More All-of-a-Kind Family Page 7

  “I hope you girls appreciate how much Lena is helping,” Mama commented. “Especially when she’s so busy too.”

  “We certainly do,” Ella replied warmly. “Lena, you’re an angel! Here you are, working so hard on our things, and you haven’t even started on your own dress yet.”

  Lena smiled. “My dress is nearly finished.”

  “It is? But how, when?”

  “Every day I come to work early. Before the others. The boss lets me use the electric machine. It goes very fast that way.”

  “What’s the dress like, Lena?” the girls questioned.

  “You’ll see it at the wedding.” And no matter how much they wheedled and begged, that’s all Lena would say.

  The last week in May came riding in on an unexpected wave of heat. The city was like a giant oven, the air close and heavy. Swarms of flies appeared everywhere. They lit on the piles of refuse and the open garbage cans in the streets, feasting greedily. They zoomed in through the windows and buzzed annoyingly about the rooms. To clear the house, Mama laid sheets of sticky fly paper on the window ledges and on the table, and hung several long curly strips of it from the ceiling. Papa brought home a fly swatter, and the children fought for a chance to slap away at the pests.

  “Oh, dear,” Mama said, wiping the perspiration from her forehead. “If it’s so hot now, what’s it going to be like when it’s really summer?”

  “Hotter,” Henny answered promptly.

  “I bet it’s real cool on the beach,” Sarah sighed. “I wish we could live at the seashore for the whole summer.”

  “Yes,” agreed Ella. “We ought to get away from the city for once!” But she was sorry she had said that, for she noticed the troubled look on Mama’s face. She knew Mama wished they could too.

  “I’m going with my friends to the river dock right after lunch,” Henny broke in. “How about lending me your pink blouse, Ella?”

  “But I haven’t even worn it myself yet,” Ella answered.

  “What are you saving it for? What’s the sense in having pretty clothes if you just let them hang in the closet?”

  “You mean I’m supposed to rush right away and put on something new the minute I get it, the way you do? No, thanks. I was saving it.”

  “Oh, come on,” Henny urged. “We can wash and iron it before your next date with that Julius.”

  Ella flushed. “Never you mind about Jules! You know very well after you get through with any of my things they look like rags.”

  “Please, Ella! I’ll be extra careful this time, I promise!”

  “All right. But remember, if there’s so much as a single button loose, I’ll never lend you anything again!”

  “Gee, thanks.” Henny skipped off to the bedroom to put on her borrowed finery.

  For lunch Mama set a platter of cold homemade corned beef and boiled potatoes on the table. “This certainly looks good,” Papa said, “but where’s the pickle?”

  “Oh, my!” exclaimed Mama. “I forgot! And pickle goes so good with corned beef, too.”

  “So how long would it take to get some?” Papa demanded. “The stand’s just around the corner.” He turned to Charlotte. “Would you like to go?”

  “Yes, Papa.” Charlotte pushed back her chair and started towards the door. On the way, she bumped into the long wire handle of the fly swatter lying on the washtub. Absent-mindedly she picked it up and carried it along as she skipped down the stairs. She flipped it back and forth enjoying the pleasant little swishing sound it made.

  She reached the corner. My, but the sun was hot! She walked close to the buildings, where the fire escapes made small islands of shade on the sidewalk. A garbage can blocked her path. “Wow, look at all those flies!” she exclaimed. She watched them circling over the rim. Fascinated, she stood quite still as they hovered, settled, and ate their fill. She waved the fly swatter threateningly, and a host of insects flew off to cling to the nearby wall.

  Wouldn’t it be marvelous if people could walk on a wall like that, she thought. Or upside down on the ceiling! Things would look awful funny when you saw them upside down. Of course I wouldn’t want to be a fly. Nobody likes them. Still it would be fun to go flying around. How can they hang on the way they do? Do they have glue on their feet?

  She tried to imagine what it would feel like to have gluey feet. Stretching her arms wide as if they were wings, she flapped them up and down, keeping her feet tight to the sidewalk. She didn’t like being stuck. One foot at a time, she pulled her feet out of the glue with a great deal of effort, till at last she was free.

  She brushed the wall idly with her swatter, and the flies scattered. One particularly bold one came to roost right on top of her straight little nose. It tickled. She shooed him away. Why, there was a fly swatter in her hand. She had almost forgotten. Slowly she raised it, bringing it down with a hard smack against the wall. Several flies fell to the ground.

  Suddenly a new thought struck her. Was it mean to kill flies? She held the swatter still. Teacher said they carry germs and make people sick. They land on your food right from the garbage cans and dirt. Even if you chased them away, the germs still stayed. And then you ate them up with the food you put in your mouth. “Ugh!” Charlotte shivered in disgust. “I’m not going to eat any more of your old germs!” Whack! Whack! She laid about with the swatter furiously.

  She stopped for a moment to let them collect again. How many could she catch at one time? In the fairy story, the tailor killed seven at one blow! She sneaked up on tiptoe and slammed the swatter against the wall with a mighty wallop. “There!” she panted triumphantly as she counted the slain enemy. Her face lengthened in disappointment. “Only three,” she muttered. “You nasty old creatures! I’m going to keep right on swatting away till I smash even more than the tailor.”

  All this time the family sat around the table waiting impatiently for Charlotte and the pickles. Papa glanced at Mama. “Where in Heaven’s name could she have gone just for some pickle?” he growled.

  “Maybe she got lost,” Gertie said.

  “Lost! Just around the corner!”

  Mama was puzzled. “I wonder what’s keeping her?”

  Everyone stared hungrily at the meat laid out in neat slices on their plates. “I think I’ll just take a small snip for a taste,” declared Henny.

  “Me, too,” Gertie echoed.

  Pretty soon all the girls were snatching “tastes,” till Mama said, “Well, we might as well eat. I’m sure she’ll be here any minute.”

  They all fell to. When the meat and potatoes had disappeared, they started on their fruit compote and drank their tea. Still no Charlotte!

  They cleared the table, leaving a place set for the missing one. Mama turned to Ella with an anxious frown. “I think you’d better go see what—” Just then in came Charlotte. Triumphantly she held up the fly swatter. “Ha, ha! Eight at one blow!” she whooped.

  “Nice time to come with the pickles!” Mama exclaimed. “And where are they?”

  Charlotte gazed up at her. Suddenly she remembered. “Oh!” Slowly she put the fly swatter back on the washtub. Taking the pickle money out of her apron pocket, she handed it back to Mama without a word.

  “Charlotte, Charlotte, when are you ever going to wake up?” Papa cried in despair.

  But Mama only said, “Sit down, child, and finish your dinner.”

  “Without pickle,” giggled Henny.

  Everyone laughed. Even Charlotte.

  JUNE ARRIVED. In three weeks, the wedding would take place. Everything was ready. Uncle Hyman had even put down a deposit on a tiny three-room apartment in the Bronx.

  “So far away!” the children wailed when they first heard about it.

  Mama felt sad. “We’ll miss you,” she said.

  “How far is it?” Lena replied. “A person would think I was going to Africa. It’s only a subway ride. You should see how nice it is up there. Wide streets, and so new! It even smells new. My apartment is in a big modern building. But mo
stly it’s still two-family houses with a little garden in the back. And on the block—trees!”

  “Trees! In the streets!”

  “Lots of people are moving away from the East Side,” Mama remarked. “Still, we shouldn’t complain. Our home is comfortable. Better than most.”

  Every spare moment Lena and Uncle Hyman went in and out of the furniture stores on Avenue A, examining and bargaining. Sometimes they took the girls along. “Fixing up a real home is much more fun than a make-believe one,” Sarah said to Ella.

  Now trouble appeared on the horizon. It hung like an evil cloud over the city. Everywhere people spoke of it in fear. Infantile paralysis! The terrible disease was occurring all over the city, crippling and destroying little children.

  Regularly each summer the disease had made its appearance, but never before had so many been struck down. In this year of 1916, it had turned into an epidemic. Their faces gray with worry and fright, parents whispered to one another: Epidemic! The newspapers printed it in bold black headlines: Epidemic!

  Like so many other mothers, Mama sewed up six little cloth bags and filled them with squares of Japanese camphor. “They say if you wear camphor, it keeps the germs away,” she explained to the children.

  So, day in and day out, the children wore the little bags next to their skin. Dangling from a string around their necks, the bag bounced up and down with every move. At first the children found the odor unbearable, but gradually they grew accustomed to it. Only Charlie kept tugging at the string till the bag ripped off. “Don’t like the funny smell,” he would cry petulantly. Mama finally had to pin the bag to his undershirt where he couldn’t get at it.

  Soon there were empty seats in the classrooms, and the clang of the ambulance bell was heard more and more frequently. Each night Mama prayed for the little ones that had been taken away. She also asked God that her own family might be spared.

  Then the blow fell! No—not Mama’s children. Nor any of the relatives’ children. It was Lena who was stricken!

  “Lena, a grown woman! How is it possible?” Mama asked. “Infantile paralysis is a children’s disease!”

  It happened three days before the wedding. Everything came to a sudden halt. Mama put the shining wedding dresses away in the girls’ closet, where they hung desolately. Papa insisted Uncle Hyman stay with them. Like a wandering ghost, he plodded back and forth from the hospital to the house, his face pale, his hair all matted on his forehead, and his eyes red-rimmed.

  The girls were heartsick. How they wished there was something they could do. Every evening when Papa came home, first thing, he’d ask, “How is she?” Uncle Hyman would only shake his head in silence. The pain inside him was too big for words.

  Finally, after all the anxious waiting, there was the happy day when Mama and Uncle Hyman came back from a talk with the doctor. “Lena’s going to be all right. The doctor says she was lucky.”

  “Thank God!” sighed Papa. He drew out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  The days passed, and the plague continued to mount. Mama kept refilling the camphor bags, even though by now she had little faith in them. All over the East Side the frightened people were leaving their homes. All they wanted was to get away. Away somewhere, anywhere, where the air would be clean. Each morning saw neighbors pile their belongings on wagons with the children safely settled on top. Mama and the girls watched wistfully as the wagons slowly clip-clopped away.

  One night Mama said. “Papa, I met a woman in the butcher shop today. She’s going out to Rockaway Beach for the rest of the summer. She told me they still have one more place left to rent out.”

  “It must cost quite a lot of money,” Papa said thoughtfully.

  Quickly Mama replied. “No. She said it was very reasonable at this place. Oh, Papa—what do you think?”

  “I think, Mama, that you should go right out there tomorrow and put down a deposit,” Papa said firmly.

  At dawn the next day, Mama left for Rockaway Beach, while Ella kept house and looked after the family. Towards evening, when a weary Mama returned, the girls could tell at once that it was good news she brought. “Well, children,” she said with a smile, “it’s all settled! We’re going to the seashore!”

  “Honest?” “Oh, Mama, how marvelous!” The children were thrilled.

  “Just think! We can go bathing every single day!” Charlotte exclaimed.

  “And play in the sand!” Gertie added. “Charlie will just love it! He’s never even seen a beach!”

  Ella took hold of Mama’s hand. “For the first time in our whole lives,” she said, “we’re all going away on a vacation! The whole family!”

  “We have Papa to thank,” Mama reminded them. “He will have to work extra hard to pay for this.”

  Immediately the girls tumbled all over their Papa, hugging him hard.

  “All right, all right! Enough already!” Papa shook them off good-naturedly.

  “It won’t be much of a vacation for Papa,” Mama remarked sadly. “It’s too far for him to come out every night.”

  Never before had the family been separated—not even for a day. “You mean,” Sarah asked tearfully, “we’re not going to see Papa the whole summer?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll see me,” Papa reassured her. “Every Friday I’ll close the shop early and come out. You’ll be having such a good time the whole week long, before you know it, it’ll be Friday.”

  Ella was worried about Papa. “But who’ll clean up the house? And who’ll make your meals when Mama’s away?”

  “Aw,” Henny waved her hand, “let the house stay dirty. We’ll clean it up when we get back. And Pop’s a good cook.”

  “I certainly am.” Papa smiled at her. “I’m a first class cook. Ask Mama. When we first got married, I had to teach her how to make gefüllte fish and even how to clean a chicken.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Mama replied, laughing. “Anyway, it makes a good story.”

  The children woke that first morning with a sense of strangeness. Ella held up her finger. “Listen,” she said. There was no sound of pushcarts, nor wagons, nor streetcars. Instead they could hear a constant rattling of the windows as if some giant were huffing and puffing on them. From a distance came the dull swish of the surf pounding and breaking on the shore.

  “I can’t wait to get into that ocean,” exclaimed Henny.

  “Me, too,” the others echoed.

  Springing from their beds they fairly flew through breakfast and the household chores. Then they put on their bathing suits. “Now children, be very careful,” Mama cautioned. “The water here is much rougher than at Coney Island. Ella, you watch them, especially Charlie.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us, Mama?”

  “Not this morning. Too much to do. I’ll go with you in the afternoon. Run along and enjoy yourselves.”

  They clattered down a flight of wooden stairs and onto the front porch. Comfortable rocking chairs invited them to sit down and gaze out on the wide sunny street, with its two-story houses hedged in by shrubbery. A fitful wind blew through the leaves of the trees that lined the curb. “Isn’t it just lovely!” Charlotte murmured.

  Sarah drew a deep breath of air into her lungs. “It smells sort of salty, doesn’t it?” she observed.

  “Yes,” Ella replied. “I can hardly believe it was just yesterday we were in the hot city.”

  When they got to the beach, Charlie stared at the onrushing ocean with eyes big as saucers. “Pick me up!” he pleaded. He cuddled close to his big sister, every so often peeping out warily at the unfamiliar surroundings.

  Ella carried him down to the water’s edge, but she could not make him go in. It did no good to say, “Don’t be scared, Charlie. See, all the little boys and girls are playing in the water.” To Charlie, the white-capped waves seemed like a big angry monster hurtling forward to snatch him up and carry him away—away out there, into the deep green beyond. The noise was deafening. He screamed, turned his back on the dread
ful thing, and fought to get away. He tried to run across the sand, but his bare little feet had nothing to grip under him. He slipped and fell. Hiding his head in his arms, he bawled pitifully as his sisters hastened to his rescue.

  Ella sat down and took him in her lap. She rocked him in her arms, speaking soothingly all the while. “All right, Charlie, don’t cry. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. Nobody’s going to make you.”

  The sisters were sorry. They had been so sure Charlie would like the beach as much as they did. “But he’s never even seen the ocean before,” Ella explained to them. “We have to give him time to get used to it. Go in without me. I’ll stay with Charlie. But mind, not too far out!”

  When Charlie’s tears ceased to flow at last, Ella gathered some large seashells. Together they scooped out tunnels in the clean white sand. She brought water, and they made mud pies. Soon Charlie began to feel at home with the sand, creeping around happily on his hands and knees. He liked the feel of the wet sand squidging through his fingers and toes. Gradually they moved closer and closer to the water’s edge without his even realizing it. He was busily digging a hole, when a wave, bolder than its companions, rolled right up under him. Like a jack rabbit, Charlie scooted away, but he wasn’t much frightened any more. He laughed aloud. “It tickles!” he cried to Ella.

  When Friday arrived, the family felt glad because Papa was coming. In the late afternoon they all walked to the railway station to meet him.

  Papa seemed pale compared to the sunburnt countenances around him. But it was good to see his familiar face light up the moment he spied them. He kissed each one in hearty greeting. “My, how marvelous you all look! Such rosy cheeks and such clear and shining eyes! Mama, they’re just blooming!”

  Mama laughed gayly. “It’s the bathing and fresh air. It gives them a wonderful appetite. I can’t seem to give them enough to eat.”

  “And you should see all the milk we drink out here!” Charlotte chimed in. “Mama says we ought to have our own cow.”

  That night they attended services at the temple nearby. It was a big, important-looking building, altogether different from Papa’s tiny synagogue on the East Side. In the city only Papa went on Fridays to pray, before the evening meal. Here Papa could do that, too, but after supper, everybody went to temple—men, women, and children. And they all sat together!