Chapter One
I have a blurred mental image of my mother cominghome from my daddy's funeral. She is wearing a veiledblack hat that scares me. I am two years old and hadbeen left at home, put to bed for my nap by a big coloredlady. But I can't sleep. The house feels too quiet.Something big is wrong. I stand up in my crib andscream. No one comes.
Finally I am taken downstairs. Grown-ups in darkclothes are standing around whispering. There is thecloying smell of sweet pastries, the sound of china;ladies in aprons are busy in the kitchen. One of themgives me a cookie. She is crying. I have never seen agrown-up cry before and I start to wail. A man picks meup; his face feels scratchy. I scramble down and look formy mother.
I see her sitting in a big chair and run to her. Shepulls me onto her lap. I tug at the black veil knockingoff her hat but, still, I cannot stop crying. "Babette,honey, shh, don't cry, it's all right," she murmurs. I feelher heart pound through my dress and, weeping, hangonto her until someone wipes my runny nose and pullsme away.
My mother sits quietly in the big chair listening to thenoises of the kitchen and the murmur of the mourners'voices. Hearing a piercing screech she thinks it camefrom her own mouth. But no one turns to her and sherealizes it was a screaming tea kettle. She stares at themourners in their dark clothes and sorrowful faces asthey move about the dining room table laden with plattersof herring, smoked whitefish, smoked salmon,cream cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bagels and Kaiser rolls.Home-made sponge cake, macaroons and fig newtons,baked by the ladies in the kitchen while her husbandwas being buried.
Upstairs, my daddy's suits hang limply with theirempty sleeves, neatly arranged by color and season, thedark blues and grays giving way along the rack to thesummer creams and whites. Shallow drawers hold rowsof jeweled cuff links, a rainbow of ties stretches along awall, and dozens of stiff-collared silk shirts hang neatlyin whites and pastels.
Now the mourners are filling the large, proud livingroom after first washing their hands from the pitcher onthe front stoop. (Someone had set up the ancient Jewishfuneral ritual as if this were a benign death and youcould wash off the wreckage.) My mother looks aroundfor my brother, a tow-headed blue-eyed boy of six, buthe has already escaped into the backyard our daddy hadequipped with swings, jungle gyms, even a child-sizedcar. Peering through the window she sees him riding hiscar on the hard, gray snow, his correct little tie off andalready a rip in the scratchy suit jacket bought especiallyfor his father's funeral.
Earlier, at the burial, he had dutifully thrown a smallhandful of dirt into the freshly dug grave as the rabbimuttered the Kaddish. I see him there in the shimmer ofa dream and imagine heat rays emanating from the opengrave like the disturbed air of hell. Suddenly mymother's knees buckle under her. The funeral directorwith his neat, black suit and blank eyes reaches out andsteadies her with the expressionless efficiency of hisprofession, corpses and collapsing widows as unremarkableto him as an accountant's pencil and addingmachine. Her dizziness is actually due to the pill givenher by a Dr. Magio who is said to be kept on a retainerfor the time a bullet or two has to be discreetly removed,and who was called when my mother was unable to stopscreaming. She feels shame in her near-collapse andextravagant sorrow—mixed as it is with a curious andconfusing measure of relief that Lou Rosen's vitalityand violence are now subdued six feet under. She is only27 after all, her flesh still young, her thighs still slenderand surely not meant never to open to a man again.
But if she imagines freedom and options with apounding heart she learns soon enough that the dead donot leave. Even without the lingering scent of his after-shave,the damp towel across the bed, the diamond stickpin and gold cuff links on the bedside table, Lou is anongoing gauzy presence, everywhere and nowhere,hovering over her, over all of us.
Now, sitting in the living room, my mother watchesa group of three men as they enter her house and hangup their coats and fedoras on the racks provided by theBerkowitz Funeral Home. She knows that the big man,the one with the drooping eyelids and heavy glasses,ordered her husband's murder—she wonders if the twomen with him were the actual killers. She also knowsthat the hundreds of white carnations and roses coveringhis casket were sent by their polite murdering hands.But she is not afraid; she has been a bootlegger's wifelong enough to know that as long as they keep theirsilence widows and children are sacrosanct. She hasbeen a bootlegger's wife long enough to understand thecode; no one will harm her unless, of course, she breaksit and reveals his name, which she knows to be JoeLonardo, the Cleveland Mafia boss who is now offeringhis clean hand to her in solemn-faced sympathy. Sheshakes his hand and feels her stomach rise to her throat.She is afraid she will vomit on his wingtips.
The rabbi in his black suit and beard and woefulexpression is standing with Marvin, brother of thedeceased. Marvin has thick black hair that looks windblown,or mussed from making love. Talking to therabbi, gesturing with his hands, he is smiling as if he'sat a wake with believers of an afterlife, even for LouRosen. The rabbi is eating a wedge of sponge cake. Hewipes his mouth with a dinky embroidered napkin.There are crumbs in his beard. He puts his empty platedown on the grand piano, straightens his yarmulke, andcrosses the room to my mother. He leans over and kissesher on the cheek; she feels his beard brush her face andhas an impulse to grab hold of it. She feels like laughingand has to duck her head and hold her handkerchief toher mouth.
"Mrs. Rosen—are you all right?" the rabbi asks. Hisvoice is deep, concerned.
She nods. She even smiles. She wonders if she isgoing crazy. Although the rabbi is older than she by atleast a decade, she thinks he is too young to haveanything to say to her. She wants him to go away, toleave her alone. But he sits down in a chair at her side,looks into her eyes and speaks. What? What did he say?She is too preoccupied to hear. She wants to ask him ifher husband killed anyone before he was killed; if Godhad punished him, an eye for an eye. She wants to askhim if a bootlegger can get into heaven. Or a bootlegger'swife, for that matter. She wants to ask him ifthere is a heaven. She wants to ask him if there is a God.Foolish woman! Not a question for a rabbi. But the truthis she receives little comfort from his respectful attendanceor his pieties or from the funeral service or theKaddish her son, a child of six, had dutifully repeated ina clear child's voice at graveside, and has no hope ofheavenly intervention into the life she has already foundto be absurd. Sitting there, receiving condolences, shefeels that God is unaware of her small mistaken existenceand that it would be dangerous to get the attentionof such a capricious deity who maybe has it in fororphan girls who get mixed up with gangsters. So shesays nothing as the rabbi rises to leave, lowering hereyes and retreating into the hushed respect reserved forthe newly widowed.
She notices her mother sitting across the room.When did she come in? Anna Wolf (Wolf being hersecond husband, now dead, who was said to have givenher the syphilis that eventually killed her) is sitting onthe couch with her purse on her knees. She has goodbones, the same good bones as my mother, her face issculptured like an aristocrat's, and with her haughtybearing, could have been reincarnated from a formerblue-blooded life. She is daintily eating a cookie withher pinky finger held aloft, sipping from her cup as ifshe were at a tea party. Now she puts the cup down onthe coffee table, opens her purse, retrieves a mirror andtube of lipstick, and carefully applies it to her thinmouth with her reddened arthritic fingers. I do not likethe feel of my grandmother's dry rough hands on myskin.
Anna's first husband was Jacob Smith, the namechanged from Schmitko when he emigrated toCleveland from Poland. But his new Americanizedname and youth, his grand handlebar mustache and hisyoung wife couldn't protect him from the tuberculosisepidemic—known in those days as consumption. Hedied at the age of thirty after a long illness leaving Annawith nothing but four children, a meager grocery store,and her own cold heart.
Tending to her few customers, she left her smalldaughters to the streets of the Scovil Avenue neighborhood.That is, until the day a neighbor paid a visit to theauthorities and reported Anna Smith's appalling neglectof her three little girls, who, dirty and hungry, had beenrunning wild in the neighborhood for weeks, months.My mother, Florence, was 3; her sisters, Lillian andMabel, 5 and 7.
Soon after, a high-bosomed woman and a man witha walrus mustache and a watch chain showed up atAnna's grocery store. She led them upstairs to herrooms, telling her daughters to wait outside. They satdown obediently on the stoop in their grimy, torndresses. A peddler passed, rattling his cart filled withpots and pans. It was July, and the air smelled ofgarbage, urine and the cabbage from someone's kitchen.A baby was crying overhead and a woman leaned out ofher window calling to her son, who was nowhere insight. After awhile, the man emerged folding papersinto his breast pocket. He nodded to the woman waitingon the stoop with the children and one at a time shelifted the three ragged girls into the wagon. (Della, tooyoung at six months to be taken, was left upstairs withAnna.) Florence, my mother, started to scream as if shewas the only one who understood what was happening,setting off her sisters. The woman reached in her bagand gave each weeping child a small lollipop. Eventhough their mother had a grocery store and a glass jarof penny candy stood on the dusty shelf, they werenever given any, and they stopped crying, tore off thewrapper and began sucking greedily. The man andwoman climbed into the wagon as the neighbors staredthrough their windows; the man jiggled the horse'sreins, and it disappeared, rattling down the cobblestonestreet.
In my sentimental imagination I picture Annarunning after the horse and wagon, arms outstretched.tears streaming down her face, crying. My babies! Mybabies! Like in a silent movie. Like Charlie Chaplin andJackie Coogan in The Kid. But I know better. What Iknow of Anna is that she turned away to wait on acustomer. Or simply stood watching them leave fromher window.
When they arrived at the Jewish Orphan Asylum onWoodland Avenue and 55th street, a smell of rot rosefrom the earth. The sisters stared at the high iron-spikedfence that surrounded the large buildings, the barredwindows and the ragged children watching them fromthe playground. Sobbing in fear, they eyed still anotherfrightening stranger come toward them on this bewilderingmorning. Later they would learn that he was Dr.Sam Wolfenstein, the director, whom they would cometo regard with fear and awe as a surrogate for Godhimself, with his heavy beard and bushy eyebrows,weekly sermons, strict discipline and constant admonitionsabout the moral life.
"Now, now," he said, lifting my mother, thesmallest, out of the wagon. "You'll have to stop thatcrying."
But she didn't. She was three years old but she knewthat something very bad was happening; the disappearanceof her mother, her lollipop and her freedom alltangled together into a confusing sense of terrifyingloss. She couldn't stop crying. She could not.
"Hush!" he said, louder.
But his shouts only brought forth a fresh cascade ofscreams.
"Stop it! This minute!" he shouted, unused to beingdisobeyed by his orphans. He held her small, dirty,screaming self at arms-length like a bad-smelling, noisy,squirming chicken and handed her to the woman fromthe wagon. As she took their screaming baby sisteraway, Mabel and Lill watched wide-eyed, their terrorand confusion striking them mute.
The sisters were then separated into their respectiveage groups among the other 500 "inmates" (as theywere called in their lives behind bars) enduring yetanother loss—this time of each other.
My mother was taken to a large damp room in thebasement (infested, like the orphanage's other nineteenth-centurybuildings, with huge rats, lice andbedbugs). Staring with alarm at the large pool of greenwater with two ladders leading down into it, she wasstripped and examined for lice. The probing of her headand body by yet another stranger set her off again into arejuvenated fit of wailing until she was dragged into thetub and shocked into silence by the scalding water. Alterbeing scrubbed by one of the older girls, her hair wascut off—setting off a lifelong preoccupation with herhair. (Over the years, following the Fashion of the day,she had it bobbed, upswept, permed, straightened,marcelled, streaked, layered.)
Scrubbed, de-loused, and shorn, exhausted andsubdued, she was now put into thick, gray undergarmentswith long legs that itched winter and summer.Black stockings went on next, then a red flannel underskirtand finally a dress of wool that reached the ankles.Over that went a blue striped apron. Shoes were madeof thick leather that laced up over the ankles. Afterbeing dressed she was assigned a number that was sewnon her uniform and by which she was henceforthknown.
She was always hungry. While doing her dawn-to-dusk-chores,during her hours of Hebrew and Bible study, shewas hungry. Attending classes in German, English andmathematics, history, social studies and geography,penmanship and spelling, she was hungry. Sittingamong the five hundred other orphans at long woodentables often in enforced silence, there was never enoughto eat, and for every hour of each and every day, for thenext twelve years, she was hungry.
But she was also smart, every year performing academicallyat the top of her class. And at the age of fifteen,on a lovely June afternoon in 1912, my mother graduatedvaledictorian from the Jewish Orphan Home.
After the ceremonies, her Hebrew teacher, Mrs.Adler, climbed the stairs to her dorm where my motherwas packing her few belongings. "You're to go to theoffice," she told her.
Clutching her valedictorian medal, she ran downstairs.Mrs. Goldstein, the secretary, was standing in theadministration office with a woman Florence had neverseen before.
"This is Anna Smith," Mrs. Goldstein said. "She isyour mother." Florence stared at the stranger standingthere in a brown coat and feather-trimmed hat. AnnaSmith had never visited her daughters. Not once. Notonce in 12 years.
But my mother went home with Anna—where elsecould she go? Her older sisters, Mabel and Lill, hadpreceded her, and their small apartment was so crowdedthe last one home had to sleep on the floor and thesecond one up in the morning got the last of the twopairs of silk stockings they owned among them.
Although Anna hadn't showed up at the Home, shecame to the house after the funeral that day, sittingsilently and drinking her tea and applying lipstick withthe monumental indifference her daughter envied butcould not, for the life of her, emulate. Her own passionshad led her from the orphan's cloistered world to thebootlegger's life, and she might have looked at herstrange mother receiving polite condolences withwonder and rage. Growing up, I heard her cheerfully,guiltlessly and frequently announce that she hated hermother. Which embarrassed me. It made me nervous.You just weren't supposed to say you hated your ownmother. And yet she was a dutiful daughter, taking herin to live with us during the Depression, giving hermoney at no small sacrifice, going on streetcars to visither in bitter cold weather after she moved out. I guessshe was still trying to have a mother. Even Anna.
Copyright © 2000 Babette Hughes. All rights reserved.