion, promoting as it did buggy riding over automobiling: No smell of gasoline, just an old-fashioned team,” it went, and further told of the “wonderful treat to hear the pat of horses’ feet.” As Joey caroled, my father clapped along.
I could resist no longer. I wedged myself between Aunt Hannah and Miriam and started twirling with Miriam. Then Aunt Hannah grabbed Joey. In a moment she and Joey snatched up my mother and they became a twirling threesome.
That left my father and Aunt Sadie, but there was not going to be any twirling there.
Aunt Sadie said to Aunt Hannah, “Sure, go on and dream yourself into a nightmare.”
Everybody at last stopped dancing, and Aunt Sadie wanted to know where it went from here.
“Back to the lake, I hope.” Aunt Hannah closed her eyes.
Aunt Sadie told her to save her jokes. “And for God’s sake, keep your eyes open already.”
Well, Manny was coming to Concordia tomorrow afternoon.
“He don’t go to work on Mondays?”
Well, he did, but he would be taking off early.
Taking off early? Aunt Sadie smelled something. So what was so important he had to take off early?
Manny wanted to talk to my father.
To who? You could see Aunt Sadie feeling insulted.
My father maintained his calm, perhaps not wanting to get into a competition with Aunt Sadie about who had family authority when. He said the thing to do was to let Manny talk, and if Manny was serious, he’d just tell him to talk with my grandfather in New York. “You think he’s serious?” he asked Aunt Hannah.
Aunt Hannah said, yes, she thought he was serious.
If this was harmonious music to my ears, to Aunt Sadie it was discordancy. “Just hold your horses, everybody,” she said. “Hannah ain’t really thought about this thing.”
Uh-oh.
Aunt Hannah stared at her. “You got something against Manny?”
Aunt Sadie took a seat in the nearby chair and leaned close. “It ain’t him,” she said, in a lowered voice, as if they might hear her in Sidalia. “Though what’s so hot about him, I ain’t sure either.” There were, apparently, plenty of other things to worry about.
The other things, Aunt Sadie said, “began at the beginning,” when my mother came to the South. According to Aunt Sadie, perhaps forgetting that it was she who had fought tooth and nail to keep my mother from doing it, my mother had to come. “Her place was with her husband,” Aunt Sadie said to Aunt Hannah. “But you ain’t in that kind of predicament.”
It was when Aunt Sadie went on to say that Aunt Hannah would meet a nice boy in New York and settle down like “a normal Jewish woman” that Aunt Hannah burst into tears.
How could Aunt Sadie make my pretty, everybody-loved-her Aunt Hannah cry?
My father at last opened up. He said that Aunt Sadie did not have the last—or best—word on everything. “Do what you want, Hannah,” he said. “You want Manny, so tell him. You don’t have to do everything Sadie says. Be your own person for once.”
Could my Aunt Hannah act on what my father had said? No. Defying Sadie was something outside her experience, and she was at this point totally confused. She asked through her tears, “But what’s wrong? Wasn’t this what we all wanted?”
“Not all of us,” Aunt Sadie answered her. “Only Reba and the rest of the Southerners.”
My mother was darting from Aunt Sadie to Aunt Hannah. “Wait! Wait! In the morning we’ll be calmer,” she pleaded.
“You may not be calm,” Aunt Sadie answered her, “but I am. Like a cold potato I’m calm.” She crossed her arms and sat motionless. “There’s things Hannah should think about before Mr. Horse-with-Two-Legs comes back tomorrow.”
Aunt Sadie looked to my mother. Hadn’t my mother been telling her how her heart ached to see her mother and father, her “Ma and Pa”? Did my mother wish this on her baby sister?
My mother’s face drew in like a pricked balloon. “Hannah,” she said, “Hovvah-leb. Maybe you should listen. You’re so young, you don’t how it is to live among strangers.”
“But I’ll have you! Since when are you strangers?”
There was a long silence while my mother wondered if she could chance it. Could she say, with my father sitting right there, that we wouldn’t be in Concordia forever, that we were tem-porary? She couldn’t help herself; she said it. And then she asked Aunt Hannah, “And what will you do then?”
She would have Manny, Aunt Hannah said. “Don’t that make up for everything else?”
And Aunt Sadie said promptly, “Not everything.” What was Aunt Hannah going to do when she had a family? “Then what?” Aunt Hannah asked her. Then, according to Aunt Sadie, Aunt Hannah would be like my mother, living in a goyish world, not knowing what to do when it was time for her son to become a man.
It was Joey’s cue to bolt out of the room. And my father’s cue to really get into it. Aunt Sadie had finally said too much. “That is our business, not yours,” my father told her. “So just butt out.” To Aunt Hannah he said, “How can you listen to Sadie and her bogeyman stories?”
This gave Aunt Hannah a bit of spunk. She raised her chin and said to Aunt Sadie, “I think I can manage.”
But Aunt Sadie had an ace in the hole, the coup de grace: “Have you figured how you’re going to leave Philip?” she asked Aunt Hannah.
And, of course, Aunt Hannah cried out, “Philip! Oy, Philip! Don’t say Philip!”
Aunt Sadie cried right back, in a voice as loud as I had ever heard, “Why shouldn’t I say Philip? I got to say Philip!” Her groans filled the room. “So she thinks she’s found Mr. Happy-Ever-After! A Jewish girl don’t have no business to cut herself away from her family for that! Is she a cripple she has to marry the first man who asks? There are plenty of men looking for wives, believe me! My Izzy can bring them home by the dozens!”
The thought of the men my Uncle Izzy could bring home by the dozens, the men from the immigrant pool, switched my mother to the other side. My mother said that by this point she was “so much to-ing and from-ing,” she was dizzy. But how could she not speak out when Sadie was comparing such men to Manny? “Sadie, listen!” she cried. “You’ll still see Hannah. You’ll come here! You can come here when you want!”
Aunt Sadie ceased all motion and sat staring at the opposite wall as if reading a legend written thereon. “No, I ain’t never coming here again,” she intoned.
“Oh, Sadie!” Aunt Hannah cried, and her sobs once more filled the room.
My father, perhaps, like me, feeling overwhelmed by all the emotional firepower, agreed with my mother that it should be left for the morning. “And maybe whatever disease Sadie is suffering from,” he said, “will change its mind by then.”
“Don’t count on it,” Aunt Sadie answered him.
All through the night the house stayed awake. My mother slipped in and out of her sisters’ room. Toward morning Aunt Sadie came out and bedded down on the bentwood rocker. The crying from Aunt Hannah never stopped. In the morning she emerged from the bedroom silent and pale, stood at the kitchen door, and said, “I hate to be here when he comes.” Then she sat in the breakfast nook and stared at her coffee cup.
The day passed in silence.
Finally Manny arrived. He came around six, just as the early darkness was setting in, and was out of his buggy in a great leap. Aunt Hannah went to meet him in the front yard.
Manny took her hands in his and smiled into her face. As she spoke, the smile faded until it disappeared altogether. In the next moment he had broken away and was striding into the house.
He sat down on the sofa and shook his head when my mother offered him tea. His dark skin seemed to have gone lighter, though his eyes were darker than ever. No, there would be no playfulness from our playful Manny today. I pushed up against the wall on the other side of the room to distance myself from this stranger.
Manny finally spoke, to say he was waiting for my father. “I need to talk to Aaron. I got to get put straight,” he said, sitting with his coat on, holding his hat in front of his knees.
Aunt Hannah sat on the other end of the sofa, silent, tears always just about to spill over.
My father came home, mad at Sadie, mad at my mother, and having to face Manny. He hooked his coat and hat on the rack. “Well,” he said to Manny. “Well, well.”
Manny jumped up. No “hello,” no “Nu, so how’s business?,” just bewilderment, asking my father, “What’s all this, Aaron? What’s all this Hannah is telling me?”
My father had no answers. He had nothing to offer that could possibly comfort. He said, to say something, “Ladies cut off their noses to spite their faces.”
Manny pushed his face up to my father’s. “It ain’t up to the ladies! It’s up to Hannah. That’s all who it’s up to!”
My father tried to tell Manny about Hannah, about who Hannah was, but Manny wouldn’t listen. “These sisters of hers have turned her so she don’t know which way is up no more,” he said.
Manny looked to my mother. “How come you did this thing?” he asked her. “I’m really surprised. I always thought you liked me, Reba.”
My mother felt a hard blow to her heart. “As much as a brother I liked you!” she cried out to him.
“So now you don’t like me no more? So now all of a sudden I’m maybe a murderer or a thief?” Manny’s eyes were dark as night. “For God’s sake, so what’s wrong with me?”
My mother used to say, in one of her most memorable mixed metaphors, that she was reaching in the barrel and finding there not a leg to stand on. What was wrong, she said to Manny, not really believing it, not really disbelieving it, was that she now foresaw no bed of roses for Hannah. “Let it be, Manny,” she said. “I beg you let it be.”
Manny would not let it be until he had heard again from Hannah. He touched Aunt Hannah on the cheek. “Tell me what you want, Hannah. Don’t be afraid.” He had it right. Aunt Hannah was afraid. Afraid of sister Sadie, afraid of leaving Philip, afraid. Aunt Hannah said she couldn’t leave her family. “It’s not in me,” she said to him.
Poor Manny. He had had the misfortune to fall in love with a family darling.