Up From Orchard Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sunday, Jack became known as “the man who loved to dress women.”
    My father was a womanizer, yet he never sustained an affair with a woman. His standard opener for flirtations consisted of, “Darling, how does it feel to be beautiful?” No hypocrisy fell from his lips. In fact, attractive women filled him with wonder and his immediate response led him to plan their improvement.
    “You know,” he would suggest, “green is not your best color. It does nothing for your complexion and makes your skin look sallow.”
Sallow
intrigued them. Uncertain of its meaning, they submitted to the man who could express himself so grandly.
    Colors were part of Jack’s artistry and like a painter he expounded on them. He hated greens and browns and asserted as if set in concrete that only middle-aged women preferred purple. He dismissed white attire as “ice cream suits” but adored every shade of blue; azure suggested morning, periwinkle the afternoon and navy blue the evening.
    Because many women in adjacent Little Italy rarely discarded their black mourning clothes, Jack advised black in small doses: black with a pinstripe; a black skirt topped with a white jacket à la Chanel, especially if worn with an expensive fur. “Never put a rat on your back,” my father would instruct me as we rode the subway together, and he would point out every fur in the subway car. By rats he meant squirrel or muskrat, though in more confidential moments he admitted that minks and sables in their natural state resembled glossy rodents.
    For my father, the worst offense was a print dress, especially fabrics that sprouted flowers. “You want flowers,” he chided, “buy a hat, visit a milliner.” Five minutes after he met a customer at the store where he worked, or a woman at a social gathering or in the lobby of a movie house, and he engaged her in conversation, he gently removed her lapel pin, invariably made of colored glass. He permitted my mother, Lil, to wear a long string of fake pearls that, in the current style, descended to her waist, but in general he despised costume jewelry, imitation gold bracelets that jangled, plastic buttons and flat-heeled shoes: “Like Greta Garbo out for a walk.” In matters of taste, my mother conceded to my father without question.
    When Jack first met Lil, he rejected her boring monochromatic attire: brown shirtwaist, long brown skirt. “The only thing to do with that outfit is burn it,” he told her. We heard the story until it passed into legend of their first date, when he commanded her to lift up her skirts. They were in my grandmother’s living room, the same one in which my brother, Willy, and I grew up.
    “What gams,” he exclaimed. “You could make it in the Follies.”
    My mother hung her head, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the room, the Persian rug and the embroidered silk shawl with long fringes that graced the table. She could hear Jack’s mother, Manya, busy in the kitchen, an inhibiting factor.
    My mother asked, “You mean that?” and dropped her skirts.
    “No, I’m just an uptown guy who feeds a pretty girl a line, then forgets her.” He called out, “Ma, come here.”
    Bubby moved to the doorway of the living room.
    “What do you think?” he asked.
    “Zee iz zayer yung,” she said in Yiddish, to spare young Lil the embarrassment.
    Throughout the many years that they lived together my grandmother defended any deficiencies in my mother with the same phrase, “She is very young.”
    My father wasn’t asking for his mother’s approval. At the age of fourteen, when he sprang up to six feet, he had started parading the young girls before his mother. She responded to them democratically: fed them, exchanged a few words of politeness, then closed her mouth as well as her eyes. Ritual taught her that the next day or the day after there would be another girl, skinny, wide-eyed, undernourished, badly dressed. Still, she paused to consider his question about Lil.
    “Where shall I