“No? Would it were so. Why?” Mom asked.
“I work among magnates. Not only magnates? Magnates of magnates.”
“Azoy? So rich?”
“Yesterday I waited on J. P. Morgan.”
“Azoy!”
“And Bernard Baruch the day before.”
“Gotinyoo! And they allow a plebeian like you to approach them?”
“Who else will set a salad in front of them? Naturally, the headwaiter takes charge. He takes the orders. He oversees all that I do. I take the plate of food from the cart, place it on the table. Everything is done according to rule. But I hear them talk, one to the other.”
“And what do they say, such powers as these?” Mom marveled.
“What they wish. Morgan will say to Baruch: ‘What do you think of such and such a stock, Bernie?’ And he will answer: ‘I’ll tell you, John, such and such a gesheft has a great future.’ They talk about the war, about Wilson, his kebinet, about great transactions.”
“Hear, only hear!” said Mom. “And none of these mighty asks whether you are—” She hesitated. “I have such a clogged head I’ve forgotten the word. You’re not needed for the War?”
“The headwaiter is only too happy to have an experienced waiter on the floor,” said Pop. “And a lively one, not some broken down alter kocker from a private club. He’s as quiet as a mouse, the headwaiter, whether I’m essential, whether I’m not essential, as they call it.” Pop used the English word. “There I’m essential. Sometimes Morgan or some other of the mighty brings in a guest, an admiral, a high state official. Believe me, they look the other way. Had I only known before. I would have heeded them with their essential like the cat.”
“Gott sei dank,” said Mom.
What Pop said was true. He worked in the Stock Exchange restaurant throughout the entire War. He was completely ignored or deliberately overlooked. Not so Uncle Moe, now a headwaiter in Radsky’s famous dairy restaurant on Rivington Street.
Husky, sanguine Uncle Moe was drafted.
“Mein Moishe,” Baba lamented, wept, rocked back and forth with anguish. “Veh iz mir, oy, veh iz mir. My good child, my devoted, happy son, my Moishe. Ai! Ai! Ai! They’re sending him into that charnel house. God give me strength to endure it.”
Grieving continually, from the day that Moe received his induction notice, she shrank visibly — she withered. Neither would she be distracted nor humored, refusing all solace. “May I not live to see the day that anything happens to him.”
Nor would she respond to Zaida’s chidings: “You must eat! You must live! How will you help him by starving to death? You’ll make a widower of me with your mourning, that’s what you’ll accomplish.”
Morris was sent away to camp. She pined; she scarcely spoke. Her face became brown, shriveled and wrinkled. Fortunately Tanta Mamie lived across the street. She did most of the shopping for the household, and much of the cooking too. Listlessly Baba sat beside the window under the summer awning, sat for hours with two fingers on her cheek and one across her lips, gazing, gazing out on the street. A physician was called in, and he tried to reason with her. “She wants to die before she lives to see her son dead,” he told an exasperated Zaida. “See that she drinks enough. If she won’t eat, force her to drink. Otherwise, she may have to go to a hospital.”
“A shvartz yur!” Zaida clawed frantically under his yarmulke. “Such a punishment to befall me. If she won’t eat, she won’t eat. But at least cook. I die of hunger here. If not for Mamie, I would wane away to a stalk, a dry reed. Oy.”
But it was Baba, not Zaida, who became more and more wasted as the weeks of Moe’s training went by. She would surely have been taken to the Mt. Sinai Hospital — Mom told Ira — if Moe hadn’t come home on furlough when he did. Together with others of the family, Ira was at Baba’s to greet him. They had refrained from writing him about Baba’s unhappy condition while he was at camp, and now they waited grimly for him to see for himself. Under his broad khaki campaign hat, Moe looked at his repining mother with the strict stare of one accustomed to command. “What’s wrong with you, Mamaleh?”
“They’re sending you to the slaughter. I don’t want to live.” Her tears lingered in the wasted furrows of her cheeks.
“Azoy? You already know I’m going to be sent into the slaughter?” Moe’s voice was ironic, and his strong hands quiet on his khaki-clad thighs, but he never took his eyes off Baba. “A Yiddish soldier truly carries a heavy load. He has two commanders. One, his mother, the other, his colonel. Fortunately he is exempt from the Torah, or God knows how he could stand it all.”
“Tell her, tell her!” Zaida urged. “Such madness has seized her that she will hear nothing. God commanded the remnant of Israel to live. Talk to a stone.”
“Mamaleh,” Moe said. “None of my friends should be worse off than I am. I live like a count. As I live. Like a lord.”
“Go, with your idle talk. Don’t torture me.”
“I swear to you, Mamaleh. You see this?” Moe turned his arm sideways the better for her to view the insignia on the sleeve of his uniform: three chevrons with a quarter-moon under them. “S’heist mess sergeant,” he explained the meaning of the stripes. “The Almighty blessed me when he made me a headwaiter. Not one in the entire camp knew how to order food for so many men: how to feed so many men, how to tell the cooks what to do. And who and how was to arrange the service for such a horde of men. It’s called mess, Mamaleh. Your Moishe is in charge. Zoi vie an offizier bin ich.”
Baba looked from the sleeve to her son’s broad, light-skinned face, with the scar on the brow; she searched with sad skepticism his blue eyes.
“Believe me, Maminyoo,” said Moe earnestly: “With these stripes I will never be sent into carnage. I could even become rich— The suppliers prod me on every side with money. If I only dared accept.”
“Moishe, child. Ai,” Baba moaned in disbelief.
“No? Ask, ask whom you wish, a total stranger. Ask, what is a mess sergeant. Treife I must eat. But to be sent into carnage, never. Who will buy for the whole regiment? It takes a Yiddisher kupf.” Moe spoke as though he were commanding Baba to understand. “I have authority, I alone. Would I buy from this dealer, and not from the other, he nudges me with fifty dollars. Believe me. But I refuse. Not that it’s worth my life to be honest, but I do it for your sake. Not to risk my ‘rank,’ as it’s called in English. These,” he pointed to his chevrons. “You understand? You have nothing to pine about.”
Perhaps Baba wanted to believe. As long as Moe was home, her appetite perked up. She even went shopping, hovered over her firstborn son with the freshest bulkies, lox and smoked white fish, every delicacy she could think of; she baked kishka, stuffed derma; she cooked borsht and kreplach, lintzes and lotkehs and carrot pudding, gefilte fish and chicken. Moe took precedence before Zaida, who was glad enough to yield: At last his wife was active again, dressed herself in her best black satin on the Sabbath, wore her pearls, served dinner and dined — ate, because Moe refused to eat unless she did. Her cheeks filled out, almost visibly absorbing nourishment; her blue eyes seemed to emerge from their caverns, like iris, her color returned. She wanted to believe. And again and again, her gaze rested on his Moe’s mess sergeant’s insignia, as on a talisman. Her son would be spared.