Free Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer Page A

” Bubby leaned forward for emphasis. “Do you know what he meant by that? I should hand over the restaurant to him, he should make jokes with the customers, drink slivovitz and do nothing else. And all the time my boy, my one and only child, would be in an orphanage.”
    Reflection filled their temporary silence. Finally the doctor wiped his mouth and asked, “But what about Mister Elkin? A real love with no shanda.”
    The subject of Mister Elkin always caused my grandmother to fight back her tears. “After my husband, Mister Elkin was the only man I ever loved. The others, a hug here, a kiss there. Gornisht. With Mister Elkin, a deep love, for both of us.”
    “What a shanda that he deserted you.” Dr. Koronovsky stroked his goatee. “A tragedy.”
    If Manya seemed about to cry, she didn’t allow the tears to fall. She busied herself adding a few butter cookies to the doctor’s plate.
    “The loss of Mister Elkin, that wasn’t a shanda, it wasn’t a tragedy. Only sad. Very very sad. When my husband died, now that was a tragedy. He left a child without a father, me without a husband, and his own life, gone too soon. Did you know that in Odessa they called him Misha the tzadik, the wise one? Who knows what he would have become if he lived?”
    Dr. Koronovsky rose from his chair. “We’ve had sad lives. Both of us.”
    “No,” my grandmother protested. “It will change soon for you.”
    “Please, don’t wish what you are thinking on my sisters.”
    “I’m not thinking what you are thinking. Doctor, forgive me, I don’t want to feel shame for what I’m telling you, but one pubic hair is stronger than ten oxen. Just marry the woman you love and bring your wife into the same house with your sisters. You’ll find a way. You’ll be happy. And excuse me again if I didn’t speak right.”
    Dr. Koronovsky blushed and added graciously, “Manya, you and I understand each other. There’s no offense.” He turned for the door. “See that your daughter-in-law takes the powders I left her.”
    The powders, crushed aspirin with possibly a dash of codeine, came in folded waxed papers and Dr. Koronovsky always carried a boxful. He distributed them for each and every ailment.
    “Manya, let me know how Lil’s sore throat is. If it’s not better in two, three days, call me.”
    As it developed, Lil’s sore throat wasn’t the problem. She took the powders in water. She gargled with kosher salt; painted her throat with tincture of iodine, wrapped her neck in cold compresses followed by hot. The dry pain in her throat eased, but she started to throw up. Every morning. She felt sick to her stomach. Her breasts hurt.
    My grandmother and mother didn’t argue or fight. But when Bubby suggested, “Maybe you’re pregnant?” Lil snapped at her, “What are you crazy? Do you think I’m out of my mind?”
    “From your mind is not how you get pregnant.”
    Lil was vain about her excellent figure, the flatness of her stomach, her incredible dancer’s legs. To this she added the fact that she had become a saleswoman on Division Street, in the very store in which she had packed coats into boxes. Lil had given birth to two children because it seemed the conventional, appropriate thing to do. The prospect of a third child horrified her. When she learned that she was in fact pregnant, she cried out, “How could this have happened to me? What did I do to deserve this?” as if beset by the plague.
    Of course, Rocco, my father’s bookie on Mott Street who considered himself the conduit through which all services flowed, crossed himself before he confided to my father. “Listen, Jack, you know I’m a good Catholic, confession every week, don’t eat meat on Friday, church on Sunday, God should burn my tongue out if I don’t believe that each child has a soul that will go to heaven. But you know how it is, Jack. You run across a bimbo every now and then and she’s in trouble. I mean, I’m not saying who got her that way,