Zagrowsky Tells

I was standing in the park under that tree. They call it the Hanging Elm. Once upon a time it made a big improvement on all kinds of hooligans. Nowadays if, once in a while … No. So this woman comes up to me, a woman minus a smile. I said to my grandson, Uh oh, Emanuel. Here comes a lady, she was once a beautiful customer of mine in the pharmacy I showed you.

Emanuel says, Grandpa, who?

She looks O.K. now, but not so hot. Well, what can you do, time takes a terrible toll off the ladies.

This is her idea of a hello: Iz, what are you doing with that black child? Then she says, Who is he? Why are you holding on to him like that? She gives me a look like God in judgment. You could see it in famous paintings. Then she says, Why are you yelling at that poor kid?

What yelling? A history lesson about the park. This is a tree in guidebooks. How are you by the way, Miss … Miss … I was embarrassed. I forgot her name absolutely.

Well, who is he? You got him pretty scared.

Me? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my grandson. Say hello Emanuel, don’t put on an act.

Emanuel shoves his hand in my pocket to be a little more glued to me. Are you going to open your mouth sonny yes or no?

She says, Your grandson? Really, Iz, your grandson? What do you mean, your grandson?

Emanuel closes his eyes tight. Did you ever notice children get all mixed up? They don’t want to hear about something, they squinch up their eyes. Many children do this.

Now listen Emanuel, I want you to tell this lady who is the smartest boy in kindergarten.

Not a word.

Goddamnit, open your eyes. It’s something new with him. Tell her who is the smartest boy—he was just five, he can already read a whole book by himself.

He stands still. He’s thinking. I know his little cute mind. Then he jumps up and down yelling, Me me me. He makes a little dance. His grandma calls it his smartness dance. My other ones (three children grown up for some time already) were also very smart, but they don’t hold a candle to this character. Soon as I get a chance, I’m gonna bring him to the city to Hunter for gifted children; he should get a test.

But this Miss … Miss … she’s not finished with us yet. She’s worried. Whose kid is he? You adopt him?

Adopt? At my age? It’s Cissy’s kid. You know my Cissy? I see she knows something. Why not? I had a public business. No surprise.

Of course I remember Cissy. She says this, her face is a little more ironed out.

So my Cissy, if you remember, she was a nervous girl.

I’ll bet she was.

Is that a nice way to answer? Cissy was nervous … The nervousness, to be truthful, ran in Mrs. Z’s family. Ran? Galloped … tarum tarum tarum.

When we were young I used to go over there to visit, and while me and her brother and uncles played pinochle, in the kitchen the three aunts would sit drinking tea. Everything was Oi! Oi! Oi! What for? Nothing to oi about. They got husbands … Perfectly fine gentlemen. One in business, two of them real professionals. They just got in the habit somehow. So I said to Mrs. Z., one oi out of you and it’s divorce.

I remember your wife very well, this lady says. Very well. She puts on the same face like before; her mouth gets small. Your wife is a beautiful woman.

So … would I marry a mutt?

But she was right. My Nettie when she was young, she was very fair, like some Polish Jews you see once in a while. Like for instance maybe some big blond peasant made a pogrom on her great-grandma.

So I answered her, Oh yes, very nice-looking; even now she’s not so bad, but a little bit on the grouchy side.

O.K., she makes a big sigh like I’m a hopeless case. What did happen to Cissy?

Emanuel, go over there and play with those kids. No? No.

Well, I’ll tell you, it’s the genes. The genes are the most important. Environment is O.K. But the genes … that’s where the whole story is written down. I think the school had something to do with it also. She’s more an artist like your husband. Am I thinking of the right guy? When she was a kid you should of seen her. She’s a nice-looking girl now, even when she has an attack. But then she was something. The family used to go to the mountains in the summer. We went dancing, her and me. What a dancer. People were surprised. Sometimes we danced until 2 a.m.

I don’t think that was good, she says. I wouldn’t dance with my son all night …

Naturally, you’re a mother. But “good,” who knows what’s good? Maybe a doctor. I could have been a doctor, by the way. Her brother-in-law in business would of backed me. But then what? You don’t have the time. People call you day and night. I cured more people in a day than a doctor in a week. Many an M.D. called me, said Zagrowsky, does it work … that Parke-Davis medication they put out last month, or it’s a fake? I got immediate experience and I’m not too stuck up to tell.

Oh, Iz, you are, she said. She says this like she means it but it makes her sad. How do I know this? Years in a store. You observe. You watch. The customer is always right, but plenty of times you know he’s wrong and also a goddamn fool.

All of a sudden I put her in a certain place. Then I said to myself, Iz, why are you standing here with this woman? I looked her straight in the face and I said, Faith? Right? Listen to me. Now you listen, because I got a question. Is it true, no matter what time you called, even if I was closing up, I came to your house with the penicillin or the tetracycline later? You lived on the fourth-floor walk-up. Your friend what’s-her-name, Susan, with the three girls next door? I can see it very clear. Your face is all smeared up with crying, your kid got 105°, maybe more, burning up, you didn’t want to leave him in the crib screaming, you’re standing in the hall, it’s dark. You were living alone, am I right? So young. Also your husband, he comes to my mind, very jumpy fellow, in and out, walking around all night. He drank? I betcha. Irish? Imagine you didn’t get along so you got a divorce. Very simple. You kids knew how to live.

She doesn’t even answer me. She says … you want to know what she says? She says, Oh shit! Then she says, Of course I remember. God, my Richie was sick! Thanks, she says, thanks, godalmighty thanks.

I was already thinking something else: The mind makes its own business. When she first came up to me, I couldn’t remember. I knew her well, but where? Then out of no place, a word, her bossy face maybe, exceptionally round, which is not usual, her dark apartment, the four flights, the other girls—all once lively, young … you could see them walking around on a sunny day, dragging a couple kids, a carriage, a bike, beautiful girls, but tired from all day, mostly divorced, going home alone? Boyfriends? Who knows how that type lives? I had a big appreciation for them. Sometimes, five o’clock I stood in the door to see them. They were mostly the way models should be. I mean not skinny—round, like they were made of little cushions and bigger cushions, depending on where you looked; young mothers. I hollered a few words to them, they hollered back. Especially I remember her friend Ruthy—she had two little girls with long black braids, down to here. I told her, In a couple of years, Ruthy, you’ll have some beauties on your hands. You better keep an eye on them. In those days the women always answered you in a pleasant way, not afraid to smile. Like this: They said, You really think so? Thanks, Iz.

But this is all used-to-be and in that place there is not only good but bad and the main fact in regard to this particular lady: I did her good but to me she didn’t always do so much good.

So we stood around a little. Emanuel says, Grandpa, let’s go to the swings. Go yourself—it’s not so far, there’s kids, I see them. No, he says, and stuffs his hand in my pocket again. So don’t go— Ach, what a day, I said. Buds and everything. She says, That’s a catalpa tree over there. No kidding! I say. What do you call that one, doesn’t have a single leaf? Locust, she says. Two locusts, I say.

Then I take a deep breath: O.K.—you still listening? Let me ask you, if I did you so much good including I saved your baby’s life, how come you did that? You know what I’m talking about. A perfectly nice day. I look out the window of the pharmacy and I see four customers, that I seen at least two in their bathrobes crying to me in the middle of the night, Help help! They’re out there with signs. ZAGROWSKY IS A RACIST. YEARS AFTER ROSA PARKS, ZAGROWSKY REFUSES TO SERVE BLACKS. It’s like an etching right here. I point out to her my heart. I know exactly where it is.

She’s naturally very uncomfortable when I tell her. Listen, she says, we were right.

I grab on to Emanuel. You?

Yes, we wrote a letter first, did you answer it? We said, Zagrowsky, come to your senses. Ruthy wrote it. We said we would like to talk to you. We tested you. At least four times, you kept Mrs. Green and Josie, our friend Josie, who was kind of Spanish black … she lived on the first floor in our house … you kept them waiting a long time till everyone ahead of them was taken care of. Then you were very rude, I mean nasty, you can be extremely nasty, Iz. And then Josie left the store, she called you some pretty bad names. You remember?

No, I happen not to remember. There was plenty of yelling in the store. People really suffering; come in yelling for codeine or what to do their mother was dying. That’s what I remember, not some crazy Spanish lady hollering.

But listen, she says—like all this is not in front of my eyes, like the past is only a piece of paper in the yard—you didn’t finish with Cissy.

Finish? You almost finished my business and don’t think that Cissy didn’t hold it up to me. Later when she was so sick.

Then I thought, Why should I talk to this woman. I see myself: how I was standing that day how many years ago?—like an idiot behind the counter waiting for customers. Everybody is peeking in past the picket line. It’s the kind of neighborhood, if they see a picket line, half don’t come in. The cops say they have a right. To destroy a person’s business. I was disgusted but I went into the street. After all, I knew the ladies. I tried to explain, Faith, Ruthy, Mrs. Kratt—a stranger comes into the store, naturally you have to serve the old customers first. Anyone would do the same. Also, they sent in black people, brown people, all colors, and to tell the truth I didn’t like the idea my pharmacy should get the reputation of being a cut-rate place for them. They move into a neighborhood … I did what everyone did. Not to insult people too much, but to discourage them a little, they shouldn’t feel so welcome. They could just move in because it’s a nice area.

All right. A person looks at my Emanuel and says, Hey! he’s not altogether from the white race, what’s going on? I’ll tell you what: life is going on. You have an opinion. I have an opinion. Life don’t have no opinion.

I moved away from this Faith lady. I didn’t like to be near her. I sat down on the bench. I’m no spring chicken. Cock-a-doodle-do, I only holler once in a while. I’m tired, I’m mostly the one in charge of our Emanuel. Mrs. Z. stays home, her legs swell up. It’s a shame.

In the subway once she couldn’t get off at the right stop. The door opens, she can’t get up. She tried (she’s a little overweight). She says to a big guy with a notebook, a big colored fellow, Please help me get up. He says to her, You kept me down three hundred years, you can stay down another ten minutes. I asked her, Nettie, didn’t you tell him we’re raising a little boy brown like a coffee bean. But he’s right, says Nettie, we done that. We kept them down.

We? We? My two sisters and my father were being fried up for Hitler’s supper in 1944 and you say we?

Nettie sits down. Please bring me some tea. Yes, Iz, I say: We.

I can’t even put up the water I’m so mad. You know, my Mrs., you are crazy like your three aunts, crazy like our Cissy. Your whole family put in the genes to make it for sure that she wouldn’t have a chance. Nettie looks at me. She says, Ai ai. She doesn’t say oi anymore. She got herself assimilated into ai … That’s how come she also says “we” done it. Don’t think this will make you an American, I said to her, that you included yourself in with Robert E. Lee. Naturally it was a joke, only what is there to laugh?

I’m tired right now. This Faith could even see I’m a little shaky. What should she do, she’s thinking. But she decides the discussion ain’t over so she sits down sideways. The bench is damp. It’s only April.

What about Cissy? Is she all right?

It ain’t your business how she is.

O.K. She starts to go.

Wait wait! Since I seen you in your nightgown a couple of times when you were a handsome young woman … She really gets up this time. I think she must be a woman’s libber, they don’t like remarks about nightgowns. Bathrobes, she didn’t mind. Let her go! The hell with her … but she comes back. She says, Once and for all, cut it out, Iz. I really want to know. Is Cissy all right?

You want. She’s fine. She lives with me and Nettie. She’s in charge of the plants. It’s an all-day job.

But why should I leave her off the hook. Oh boy, Faith, I got to say it, what you people put on me! And you want to know how Cissy is. You! Why? Sure. You remember you finished with the picket lines after a week or two. I don’t know why. Tired? Summer maybe, you got to go away, make trouble at the beach. But I’m stuck there. Did I have air conditioning yet? All of a sudden I see Cissy outside. She has a sign also. She must’ve got the idea from you women. A big sandwich board, she walks up and down. If someone talks to her, she presses her mouth together.

I don’t remember that, Faith says.

Of course, you were already on Long Island or Cape Cod or someplace—the Jersey shore.

No, she says, I was not. I was not. (I see this is a big insult to her that she should go away for the summer.)

Then I thought, Calm down, Zagrowsky. Because for a fact I didn’t want her to leave, because, since I already began to tell, I have to tell the whole story. I’m not a person who keeps things in. Tell! That opens up the congestion a little—the lungs are for breathing, no secrets. My wife never tells, she coughs, coughs. All night. Wakes up. Ai, Iz, open up the window, there’s no air. You poor woman, if you want to breathe, you got to tell.

So I said to this Faith, I’ll tell you how Cissy is but you got to hear the whole story how we suffered. I thought, O.K. Who cares! Let her get on the phone later with the other girls. They should know what they started.

How we took our own Cissy from here to there to the biggest doctor—I had good contacts from the pharmacy. Dr. Francis O’Connel, the heavy Irishman over at the hospital, sat with me and Mrs. Z. for two hours, a busy man. He explained that it was one of the most great mysteries. They were ignoramuses, the most brilliant doctors were dummies in this field. But still, in my place, I heard of this cure and that one. So we got her massaged fifty times from head to toe, whatever someone suggested. We stuffed her with vitamins and minerals—there was a real doctor in charge of this idea.

If she would take the vitamins—sometimes she shut her mouth. To her mother she said dirty words. We weren’t used to it. Meanwhile, in front of my place every morning, she walks up and down. She could of got minimum wage, she was so regular. Her afternoon job is to follow my wife from corner to corner to tell what my wife done wrong to her when she was a kid. Then after a couple months, all of a sudden she starts to sing. She has a beautiful voice. She took lessons from a well-known person. On Christmas week, in front of the pharmacy she sings half of the Messiah by Handel. You know it? So that’s nice, you think. Oh, that’s beautiful. But where were you you didn’t notice that she don’t have on a coat. You didn’t see she walks up and down, her socks are falling off? Her face and hands are like she’s the super in the cellar. She sings! she sings! Two songs she sings the most: one is about the Gentiles will see the light and the other is, Look! a virgin will conceive a son. My wife says, Sure, naturally, she wishes she was a married woman just like anyone. Baloney. She could of. She had plenty of dates. Plenty. She sings, the idiots applaud, some skunk yells, Go, Cissy, go. What? Go where? Some days she just hollers.

Hollers what?

Oh, I forgot about you. Hollers anything. Hollers, Racist! Hollers, He sells poison chemicals! Hollers, He’s a terrible dancer, he got three left legs! (Which isn’t true, just to insult me publicly, plain silly.) The people laugh. What’d she say? Some didn’t hear so well; hollers, You go to whores. Also not true. She met me once with a woman actually a distant relative from Israel. Everything is in her head. It’s a garbage pail.

One day her mother says to her, Cissile, comb your hair, for godsakes, darling. For this remark, she gives her mother a sock in the face. I come home I see a woman not at all young with two black eyes and a bloody nose. The doctor said, Before it’s better with your girl, it’s got to be worse. That much he knew. He sent us to a beautiful place, a hospital right at the city line—I’m not sure if it’s Westchester or the Bronx, but thank God, you could use the subway. That’s how I found out what I was saving up my money for. I thought for retiring in Florida to walk around under the palm trees in the middle of the week. Wrong. It was for my beautiful Cissy, she should have a nice home with other crazy people.

So little by little, she calms down. We can visit her. She shows us the candy store, we give her a couple of dollars; soon our life is this way. Three times a week my wife goes, gets on the subway with delicious foods (no sugar, they’re against sugar); she brings something nice, a blouse or a kerchief—a present, you understand, to show love; and once a week I go, but she don’t want to look at me. So close we were, like sweethearts—you can imagine how I feel. Well, you have children so you know, little children little troubles, big children big troubles—it’s a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too.

Oh, Iz. How could it happen like that? All of a sudden. No signs?

What’s with this Faith? Her eyes are full of tears. Sensitive I suppose. I see what she’s thinking. Her kids are teenagers. So far they look O.K. but what will happen? People think of themselves. Human nature. At least she doesn’t tell me it’s my wife’s fault or mine. I did something terrible! I loved my child. I know what’s on people’s minds. I know psychology very well. Since this happened to us, I read up on the whole business.

Oh, Iz …

She puts her hand on my knee. I look at her. Maybe she’s just a nut. Maybe she thinks I’m plain old (I almost am). Well, I said it before. Thank God for the head. Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up. For some reason she gives me a kiss on the cheek. A peculiar person.

Faith, I still can’t figure it out why you girls were so rotten to me.

But we were right.

Then this lady Queen of Right makes a small lecture. She don’t remember my Cissy walking up and down screaming bad language but she remembers: After Mrs. Kendrick’s big fat snotty maid walked out with Kendrick’s allergy order, I made a face and said, Ho ho! the great lady! That’s terrible? She says whenever I saw a couple walk past on the block, a black-and-white couple, I said, Ugh—disgusting! It shouldn’t be allowed! She heard this remark from me a few times. So? It’s a matter of taste. Then she tells me about this Josie, probably Puerto Rican, once more—the one I didn’t serve in time. Then she says, Yeah, and really, Iz, what about Emanuel?

Don’t you look at Emanuel, I said. Don’t you dare. He has nothing to do with it.

She rolls her eyes around and around a couple of times. She got more to say. She also doesn’t like how I talk to women. She says I called Mrs. Z. a grizzly bear a few times. It’s my wife, no? That I was winking and blinking at the girls, a few pinches. A lie … maybe I patted, but I never pinched. Besides, I know for a fact a couple of them loved it. She says, No. None of them liked it. Not one. They only put up with it because it wasn’t time yet in history to holler. (An American-born girl has some nerve to mention history.)

But, she says, Iz, forget all that. I’m sorry you have so much trouble now. She really is sorry. But in a second she changes her mind. She’s not so sorry. She takes her hand back. Her mouth makes a little O.

Emanuel climbs up on my lap. He pats my face. Don’t be sad, Grandpa, he says. He can’t stand if he sees a tear on a person’s face. Even a stranger. If his mama gets a black look, he’s smart, he doesn’t go to her anymore. He comes to my wife. Grandma, he says, my poor mama is very sad. My wife jumps up and runs in. Worried. Scared. Did Cissy take her pills? What’s going on? Once, he went to Cissy and said, Mama, why are you crying? So this is her answer to her little boy: she stands up straight and starts to bang her head on the wall. Hard.

My mama! he screams. Lucky I was home. Since then he goes straight to his grandma for his troubles. What will happen? We’re not so young. My oldest son is doing extremely well—only he lives in a very exclusive neighborhood in Rockland County. Our other boy—well, he’s in his own life, he’s from that generation. He went away.

She looks at me, this Faith. She can’t say a word. She sits there. She opens her mouth almost. I know what she wants to know. How did Emanuel come into the story. When?

Then she says to me exactly those words. Well, where does Emanuel fit in?

He fits, he fits. Like a golden present from Nasser.

Nasser?

O.K., Egypt, not Nasser—he’s from Isaac’s other son, get it? A close relation. I was sitting one day thinking, Why? why? The answer: To remind us. That’s the purpose of most things.

It was Abraham, she interrupts me. He had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. God promised him he would be the father of generations; he was. But you know, she says, he wasn’t such a good father to those two little boys. Not so unusual, she has to add on.

You see! That’s what they make of the Bible, those women; because they got it in for men. Of course I meant Abraham. Abraham. Did I say Isaac? Once in a while I got to admit it, she says something true. You remember one son he sent out of the house altogether, the other he was ready to chop up if he only heard a noise in his head saying, Go! Chop!

But the question is, Where did Emanuel fit. I didn’t mind telling. I wanted to tell. I explained that already.

So it begins. One day my wife goes to the administration of Cissy’s hospital and she says, What kind of a place you’re running here. I have just looked at my daughter. A blind person could almost see it. My daughter is pregnant. What goes on here at night? Who’s the supervisor? Where is she this minute?

Pregnant? they say it like they never heard of it. And they run around and the regular doctor comes and says, Yes, pregnant. Sure. You got more news? my wife says. And then: meetings with the weekly psychiatrist, the day-by-day psychologist, the nerve doctor, the social worker, the supervising nurse, the nurse’s aide. My wife says, Cissy knows. She’s not an idiot, only mixed up and depressed. She knows she has a child in her womb inside of her like a normal woman. She likes it, my wife said. She even said to her, Mama, I’m having a baby, and she gave my wife a kiss. The first kiss in a couple of years. How do you like that?

Meanwhile, they investigated thoroughly. It turns out the man is a colored fellow. One of the gardeners. But he left a couple months ago for the Coast. I could imagine what happened. Cissy always loved flowers. When she was a little girl she was planting seeds every minute and sitting all day in front of the flower pot to see the little flower cracking up the seed. So she must of watched him and watched him. He dug up the earth. He put in the seeds. She watches.

The office apologized. Apologized? An accident. The supervisor was on vacation that week. I could sue them for a million dollars. Don’t think I didn’t talk to a lawyer. That time, then, when I heard, I called a detective agency to find him. My plan was to kill him. I would tear him limb from limb. What to do next. They called them all in again. The psychiatrist, the psychologist, they only left out the nurse’s aide.

The only hope she could live a half-normal life—not in the institutions: she must have this baby, she could carry it full term. No, I said, I can’t stand it. I refuse. Out of my Cissy, who looked like a piece of gold, would come a black child. Then the psychologist says, Don’t be so bigoted. What nerve! Little by little my wife figured out a good idea. O.K., well, we’ll put it out for adoption. Cissy doesn’t even have to see it in person.

You are laboring under a misapprehension, says the boss of the place. They talk like that. What he meant, he meant we got to take that child home with us and if we really loved Cissy … Then he gave us a big lecture on this baby: it’s Cissy’s connection to life; also, it happens she was crazy about this gardener, this son of a bitch, a black man with a green thumb.

You see I can crack a little joke because look at this pleasure. I got a little best friend here. Where I go, he goes, even when I go down to the Italian side of the park to play a little bocce with the old goats over there. They invite me if they see me in the supermarket: Hey, Iz! Tony’s sick. You come on an’ play, O.K.? My wife says, Take Emanuel, he should see how men play games. I take him, those old guys they also seen plenty in their day. They think I’m some kind of a do-gooder. Also, a lot of those people are ignorant. They think the Jews are a little bit colored anyways, so they don’t look at him too long. He goes to the swings and they make believe they never even seen him.

I didn’t mean to get off the subject. What is the subject? The subject is how we took the baby. My wife, Mrs. Z., Nettie, she plain forced me. She said, We got to take this child on us. I will move out of here into the project with Cissy and be on welfare. Iz, you better make up your mind. Her brother, a top social worker, he encouraged her, I think he’s a Communist also, the way he talks the last twenty, thirty years …

He says: You’ll live, Iz. It’s a baby, after all. It’s got your blood in it. Unless of course you want Cissy to rot away in that place till you’re so poor they don’t keep her anymore. Then they’ll stuff her into Bellevue or Central Islip or something. First she’s a zombie, then she’s a vegetable. That’s what you want, Iz?

After this conversation I get sick. I can’t go to work. Meanwhile, every night Nettie cries. She don’t get dressed in the morning. She walks around with a broom. Doesn’t sweep up. Starts to sweep, bursts into tears. Puts a pot of soup on the stove, runs into the bedroom, lies down. Soon I think I’ll have to put her away too.

I give in.

My listener says to me, Right, Iz, you did the right thing. What else could you do?

I feel like smacking her. I’m not a violent person, just very excitable, but who asked her?—Right, Iz. She sits there looking at me, nodding her head from rightness. Emanuel is finally in the playground. I see him swinging and swinging. He could swing for two hours. He likes that. He’s a regular swinger.

Well, the bad part of the story is over. Now is the good part. Naming the baby. What should we name him? Little brown baby. An intermediate color. A perfect stranger.

In the maternity ward, you know where the mothers lie, with the new babies, Nettie is saying, Cissy, Cissile darling, my sweetest heart (this is how my wife talked to her, like she was made of gold—or eggshells), my darling girl, what should we name this little child?

Cissy is nursing. On her white flesh is this little black curly head. Cissy says right away: Emanuel. Immediately. When I hear this, I say, Ridiculous. Ridiculous, such a long Jewish name on a little baby. I got old uncles with such names. Then they all get called Manny. Uncle Manny. Again she says—Emanuel!

David is nice, I suggest in a kind voice. It’s your grandpa’s, he should rest in peace. Michael is nice too, my wife says. Joshua is beautiful. Many children have these beautiful names nowadays. They’re nice modern names. People like to say them.

No, she says, Emanuel. Then she starts screaming, Emanuel Emanuel. We almost had to give her extra pills. But we were careful on account of the milk. The milk could get affected.

O.K., everyone hollered. O.K. Calm yourself, Cissy. O.K. Emanuel. Bring the birth certificate. Write it down. Put it down. Let her see it. Emanuel … In a few days, the rabbi came. He raised up his eyebrows a couple times. Then he did his job, which is to make the bris. In other words, a circumcision. This is done so the child will be a man in Israel. That’s the expression they use. He isn’t the first colored child. They tell me long ago we were mostly dark. Also, now I think of it, I wouldn’t mind going over there to Israel. They say there are plenty black Jews. It’s not unusual over there at all. They ought to put out more publicity on it. Because I have to think where he should live. Maybe it won’t be so good for him here. Because my son, his fancy ideas … ach, forget it.

What about the building, your neighborhood, I mean where you live now? Are there other black people in the community?

Oh yeah, but they’re very snobbish. Don’t ask what they got to be so snobbish.

Because, she says, he should have friends his own color, he shouldn’t have the burden of being the only one in school.

Listen, it’s New York, it’s not Oshkosh, Wisconsin. But she gets going, you can’t stop her.

After all, she says, he should eventually know his own people. It’s their life he’ll have to share. I know it’s a problem to you, Iz, I know, but that’s the way it is. A friend of mine with the same situation moved to a more integrated neighborhood.

Is that a fact? I say, Where’s that?

Oh, there are …

I start to tell her, Wait a minute, we live thirty-five years in this apartment. But I can’t talk. I sit very quietly for a while, I think and think. I say to myself, Be like a Hindu, Iz, calm like a cucumber. But it’s too much. Listen, Miss, Miss Faith—do me a favor, don’t teach me.

I’m not teaching you, Iz, it’s just …

Don’t answer me every time I say something. Talking talking. It’s true. What for? To whom? Why? Nettie’s right. It’s our business. She’s telling me Emanuel’s life.

You don’t know nothing about it, I yell at her. Go make a picket line. Don’t teach me.

She gets up and looks at me kind of scared. Take it easy, Iz.

Emanuel is coming. He hears me. He got his little worried face. She sticks out a hand to pat him, his grandpa is hollering so loud.

But I can’t put up with it. Hands off, I yell. It ain’t your kid. Don’t lay a hand on him. And I grab his shoulder and push him through the park, past the playground and the big famous arch. She runs after me a minute. Then she sees a couple friends. Now she has what to talk about. There, four women. They make a little bunch. They talk. They turn around, they look. One waves. Hiya, Iz.

This park is full of noise. Everybody got something to say to the next guy. Playing this music, standing on their heads, juggling—someone even brought a piano, can you believe it, some job.

I sold the store four years ago. I couldn’t put in the work no more. But I wanted to show Emanuel my pharmacy, what a beautiful place it was, how it sent three children to college, saved a couple lives—imagine: one store!

I tried to be quiet for the boy. You want ice cream, Emanuel? Here’s a dollar, sonny. Buy yourself a Good Humor. The man’s over there. Don’t forget to ask for the change. I bend down to give him a kiss. I don’t like that he heard me yell at a woman and my hand is still shaking. He runs a few steps, he looks back to make sure I didn’t move an inch.

I got my eye on him too. He waves a chocolate popsicle. It’s a little darker than him. Out of that crazy mob a young fellow comes up to me. He has a baby strapped on his back. That’s the style now. He asks like it’s an ordinary friendly question, points to Emanuel. Gosh what a cute kid. Whose is he? I don’t answer. He says it again, Really some cute kid.

I just look in his face. What does he want? I should tell him the story of my life? I don’t need to tell. I already told and told. So I said very loud—no one else should bother me—how come it’s your business, mister? Who do you think he is? By the way, whose kid you got on your back? It don’t look like you.

He says, Hey there buddy, be cool be cool. I didn’t mean anything. (You met anyone lately who meant something when he opened his mouth?) While I’m hollering at him, he starts to back away. The women are gabbing in a little clutch by the statue. It’s a considerable distance, lucky they got radar. They turn around sharp like birds and fly over to the man. They talk very soft. Why are you bothering this old man, he got enough trouble? Why don’t you leave him alone?

The fellow says, I wasn’t bothering him. I just asked him something.

Well, he thinks you’re bothering him, Faith says.

Then her friend, a woman maybe forty, very angry, starts to holler, How come you don’t take care of your own kid? She’s crying. Are you deaf? Naturally the third woman makes a remark, doesn’t want to be left out. She taps him on his jacket: I seen you around here before, buster, you better watch out. He walks away from them backwards. They start in shaking hands.

Then this Faith comes back to me with a big smile. She says, Honestly, some people are a pain, aren’t they, Iz? We sure let him have it, didn’t we? And she gives me one of her kisses. Say hello to Cissy—O.K.? She puts her arms around her pals. They say a few words back and forth, like cranking up a motor. Then they burst out laughing. They wave goodbye to Emanuel. Laughing. Laughing. So long, Iz … see you …

So I say, What is going on, Emanuel, could you explain to me what just happened? Did you notice anywhere a joke? This is the first time he doesn’t answer me. He’s writing his name on the sidewalk. EMANUEL. Emanuel in big capital letters.

And the women walk away from us. Talking. Talking.