Mameh said, “What do you mean we aren’t going? I am going. Without me your grandsons would grow up like wild animals. You do whatever you want. Stay here and starve.”
He said, “Addie will keep house for me.”
“She can’t even boil water.” Mameh threw up her hands. “Ach, what do I care? You can both starve.”
They went around and around for a long time: Levine explained, Betty argued, and Mameh yelled until finally my father stood up. “You can talk until the Messiah comes but I am not going anywhere.” On the way out, he slammed the door so hard the cups on the table jumped.
Levine turned to me. “What’s going on? I thought this would make him happy.”
Happy was not a word I would put together with my father or my mother. But I told him that the problem was my father’s synagogue.
After Lenny died, my father had gotten more religious. He started working the night shift so he could pray in the morning on his way home and ate an early supper so he could pray before he punched in. He made his schedule so he didn’t work on Saturdays and spent most of it at shul.
Papa was a different person when he was there. At home he was quiet—aloof even. But when he walked in there, men would run over to shake his hand and he would smile and say things that made them laugh. He was an important man there—a scholar.
Levine apologized to Papa. They should have asked him first and of course if Papa wanted to stay put, he could always move later if he wanted. But if he did come, there was a synagogue a few blocks from the new house. It had a big library with a whole Talmud and electric lights so you could read at night. The rabbi had a long white beard.
“He’s not American?” Papa asked.
Levine said, “I think he’s from Germany.”
“Even worse.”
Levine gave up. There was no way he could change Papa’s mind, but it turned out that he didn’t have to because the landlord kicked my father’s synagogue out of the storefront and Avrum, the caretaker, was moving to Roxbury. Avrum told Papa that he’d been to Levine’s temple and said that the library was pretty good, which was like an A-plus. He also said that the rabbi wasn’t bad for a German, which was high praise coming from a Hungarian.
So, in the end, Papa moved to Roxbury with everyone else. But I did not.
—
I didn’t say anything about my plans until the day they were moving. Just as the truck pulled up I told my parents that I had taken a room in Mrs. Kay’s boardinghouse on Tremont Street. It was a very respectable place and Betty told me to mention that it was mostly Jewish ladies who lived there, as if that would make any difference.
My father made a sour face but he didn’t look surprised, which made me think that Betty had told him in advance. My mother was a different story. She gave me a look like I was a worm. “I should be glad you’re going to a Jewish whorehouse?”
And that was just the beginning. I was disobedient and stubborn. I was disrespectful. I never told her what I was doing or where I was going. I was a disappointment, a fool. I had a big head.
The longer she went on, the madder she got.
Finally, she said, “You’ll be sorry. And don’t come back when you’re in the gutter.”
My jaw hurt from keeping quiet. I had promised myself I wouldn’t fight, but inside my head I was screaming, Don’t call me a whore. Why does reading books give me a big head? Why don’t you ever ask what I’m reading? The gutter? Who’s been paying your rent?
“You don’t even look at me when I talk to you!” Mameh screamed. “Get out of here, go. I’m finished with you.”
Betty said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Look who’s talking? The big shot! I blame you for this—you and that husband of yours. All you care about is money and making a big impression. I know you think I’m a nothing, a greenhorn. But you two are peasants, climbers. I only hope your children treat you the way you treat me.”
Betty told me, “Don’t pay attention.” Levine slipped me five dollars and said, “She doesn’t mean it.”
I used to dream about how wonderful it would be on the day I went to live on my own but what I remember about that day is running to the curb and throwing up.
—
The boardinghouse was cheap and clean but my room was dark and smelled like mothballs. Actually, the whole building smelled like that, even the dining room. I was the youngest person there by thirty years and the only one who went to work. The rest were spinsters or widows living on pensions and all of them were lonely.
If I took a book into the parlor, one of them would sit down by me and complain about the landlady, or an ungrateful niece who never visited, or how awful the other women’s table manners were.
They all agreed that things were better in the old days. Some of them were sad about it and some were bitter, but it was always “Nothing is as good as it used to be.”