Free Jew Store by Stella Suberman Page B

a Southern effect, he added, “These are some great vittles,” which, despite the drilling from the girls in Savannah, emerged as “gray twittles,” and Miss Simmons looked startled before she caught on.
    After breakfast, my father wanted to ask
Miss Brookie
—the lady had requested that he call her that, and he was trying to keep it in mind—for help in finding a store, but she had first wanted to take them on a tour of the house. They had seen mostof it, but the living room, the “front room,” as it was called in Concordia, was as yet unexplored.
    The furniture in the front room was what Miss Brookie referred to as her “Victorian afflictions”—hard-framed crimson sofas lacking in the slightest give and chairs that she said were not the usual easy chairs but
un
easy ones. These she had inherited, along with numerous small, curvaceous mahogany tables, from her parents. Hanging on the walls in heavy gold frames were paintings by “minor Italian masters,” which, she said, nobody in town considered fit viewing, for the reason that they weren’t what folks were accustomed to—what they were accustomed to, according to Miss Brookie, being pictures of Jesus with his eyes rolling up toward heaven. Her comment on this, my father said, was, “And mercy, what he’s looking at ain’t anything I’m prepared to discuss.” Miss Brookie, as we found out, could use the vernacular as well as anyone in town, and it seemed to please her to use it whenever she was particularly “outdone,” as she would put it.
    On this day, the more Miss Brookie described her things, the more bewildered my father became. Victorian afflictions? Minor Italian masters? Maybe it could be interesting, my father thought, but not right now. No, now he was desperate to get to his own mission and was simply trying to hold on.
    At the sight of a grand piano and a harp, Joey and Miriam snapped to attention. Italian, Miss Brookie said her harp was, shipped from Italy while she was on a trip there. She expressed a devotion to the Italians and thought my father must know a lot of them in New York. “Don’t you just love them?” she asked him.
    My father didn’t much want to talk about Italians; he wanted to talk about stores, and anyway he wasn’t sure whether he loved Italians or not. He didn’t know many, and those he knew were immigrants like himself, making their livings in their own way, in produce stores or shoe-repair shops mostly. “
Nonso
,” he answered the lady, making use of two of the three Italian words he knew. It meant “I don’t know,” and it about covered it.
    After the tour, Joey and Miriam went out to play in the yard, and my father sat on the steps of the front porch to wait for Miss Brookie to come out.
    Green things—trees, bushes—were much in evidence. The crape myrtle and rose of Sharon were in bloom, and my father had a fleeting thought that if my mother would just let herself go, she might consider them a pleasure to look at.
    In various spots were plaster cherubs and, on the branches of the trees, rusted hanging baskets. The yard could be said to reach a kind of clutter climax at the side, where an arched trellis thick with indeterminate vines opened up to a clutch of furniture—a love seat, two armchairs, and a tiny table—contrived of bent willow so green all the legs had sprouted.
    As my father had sensed, if anybody could point him in the right direction, it was Miss Brookie. There was something about the lady, as there had been about the boy T, that made him feel he was in good hands. Even the little one, Erv, though he did nothing but stare, stared not with suspicion but with simple curiosity.
    My father’s intuition had not misled him. Miss Brookie was just such a person. When my family first came to her, she was fifty-eight years old and had been a presence in the town for all those