A Good Place to Come From
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Morley Torgov
Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0-9878146-2-3
Copyright © 1974 Morley Torgov
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To him—in lieu of candles
Contents
Semper Paratus, Semper Fidelis, Semper Annie
Of Life and Love in a '41 DeSoto
The Making of the President, 1944
The Messiah of Second-Hand Goods
For their constant encouragement and support during the writing of this book, I am deeply indebted to my wife Anna Pearl, my children Sarah Jane and Alexander, and my friends Beverley Slopen, Lois and Jack Shayne, Lila and Alex Mogelon, Helen Mathe, Sydney M. Harris and Ben Kayfetz.
M.T.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon, a half hour before train time. "We better get going," my father said, snapping shut the locks on his brown valise. The businesslike tone of his voice, the sharp clicking of the locks, the firmness of his step as we walked toward the car—everything contributed to an air of determination. "It's only a two-minute drive to the station, what's the rush?" I asked. "Sure, that's right," he responded, "leave everything to the last minute, drive like a crazy fool, kill somebody, ruin a perfectly good brand new car, what do you care?" I shook my head in defeat. It was no use trying to convince him I cared.
Always, on the day my father was leaving for Toronto to buy goods for his store, there was this atmosphere of tension, this feeling of great commercial urgency: schedules to be met, judgments to be exercised (will this be a hot little item? ... will this be a lemon?), deals to be made, money to be spent—all this to be accomplished in the garmentmanufacturing jungle that was Spadina Avenue in those days. This time, however, my father was especially on edge. Earlier that day he had taken delivery of a new 1949 Pontiac sedan—his first new car since before the war. It was gleaming black with white sidewall tires; parallel chrome stripes ran along the centre of the hood and continued again over the trunk lid giving the car a sleek, sporty appearance. "Look how she sits, just like the Queen Mary," my father said as he rolled the car lovingly, almost tenderly, out of the dealer's garage on Tancred Street. We made our way home along Queen Street behind the proud prominent nose of the chrome Indian head mounted atop the grille. My father's touch at the wheel was delicate, as if he were driving a crystal chandelier. Suddenly, at the corner of Queen and Bruce, mere yards away from where his own garage waited with doors thrust open to receive the distinguished new guest, rain began to fall, a soft mid-May rain. "Ach, sonofabitch!" he hissed, switching on the wipers. "Rain! My goddam luck. There must be a devil in my life. That's all there is to it ... a devil in my life."
That had been several hours ago. Now we were on our way to the C.P.R. station at the head of Pilgrim Street. It was my maiden voyage at the helm (he had handed me the key to the ignition as if it was the key to a great city) and I drove as the historic importance of the moment dictated— avoiding pot-holes and puddles, creeping warily through intersections, while my father sat nodding with approval. He smelt strongly of after-shave lotion, having shaved—as he always did when he was leaving for Toronto—only an hour before train time. "Got to look my best," he would explain, "just in case I run into a good-looking squaw between here and Sudbury." That pre-train shave was the only festive gesture in an otherwise solemn departure routine.
I drove, and we talked . . . or rather he talked.
"You'll remember to double-check the cash at the end of each day to make sure it's not short or over. What's the combination to the safe?"
"Left to forty, right to twenty-two, left again to fifteen, then right again to fifty."
"Good. Try not to forget it."
"Okay. I'll write the numbers down on a piece of paper—"
"Schmeckle! Somebody'll find it—"
"So what should I do for godsake?"
"Keep repeating it. Say it over to yourself a few times every day."
"I got a great idea," I said. "Maybe I'll say it before meals, like grace."
"That's right, smart-alec, make fun. You'll see how funny it is some day when you come into the store and find the whole goddam place cleaned out . . . everything gone, stolen!"
I rattled off the magic numbers once again just to make him happy. He went on. "Remember to turn off the window lights at ten each night, don't waste electricity. You'll roll up the awning if it looks like rain but for Chrisake remember to put it down if it's sunny, it shouldn't fade the goods in the windows. And make sure you lock the garage good and tight before you go to bed. You never can tell these days who'll fool around with the car, there's so many strangers in town now. Oh yes, and stay off Wellington Street; they're putting down fresh tar on the road, the bastards, and it makes a mess of the tires. "
"A person would think you're going to Europe," I said.
He sighed deeply. "Europe. I only wish to hell I was going to Europe. Anywhere but Toronto. Those whores on Spadina, I can see them now, dragging out one lousy shmateh after another, telling every lie in the book about how wonderful their crap is put together and how much they're selling to this one and to that one. Making phony promises. Gypsies, every one of 'em."
"So why do you stay in the ladies-wear business?" I asked.
"Why do I stay? Because there's a devil in my life. That's all there is to it."
As he said this, the car bounced into and out of a giant pot-hole. I grinned sheepishly. "Sorry."
"Why the hell don't you look where you're going?" he pleaded, wounded and bleeding there on the passenger side.
"I did look, honest to God—"
"If you looked, how ... how could you possibly drive right into it?"
·"I don't know. I guess there's a devil in my life, and that's all there is to it."
Staring straight ahead through the windshield, maintaining a sharp lookout for pot-holes, he sighed deeply again. "You see," he said quietly, "a university can give you an education—but it can't give you brains."
Rain began to fall again, pelting down into the face of the chrome Indian, drumming like war music against the black hood. We were almost at the intersection of Queen and Pilgrim, about to turn north to the station. "Look at this lousy town," he said moodily, "six months winter, six months rain. Sault Shtunk Marie. Same weather. Same side walks. Same buildings. Same faces day in, day out."
"You're just sore because it's raining on your car," I said, trying to sound cheerful. "Just think of this: if you'd stayed in Russia you wouldn't be driving a new Pontiac now, you'd be a slave to some dumb Siberian Cossack."
"What's the difference whose ass you kiss? In Russia it was a Cossack's, here it's some bitch-of-a-customer's ass. I dug a grave for myself in this town, that's all there is to it." "So be happy," I suggested. "You're off to Toronto. A few days out of the grave."
"Every place is a grave. Russia was a grave. The Soo's a grave. Toronto's a grave. You see this car? It's a toy, that's all. It's a toy they give you to play with, to take your mind off all the crap you had to put up with to earn the toy. It means nothing. Jesus Christ! Be careful."
I swung the car hard just in time to miss another giant pot-hole. "The sonsofbitches," my father said, referring to the local Works Department, "they got no respect for other people's property."
We stood on the platform waiting for the conductor's signal to board. "Every time I come here," my father said, "I think of the first time you went to Camp Borden with the Air Cadets—when was that, 1943?—and you told me on the way to the station I shouldn't kiss you goodbye in front of the other boys. When I drove away afterwards, I was so upset I wasn't sure should I laugh or cry. Now look at you. College boy. Big shit!"
I smiled and let him kiss me goodbye on the cheek.
He stood on the lowest step at the entrance to the Pullman coach, holding onto the handrail to steady himself as the train heaved and strained to overcome its own inertia. In a moment he would make the short farewell speech that he delivered always at the precise moment of the wheels' first forward motion, and that I had come to know so well.
Waving, he called out, as if pronouncing his blessing upon everyone gathered on the platform, "Goodbye Soo, fuck you."
Then he was gone.
Queen Street is the main street of Sault Ste. Marie. It runs east and west, roughly paralleling the St. Mary's River, for a distance of about five miles.
Today, Queen Street is lined with signs telling you it is a one-way thoroughfare heading west. You get onto Queen Street at, say, Pim, and you drive past Brock, Spring, March, Elgin, Bruce, Dennis, Tancred, Gore, travelling westward past the new International Bridge, following the setting sun all the way. Now you are as far as James Street in the heart of Little Italy. A few blocks more and you are into Steel Plant Country: Bayview, the wrong side of the tracks-smoke, dust, the grinding noises of trains and cranes, the overpowering, deep-seeping smells of sulphur and coal-tar. You obey the road signs, and you go west.
Yesterday—in the nineteen-thirties and early forties— Queen Street was a one-way thoroughfare heading east. There were no signs that told you this, only an instinct, a compelling sense of direction. You got onto Queeri Street at, say, Huron, and you passed about two dozen streets as you travelled eastward, stopping-if you were a Gentile-at Simpson Street where the stately red brick houses and the green lawns were; not stopping-if you were a Jew-until you had gone as far east as you could go: east along High way 17 and eventually along Highway 11, passing through Sudbury and North Bay and Huntsville, until the road signs said "City of Toronto" some 500 miles later. Then, and only then, did you stop.
For the smalltown Jew, and especially for the children of
the smalltown Jew, Queen Street was a one-way street heading eastward to Toronto. There could be no stops in between.
The people of whom I write—the thirty to forty families who made up the local Jewish community—occupied stores and apartments and houses within a relatively small area in the central part of Sault Ste. Marie. The intersection of Queen and Bruce Streets formed the hub of this area, and most of the Jewish business establishments and homes lay no more than a block or two from that point. Despite this apparent concentration, it is impossible to characterize the inhabitants as ghetto-dwellers, nor was this a shtetl environment in the European sense of the term. As you walked along Queen Street, you saw, true enough, signs that read "Himmel's Ladies' Wear," "Friedman's Department Store," 44 Fishman's Men's Wear." You heard two neighbouring merchants call to each other on the sidewalk, 44 Hello, Joe," "Hello, Isaac." You heard Mr. Cohen and Mr. Mintz greeting each other in Yiddish outside the Royal Bank. Yet you were not conscious of being in the midst of a Jewish world. It was as if the Jews-even those who owned their own properties-were no more than temporary .tenants who borrowed time · and space on Queen Street during daylight hours in order to make their living. To the Gentile population, we were a mysterious subterranean breed, a race who surfaced daily from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. (midnight on Saturdays) to sell merchandise, and disappeared into the ground after hours to do God-knew-what. There were no Jewish theatres, delicatessens, butcher shops, corner con fectionaries; none of the storefront street-level institutions one associates with the ghettto. Until the mid-1940's there was no synagogue.
If there was little resemblance to the big-city ghetto, there was even less resemblance to the shtetl. Having been blown across Europe by a hundred different winds of turmoil, and having vomited their way across seas and oceans to North America, our fathers were far too worldly to live the life of simple villagers. They had shaved off beards and sidelocks, discarded skullcaps, eaten pork when it meant the difference between living or starving, battled with the English language and called down plagues upon its unfamiliar spellings and pronunciations. They worked on the Sabbath, indeed worked harder and longer on the Sabbath than on any other day of the week, for that was the one day of the week when the Gentiles were most often in a spending mood. To nothing—save the inescapable curse of old age—did they resign themselves. Before no one did they bend or cower. The rabbi was always no more than a few minutes away, ready to be consulted when the spirit was low or the conscience was tortured. But somehow he could never be the symbol of rigid, orthodox discipline that his shtetl counterpart had been in Europe; rather, he could only be one of them. Granted he hadn't shed the trappings of his religion as they had done; nevertheless, the same gales that had carried them like pollen from one continent to another, had carried him as well. He and they were comrades, shipmates, fellow-tenants.
Not ghetto Jews, not shtetl Jews. What then were they? Upside-down weeds . . . that perhaps is the best way to describe them. Weeds that had planted themselves in strange ground, weeds that grew with their foliage—the fruit of their labours—submerged in the earth and their roots exposed to air and sky. They spent their lives this way, scratching, scraping, building up, tearing down, conniving and surviving. Always there was the struggle to invert themselves, to establish root and leaf in proper order, to become more than mere weeds, to become indigenous plants.
They never entirely succeeded.
My father demobilized himself from the Russian army late one night in the summer of 1917. Reluctantly he had spent two years and eight months in the service of the Czar and his lack of enthusiasm for military life only deepened when the Czar was eliminated and the Bolsheviks moved into the royal palaces. The southern part of Russia, near Odessa, where my father had been born and raised, was famous for producing great watermelons and violinists, both of which products my father loved, but these attractions were not powerful enough to draw him back to a land which was also famous for producing misery and cruelty. Taking liberty without leave, he headed in the direction of Roumania and never saw Russia again. Nine years later, his tour of the Western World came to an end in a small, northern Ontario town, the name of which he could barely pronounce—Sault Ste. Marie.
In the interval between his self-demobilization and his descent at the Soo's railway station, he had dabbled profit ably in the currency market in Roumania, earned the price of a steerage ticket to "Kanada," harvested wheat in Saskatchewan, taught Hebrew in Winnipeg where he married the older sister of one of his pupils—a prize catch because she had been born in England and her father was a man of property who had once been reeve of West Kildonan. After Winnipeg, it was peddling made-to-measure suits to miners in Timmins, doing business out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon. For engaging in this enterprise without a transient licence, he was arrested and fined $50.00. That experience crystallized his thinking. It was high time to stop being a transient.
But where to settle?
In the financial circles frequented at the time by my father (i.e., the roving bands of fellow peddlers and other here-to day-gone-tomorrow types), word was spreading about the golden promise of a town with a crazy French name which they pronounced "Sahlt-stee-maria." The Algoma Steel plant there was taking on hundreds of immigrants from Italy and the Slavic countries. The town held potential riches for a clothing man who didn't mind working eight days a week, could communicate in the foreigners' lingo, and was fast with a tape measure.
Sault Ste. Marie society little noted nor long remembered the day my father and mother, anchored by a large steamer trunk, disembarked at the railway station at the head of the street appropriately named "Pilgrim Street." To the by standers on the station platform who eyed them with only casual interest, this was simply another greenhorn and his wife come to town to hustle yard goods and ribbons. But to the handful of Jews already there, the new couple would be welcome company. Would this mean a fresh source of competition? Yes. Sometimes, however, in this semi-wilderness, it was better to lose a dollar here and there and gain a landsman, a neighbour from your part of the old country, someone who spoke Yiddish, could perhaps quote a bit of Talmud, someone who slurped tea from a glass through a sugarcube held between the front teeth, and remembered what the watermelons were like in the south of Russia.
Before long, the town began to yield some of its golden promise: a small shop on Queen Street, a self-contained flat over the shop, a Model T, and for the first time, a feeling of permanence. The young Russian Jew, still sporting the pencil-slim moustache he had affected years before in the Russian Army, and the quiet Winnipeg girl who worked at his side day and night in the shop despite the fact that she was now very pregnant, were here to stay.
Like most of his fellow merchants, my father was everything in the business—merchandise-buyer, window-trimmer, window-washer, cashier, stock-controller, salesman, even seamstress on occasion. And like most of his colleagues in the trade, he depended heavily upon his wife who assisted him in nearly all of these diverse functions. But there was one ritual in which he relied entirely upon her. That was when the ''Inspector-Generals" made the rounds. The Inspector-Generals were women who customarily travelled in pairs, visiting one store after another along Queen Street. They would finger their way through long racks of dresses and try on every hat in the place, whispering furtively to each other in Italian or Ukrainian or Finnish, never committing themselves one way or the other, but examining each garment critically at arm's length. Truly an outsider at such moments, the merchant could do nothing but stand idly by, wondering whether the Inspector-Generals were planning a purchase or plotting a pogrom. At last, one of the women would speak up: "Where Missus?" That was the signal for the merchant's wife to come forth. If "Missus" neither spoke nor understood these foreign languages, she was at least fluent in the international language of hemlines and bodices; therefore, "Missus" usually clinched the sale, turning the tricky, final stage of the transaction—the price haggling—back to her less gentle husband.
When it came to male trade, it was a different story. Here the merchant himself took over exclusively because this aspect of the business involved a fine art known as "sidewalking." My ·father would position himself on the sidewalk directly in front of his emporium, standing well out towards the curb so that he had a commanding view of the eastern and western approaches. His competitors up and down the street stationed themselves similarly on the sidewalk in front of their establishments. All of them pretended not to notice each other. Then, from a distance, the merchants could spot the first contingent of spenders. They might be steel workers just finished the night shift, still grimy and sweaty, carrying their empty lunchpails and bearing those most important fortnightly pay cheques in their wallets. Or they might be lumberjacks just arrived in town on the Algoma Central from the "bush", desperately needing hot baths and fresh clothes, their pockets bulging with a winter's pay. Whether or not the steel worker or lumberjack had a familiar face was immaterial. As soon as the fellow was within hooking range, my father would call out to him, "Hey, Mike! [It was always assumed that the man's name was Mike] ... Mike, come on in. I got some real good buys for you today. Gotta nice suit for you for Easter. C'mon, Mike!" The next thing Mike knew, he was standing before a full-length mirror draped in the latest blue sergor black pinstripe. The fitting of such a garment involved a degree of ingenuity and virtuosity never dreamed of in Saville Row. These smalltown Jewish merchants had learned the art of fitting in the "tuck-and-pull" school where a suit was literally yanked, stretched, jammed and cajoled into shape in an exercise that amounted to an outright assault upon the customer's sagging body. The physical effort was accompanied by grunts, sign language, quips in the customer's native tongue, Yiddish oaths. Finally, sighs of relief from both vendor and purchaser as the last pin was pressed into place in the trouser cuffs. When the ordeal was over, the merchant would stand back to admire his handiwork. "Mike," he would assure the fellow in the mirror, "you'll be the talk of Queen Street on Easter Sunday, believe me." Before Mike had time to agree or disagree, he was choosing a shirt, matching tie, socks, shoes. The split-second Mike was out the door, having left behind him a fair chunk of his pay, the shopkeeper was back once again at his sidewalk stand, calling out to the next available steel worker or lumberjack, "Hey Mike, c'mere ..."
The social life of the Jewish community revolved around a suite of two rooms rented in the second storey of a building near the corner of Queen and Bruce. Located within easy reach of nearly all the Jewish stores and homes, the nshul had the advantage of convenience. But that was all.
The smaller of the two rooms was occupied as a cheder for the children as well as a place for memorial services. H·ere the young were instructed and the dead remembered, all in an atmosphere of mustiness and overcrowding. The room constantly reeked of cigarette smoke and ancient mildewy prayer books. Even when the windows were opened wide, fresh air refused to venture within; instead it hung outside in the bright sun, beckoning children to come out and play. The men, swaying idly to and fro as the rabbi murmured and chanted, stared longingly out of the windows and daydreamed of sitting in rowboats, fishing and munching hardboiled eggs.
The larger of the two rooms was much too large for the average community function. Therefore, it was used very little, mostly for special occasions—High Holiday services, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, benefits. Long wooden benches ran along the walls of this chamber, leaving a vast empty space in the middle. Thus it was quite impossible to make an entrance or exit without the entire congregation's eyes falling upon you and without attracting comment. "Look at that, he just got here and already he's running back to the store" . . . "Look at Queen Esther, if you please, sneaking in a minute before the service is over so God should think she was here all day" ... On Yom Kippur, late entries and hasty exits were dead giveaways: "Aha, the bastard's just come from breakfast" ... "There she goes, couldn't wait like the rest of us until the rabbi blows the shofar" ... It was a seating arrangement designed for conspicuous prayer only; private sacrilege was quite out of the question.
The worst feature of the larger room was that it lacked exclusivity, since it was also the local headquarters for the Independent Order of Foresters. Indeed, the Foresters had the main claim to the premises and filled the walls with their regalia. There were photographs of officials all posing stiffly and sternly as if guaranteeing posterity that the Foresters would always be independent and stand for order. Huge framed charters, adorned with red wax seals and gold ribbons, proclaimed the legitimacy of the local branch. Shields were mounted in recognition of noble collective efforts, and plaques honoured all sorts of individual acts of self-sacrifice. Only a dull cabinet that cried for a coat of varnish belonged to us. It stood against the east wall of the room and housed the two Torahs during High Holiday services and Passover. All the rest was Foresters' property, in Foresters' territory.
The two rooms were connected by a dimly-lit corridor where the boys gathered to exchange dirty jokes and tease the girls, and where everyone gathered occasionally as a diversion from religious devotions, to listen to a Finnish husband and wife who occupied an apartment on the same floor, screaming at each other in their native cacophony.
In 1946, after years of fund-raising, planning, debating (put ten Jews together and you immediately had ten architects), the first synagogue was consecrated. At last the congregation possessed its own building, a modest red brick structure on a modest plot of land on-where else?—Bruce Street, not far from its intersection with Queen.
I wonder: in all the years preceding the opening of the new synagogue, how many little Jewish kids were convinced, as I was, that God was actually a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Lodge of the Independent Order of Foresters?
Why did we, the children of the smalltown Jews, leave home? Why this perpetual motion eastward?
There are a thousand and one reasons, but they all boil down to a single reason: we left because our parents counselled us to leave, begged and pleaded with us to leave, even ordered us to leave. Only yonder in the big city, they insisted, could one be a truly big person; here in this town, one could be no more than a large fish in a tiny pond. Better to be the tail of a lion in a great city, than the head of a jackal in Sault Ste. Marie.
We, the children, resisted at first. Life seemed so simple, so attractive in the small town.
There was little, if any, overt discrimination against the pocket-size Jewish community. Happily for us, the Gentile population was too engrossed in a civil war of its own to pay us much attention. It was a cold war, waged between the Anglo-Saxons of the East End and the Italians of the West End. The latter group, who numbered many thousands, were beginning to look eastward from the Latin Quarter towards Simpson Street. Dr. Mancini, recently graduated, preferred to live in the same fashionable part of town as old Dr. Macmillan. Old Dr. Macmillan was prepared to tolerate Dr. Mancini at meetings of the local medical society, but having Dr. Mancini and all the little Mancinis residing next door to the Macmillans was another matter. So totally did this conflict occupy the two principal racial establishments that somehow we 1ews were able to slip out from between the two sides and maintain a state of neutrality. Besides, a handful of 1ews such as we could scarcely pose any threat even if we had become partisans in the struggle. So we kept our feelings to ourselves, smiled compatibly at both major factions, and simply carried on selling them noncombat merchandise-clothing, furniture, scrap metal-in return for which they were gracious enough to pay their bills and leave us in peace.
And what of the eternal quest to earn a decent livelihood—wasn't it easier in the small town? Our fathers had planted the saplings for us, had endured the Depression, had prospered through the war years; now all that remained for us to do was to nourish the orchards and harvest the fruits. Every afternoon there was lunch at home and a short nap. In the summer, you could close your store at six and be sitting down to supper at your cottage at Pointe-aux-Pins by six-thirty. Wednesday afternoons there was fishing at Garden River or Echo Bay, a few miles down Highway 17. Who needed fancy college· degrees? Who needed the urban rat race? Who needed suburbia?
On the surface, it was an effortless, uncomplicated existence.
But our fathers and mothers knew otherwise. Beneath the paper-thin crust of their serenity, volcanoes were boiling. Gone were the days of "sidewalking;" now there were petty jealousies and, sometimes, bitter competition as business rivals strove to consolidate the gains of the war years and expand their tidy fortunes. Fathers and mothers stewed privately and publicly about the love affairs of their sons and daughters: how could young David ever find and settle down with a Jewish girl if, instead of venturing forth to Detroit or Toronto, he stayed put on Queen Street and took out schiksas on Saturday nights? What could be done to prevent young Miriam from becoming too involved with that shaygetz from Pim Hill, the fellow with the Irish surname who kept taking her to Hi-Y dances and Boat Club regattas? The same people saw each other all the time. They did the same things all the time. The men played cards around the dining-room table, while the women sat in a circle in the living room and gave each other recipes (often deliberately omitting a key ingredient or a crucial measurement, a favourite bit of one-upmanship). Old-timers who knew each other intimately, too intimately in fact, were getting on each other's nerves. The neighbourly pat on the back was beginning to leave claw marks.
How ironic it is that the years from 1939 to 1945-in many ways the best years of their lives—had left these smalltown 1ews stale and worn out, fiercely determined on the one hand to hang onto the narrow but secure patches of life they had cultivated for themselves, but equally determined that their children should cultivate far different patches in far-away metropolises.
Thus, my father, surveying all he had accumulated, did not turn to me and proclaim, "Some day all this will be yours." Rather, he looked about him at the racks of suits and dresses that were in style today and out of style to morrow; at the Inspector-Generals who still managed to make their rounds despite their arthritis and fallen arches; at the bleak, black silence of Queen Street on a February night when it seemed that the only thing stirring in the whole world was a solitary snow plough. And all he said was,. "Get out, get out before it's too late".
And I did. I got out before it was too late.
We thought she was dying. She stood at the door of our apartment that Saturday morning pale and shivering. With both hands she gripped a badly worn suitcase that had been tied round with twine for reinforcement.
"Don't tell me you walked on a morning like this!" my mother said. It was February, the harshest time of the year in Sault Ste. Marie. All life was deep in the annual winter standstill, caked in ice, buried in snow. "Come in, come in for heaven's sake." My mother waved the girl in. "You can put your suitcase down in the hall for now. Sit down and warm up for a few minutes," she said, gesturing toward the kitchen.
Slowly, carefully, as if fearing to damage the cheap wooden kitchen chair that was offered, the girl sat down. Her hat and coat and gloves were still on. She rubbed her gloved hands together, uttering low hissing sounds as the told burned its way out of her fingers and the numbness departed telling her she was still alive.
I took a chair at the kitchen table where I sat appraising our new maid. She looked at me, but her face hadn't thawed sufficiently to permit any form of recognition that I was there. After a long minute of silence, I asked, "Do you know the words to 'Red Sails in the Sunset?' "
She nodded no.
"Do you know the words to 'The Isle of Capri?' "
Again she nodded negatively.
"I learned some new words," I said. I began to sing, "Twas on a pile of debris that I met her ..."
The girl began to laugh. She laughed self-consciously, without parting her lips, stifling herself so that she would not appeal;" too forward in the strange household.
I followed the girl as she went to the closet and withdrew a hanger. She placed her coat on the hanger, hooked the hanger over the closet bar and closed the closet door-doing all these acts with the same slow, careful motion with which she had sat on the kitchen chair. It was as if everything in the apartment was sacred and fragile.
"Are you Italian?" I asked.
"No," she answered quietly.
"Our last girl was Italian. She taught me some funny words in Italian. Do you know how to say 'Kiss my behind' in Italian?"
The girl flushed—the first sign of colour in her face-but before she could answer, my mother intervened. "Don't listen to him," she said to the girl. "He's got an awfully big mouth for a nine-year old."
I was determined to track down the girl's racial origin. "Are you Ukrainian? We had a Ukrainian girl once. And before her we had a Croatian girl and before her—"
"I'm Ukrainian," the girl said, interrupting my short history of family domestics.
"Can you teach me some Ukrainian? The last Ukrainian girl that worked here taught me how to say-"
"Never mind," my mother cut in again. To the girl she said, "Come, I'll show you to your room and you can unpack. You'll stay in our son's room." My mother talked as she led the way, like a tour guide. The girl followed her, walking with timid steps lest she should disturb the precious linoleum underfoot.
I sat on the edge of my bed watching her unpack. Why she needed twine to secure the suitcase I don't know; there were very few items within.
"How come you've only got that much?" I pointed to the small pile of clothing she had arranged on what was to be her bed. "The last girl, the Italian one, she needed two whole drawers in my dresser to put her stuff into."
"I guess she was pretty fancy," the new maid replied.
"She wasn't so fancy. I heard my mother and father talking after she left. My mother said she left some underwear in the dresser and was it ever dirty." ·
The girl turned and smiled at me. "You've got awfully big ears too." She had small teeth, white and even, and when she smiled, her wide face with its high cheek bones seemed to become even wider, giving her a pleasant countenance. I decided I was going to like her.
"Is your name Annie?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"I took a guess," I said, proud of my acumen. "Most of the maids I've seen in people's houses are called 'Annie.'"
She made no comment on this observation. A small boy's generalizations, right or wrong, flattering or insulting, had to be accepted when one was just starting a new job with the small boy's parents. She continued laying away her clothes in one of the drawers.
"We're Jewish," I said. "We eat a lot of things that Ukrainians eat, like stuffed cabbage for instance."
"I know. Except you people put meat in yours. We just put rice in ours. I know some girls who work in Jewish homes and they've told me. They say Jewish people eat a lot of meat. Every day, too."
"Is that why you're coming to work here?"
She made no response.
I guessed what part of town she came from. "You're from Bayview, I bet." She nodded; I was right again. "They all are," I said.
I knew Bayview well. It was in the extreme west end of town, the section that lay in the soot and shadows of the steel plant. The streets there were unpaved, and in the summer, dust rose from the roadways to meet the yellowish smoke descending from a multitude of plant smokestacks nearby, the two combining to smother people and animals and houses in a dense, ugly pall. In winter there was no dust on the roads; instead there was slush hardened into tortuous ruts that defied pedestrian feet and automobile tires. In all seasons the yellowish smoke and the smell of sulphur lingered heavily in the air.
I had gone often to Bayview, travelling there twice a month with my father while he made the rounds collecting—or attempting to collect—bills that had been owing by his customers for weeks, months, even years. I would wait for him in the car, playing behind the steering wheel and making furious speeding noises, while he entered one unpainted house after another, his accounts books in hand. In warmer weather his customers would come out to the car to greet him, extravagantly complimenting him on his clever, hand some boy, occasionally offering cookies or fresh produce from their backyard gardens, but almost never tendering cash. It was always the same frustrating pattern on those visits to Bayview: a few words exchanged between merchant and customer in some Slavic tongue or in broken English, a pat on the back, and goodbye, see you next month. On the return drive to the centre of town my father would always mutter, "Didn't collect five cents and now I've got to wash the goddam car again."
That was Bayview. That was where they were from, these girls in their late teens or early twenties who worked for the Jews "downtown." Their own families were hopelessly overpopulated and underfinanced in these Depression years. As soon as each girl was old enough to scrub an acre of floor and wash dishes for ten people—a state of the art usually reached early, say, at fifteen or sixteen—she immediately became available for domestic service. Through a mysterious grapevine that transmitted "Help Wanted" cries all the way from Queen Street East westerly to Goulais Avenue in Bayview, news of such a girl's availability quickly spread. If the girl's older sister had preceded her into the market, the faults or the virtues of the elder—telegraphed along the same grapevine—usually influenced the speed with which the younger found employment.
The salary—ten or twelve dollars a week—could hardly be called liberal, bearing in mind that the girl's typical day, repeated six times weekly, began at seven in the morning with the preparation of breakfast and ended at nine in the evening when the last dish had been dried and the youngsters in the family had been coaxed into bed.
But there were compensations. The girl, accustomed to sharing a room at home with perhaps four or five sisters and brothers, was now reduced to a single roommate or, if she were lucky, she might even have a room all to herself. And then there were three meals a day, one of which always featured meat or fowl. Often there was a large family-size bottle of orange or cola-flavoured "Kik" on the table, a beverage that had originated as a Sunday-lunch luxury but eventually became as indispensable as a mezuzeh in the average Jewish home.
This was the life to which our new maid could look forward.
Except on Sundays, we ate all our meals in the kitchen. The maid always ate with us. My mother and father seldom lingered over breakfast or lunch. Both worked in the family clothing store downstairs and had little time for second cups of coffee and idle chit-chat. Even in these dreary doldrum days, they seemed possessed by a sense of commercial urgency. There might be whole days when barely a customer came into the store, yet they had to be there. There were "things to do," always "things to do."
It was the same on this February Saturday afternoon. Lunch had been eaten quickly, then my parents were off downstairs again, my father calling to my mother, "Come, there's things to do ..."
We were alone —the girl and I—at the table.
"Do you like being a maid?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess it's alright." Her voice was flat and she played with her fork, jabbing it into the mound of untouched cottage cheese and sour cream on her plate.
"Did you go to school before you came here?"
"Yes. I was in grade ten at Tech, but I had to quit."
"You going to get married?"
"No." She thought for a moment, then added, "Maybe someday, I guess. I'm going with a boyfriend."
"What's his name?"
Reticently the girl looked down at her plate, prodding her cottage cheese with her fork into a compact mound. "Pete. Peter Lisanti. My folks say they'll kill me if I ever marry him. He's Italian, that's why." I nodded wisely, pretending to understand.
The following day—Sunday—the girl had been given the afternoon off to spend at home with her family. My father drove her to her house in Bayview. On his return he stamped his feet and clapped his hands trying to generate warmth in his limbs.
"I went inside their house for a minute," he told my mother. "My God, how can people live like that?"
He described the cardboard patches on the walls, the wood-burning stove that served as the central heating system, the dilapidated furniture, the bread crumbs and finger smudges.
"And kids everywhere," he exclaimed. "Wherever you look there's a kid. I just don't know how people can live like that. We shouldn't be paying these girls, they should be paying us. We're actually doing them a favour when we take them in."
"You have to feel sorry for people like them. Look at it that way," my mother said. "Besides, I couldn't be in the store six days a week without a girl in the house, you know that."
My father said nothing; he knew she was right. But his thoughts were still back in that house, that broken-down frame cell situated at the dead end of a bleak street in Bayview. He had seen these houses many times over the years, but he would never grow used to the sight.
"Pheh!" was all he could say. Shaking his head sadly, he repeated it quietly to himself, over and over again, "Pheh!"
That evening, after Annie had returned, she came into my room—which was now "our room"—carrying a paper shopping bag. I was already tucked away for the night but had stayed awake waiting for her. Whispering so my parents wouldn't know I was still up, I called to her.
"Annie?"
"You still awake? Shame on you. Don't you know it's almost ten o'clock?"
"What's in the bag?"
"The rest of my clothes."
The room was dark except for a sliver of light coming through the door that had been left slightly ajar. "You can turn on the light if you want to," I said.
"It's okay. I can see what I'm doing." She withdrew her belongings from the shopping bag and pressed them into the drawer. "There," she said, sounding satisfied, "that's everything."
"Why didn't you bring all that in the first place? There was enough room in your suitcase, wasn't there? Did you think maybe you wouldn't be staying?" I asked.
"Goodnight nosey," she whispered back. "Go to sleep."
I heard her in the dark undressing and putting on her pyjamas. A couple of minutes later I called to her again. "Aren't you going to brush your teeth?" She didn't reply. She was sound asleep.