Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [159]
If a place was furnished, everything had to be moved and covered. Then came the shlep, the stevedore’s work. He lugged ladders, saw-horses, planks, and pasting tables up two or three stories. In the beginning, he was unable to match rolls on the walls and ruined a half-dozen jobs. Sometimes the walls were too crooked. At other times the paste wouldn’t hold and the whole roll fell down on top of his head.
“It’s up the ladder, down the ladder, three hundred times a day, then shlep everything down three flights and move all the furniture back. I’m getting varicose veins.”
There was little work in the winter, so Nathan taught Yiddish for fifty cents a student a week and Leah picked up a few dollars as the director of the Freiheit Choral Society.
In springtime, Nathan left to go to one of the “gold rush” cities such as Pittsburgh, where the out-of-town paperhangers worked seven days a week for two or three months straight to fill the larder for the coming winter.
Our second year in Norfolk, when Nathan left on his route of the gold rush cities, Momma suddenly lost interest in lugging Gideon from clinic to clinic. In addition to school, I kept the flat clean, did most of the cooking, and took care of Gideon.
Both of us started to feel the eyes of the comrades on our backs when we would enter a home or meeting hall. It seemed that Momma was being very friendly to a lot of the men comrades. I know that the Freiheit Choral Society was suddenly overloaded with male singers for the first time.
When Nathan slipped home for an occasional weekend, he and Momma always argued.
“I tell you, one more year of this paperhanging business and I’m going crazy.”
Momma always had a new and mysterious malady. “My gallbladder is wrecked from too many hours and days in the Ginzburg Brothers slave shop.”
Then Nathan would always turn on Gideon. “My son is a disgrace to me. Look at this report card. What’s this business of engaging in reactionary pleasure-seeking activities? Baseball, football. It is a shame for a proletariat child. And who let him bring Mark Twain into the house!”
Sometimes the only way to have a truce was for me to get a headache, or Gideon to have an attack of asthma.
But Momma knew how to laugh a lot and even joked about herself. She did keep our clothing neat and patched and shopped for the best day-old food that could be found, and we never missed any concert, or opera, or play that came to Norfolk.
She learned to read beautifully and lifted us into the world of Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill. If nothing else, Gideon owes her his love of literature and I owe her my love of acting and music.
NORFOLK-BALTIMORE
1935
MISS ABIGAIL WINTERS was no ordinary sixth-grade teacher. The children at J. E. B. Stuart Grammar School held their breath at the beginning of the term, praying they would be assigned to her class. Miss Abigail was not much of a looker. She was a gangly type, almost awkward in her movements, and she didn’t go to too much trouble to pretty herself up. Most men were intimidated by her, because she was a very rare person, a woman flier, an aviatrix, and this commanded fear and respect.
Her father, Clarence, had been a war ace and she and her brother, Jeremy, were, as it were, raised in an open cockpit. Miss Abigail did a lot of other extra-special things like playing the guitar and composing songs. She knew dozens of songs in many languages. She was the drama coach of the school, as well.
She took her students on field trips to the sand dunes at Spencer’s Point—the air shows, the walks through the swamps and marshes near the creeks, and the creeks themselves—so they could explore the animal and plant life that would evade the untrained eye.
It was no secret that the Norfolk school board had their eye on her to make her an assistant