Read Online Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer - Free Book Online Page A

no hospital beds could be found for him. Not a single one in the city, or in that unexplored and alien region known as “Upstate” New York. One afternoon Misha hemorrhaged in front of Stein and with the greatest reluctance, Stein had to let him go. My grandmother took a second job as a prep cook in a restaurant, work she could do in her sleep and often did because she didn’t give up her hours in the bakery.
    Misha stayed in bed and swallowed cough syrup, nothing else. They moved to an upstairs room in the same building that had more air and filtered sunlight, then considered the absolute cures for consumption. Every spare hour Manya spent in bed with her husband. They made love feverishly. Unafraid of infection she kissed him on the mouth. She believed she could heal him with those kisses. Twice a month she went to the hospital and begged for a bed for Misha. “It’s a shanda,” the nurse said, “that such a handsome man, refined, should not be getting hospital care, but all I can do is move him up on the waiting list.”
    Yet joy smiled at them when my grandmother became pregnant. A man who could make a baby had life and strength in him. The baby! A lucky omen.
    Misha sat in a chair at the window as a midwife and Manya delivered my father. The couple could not believe their good fortune and happiness. The possibility of death didn’t enter their minds. Soon the hospital bed would be available; soon Misha would be cured; soon the baby would understand what a gift of God he was, a “golden mitzvah.” They had an almost mythological sense of their destiny. The illness was a setback, not a tragedy. The baby brought them a new sense of innocence. And just as innocently, Misha died.
    After that, my grandmother explained, she never feared death. It came, she said, as a whisper, almost silently. Death wasn’t frightening. Only irreversible. Since she hadn’t been raised to believe in an afterlife, she couldn’t console herself with the notion that she would see Misha again. But she kept his memory alive with the tales that she spun more nights than I can remember. Often she would draw me close and confide, “Did I tell you the worst shanda of all? On the day of the funeral, some social worker came to tell me that they had a bed in the hospital. Now
there’s
a shanda.”
    Winters tested our endurance on Orchard Street with teeth-chattering, bone-aching cold. Ice and frost covered the windows as if they had been applied with glue. The mildest rain hardened into ice; the snow that we loved to watch turned into icicles. We lined the leaky windows with old towels that grew sopping wet from droplets of ice. Damp, frigid air seeped into every room. In the dining room the wallpaper that my parents prized buckled from the moisture.
    To offset the cold, we wore layers of sweaters over our underwear. Sweaters knitted by Lil provided bulk rather than warmth. Our skin, oily and smelly, longed for a warm room and a bath. On rare occasions we bathed in a tin tub filled with water heated in one of Bubby’s vast soup pots. Lil bathed at her friend Ada’s, who lived on East Broadway “by the doctor,” Dr. Hershel. He occupied the top floor, his office as well as his home, while Ada Levine and her family rented the apartment four steps up from the sidewalk, facing East Broadway. A visit to Ada’s three-room railroad flat provided Lil with steam heat and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub adjacent to the kitchen.
    Once, I accompanied my mother to Ada’s for a bath, while her daughter, Shirley, and her son, Artie—the same ages as my brother, Willy, and me—played on the stoop. Ada, a short brassy blonde with brassy bleached hair, a brassy voice and a look of naked aggression, could level you to the ground with an unflinching stare. Seeing me undressed in the bathroom, she observed that my vagina resembled a “dried-out knish.”
    Hearing this, Bubby responded with outrage. “You, a dried-out knish? You ugly? You have more in one