Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [136]
Joe craved tenderness. For a fleeting moment in the postwar hysteria, Leah was consumed with an angelically noble desire to care for a wounded veteran. That urge was soon dissipated in the day-to-day grind. She saw a lifetime before her of caring for a semi-invalid.
Joe had a lot of attractive men friends, and Leah, in love with her concept of her own innocence, was a toucher and a brusher-up-against. This rankled the hell out of Joe.
Life boiled down to a cycle of arguments, drinking bouts, sullenness, and drugs. One day Joe found a packet of perfumed letters, bound with a satin ribbon, tucked away on a shelf in her closet. It contained love letters from over a dozen soldiers who wrote to her from France after she had become a married woman. Leah swore she knew the boys before she had met him. She just didn’t have the heart to tell them, being in the trenches and all, that she was now married.
With bottomless sincerity, Leah asked Joe, “How could I write that I was married when they were facing death?”
“What the hell were you going to do, marry them all?”
“Oh, Joe, you just don’t understand.”
“How many of them did you fuck?”
“Joseph Kramer! How dare you! Don’t you use those words when you speak to me.”
That was when he punched her in the eye, threw her out, and then left Joplin for points unknown. It was back to the Ginzburg Brothers factory for Leah, with her sewing machine next to her sister Fanny’s.
AFTER AN INITIAL postwar boom, America slammed the brakes on its overheated industrial machine. Billions in war contracts were abruptly canceled, resulting in massive layoffs and a deep national economic depression.
Everyone struggled, Lazar in his new store, Momma with her wedding gown business, house painting. Even that paskudnyak Gilbert Diamond felt the pinch. Only Dominick, with his city job on the police force, was untouched.
Hannah broke her head trying to keep the house on Fayette Street, but it became a hopeless cause. She had no choice but to liquidate and sell the business at a tremendous loss. She shopped around for smaller, cheaper quarters.
Foreclosures were a common occurrence, and many of Baltimore’s little two-story row houses, with their uniform pearly-white marble steps, were for sale at bargain prices. Alas, there was no Uncle Hyman to come to their rescue.
Hannah found a house to lease, dirt cheap, on Monroe Street, out of the downtown area. The neighborhood was only partly Jewish and partly everything else. It was a crying shame to leave the sights, sounds, and smells of Jewish Fayette Street, but there seemed to be little choice.
The house on Monroe Street consisted of a pair of flats. Downstairs, the living room was converted into a dressmaking shop and the dining room into a bedroom, which Hannah would share with Leah. Upstairs, the three children, Molly and Fanny’s two, would have the front room and Al and Fanny the rear bedroom.
It meant there was no place whatsoever for Moses. When he learned that Hannah had made an application to remove him to the Hebrew Home for the Aged, a sudden miracle took place.
He walked down the steps by himself and stood humbly before Hannah and confessed. “I wasn’t entirely wiped out. I’ll buy the house on Monroe Street, if you take me with you.”
“You dog! You goniff!”
“I implore you humbly not to send me to the old age home.”
“You can go shit in the ocean.”
“Here, take the money.”
“What’s the difference? There’s no room for you.”
“All I ask is a cot in the shop. I swear to the Lord of Abraham and Isaac, I won’t make a minute’s trouble. And what is more,” Moses continued, “some feeling is returning to my hands. Maybe I can even take in a little tailoring work.”
At first Hannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But God moves in strange ways. Well, what to do? Beggars can’t be choosers. Off they moved to Monroe Street, consuming every square inch of living space. But there was a bright side.