We didn’t want him to marry again. Why should he? Certainly not to satisfy the flesh. A gray-haired man with seven grown children! Companionship? For Papa? Absurd! He was the shyest of men. Give him a Yiddish paper to read and three nights of back-breaking work each week as a baker, and that was his life. That and looking after the steam heat in the winter. He didn’t even go to the Yiddish theater.

That’s why we were so startled when two years after Mamma died Papa started to dress up on Saturday nights and slip out of the six-family house in Bensonhurst and head for the Sea Beach Express.

At first we used to question him, with that disregard of privacy so characteristic of immigrant Jewish life.

“Where you going, Pa?” I would say, looking up from my college algebra assignment.

Sam and Gershon would stop slamming the ping-pong ball on the dining room table, walk into the kitchen, and take up the question a little tauntingly. “Yeah, Pa, where you going?” It never occurred to them that they had no right to ask, nor to Papa that he could refuse to answer.

He looked trapped. There he was seated at the kitchen table, spooning up the soup prepared by Marian, who lived in one of the downstairs apartments in the house that Papa owned. His left foot would start to beat a nervous tattoo on the kitchen floor.

“I’m going to New York,” he said, naturally in Yiddish. And New York at that time meant only one thing to us: the Lower East Side, the heartland. It was where the family had come from, and Cherry Street was vivid in our minds. We knew we were lucky to have escaped it. Then why did we keep going back there for suits and for weddings in sweaty little halls? Now Papa was going there. Clearly it was a place where things happened.

There were five boys and two girls in the family. The oldest two were already married. Those at home ranged between fifteen and twenty-five. We had been fond of our mother, maybe too fond. She had exercised a tyranny over the family. A stout woman but handsome, she had quarreled chronically with Papa. With us she was different. She knew how to fuss over us, and she was really overworked, forever trapped in the kitchen by a truly spectacular inefficiency, forever making steak and fried potatoes for every member of the family.

They would fight, and Papa would begin a long, patient, slow-building tribal imprecation against her family culminating in the final snarling outcry of Elke’s a tochter! We used to imagine some monstrous disgrace in that remote Polish village of our mother’s family. It turned out simply that Grandma Elke talked too much. Nor did Mamma endure this taunt passively. She would turn on his parents—the cheapskates . . . they lived in dirt . . . they didn’t have a decent coat to wear. . . .

Poor Papa would retreat to the bedroom he shared with three of the boys, muttering under his breath against marriage and the follies of wives and the money thrown out by foolish women.

After Mamma’s death, she became a kind of martyr to us, killed by overwork and an extravagant devotion to the family. “With so many kids working, depression or no, why couldn’t she have got help once a week? And why did she have to do her own laundry?” And in back of our minds we heard, resentfully, Papa’s perennial complaining about money thrown out: “Arosgeverfene gelt,” he used to say; the phrase still beats iambically in my mind.

We would listen to a Belle Baker record of “A Yiddishe Mamma” and another shameless tear-jerker, “Old Fashioned Lady.” And poor Papa had to participate in this hagiolatry.

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We started to discuss Papa’s trips to New York. The first thing we did was to telephone Max, who was the oldest. And the oldest son, the first really to read or write English in an immigrant Jewish family, the one who signs the report cards of the younger ones—he is, in effect, the head of the family.

“Look, what can you do?” Max said. “He’s a man. Maybe he wants to marry again.”

Max was inclined to be easygoing. Anyway his wife was pregnant again, and he was going into business. He had his hands full. But the rest of us wouldn’t take so tolerant a view. We argued that the two-year interval between Mamma’s death and Papa’s Saturday night jaunts was too brief. We really meant that he hadn’t done penance long enough.

But our main quarrel with him was that he was not taking us into his confidence. Every decision in this family-collective had to be made in the open. There could be no secret lives, no private emotions.

Even Bernice, eighteen and boy-crazy, submitted to this family hegemony. Every guy she met, every stray pick-up on Bay Parkway, was carefully scrutinized by all of us. Only Papa would let them alone. At most he would smile with helpless benignity. Bernice had the bad luck to get involved with an Italian boy. He was nice enough, a scissors-grinder in the garment center who made a good living. But an Italian! The two oldest boys went to look him over. Bernice was supposed to meet him in front of the Times building. (Her rebellion would never carry so far that she would refuse to tell where and when she was meeting him.) Max and Oscar circumnavigated the Times building like musical comedy detectives, full of hoarse whispers and black suspicions. There was even one overdressed matron waiting to meet her husband who, they were convinced, was a white-slaver determined to prey on their sister.

But it was Larry, the youngest, who was most disturbed by Papa’s outings. He was fifteen, and it was summer. And for the first time there were the girls on the block. His eye was constantly drawn to his friend Sidney’s stoop, where they sat with secret smiles. Late on Friday afternoon, obeying a collective impulse, the girls would walk out of their homes, washed, burnished, and glistening in the fading light, their young bodies moving mysteriously under their light summer dresses. Larry and his friends would stop their punchball game to watch, full of adolescent yearning. In the evening the yearners crowded up to Sidney’s stoop. They picked leaves from the hedges, they leaned toward each other in adolescent solidarity, but pulled sharply away from any real encounter with the girls.

On Saturday nights that summer there was almost always a party for Larry to go to. One or another of the girls, Ettie or Sylvia or Pearlie, would buy some Wool-worth candy, a few bottles of soda, and there was a party. Or sometimes, excruciatingly self-conscious, he would negotiate the rites of the date—the movie, the ice-cream soda, the fumbling for something—anything—to talk about.

But what disturbed Larry most was when he went to his bedroom to dress for Saturday night. There was Papa going through the same motions: the new suit, the unfamiliar white shirt, even cuff links. They were conscious of a grotesque, parodic element in all this, each imitating the other in a stiff, clumsy ceremonial. Once they even happened to leave at the same moment, Larry on his way to plump little Pearlie and Papa going the other way toward the station.

We heard vaguely that he was seeing a shadchen. We were emancipated enough, even twenty-five years ago, to regard a shadchen as a comic figure. He was in a class with Bluhmie, the lady bootlegger, who also had a community function. We used to see her walking agitatedly through the streets of Bensonhurst, carrying a few bottles of whiskey for a wedding or engagement party, her toothless gums working furiously. We had heard of Al Capone, but what did racketeers have to do with Bluhmie who took care of simchus and did cupping besides?

A shadchen was like Bluhmie—a trifle absurd, vaguely irrelevant, and not to be taken seriously. In time, however, we got used to the idea. We had a vision of lengthy negotiations, Papa’s left leg tapping nervously, a shy, self-deprecating smile on his face as he declined one middle-aged charmer after another.

Of course we had a clear idea of what he was after. We saw a wholesomely un-modish woman, much like Mamma, perhaps a little gentler of tongue. She would have children of her own, lots of them, and she would talk Yiddish (but Litvak not Galitsyaner, to us the idiom of termagants and crooks). Somberly dressed, her face innocent of makeup—except powder, that was all right—she would come into the house and go straight to the ice-box to see what was inside. She would then roll up her sleeves, exposing heavy forearms, and get started in the kitchen, expostulating all the while about how thin we looked and how badly we had been eating.

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A few months later, she did come. Creature of habit that he was, Papa brought her early in the morning, the time he usually came home from work with a bagful of rolls and jelly doughnuts higher than his head. This time he brought his new wife. No warning, no hints. Nothing.

They had been married the evening before. Her grown children had served as witnesses. And without delay, she had come for the confrontation. She stood there, smiling stubbornly, determined to over-ride any opposition with unflinching good humor. “I’m your new Aunt Hannah,” she kept saying with strident cheerfulness, the smile working over her face, one gold tooth in the corner of her mouth glinting malevolently.

We looked at her with astonishment, and one by one we went into the bedroom and found the others lying there, rolling and howling.

“My God,” Gershon said, “who would have believed it?”

“The old boy’s got more pep than you gave him credit for,” Alex said half admiringly, half in protest.

“Did you see her shoes—and that dress?” Bernice asked.

The plain truth was that nobody could have done more violence to our preconception of whom Papa should marry. She had bright henna’d hair, a dazzling yellow dress, orange satin shoes, and an enormous floppy summer hat which could not successfully conceal the foolish, lipsticked mouth. Instead of a Yiddish Mamma, we had gotten this. And with a Galitsyaner accent! (Whenever there was conflict later on, Bernice would say with doleful monotony, “What can you expect from a Glitz anyway?”)

Papa had fooled us all. Nothing in our experience could account for her. What was Jewish was equated rigorously in our minds with virtue and simplicity. We had known vaguely that there were some Jewish women who wore makeup and had broken away from the traditional pieties. There was even a certain furtive gaiety I had observed at a small Catskill hotel, a restlessness on the porch after supper while my mother and other nice people were singing Yiddish songs on the lawn. But there wasn’t much of that.

Aunt Hannah became a symbol of a whole sub-continent of living whose existence we had denied. In a word, there was a kurvishe flavor about her—in the giddy hair and satin shoes at 8 A.M., in the nudges and winks she directed at the boys. “Oh, your Aunt Hannah, she knows what you t’ink about,” she would say. And there were her children. “The apples don’t fall far from the tree,” my older sister Marian would say in Yiddish.

Aunt Hannah’s children came, one at a time, to look us over. Polite and circumspect, they had been told that we were refined, a family full of college graduates.

The older son was all right. He was a familiar enough type. Pot-bellied and cigar-smoking, he had shrewd, nervous eyes and a timid wife. He was a small businessman—some kind of: leather business in Williamsburg—and we could see he was pleased his mother had re-married. She had cost him money.

But the others were something else. There was the younger son, Mike, an ex-Golden Glover, we were told. We later discovered this was a fabrication. He merely had working-class muscles, a limp handshake, and a dull mind. He soon came to live with us, and he introduced the Journal-American to our home, and on Saturday afternoon, after work, he went out for chinks. Later he got a girl into trouble and had to marry her.

Aunt Hannah’s older daughter, Sally, was separated from her husband and was living with a big Polack who, to our immense delight, got into a fight with cops a week after Papa got married. He was a big taciturn fellow, good-natured enough but with an old grudge against cops which came alive when he had a few drinks.

Papa liked him. There was a kind of old country bond between them—the Jew and the peasant. Steve had thinning hair but an astonishing torso and massive hands. He worked as an automobile mechanic and had an old roadster which ran like a dream. Once I went to the beach with their whole family—a carnival of breast, haunch, and muscle. My own family seemed pallid by contrast.

Sally herself was a blowzy, good-natured woman who looked after her daughter conscientiously and never insisted that she accept Steve as a father. The girl, fifteen and nubile, used to read poetry. But she was enough her mother’s daughter that when September rolled around, she became one of the girls on a Mardi Gras float at Coney Island. I went to see her. She was standing, one knee bent slightly, in satin shorts and halter on a float representing the spirit of the Edison Company.

But it was Teddy who seized our imaginations most. She was small, dark, and intense—the kind of girl who when single looks knowing, and when married still looks single. She had been vaguely in show business. In any case, she had made the annual shuttle run for a long time between Miami and New York. She was now married to a rich Miamian. He was in slot machines, we were told. Later we learned that he actually worked for the City of Miami Beach, something to do with slot machines, which were legal then. And this too gave us a startled pleasure.

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Every summer the heat drove Teddy to New York. She came alone; her husband remained in Miami. Almost every evening, a big car would stop in front of our house and a man would pick Teddy up. He would be tall and flashily dressed, and he would say only as much to us as he had to. She would get home late, long after we were asleep, and spend the next day in a housecoat doing her nails, moving with nervous grace against the background of rhumba music from the radio.

Occasionally, indifferently companionable, she would dance with us, show us a fancy rhumba break, or explode into an adolescent Lindy leaving us standing open-mouthed and helpless in the middle of the living room. In all fairness to her, she didn’t tease us. What did she need us for? But Gershon, who was hanging around Green-berg’s candy store with the boys, subscribed to the notion that a girl who does will do so with anybody. Anyway he tried a few times during those afternoon dansants.

He had picked up a piece of candy-store folklore that just dancing close to a susceptible girl would reduce her to a quivering mass. He tried it out on Teddy. She leaned away adroitly.

“What an angle I’m dancing at,” she jeered. Gershon flushed angrily.

Aunt Hannah tolerated her daughters’ vagaries. She understood her children, she told us. “I’m not such an old woman,” she insisted. “I got young ideas. Harry,” she would say, Papa’s name ringing unfamiliarly in our ears, “he don’t know how to live. But I’ll teach him yet.”

She changed the house. The old furniture went out. It was no great loss. But the stuff she brought in alternately outraged and amused us. She hung leather portières at the entrance to the living room, and there was satin-finished upholstery. Worst of all, there was a French doll with a cigarette stuck in her mouth sitting in one of the armchairs. Every time we wanted to sit in it, we threw her on the floor. And there were red bulbs in the electric fixtures. It was quite a place.

When Bernice had a date—and that was quite often—Aunt Hannah would officiously lead the young man into the living room. The room would be suffused with a pale scarlet light. The boy, a Bensonhurst innocent, would look uneasily from the rakish doll to Aunt Hannah, brassy and friendly. Aunt Hannah would trot discreetly off, bellowing to Bernice at the other end of the apartment. “Bernie,” she would shout (she had learned from Teddy that masculine names are somehow sexier), “a gentleman to see you!” And the boy would sit there and wonder: where am I?

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Our relationship with Aunt Hannah began to settle down after a while. She wasn’t a bad-natured woman, just a foolish one. Her Yiddish, with its Galician accent, disturbed us. She bragged too much—even about her first husband who, we later learned, died in a nut-house. And every time she prepared a meal, she exacted verbal tribute. “You leek your finger from Aunt Hannah’s cooking, don’t you?” she would leer at us. We would play-act for her at first but got tired of it. She also tried to push Bernice into marriage with anyone at all. Another Italian boy came to call once. We sat like a tribunal. Aunt Hannah was all smiles and gurgles. “What kind of Jewish woman is this?” we asked each other. We sensed that she was trying to narrow the gap between her children and us.

But there was no doubt about one thing: she was good for Papa in a way we hadn’t dreamed possible. He shared a bedroom with her, something he hadn’t done for years with our mother. We took to calling him among ourselves “the little bridegroom,” and we snickered when we would see her in a dressing gown before going to bed, her little eyes sparkling behind thick glasses, or Papa sidling into the bedroom at an early hour.

A week after they were married, they made a trip to the East Side and came back with two new suits. We couldn’t remember when he had last bought a suit—probably eight years ago for Max’s wedding. She bought him after-shave lotion and cologne, which he couldn’t bring himself to use. And she called him Harry in a way that reminded us that it was a young man’s name, breezy and happy-go-lucky. Many years too late, Papa almost became the young, comradely father of our imagination.

She even took him to Florida the next winter for a three-week vacation. She was part of the Jewish advance guard that establishes the low-priced beachheads in the resorts. They stayed at an efficiency, a word we had never heard. Papa even went to Hialeah once, but smiled helplessly when we asked him how he liked the races.

He liked the attention, he liked being a husband. (For years he had been only a father.) But he didn’t like giving up the old roles. We would come home and find him buried in the closets, silently straightening them out. Sometimes, in an access of nostalgia, he would put on his old, pre-Aunt Hannah shirts with the sleeves cut off.

In just a year, things began to fall apart. Aunt Hannah had assumed that there was money in the family. There was none to speak of. The college graduates had been invested in her mind with magical potency. With five boys in the family, she thought she would really fall into something—a schmalzgrub! Instead she inherited a big apartment and headaches. When the money didn’t materialize, she turned shrewish.

First she limited our milk drinking. “What are you,” she demanded truculently, “milk babies?” She had her son, poor nerveless Mike, put a lock on the refrigerator. And she would dole the milk out to us. This was funny at first. What Jewish home is anything less than a cornucopia of food and drink? The idea of being denied food after having had it pressed on us aggressively all our lives was a small relief. But we also genuinely liked milk. And the daily allotment soon began to bother us.

Why go into detail? Aunt Hannah was through. She didn’t want to be housekeeper for another woman’s children. She took to staying in bed for whole days, even letting her bleached hair go gray at the edges and roots. She complained of mysterious ailments, although we knew she was as strong as a horse. She accused us of being ungrateful and supercilious. (“My children didn’t go to college, but Mike—he don’t make a good living? He got more common sense than you.”) She picked fights.

Finally, she picked a fight with the wrong person—from her point of view, I suppose, he was the right person. She accused Marian’s husband of free-loading on his father-in-law. He was a hard-working, kind-hearted man who was sweating out the depression pushing a hack. When she said this, we had to restrain him from hitting her. His fourteen-hour workdays welled up in him in an insanity of rage.

She went shrieking through the streets about the terrible family she had to live with. They were trying to kill her. Poor Papa sat white-faced in their bedroom. It was true about stepmothers. What would the neighbors think? Ah, they knew her for what she was.

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We had to break up. That was clear. Aunt Hannah, her fury almost spent, went to her daughter in Coney Island, the one with the Polack. “I won’t stay with those louses,” she bellowed in the quiet afternoon street. Papa emerged from the bedroom.

“I’ll go to her, just to keep her quiet,” he said. “A crazy woman,” he added. He cursed under his breath. “I’ll be back later,” he announced when he left.

But he didn’t come back later, nor the next day, nor the day after that. A week later, her oldest son came in his car, mumbled a shame-faced greeting, and took away her clothes. The following day a moving van rolled up and emptied the apartment of her furniture. Only the leather portieres remained to frame the naked room. Bernice unscrewed the red bulbs from the living room fixtures. “Well, thank God for that,” she said.

Two weeks after he left, Papa came back. It was seven in the morning after a night’s work in the bakery. He came up the steps, let himself in with his own key, and neatly set the towering bag of rolls and breakfast cake on a chair. He hung up his coat and jacket and prepared a percolator full of coffee. When we came into the kitchen, eyes full of sleep, our mouths working sourly, he was sitting there. He looked the way he always did: shyly proprietary, a little man but not without a certain masculine dignity. His two hands were interlaced around a mug of coffee. His thick gray hair was well combed. He was wearing a good shirt, not one of his sleeveless specials. She’s looking after him, we thought.

There were no explanations, just the usual desultory kitchen talk—about the furnace, about Uncle Jake, about the relatives in Poland. When we went to school, he was still sitting there, his back against the wall. He stayed until noon. A few days later he came again, deposited the bag of rolls on the edge of a chair, and prepared coffee. This time he woke us up in tentative reassertion of his family duties. Later that morning he packed his clothes in an old valise and went back to Coney Island.

And that’s the way it was until he died seven years later. Three times a week, after each night’s work, he came to us and sat in the kitchen, ruminative and voluble over the three cups of coffee. Always after the second cup he would undo the top button of his trousers. He always left the bag of rolls and cake with us. But toward the end, he used to fill a smaller bag, which he took back for his wife.

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