A Good Place to Come From Read online

  A Good Place to Come From

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  Morley Torgov

  Published by Bev Editions

  ISBN: 978-0-9878146-2-3

  Copyright © 1974 Morley Torgov

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  To him—in lieu of candles

  Contents

  A Good Place to Come From

  Queen Street

  Semper Paratus, Semper Fidelis, Semper Annie

  Room and Keyboard

  The Guest Speaker

  Being Prepared

  The Salesman

  Cafe Society

  Press Pressure

  The Lawyer

  Up in Smoke

  Of Life and Love in a '41 DeSoto

  The Making of the President, 1944

  The House on the Rock

  The Messiah of Second-Hand Goods

  For their constant encouragement and support during the writing of this book, I am deeply indebted to my wife Anna Pearl, my children Sarah Jane and Alexander, and my friends Beverley Slopen, Lois and Jack Shayne, Lila and Alex Mogelon, Helen Mathe, Sydney M. Harris and Ben Kayfetz.

  M.T.

  A Good Place to Come From

  It was four o'clock in the afternoon, a half hour before train time. "We better get going," my father said, snapping shut the locks on his brown valise. The businesslike tone of his voice, the sharp clicking of the locks, the firmness of his step as we walked toward the car—everything contributed to an air of determination. "It's only a two-minute drive to the station, what's the rush?" I asked. "Sure, that's right," he responded, "leave everything to the last minute, drive like a crazy fool, kill somebody, ruin a perfectly good brand new car, what do you care?" I shook my head in defeat. It was no use trying to convince him I cared.

  Always, on the day my father was leaving for Toronto to buy goods for his store, there was this atmosphere of tension, this feeling of great commercial urgency: schedules to be met, judgments to be exercised (will this be a hot little item? ... will this be a lemon?), deals to be made, money to be spent—all this to be accomplished in the garmentmanufacturing jungle that was Spadina Avenue in those days. This time, however, my father was especially on edge. Earlier that day he had taken delivery of a new 1949 Pontiac sedan—his first new car since before the war. It was gleaming black with white sidewall tires; parallel chrome stripes ran along the centre of the hood and continued again over the trunk lid giving the car a sleek, sporty appearance. "Look how she sits, just like the Queen Mary," my father said as he rolled the car lovingly, almost tenderly, out of the dealer's garage on Tancred Street. We made our way home along Queen Street behind the proud prominent nose of the chrome Indian head mounted atop the grille. My father's touch at the wheel was delicate, as if he were driving a crystal chandelier. Suddenly, at the corner of Queen and Bruce, mere yards away from where his own garage waited with doors thrust open to receive the distinguished new guest, rain began to fall, a soft mid-May rain. "Ach, sonofabitch!" he hissed, switching on the wipers. "Rain! My goddam luck. There must be a devil in my life. That's all there is to it ... a devil in my life."

  That had been several hours ago. Now we were on our way to the C.P.R. station at the head of Pilgrim Street. It was my maiden voyage at the helm (he had handed me the key to the ignition as if it was the key to a great city) and I drove as the historic importance of the moment dictated— avoiding pot-holes and puddles, creeping warily through intersections, while my father sat nodding with approval. He smelt strongly of after-shave lotion, having shaved—as he always did when he was leaving for Toronto—only an hour before train time. "Got to look my best," he would explain, "just in case I run into a good-looking squaw between here and Sudbury." That pre-train shave was the only festive gesture in an otherwise solemn departure routine.

  I drove, and we talked . . . or rather he talked.

  "You'll remember to double-check the cash at the end of each day to make sure it's not short or over. What's the combination to the safe?"

  "Left to forty, right to twenty-two, left again to fifteen, then right again to fifty."

  "Good. Try not to forget it."

  "Okay. I'll write the numbers down on a piece of paper—"

  "Schmeckle! Somebody'll find it—"

  "So what should I do for godsake?"

  "Keep repeating it. Say it over to yourself a few times every day."

  "I got a great idea," I said. "Maybe I'll say it before meals, like grace."

  "That's right, smart-alec, make fun. You'll see how funny it is some day when you come into the store and find the whole goddam place cleaned out . . . everything gone, stolen!"

  I rattled off the magic numbers once again just to make him happy. He went on. "Remember to turn off the window lights at ten each night, don't waste electricity. You'll roll up the awning if it looks like rain but for Chrisake remember to put it down if it's sunny, it shouldn't fade the goods in the windows. And make sure you lock the garage good and tight before you go to bed. You never can tell these days who'll fool around with the car, there's so many strangers in town now. Oh yes, and stay off Wellington Street; they're putting down fresh tar on the road, the bastards, and it makes a mess of the tires. "

  "A person would think you're going to Europe," I said.

  He sighed deeply. "Europe. I only wish to hell I was going to Europe. Anywhere but Toronto. Those whores on Spadina, I can see them now, dragging out one lousy shmateh after another, telling every lie in the book about how wonderful their crap is put together and how much they're selling to this one and to that one. Making phony promises. Gypsies, every one of 'em."

  "So why do you stay in the ladies-wear business?" I asked.

  "Why do I stay? Because there's a devil in my life. That's all there is to it."

  As he said this, the car bounced into and out of a giant pot-hole. I grinned sheepishly. "Sorry."

  "Why the hell don't you look where you're going?" he pleaded, wounded and bleeding there on the passenger side.

  "I did look, honest to God—"

  "If you looked, how ... how could you possibly drive right into it?"

  ·"I don't know. I guess there's a devil in my life, and that's all there is to it."

  Staring straight ahead through the windshield, maintaining a sharp lookout for pot-holes, he sighed deeply again. "You see," he said quietly, "a university can give you an education—but it can't give you brains."

  Rain began to fall again, pelting down into the face of the chrome Indian, drumming like war music against the black hood. We were almost at the intersection of Queen and Pilgrim, about to turn north to the station. "Look at this lousy town," he said moodily, "six months winter, six months rain. Sault Shtunk Marie. Same weather. Same side walks. Same buildings. Same faces day in, day out."

  "You're just sore because it's raining on your car," I said, trying to sound cheerful. "Just think of this: if you'd stayed in Russia you wouldn't be driving a new Pontiac now, you'd be a slave to some dumb Siberian Cossack."

  "What's the difference whose ass you kiss? In Russia it was a Cossack's, here it's some bitch-of-a-customer's ass. I dug a grave for myself in this town, that's all there is to it." "So be happy," I suggested. "You're off to Toronto. A few days out of the grave."

  "Every place is a grave. Russia was a grave. The Soo's a grave. Toronto's a grave. You see this car? It's a toy, that's all. It's a toy they give you to play with, to take your mind off all the crap you had t
o put up with to earn the toy. It means nothing. Jesus Christ! Be careful."

  I swung the car hard just in time to miss another giant pot-hole. "The sonsofbitches," my father said, referring to the local Works Department, "they got no respect for other people's property."

  We stood on the platform waiting for the conductor's signal to board. "Every time I come here," my father said, "I think of the first time you went to Camp Borden with the Air Cadets—when was that, 1943?—and you told me on the way to the station I shouldn't kiss you goodbye in front of the other boys. When I drove away afterwards, I was so upset I wasn't sure should I laugh or cry. Now look at you. College boy. Big shit!"

  I smiled and let him kiss me goodbye on the cheek.

  He stood on the lowest step at the entrance to the Pullman coach, holding onto the handrail to steady himself as the train heaved and strained to overcome its own inertia. In a moment he would make the short farewell speech that he delivered always at the precise moment of the wheels' first forward motion, and that I had come to know so well.

  Waving, he called out, as if pronouncing his blessing upon everyone gathered on the platform, "Goodbye Soo, fuck you."

  Then he was gone.

  Queen Street

  Queen Street is the main street of Sault Ste. Marie. It runs east and west, roughly paralleling the St. Mary's River, for a distance of about five miles.

  Today, Queen Street is lined with signs telling you it is a one-way thoroughfare heading west. You get onto Queen Street at, say, Pim, and you drive past Brock, Spring, March, Elgin, Bruce, Dennis, Tancred, Gore, travelling westward past the new International Bridge, following the setting sun all the way. Now you are as far as James Street in the heart of Little Italy. A few blocks more and you are into Steel Plant Country: Bayview, the wrong side of the tracks-smoke, dust, the grinding noises of trains and cranes, the overpowering, deep-seeping smells of sulphur and coal-tar. You obey the road signs, and you go west.

  Yesterday—in the nineteen-thirties and early forties— Queen Street was a one-way thoroughfare heading east. There were no signs that told you this, only an instinct, a compelling sense of direction. You got onto Queeri Street at, say, Huron, and you passed about two dozen streets as you travelled eastward, stopping-if you were a Gentile-at Simpson Street where the stately red brick houses and the green lawns were; not stopping-if you were a Jew-until you had gone as far east as you could go: east along High way 17 and eventually along Highway 11, passing through Sudbury and North Bay and Huntsville, until the road signs said "City of Toronto" some 500 miles later. Then, and only then, did you stop.

  For the smalltown Jew, and especially for the children of

  the smalltown Jew, Queen Street was a one-way street heading eastward to Toronto. There could be no stops in between.

  The people of whom I write—the thirty to forty families who made up the local Jewish community—occupied stores and apartments and houses within a relatively small area in the central part of Sault Ste. Marie. The intersection of Queen and Bruce Streets formed the hub of this area, and most of the Jewish business establishments and homes lay no more than a block or two from that point. Despite this apparent concentration, it is impossible to characterize the inhabitants as ghetto-dwellers, nor was this a shtetl environment in the European sense of the term. As you walked along Queen Street, you saw, true enough, signs that read "Himmel's Ladies' Wear," "Friedman's Department Store," 44 Fishman's Men's Wear." You heard two neighbouring merchants call to each other on the sidewalk, 44 Hello, Joe," "Hello, Isaac." You heard Mr. Cohen and Mr. Mintz greeting each other in Yiddish outside the Royal Bank. Yet you were not conscious of being in the midst of a Jewish world. It was as if the Jews-even those who owned their own properties-were no more than temporary .tenants who borrowed time · and space on Queen Street during daylight hours in order to make their living. To the Gentile population, we were a mysterious subterranean breed, a race who surfaced daily from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. (midnight on Saturdays) to sell merchandise, and disappeared into the ground after hours to do God-knew-what. There were no Jewish theatres, delicatessens, butcher shops, corner con fectionaries; none of the storefront street-level institutions one associates with the ghettto. Until the mid-1940's there was no synagogue.

  If there was little resemblance to the big-city ghetto, there was even less resemblance to the shtetl. Having been blown across Europe by a hundred different winds of turmoil, and having vomited their way across seas and oceans to North America, our fathers were far too worldly to live the life of simple villagers. They had shaved off beards and sidelocks, discarded skullcaps, eaten pork when it meant the difference between living or starving, battled with the English language and called down plagues upon its unfamiliar spellings and pronunciations. They worked on the Sabbath, indeed worked harder and longer on the Sabbath than on any other day of the week, for that was the one day of the week when the Gentiles were most often in a spending mood. To nothing—save the inescapable curse of old age—did they resign themselves. Before no one did they bend or cower. The rabbi was always no more than a few minutes away, ready to be consulted when the spirit was low or the conscience was tortured. But somehow he could never be the symbol of rigid, orthodox discipline that his shtetl counterpart had been in Europe; rather, he could only be one of them. Granted he hadn't shed the trappings of his religion as they had done; nevertheless, the same gales that had carried them like pollen from one continent to another, had carried him as well. He and they were comrades, shipmates, fellow-tenants.

  Not ghetto Jews, not shtetl Jews. What then were they? Upside-down weeds . . . that perhaps is the best way to describe them. Weeds that had planted themselves in strange ground, weeds that grew with their foliage—the fruit of their labours—submerged in the earth and their roots exposed to air and sky. They spent their lives this way, scratching, scraping, building up, tearing down, conniving and surviving. Always there was the struggle to invert themselves, to establish root and leaf in proper order, to become more than mere weeds, to become indigenous plants.

  They never entirely succeeded.

  My father demobilized himself from the Russian army late one night in the summer of 1917. Reluctantly he had spent two years and eight months in the service of the Czar and his lack of enthusiasm for military life only deepened when the Czar was eliminated and the Bolsheviks moved into the royal palaces. The southern part of Russia, near Odessa, where my father had been born and raised, was famous for producing great watermelons and violinists, both of which products my father loved, but these attractions were not powerful enough to draw him back to a land which was also famous for producing misery and cruelty. Taking liberty without leave, he headed in the direction of Roumania and never saw Russia again. Nine years later, his tour of the Western World came to an end in a small, northern Ontario town, the name of which he could barely pronounce—Sault Ste. Marie.

  In the interval between his self-demobilization and his descent at the Soo's railway station, he had dabbled profit ably in the currency market in Roumania, earned the price of a steerage ticket to "Kanada," harvested wheat in Saskatchewan, taught Hebrew in Winnipeg where he married the older sister of one of his pupils—a prize catch because she had been born in England and her father was a man of property who had once been reeve of West Kildonan. After Winnipeg, it was peddling made-to-measure suits to miners in Timmins, doing business out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon. For engaging in this enterprise without a transient licence, he was arrested and fined $50.00. That experience crystallized his thinking. It was high time to stop being a transient.

  But where to settle?

  In the financial circles frequented at the time by my father (i.e., the roving bands of fellow peddlers and other here-to day-gone-tomorrow types), word was spreading about the golden promise of a town with a crazy French name which they pronounced "Sahlt-stee-maria." The Algoma Steel plant there was taking on hundreds of immigrants from Italy and the Slavic countries. The town held potential ri
ches for a clothing man who didn't mind working eight days a week, could communicate in the foreigners' lingo, and was fast with a tape measure.

  Sault Ste. Marie society little noted nor long remembered the day my father and mother, anchored by a large steamer trunk, disembarked at the railway station at the head of the street appropriately named "Pilgrim Street." To the by standers on the station platform who eyed them with only casual interest, this was simply another greenhorn and his wife come to town to hustle yard goods and ribbons. But to the handful of Jews already there, the new couple would be welcome company. Would this mean a fresh source of competition? Yes. Sometimes, however, in this semi-wilderness, it was better to lose a dollar here and there and gain a landsman, a neighbour from your part of the old country, someone who spoke Yiddish, could perhaps quote a bit of Talmud, someone who slurped tea from a glass through a sugarcube held between the front teeth, and remembered what the watermelons were like in the south of Russia.

  Before long, the town began to yield some of its golden promise: a small shop on Queen Street, a self-contained flat over the shop, a Model T, and for the first time, a feeling of permanence. The young Russian Jew, still sporting the pencil-slim moustache he had affected years before in the Russian Army, and the quiet Winnipeg girl who worked at his side day and night in the shop despite the fact that she was now very pregnant, were here to stay.

  Like most of his fellow merchants, my father was everything in the business—merchandise-buyer, window-trimmer, window-washer, cashier, stock-controller, salesman, even seamstress on occasion. And like most of his colleagues in the trade, he depended heavily upon his wife who assisted him in nearly all of these diverse functions. But there was one ritual in which he relied entirely upon her. That was when the ''Inspector-Generals" made the rounds. The Inspector-Generals were women who customarily travelled in pairs, visiting one store after another along Queen Street. They would finger their way through long racks of dresses and try on every hat in the place, whispering furtively to each other in Italian or Ukrainian or Finnish, never committing themselves one way or the other, but examining each garment critically at arm's length. Truly an outsider at such moments, the merchant could do nothing but stand idly by, wondering whether the Inspector-Generals were planning a purchase or plotting a pogrom. At last, one of the women would speak up: "Where Missus?" That was the signal for the merchant's wife to come forth. If "Missus" neither spoke nor understood these foreign languages, she was at least fluent in the international language of hemlines and bodices; therefore, "Missus" usually clinched the sale, turning the tricky, final stage of the transaction—the price haggling—back to her less gentle husband.