Up from Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer

Author:Eleanor Widmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307418685
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

14

The Arrival of Maurey

INVARIABLY LIL SHED a few tears whenever Jack left her; this parting was no different than the others. Like the Gershwin song that began, “I could cry salty tears,” she shed a few outside the farm when she acknowledged that Jack would not be returning in the evening.

I was less than three years old when I sat on the dining room table while Bubby fed me chicken soup with noodles, as two ambulance men carried Lil to the hospital because of double pneumonia. The windows were caked with ice; the walls dripped with water; the kitchen oven could not create enough warmth to seep into the bedroom. Dr. Koronovsky had no alternative than to suggest a warm hospital. Jack cried, my mother cried, and Bubby, whose fear and hatred of hospitals had been imprinted on the entire family, busied herself with me rather than walk alongside the ambulance gurney.

But she cried, too, cried until her tears fell into my soup and I asked, “Bubby, is this tear soup?” She stopped feeding me, drew me to her copious breasts and assured me, “It’s from cutting onions.” Bubby talked about “tear soup” for years, and whenever a financial or health crisis befell us she announced with the little cheer she could muster, “Today we’ll have tear soup.”

As we entered the dining room in Colchester after my father left, Lil sighed, “I guess we’ll have tear soup for dinner.” Tear soup would have been an improvement on the Sunday evening dinner: tomato slices and watery cottage cheese, which Margie referred to as spring salad, and bowls of blueberries for dessert. Willy and I ate our berries with sour cream in time-honored Russian fashion, but Aunt Bea regarded sour cream as lower class and poured sweet cream over the berries for Leonard and Alice. Since their father was not present, they let out a howl of protest that the cream smelled funny, followed by a sirenlike sound from Cousin Alice: “I’m hungry, I want a sammich.” Her sentiment was repeated throughout the dining room. Gabe had left to return Pudge to Hartford; Hal was cloistered with his father discussing the wisdom of following Sybil to Cape Cod.

Ronny and Sam, two med students who served a different corner of the room than ours, did their best to quell the rebellion, which was made more difficult because several women who had been bidding farewell to their husbands now came late to their tables. Ronny Silver, a nice young man studying internal medicine, called out, “Tuna sandwiches coming up.” He and Sam Green ran back into the kitchen, presumably to open cans of tuna.

With reluctance my mother made herself a tomato sandwich on “goyisha” Wonder bread and called it a night. “Good thing Daddy isn’t here,” she said. “He wouldn’t open his mouth for such food.”

It took forever for the tuna sandwiches to be brought out, lathered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Cousin Alice wolfed down her first and grabbed a second. Lil nodded at me.

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