“That was the East Side,” Mom reminded him. “There are—” she clutched her cheek—“Brooklyn, the Bronx, and who knows where else?”
“What? Is it better to molder in a stockade than to learn a route in — ah! — anywhere: In Brooklyn, in the Bronx. Noo.”
So Pop became a trolley-car conductor. The route assigned to him could not have been more conveniently located: the Fourth and Madison Avenue line that crossed 119th Street only a block away. His was the “relief shift,” as it was called: from midmorning to well into the evening. Reporting for work or returning home, he wore the uniform of the trolley-car conductor, a navy-blue jacket and a visored cap with badge. Ira caught sight of him once or twice when school let out — he still attended P.S. 103 on Madison Avenue and 119th Street — saw his father on the rear platform of the passing trolley, cranking coins down the transparent chute into the till below.
All would have gone well. Pop’s job met the official criterion that the work be essential. It was essential. But after awhile, the constant lurching of the trolley — so he complained, though it may have been his nervous tension — began to affect him. He suffered more and more from diarrhea. Finally it became chronic. Diarrhea on a trolley car! Sometimes his bowel spasms were so severe, he was unable to contain himself long enough until the trolley reached its terminal, in whose offices were toilets. Instead he had to signal the motorman to halt the trolley in midroute, while he ran into one or another of the lunchrooms along the avenue and relieved himself.
“Mein ormeh mann,” Mom commiserated (in a way that Pop both welcomed and rebuffed). “My poor husband. Perhaps if you eat only wholesome food, hard-boiled eggs, a little chicken broth, coffee with scalded milk, such things as prevent diarrhea. Or strong tea with lemon. But best of all, scalded milk with a thick skim — that will stem the wild flux.”
“How? Where? To keep scalded milk with a thick skim in a trolley car? Had you come to St. Louis as I asked, I wouldn’t be suffering these pangs. But you refused. So I’m twice a poor man, poor in money, poor in health.”
“And what if you had gone to St. Louis and opened a cafeteria and failed, then what? How would you be any better off? A bankrupt, the military would surely have seized you.”
“Uh, she has me bankrupt already!”
“No? You become so bewildered in transactions.”
“Go whistle, and not talk,” said Pop. “I have brothers there in St. Louis, no? Even if I failed in business, Gabe is a political fixer. He would have interceded for me. He wangled a garbage collection inspector’s job for my brother Sam; he could have found some safe crevice for me to escape the military.”
“Who could know things would come to this bitter pass,” Mom continued her self-restrained exoneration. “You needed only to send me my allowance, you could have stayed in St. Louis until the Messiah came.”
“Azoy? Without a wife? Two separate abodes. I might as well have landed in the military, stout soldier that I would have made. And a fatherless household. It’s clear what you wished.”
“To you it’s clear,” Mom said stonily.
“No? And if I didn’t send you your allowance?”
“Then I would accompany Mrs. Shapiro to the synagogue that sends them to homes to wash floors.”
“And you think I would live alone? All by myself.”
“My paragon. Blessed be the day you found another.” Mom leveled her sarcasm evenly. “Chaim, it was you yourself who chose to be a trolley-car conductor.”
“Much I could do about it.”
“You could have chosen to be a milkman again. Milk all people with children must have.”
“Go, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Milkman. Do you see milk-wagons today? Milk-wagons drawn by a horse?”
Mom was silent, then tilted her head in acknowledgment — and sighed. “Indeed. Were my griefs as rare.”
“Aha. Today the milk companies want only drivers who can operate those little hand-organs, with a crank in front that you spin, and the whole cart shudders. That’s the sort of drivers they want today.”
“Perhaps they would have taught you if you hadn’t fallen out with Sheffield and with Borden’s.”
“You speak like a fool.”
“Then I don’t know. Oy, it’s a dire affliction.” Mom swayed from side to side — stopped: “Do you want to hear a panacea? Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m in a good mood to laugh,” Pop retorted with a grim jerk of his head.
“You go past 119th Street every day. One way, the other way. Again and again. Let the kaddish wait for you there. I’ll give him a bag with food you can eat. You’ll tell us a time — when you pass. He leaves school. He runs home. I have the food ready. He runs back to the corner with it.”
Pop meditated in harassed uncertainty.
“Cornmeal mush is also good for this kind of spasm. With a pat of butter on it. Your favorite dish,” Mom urged. “I’ll have it hot. And on Fridays a little broth in a jar, a bit of boiled fowl in a clean napkin. Ira will wait with it on the corner. He knows where.”
“A shlock auf iss!” Pop snapped furiously. “They and their accursed war. May they be destroyed with it one by one and soon!”
“Amen, selah,” said Mom.
So day after day, a few minutes after he came home from school, Ira was dispatched with a brown paper bag containing Pop’s midafternoon meal. Always Ira waited on the corner on the uptown side because the terminal was only a dozen or so blocks away in uptown Harlem, and in the few minutes while allowing the preceding trolley a little more lead time, Pop managed to consume most of his meal. Ira stationed himself at the newly opened variety store opposite the gray school building and waited for Pop’s trolley to arrive. . and waited. . and invariably daydreamed, wool-gathered—
Until suddenly out of the haze of reverie, there was Pop in his blue conductor’s uniform leaning out of the rear platform of the trolley, calling irately in Yiddish: “Dummkopf! Bring it here! The smallest task you bungle!” And almost at the point of leaping off the trolley step to fetch the paper bag himself — and probably fetch Ira a blow for his laggardliness as well.
Poor Pop! The home-cooked meals helped at first, but only for a while, and then he relapsed again into chronic diarrhea. It was no use. The cause of his disorder, he maintained, his shrotchkee, as he called it (the very sound of the Yiddish word suggested gastric turmoil), was the lurching and jouncing of the trolley car, nothing else. And coffee with scalded milk, and strong tea with lemon, or hard-boiled eggs wouldn’t help and didn’t help. The constant motion caused a commotion of his bowels. He cursed the “jop,” he cursed his luck — and time and again, he reminded Mom how much she was to blame for his plight because she refused to move to St. Louis. “Had you granted me a few weeks, abided here a few weeks,” he fumed, “till I accumulated enough money to send you passage by train and have the furniture moved, we would have been reunited as in a new land. What am I saying? For you it would have been better than in a new land. It would have been easier. It’s the same land. And a little you’ve learned — true, it’s a smattering — but a greenhorn you’re not anymore: You’ve learned to ask where and how much, and to say yes and no.”
“Indeed.”
“We would have quit this accursed New York.” Pop rubbed his abdomen. “Who would have needed your hard-boiled eggs and your scalded milk with skim? Perhaps in time we might have bought our own home on the outskirts of the city, as my brothers have, lived decently, with a tree in front and grass in the yard.”