Up From Orchard Street Read Online Free PDF

begin?”
    “With the head.”
    As my grandmother later told me, she was referring to whether or not my mother could keep up with her fast-talking, quick-witted son. He, on the other hand, concentrated on the color of Lil’s hair. “Blonde or red?”
    “Rayt vee un Tzigeunner?”
    “You’re right, red is for gypsies. We’ll go for natural blonde.” And he marched the sixteen-year-old Lil to Pandy’s beauty parlor on Clinton Street.
    Did my mother protest when Jack discussed the shade of hair he desired with the beautician, Pandy? Did she ask a question, possibly offer her own suggestion? She sat there mute, gaga-eyed with instant love, mesmerized by this tall, thin young man with his gleaming black hair, his suit complete with vest, and the disarming way he appraised her.
    Jack took an intense interest in every aspect of Lil’s revitalized hair, holding her hand while the color dried as if she were a patient about to undergo a medical procedure that required soothing words. He told her that he, Jack Roth, had a perfect eye, the way some musicians had perfect pitch. More often than not his vocabulary confounded her, made her wonder in astonishment what he was saying. She was sixteen, and she earned her living wrapping coats and suits into tissue paper before she boxed them at a store on Division Street; she hadn’t finished high school because her family of seven brothers and two sisters needed the money she earned. Yet here she sat with a City College man.
    Yes, Jack had registered at college, and yes, he attended a few classes sporadically. But he was too enchanted with life, with young women, with his sporty clothes, with Broadway plays, with movies, with his desire to dress and clothe women appropriately to bother with sitting in classrooms. He read voraciously. He told Lil about deep plays that he had seen by Eugene O’Neill, or novels by Ernest Hemingway that made her blush. Later, my mother cried because God had made me take after him instead of her when it came to reading.
    An autodidact, my father loved to dispute H. L. Mencken’s articles out loud. He read three newspapers a day, but mostly he enjoyed the tabloids, explaining to Lil about yellow journalism. He wished he could write like Winchell or Damon Runyon, idolized Ben Hecht and Mark Hellinger.
    When Lil’s hair came out the exact shade he desired, Jack gazed upon her as if he had created a masterwork. In fact my mother became an ongoing creation of which he rarely tired.
    A zealot about every article of her clothes, he chose her dresses and coats as well as her shoes. Though our apartment resembled a bitter hell in the winter with its windows covered with ice, he didn’t allow her to sleep in flannel nightgowns. No matter if she wore a sweater over her nightie, it had to be silk or crepe, soft to the touch. “Flannel is for old ladies, older than Bubby,” he declared when he lectured me on his favorite topic, “How Women Should Dress.”
    Once in a rash moment, he bought my mother a fur jacket made from bits and pieces of seal fur, a patchwork shortie. My mother hated it on sight, and possibly in revolt against Jack’s rigid code, on arctic days she defiantly wore it to the toilet in the hall. Subsequently, she thought of a better purpose for it, namely as a partial bedspread that covered their shoulders and ears.
    My father tormented himself for that mistake. How could he have made such a purchase? What was he, blind, a beggar with a box of pencils, some greenhorn off the boat conned by the bargain price? But I assumed that most people had fur bedspreads, and loved to nap under the seal pelt. My father’s sense of disgrace rekindled every time he looked at it, and one day when the weather skyrocketed to unseasonably warm, he tossed the fur out the window on the Orchard Street side. Immediately, a passerby in full retreat claimed the unexpected bounty, and Jack’s blunder disappeared forever.
    My mother was a golden person, or at least Jack