Up From Orchard Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

transformed her into one. Sometimes, when in a playful mood, Lil instructed my brother, Willy, and me to state our address as “Orchard Lane,” bringing to mind the movie version of southern mansions surrounded by hundred-year-old leafy trees in perpetual bloom.
    Not that our location really bothered Lil. Variously, she borrowed the street number of Jacob’s Men’s Clothing, a store on Canal Street directly under our apartment, or decided on her friend Ada’s address on East Broadway, two blocks south of the
Jewish Forward
building. In bolder moments she announced that we resided in the Amalgamated buildings, an apartment complex funded by money from the garment workers’ union. She had New York street smarts and could have devoured the entire city with her seductive smile and white teeth. The ethics of survival dictated how my mother acted or what she said; expedience was all.
    I always cringed when sightseeing buses rumbled down Orchard Street with the bus guide shouting through a megaphone, “Here we are on Orchard Street where they sell black for blue and blue for black.” Street urchins ran after the bus, the girls raising their shabby skirts to show their dirty underpants, the boys yelling, “Monkeys in the zoo, they look the same as you.”
    The tour buses never fazed Lil. Always fashionably dressed, she wore high-heeled shoes even when walking to the toilet in the hallway. She regarded herself as sophisticated enough to move uptown in a wink, if only she and Jack had the money. The Orchard Street apartment was Bubby’s, and though Lil moved in the day she married Jack, and was to hand over her two children to be raised by Manya, she regarded the arrangement as temporary. Some act of magic would one day whisk the whole family off to West End Avenue, the middle-class Jewish mecca for which she yearned.
    Every Friday, on their day off, Jack and Lil rode the subway uptown, maybe to the Palace or the Roxy, possibly to Radio City Music Hall, although the live entertainment at Radio City did not suit my father. He loved Broadway musicals with singable tunes—Ethel Merman was his favorite—and whenever possible he bought tickets to her shows. On the return trip, if a vendor was standing at the steps of the Forty-second Street subway, my father bought a song sheet printed on cheap green paper that provided the lyrics to the latest popular tunes. As soon as they danced through the door of the apartment, my mother began to sing, not stopping until she had gone through all the lyrics on the sheet.
    That was the best part of Lil: singing. She sang throughout the day, accompanied by music from the radio or by songs in her head. She had neither the style nor the cadence of great women vocalists, but her voice came through without affectation and she could instinctively deliver a tune. Her greatest failure was her haphazard memory. She couldn’t remember lyrics from one song to the next, and in midtune and at a loss, she didn’t scat sing like Louis Armstrong; she either jumbled some nonsense syllables together or she snapped her fingers and I provided the words.
    From the age of five, maybe earlier, I served as my mother’s prompter. If we had guests and she took the floor to sing, I tried to remain as invisible as possible while mouthing lyrics. I memorized every song in her repertoire. Lil needed no prompting for oldies like “Margie,” “You’re Mean to Me,” or “Melancholy Baby” and she did a fair imitation of Harry Richman singing “Putting on the Ritz.” But a song like “Prisoner of Love” stumped her—she couldn’t reach the line “I need no shackles to remind me” without going blank, and she botched “Button Up Your Overcoat,” referring to “bootleg hootch” as “hootchey kootch.” Not that anyone cared. Gifted with a cabaret vibrato that carried her along, she brought down the house with her rendition of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
    She and my father always ended the entertainment