PART I
Cannon Street
Cannon Street was the first of the streets on the Lower East Side that life scooped out for me. It stretches out of Grand Street north past Broome, Delancey, Rivington, and Stanton into Houstonâa narrow gutter, flanked by narrower sidewalks. On the other side of Grand Street, where I used to go Saturday nights to buy my hair ribbons, it ascends like a runway in a theater. At the corner rose the sugary odors of a pie factory.
On the other side of Houston Street, a street of noble width, Cannon Street narrows and narrows until it is but the wink of a blind manâs eye: Manhattan Street.*
Thousands of people live on Cannon Street, occupying rear houses and front houses from basement to top floor. The houses are sour with the smell of crowded human flesh. So many words were spoken that words meant little. Blows meant more.
On this street, I spent the first ten years of my life.
On this street, I learned to fear people.
We landed in New York and were greeted by a short, frail blond man with pink-threaded cheeks. He told me that he was my cousin but he was not. My mother and I spent the first night in a bed with two others in a room back of the restaurant kept by Channeh Rosenthal. Her little girl was a waxen, famished-looking creature who was always whining for her âmommehâ and sucked her thin thumb. She was older than I was by two years. I remember her sulking jealousy of my red dress.
I could sing well in Hungarian and German and spoke a broken Romanian as well as a smooth, declamatory Yiddish. Before long I could mutter realistically English oaths. For all these, the patrons of Channeh Rosenthalâs restaurant would pay me in coppers which I dutifully handed over to my mother.
My mother did not stay long in Channeh Rosenthalâs restaurant. She went to an employment agency on Fourth Street between Avenues C and B, one of a number on the block. The same string of employment offices exists today with their blatant blue and white painted signsââSERVANTSââjutting out from the top level of the stores in which they are located.
I grew restive under the enforced waiting of three monotonous days. Mother and I would arrive in the morning, wait until twelve when we would go out and buy an apple from a street peddler, return and wait until four, and finally return home. I would play outside by myself or accept overtures from the âYankeeâ children after they had teased me to their heartsâ content.
When I grew tired I would sit on the floor of the office and watch. Employers, usually the womenfolk, would come down to interview applicants. Did the girl like children? Could she cook? Frequently the ever-ready assistant would be dispatched for a fortunate girlâs suitcase left with her landlady. Sometimes the latter would refuse to give up the suitcase and would herself come down to the office. The girl owed her money. Who would pay her? Oh, the girl had a job! Well, the valise could go, but not before the address of the girlâs situation is written out âblack on white.â Meanwhile the girl would be glancing apologetically at the face of her prospective employer and pluck at her hands in fear.
Then the employer, the newly hired servant, and the assistant with the suitcase would be off together in an uneven line.
We had to wait and wait because no one wanted a servant with a child.
Finally our turn came.
We went to the house of a man who wore his tightly curled hair parted in the middle. When he smiled, he kept his pink lips shut and wrinkles chased themselves across his face like ripples on water. His wife was in the hospital and Mother was to be the servant until his wife returned and was well enough to take care of the house and the three children.
I donât remember seeing any children, but I do remember the peculiar arresting odor of leather in the house. Of the day we spent there, I know nothing. At night, I remember my mother complained of the weariness she felt after scrubbing those five rooms and feeding the children. But we were glad to have found a temporary haven. Then she and I went to sleep.
Perhaps two hours later, I was awakened by the voice of my mother, shrill and sharp with indignation. By the side of the bed, stood her employer. . . .
We finished the rest of the night in the bed of Channeh Rosenthal, after my mother had wept her story and received Channehâs pitying cluckings.
Again, we went to the employment office and waited for work.
By this time, it was summer and my mother went to work in the house of a middle-aged, sharp-eyed couple in Canarsie for sixteen dollars. These people kept a counter and restaurant, serving seafood, frankfurters, popcorn, etc. They had three sons, two of whom helped in the business, and the third, who was in the throes of a disease that makes people grow too much (I donât know what it is called), did nothing but sit on the beach and throw sand into the water after he had carefully molded it into a ball. There was an adopted daughter besides, a tall soft-breasted girl of seventeen who had hair the color of prune soup. She giggled when the diners talked to her and parted the wave in her pompadour with a pink, long-fingered hand.
I wandered about at my own will becoming a familiar and welcome figure in the beer gardens that at the time were as much a part of Canarsie as the salty air. In these beer gardens, one could order a mug and see a vaudeville show on the strength of one order. I would run errands for some of the actors and actresses and be paid liberally. I would imitate them and they would throw back their heads and laugh and I was happy. Very happy. I liked to make people laugh.
It was close to the end of the summer when something happened to hasten our departure. Mother and I shared the bed with Celia, the adopted daughter of our employers. Throughout our stay, there had always been bedbugs, but on that night, they seemed to have called a mass meeting, as Celia observed with her giggle.
I fell asleep while my mother mounted watch over me. It was in one of those half-veiled snatches of sleep that I felt the need of my motherâs protecting hand on my uncovered feet. I opened my eyes and saw Celia sitting up against the wall, her arms crossed over her bosom, her hair falling about her like moon mist. She wore no nightgown but a short, thin petticoat and her shirt. My mother was moving about on the floor feeling her way to the matches. I could see everything by the white light that came from the night sky.
âI canât find them,â my mother cried. âWhere are the matches? I canât find the matches.â
âYou want the matches?â
My body stiffened. That was a new voice . . . a manâs voice.
âShe wants the matches!â said a second new voice . . . a manâs voice. It was mocking and ugly.
âLet âer look,â added a third new voice. It belonged to the boy who was growing to death.
And suddenly through the dark room sped lighted matches deftly flipped from the corners of the room. I screamed as one touched me. Celia was crying and laughing wildly, while my mother shrieked and shouted, âIf I only had a knife, I would stick it into you, murderers! God should punish you for what you are doing to a poor orphan.â The orphan was Celia.
I do not remember how the night ended, and I will not ask my mother. She would probably lie about it and perhaps try to laughânot to reassure me, but herself.
Three days later, we left. Celia wept when my mother left but shook her head when Mother asked her to go away with us.
âWhere could I go? This is the only home I know. Oh, donât worry about me. I donât belong to anyone. No one cares what happens to me.â
Then she began to giggle and patted the wave in her pompadour.
When we returned, we stayed with a woman whom my mother called the Peckacha, in a rear house on Ridge Street. She was a pock-marked, toothless woman of thirty-two who was always pressing her bladderlike breast to the mouth of a reluctant, sallow baby. Her husband had the saintly, shadowy look of a prophet. His face was delicately gaunt, with two deep-set, pale blue eyes and blond whiskers that grew at random, like grass in rocky ground. He was a baker. He slept during the day so Mother and I were able to sleep in his bed at night.
There were many children who, from the oldestâa long-legged and freckled-faced girlâto the two-year-old Mechel, who would wander out into the street as he was created, did nothing but swear at each other. They all had great dark slimy eyes as if gutter mud had been slapped into their faces and broad noses.
They pinched me and slapped me just as they did one another. Only when I âactedâ for them did they give me peace.
The figure of a slight, sallow girl whose black dress merges into the shadows of my memory will not evade me. She lived underneath us, boarding with an old man and his wife. I cannot remember this girl ever smilingânot even her eyes. They were like still, stagnant sewer pools in her V-shaped yellow face. Her hair she wore like the girls of the day, in a pompadour to the front and a Psyche knot in the back. She always seemed to be resting her slight weight against the side of the open doorânever going out into the street, frequently retreating with frightened backsteps into the yard. I never saw her during the daytime.
My mother called her âthe night birdie.â
My mother did not like me to go with her to the employment offices and so she left me behind to the mercies of the young Peckachas. I avoided them as much as possible. I was afraid of them.
I found living on the floor below us a fat man with a wooden leg who could play the accordion melodiously well. He played Romanian folk music mostly but now and then would change the programme to include âTake a Car,â then in vogue. The Peckacha children dubbed him my âfella.â When I did not seem to mind, they stopped calling him that, and after they discovered that I was honorableâI did not betray them when they lied or when they beat a child younger than themselvesâthey took me with them on one of their forages to Attorney Street. Attorney Street, like Orchard Street, is a market where fruit and vegetable dealers sell to the street and store vendors. Cases, bulging with oranges or apples and watermelon, line the streets, while men with live, dirty hands darted among them with eyes that took in everything. People live on these streets as well, rotting in their cases with the overripe fruits.
The Peckacha children went in a group. Manny, the oldest boy, pointed out a case of large ripe oranges to me.
You see that place where the stick is broke? Go over there anâ take an orange,â said Manny. âIf you get it, run.â His nose resembled a round mass of putty, wet and gray. He drew it up in the manner of one who knows that he was talking to a faint heart. Then they all walked to the corner and waited for me.
I walked to the case and without even looking around, stuck my hand into the aperture and plucked a large, overripe orange. My heart pounded against me. I wanted to run, but my feet were stuck to the ground. There I stood with the stolen orange in my hand.
âGo to hell, run!â shouted Manny.
I threw the orange at him and ran in the opposite direction.
My mother found a new situation at fourteen dollars a month in a home where there were two little girls of my own age. I remember nothing of this home, except its cleanliness and that the âbossâ was a jovial, middle-sized fellow who always brought me what he brought his two little girls. When my mother took the children and me for a walk after her work in the kitchen was over, we always stopped outside a large fruit and grocery store. The memory of its clean, spicy smell still stays with me. Above us, at intervals rumbled the âL.â
Then Mother decided that she wanted to work in a shop . . . that cooking, housework, and washing were a little too much for her. The middle-sized man was not jovial now but long-faced and offered to give her a raise if she would only stay.
But my mother had made up her mind to go. She was really meant to be a rover, and the idea of going to w...