Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [120]
There was a strange counterpoint to this. When Lazar brought a girlfriend home or appeared to be more than casually interested, his mother and sisters suddenly elevated him onto a pedestal. No girl was good enough for “their” Lazar. Girlfriends were made to feel patently uncomfortable. The inference was always that they must be tramps. On the one occasion when the engagement was about to be officially announced to Zelda Meyers, the butcher’s daughter, Hannah was stricken with a mysterious illness. Fainting spells, shooting pains, and insomnia led a parade of symptoms which miraculously disappeared when Lazar and Zelda broke up. After a time, Lazar stopped bringing girlfriends home. By his mid-twenties he seemed headed toward lifelong bachelorhood.
“Never mind, Lazar,” Hannah would say, “if you like the girl, you have my blessings ... go. And don’t worry about us, we’ll survive. Maybe you should first check a few things about her health. Some stories, probably idle gossip when she was younger ... actually, who knows her real age ... some certain disease ...I wouldn’t mention. Just be careful. You know what I mean. You’re a druggist. You know what the little drawer near the register has in it. Just be careful.”
So, Lazar hung out with the other bachelors, a little card game, a cinema, a lot of talk about poon, and all that manly stuff. Lazar’s sole passion remained basketball, at which he was a wizard from childhood. He was star guard for the team of the Council of Young Men’s Hebrew and Kindred Associations, the much respected CYMAKS, into which he channeled his excess energy.
WITH THE THREE Balaban sisters, the situation was amazingly similar, but slightly different. Hannah and her girls retained a tight little island for themselves in the riotous confines of poor Jewish Baltimore, a ghetto centered on a pair of aged synagogues on Lloyd Street.
Leah was not only the oldest, but the cleverest and best-looking. By her mid-teens she had grown taller than her mother and alluringly buxom and was crowned with a head of marcelled hair that flowed down to the middle of her back. She was the first to go out and skirmish in the world of young men. Her immense brown eyes knew how to flash out the signal that brought instant palpitations to the recipient.
Leah was both vain and passionate. She enjoyed the flirtations and became adept in the use of charm, allure, and manipulation. But the foundation for womanhood was shaky. The voice of her mother seemed to be always whispering in her ear. Womanhood was a place filled with traps and pitfalls. Beware.
Leah’s suitors and, later, Fanny’s and Pearl’s were all poor boys with uncertain futures. After the initial kisses and embraces, the boys usually sensed something forbidding about the Balaban sisters.
The little flat above the bakery was a lively place. The kitchen also served as the living room, and Fanny played a secondhand upright piano well enough to convey the sentiments of the day, even though it was badly out of tune. The songs were about twilight and gloaming and strawberry blondes and men on flying trapezes and birds in gilded cages. The kitchen table was filled with baked goodies and lively discussions abounded about the organizing of the garment workers, or socialism, or news of the old country.
Beneath the gaiety, a sensitive man soon detected that Hannah and her daughters carried deep, hidden anger against the father, who was never mentioned, whose photograph was missing from the mantel. Disdain for males was never spoken of, or even admitted to directly, but many young men sensed it and never returned.
1914
HANNAH GOT UP from her sewing corner when Leah came home from work and, as she did each day, poured two glasses of tea from