“Another Veljish,” said Mom. “Here in New York, here in Harlem are my relatives. I made my choice. Here I remain.”
“You’ll pay for remaining here, just as you’ll pay for my suffering,” Pop warned ominously. “A ruinous choice you’ve made. You’ll see.”
“And you didn’t want to come here with your pitiful milk-wagon?”
“I but followed after you. Who knows what I would have done otherwise? I could have driven a horse for other kinds of deliveries. Like your cousin Yussel with the red beard. I could have delivered bread from the bakers to the grocers.”
Mom maintained her grave composure: “Chaim, tell me: How do these goyim stand it, the rocking of the trolley car?”
“Because they’re goyim,” said Pop.
“It’s not because they’re always on edge like you? It’s not because they have a skittish stomach?”
“Why should they have a skittish stomach?” Pop echoed in nugatory denial. “Did they have to skimp as I did until I saved enough money for your passage to America?”
“Who told you you had to starve? To live on a sweet potato the peddler baked in his street oven, or a boiled ear of corn, or a duck dinner for fifteen cents, and who knows how the duck met his end. So it would have taken another month or two to buy my passage.”
“Another two months, then I surely would have had to pay full fare for him. Who would have believed he was only a year and a half.” Pop’s retort was quick in coming. “In Galitzia you were reasonable when it came to waiting; you were patient. Why not when I would have been in St. Louis?”
“A good reason.”
“What?”
“Chaim, to talk about it further is in vain.”
VII
Where could he try it out, when a petzel stiffened into a peg? Dora Bahr, Davey’s scrawny sister. Their tenement cellar-door opened on the yard. You could hide behind it. Or Meyer Shapiro’s younger sister, if you could get her alone and if she wanted — or one of the little Irish shiksas—“Mary, Mary, what a pain I got,” the Mick kids singsang. “Let’s go over to the empty lot. You lay bottom. I lay top. Mary, Mary, what a pain I got.” Pop should never have left for St. Louis. You wanted that feeling again that came with rubbing against Mom — that’s what Uncle Louie must have wanted. Uncle Moe too, exhibiting his great tower of red flesh — and that rusty bum who wanted Ira to take his pants down. And then pumped his big thing against a tree. And most startling of all, Mom too, even if no longer — she said—ausgebrendt in Yiddish. “Burned out.” So girls too. And for her own brother Moe, more, more than for Pop, but not allowed. All for that feeling. Where could you get it? With whom? The Hoffman kid on the roof; that was lousy, sitting down pulling your own peg, like that rusty bum. It had to be somebody to pry into: living, warm, like Mom’s thighs, a girl it had to be, like Rosy S, Louie’s daughter, who showed him she was a girl, with a fire-red slit instead of a petzel. Who liked it, who wanted it the same way he did, who got the same wonderful feeling between her thighs he almost got with Mom, when she woke up and laughed. What girl? Where?
And then one evening, long before his shift was up, Pop came home with both eyes blackened, nose bruised, blood still adhering to his nostrils. He had tried to eject a drunken sailor from the trolley car and been badly beaten, badly enough so that the dispatcher had sent him home.
Mom wept; so did Ira. And Pop too at his malign fate.
“Oy, gevald!” Mom cried out. “What woe is mine! Did you have to wrangle with a drunken sailor?”
“I with him? He attacked me. He wouldn’t pay his fare when I told him to. I merely said he would have to get off.”
“Then let him be. And let him be slain,” Mom lamented. “May the war take its toll of him!”
“It’s my jop,” said Pop. “And if there was an inspector aboard the car, and I was a fare short, I would be fired.”
“Ai, my poor husband!” Mom clasped her slightly built spouse to her large bosom. “Would I could take your place! Would I were there to defend you. I have shoulders. I have strength!”
“Now you comfort me!” Pop extricated himself from Mom’s arms. “I thought that with America in the accursed war, it would last two months, three months. When so many men were soldiers, businessmen too, I could easily establish myself in a luncheonette in St. Louis. Or with Gabe’s finagling — I’m his brother—ai, fortune, fortune. Such good fortune betide Woodrow Wilson and his advisers. Gabe said: Have nothing to do with the stinking Democrats. How right he was. How right, how right! Ten days longer I’ll suffer there on that verflukhteh trolley car — until my black eyes recover — fortunately I took off my glasses when I went to put him off.”
“Oy, gevald!” Mom grieved. “I thought so.”
“Noo, what else?”
“And then?” Mom asked.
“And then let them be destroyed with their jop. Ten days, two weeks more. The most. I’ll sneak to the employment office: not to the union hall full of patriots, but to a plain employment office goniff. Where is there a jop for a waiter, I’ll ask. They must be jops in the unheard-of thousands.”
“And if they come after you? Those who seek the shirkers, the dreft-dodgers, as one hears on all sides the hue and cry?”
“Luzn seh mir gehn in d’red. I’ll tell them: Go be a conductor on a trolley car yourself, when you have to discharge every half-hour. Let us see what you’ll do. I’m like an invalid, no? Cremps. Cremps. Cremps. You want a soldier with cremps in the militaire?”
“Indeed,” said Mom. “Oy, that they may not seize you!”
“Seize me!” Pop scouted. “I’ve already been seized.”
“And I would ask them a general doesn’t need a waiter? An officer doesn’t need a waiter? He doesn’t have to be a stalwart, a hero—”
“As long as he knows how to set a table, how to serve, that’s enough.” Encouraged, Pop interrupted. “Better to be a waiter to a general, a colonel, than a trolley-car conductor. Allevai,” he added fervently after a moment. “Wages they would have to pay me to support my family. Even if they never gave me a tip, it would still be better than spasms of the bowels on the back of a trolley car.” His fingers stroked his discolored cheekbones. “And black eyes when you try to collect a fare. Such an ugly fate may my friend, President Wilson, have to endure!”
VIII
Pop worked for another two weeks, reported to the personnel office that he no longer could work on the trolley line because of the disorder of his bowels. He requested a release so that he could seek other essential work. He was accorded a release, and he handed in his badge (visored hat and navy-blue jacket were his by-purchase, and Mom sold them in the same secondhand store on 114th Street where she so often and with such tenacity — to Ira’s intense embarrassment — haggled for his secondhand clothes).
The day following his separation from the trolley line, Pop was already working. So scarce were experienced waiters, the employment agency sent him to one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city: the Wall Street Stock Exchange Club dining room. No tips — the diners were enjoined from paying them and he from accepting them. He received a fixed salary and a percentage of the bill, and that was all — not as much as he might have received otherwise in as high-toned a restaurant but he was free weekends, and could seek, and easily find, “extra jops by a benket.” But at least he was over that trolley-car plague, he congratulated himself, adding. “Anything is better than that. A living I make. My bowels are at peace. And seek me out I’m sure they won’t.”