Crackpot, page 18
There. It was out. She had worried about it, and yet now it had turned out to be surprisingly easy, thanks to Morgan. Just as long as she went on learning, Danile told his daughter fondly, and didn’t get discouraged, and didn’t take it into her head to run off with his little girl, who was the only fortune he had, he would be quite contented. They had a good laugh about that, and Hoda was relieved, because now, on days when she didn’t have a cleaning job or anywhere else to go, and it was too cold just to walk around for hours, she could stay home without having to make up an excuse for why she wasn’t going to school. She really felt sorry for Morgan, in a way, because it must be awful to have a father you couldn’t get along with.
Not long afterwards, when the snow was already deep in the yard, and the peddlers and milkmen and breadmen had changed their wagons for sleds which packed hard, narrow paths over the groaning snow of the city streets, and Danile had shovelled a narrow path too, along a trench which Hoda had first scuffed out for him with her galoshes, from their door to the front gate, Hoda brought her friend Hymie home late one evening. She hadn’t wanted to, but she couldn’t avoid it; there was no place else to take him, and he had some money to burn. She couldn’t afford to let him go somewhere else to burn it. She didn’t know how they were going to manage it, but in the meantime she introduced him to her father, who was sitting and working by the stove, as a good friend, who even understood some Yiddish, if Daddy would talk slowly enough.
The first thing Daddy asked, in his gentle way, was how Hymie was enjoying his studies. And Hymie, who wanted to be a big shot gambler, was about to deny indignantly that he was still a schoolboy, when Hoda jumped in quickly and said that Hymie had been away from school for a long time, and now he had a problem, and she was going to help him. That’s why she had brought him home. It was all true, wasn’t it? Hoda never lied outright to Daddy if she could possibly avoid it. And later on, when the fiction had been fully established, she always denied to herself that she had been the first to state explicitly that she was giving private lessons to her visitors, even though it might have sounded as though that was what she had meant when she explained about Hymie. It was what Daddy thought she meant, and he was so pleased, she just let him go on thinking it. And he was so nice about it, gathering up his materials, though she told him it wasn’t necessary, because they were going to work in her bedroom anyway, and insisting on removing himself and his work to his own room, while at the same time chuckling over her new vocation, and exhorting Hymie over and over again to “study, study,” and then again “study,” so that Hymie began to wonder whether he wasn’t really as foolish as some people said he was, though he knew better than to say anything to Hoda about it. Crazy or not, he wasn’t hard to get rid of at least; he even closed his door so as not to disturb them at their studies.
Hoda took Hymie into her bedroom, and as an extra precaution made him put her mattress on the floor, so no frivolous noises should carry by chance to the other bedroom. And she tried not to laugh out loud.
Afterwards, they sat and talked in the kitchen for awhile, and Hoda gave Hymie some tea, and took a cup in to Daddy too, and Daddy called out, “study, study,” encouragingly to Hymie again from his bedroom. It made Hymie a little uncomfortable, because the word for “study” in Hebrew sounds like the word for “pig” in Yiddish, and he thought, her old man really is cracked, but didn’t say anything, naturally, because of Hoda’s temper. Then, when Hymie wanted her to go on the mattress again before they put it back on the bed, she said she had a better idea. Than what, for godsake? Some idea! Almost as crazy as her old man, but plenty smart, that Hoda. She said if he paid her a little more she’d throw in the straw bag her daddy had just finished making. When Hymie said he didn’t want the bag, what would he need a woman’s straw bag for? Hoda got huffy about it, because he’d come in her house and she’d made everything comfortable for him, and he had admired the bag, so why couldn’t he buy it to give to his mother for a present, since he happened to have the money today and she bet his mother would like it.
All he’d said was, “that’s a nice thing you’re making,” just to be polite to the old guy; he didn’t want the damn thing. But he finally realized that if he wanted to get her on the mattress again he’d have to agree. “All right, all right,” he’d shell out and take the bag too, though his old lady would think he’d gone nuts; he’d never brought her a present in his life. She’d probably get sore at him for not just giving her the money, instead.
When he left, with Danile’s ringing encouragement of “pig! pig!” following him out of the house, so that he thought, uneasily, Jeez, what a crackpot! he had to stuff the bag into his coat, first, because he wasn’t going to be seen carrying it, for godsake, in the middle of winter, too. That Hoda!
Danile couldn’t get over what a doubly talented daughter he had, blossoming forth both as a teacher and as an irresistible saleswoman, but Hoda demurred modestly, and said that Hymie naturally wanted the bag for his mother once he’d seen her daddy’s workmanship close up.
The fact that it was working out all right didn’t prevent Hoda from feeling badly sometimes, particularly afterwards, when the guys she brought home had left, and she couldn’t help remembering how nice Daddy always was about leaving the kitchen and closing himself up in his own chilly little bedroom while the guys all sprawled around and talked and joked and played cards while they waited their turns to go in her bedroom with her. She tried to make sure that he was comfortable, and didn’t feel neglected. She always checked to see that the pipe in his room was open, so he would get as much heat as possible from the stove, and she made him put on a sweater, and brought him tea. And she told herself that he liked to work in his own room; he always did it at night, and anyway, it was only sometimes it happened, and other kids did it too; well, at least they brought home friends in the evenings and kibitzed around. But it was hard, for all her padding, to soften the knowledge that she was deceiving him, right to his poor blind face, and she had to develop a whole series of mental exercises to prevent the most miserable question from popping into her head before she fell asleep, but it slipped through sometimes anyway: What if he ever found out?
No he wouldn’t. Daddy didn’t know about such things. He’d never believe it. She’d kill anyone who told him. The guys wouldn’t dare say anything, even though she could tell they thought it was pretty funny the way he kept calling out to them to study and cram. No, he wouldn’t find out. Of course he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t what? What was it she’d just been thinking about? Something that made her feel awful. About Daddy? A bad thing. Not about Daddy if it was a bad thing. She couldn’t remember, suddenly. It had just slipped away. But it would come back. And then maybe she would find it was a mistaken thought, and she would be able to think it into something good. Only she couldn’t concentrate. It was gone. She couldn’t remember. Let it go. Maybe it wasn’t so bad if it went away just like that. Better it should forget itself, whatever it was, and let her begin to feel better.
Once, when she had a whole bunch of boys over, and they were making quite a bit of noise, she went in to speak to Daddy, and on an impulse, she told him that the boys weren’t over to study this evening. They had just come over to have some fun, and they were playing games together. And Daddy had laughed and told her he’d thought as much, from the kinds of noises they were making. And why not? Scholars need to have fun, too, and he couldn’t blame them for choosing their little teacher to have fun with. He couldn’t help thinking how delighted her mother would have been had she lived to see her little girl blooming into a honeypot for all the bees. Hoda wasn’t as relieved as she’d expected to be, for all that she’d told him a little more of the truth. But she was at least a little relieved, anyway. Daddy was glad she was popular. And just because she didn’t feel sorry, like Daddy was, that her mother wasn’t here to see her, didn’t mean she was glad her mother was dead. She knew she could prove that to herself, and would, later on, when she had time.
Over against the bad feelings she could set the fact that some of the boys had brought friends, and one or two of them had regular jobs, and could come more often, and sometimes even treated a pal to a turn with Hoda. She could also usually manage, if she thought that someone had money in his pocket, to persuade him, if she was firm about it, and particularly if he was new, to pay the little extra and buy a bag or a basket, too. Once a guy was in the house, he didn’t want to risk getting sent away with his load still on. He didn’t have to know she couldn’t afford to send him away, and she never actually said she would; but if he got worried it might happen, it usually worked. So Hoda was able, at last, to begin to reduce, appreciably, the stock of bags and baskets which were piled all over the living room, and in the summer kitchen, and which would otherwise soon have overflowed to the shed, where the winter cold would probably have ruined them. And she and her father were at least managing, like other living things that must survive on very little during the season of muffled life, to remain alive.
It was at this point that the woodyard delivered a cord of wood logs which neither of them had ordered, and the sawmen turned up, also unbidden, with their high-wailing power saw which, with short, anguished screams, sliced down the logs and scattered the snow with showers of golden sawdust. Then the men piled the stumps in a row beside the shed, grumblingly, because they had to go through deep drifts part of the way, where Hoda and Danile had had no reason to clear the snow. Hoda and Danile stood bundled up in their tattered winter coats, faces smarting and eyebrows frosted, and smelled the sawdust, sipping in short, quick sniffs which tried to prevent their noses from running, and listening to the eerie saw.
After they were all finished, Hoda did what her mamma had always done, she invited them in to have some tea and warm up, and Daddy talked to them in Ukrainian, and they felt better about having had to push through the deep snow because they saw that Daddy really was blind and he and Hoda lived alone together and hadn’t made it hard for them on purpose, but just didn’t clear enough of a path because they didn’t know they were going to get more wood than what they had been able to stock up on credit before the snow had layered up so high.
For Danile and Hoda it was a moment of triumph, of sorts. Whether or not Uncle was conceding defeat, he had at least made a conciliatory gesture. “You see,” said Danile gently, “he is not such a bad man, really. He doesn’t want us to freeze.”
Hoda was a little less sanguine. “He waited long enough,” was her comment. But she was not disposed to be vindictive. Uncle’s gift provided them with the unexpected luxury of knowing that they would be kept warm without worry for the rest of the winter, if the winter didn’t last too long. This was more like things should be. If the worst can happen and your mother dies and all the good things you knew get spoiled, well, it’s time for the best to start happening, too, though Hoda knew it wasn’t so simple as it had seemed when she was a dumb kid. The Prince of Wales might actually be coming here, to her own city, and they even said he would drive through the streets so everyone could see him, but Hoda didn’t really imagine that he was likely to catch a glimpse of her, much less get into the kind of conversation that she imagined herself having with him sometimes, and asking her to dance and discovering what a terrific dancer she was.
She sure was. Didn’t she go to all the weddings in the neighbourhood? All that she got wind of, anyhow, and that were big enough for the dance to be given in a hall or a synagogue basement. A lot of them took place in the synagogue Daddy went to just down the street. If she possibly could, Hoda liked to get there on time for the ceremony. It was beautiful, all the nice clothes and the slow walking, and the singing prayers under the canopy, and the way the groom smashed the glass so decisively with his foot, and the bride’s mother crying because her little girl was grown up and leaving her; Hoda always cried too, smitten by the pain there was in even the nicest things.
Sometimes, when she was lucky, she could even slip in and find a place for herself at the banquet table after the ceremony. If she hung around till everybody had a chance to get seated, and there were still some empty places set at the far end, and she just sat down as if she belonged, and her dress was clean and mended, even if it wasn’t a party dress, and she looked nice, with a bow in her hair, or else that big cloth flower that her mother had treasured, the waiters and waitresses were usually so busy and in such a hurry that they just served her automatically. They didn’t know she wasn’t invited. And the other guests were so busy eating and laughing and joking and judging the food and gossiping about everybody that Hoda found it easy to join in the conversation and laugh and joke too. Of course there were always one or two sour ones, who raised eyebrows and exchanged mutters and glances, particularly if she took several helpings. Sometimes one of them even said something mean, like “I didn’t know you were connected. Which side?” in a sniffy tone of voice. But Hoda had an answer. She would reply with a cheeky grin, “Both. I’m a friend,” which was perfectly true. You could be someone’s friend even if they didn’t even know you. Anyway, once you were in, nobody was likely to turn you away if you behaved all right, because it’s a sin and a shame to turn someone away from a celebration. And rightly so; Hoda loved her weddings, particularly the dancing afterwards.
Sometimes she came to the dances with one or two of the guys, and they all made themselves at home and helped themselves at the refreshment table, where the father of the bride or another close relative presided, handing out the good things with a lavish hand, and calling out, “Everybody eat! drink! have a little schnapps!” until he himself could scarcely stand on his feet any longer, for the good example he was setting. Sometimes she hurried along by herself, late in the evening, pausing to be humbled, briefly, by the cool green, hot green, shifting green celebrant dance of the northern lights, in the depths of velvet blue synagogue sky. Nothing could keep her away from a wedding in those early years, whether there was a blizzard snowing over the whole world in great drifts of white, and she had to labour through thigh-deep mounds that grunted as she panted, and when she finally reached the hall she was all caked over, and had to shake herself off and stamp on the stairs before she could even go in, and then when she was in it took her half an hour to climb out of all the layers of woollen things that melted and got soggy as she undressed and made the little cloakroom smell even more rancid and doggy; or whether it was too hot a summer night for even Daddy to consider sleeping indoors, and he dragged his mattress onto the verandah because, he claimed, though he was wrong, that not even the mosquitoes could be very energetic tonight. Hoda could hear the music and see the yellow light of the synagogue hall pouring out the open windows and open doors, and people standing and sweating and fanning themselves, and a mother holding her baby so it could look through the door and down the stairs, and the baby blinking, stupefied, at the crazy whirl of dancing people, and Hoda, as she pushed by, asked the mother, “Who got married?” and the mother laughed and replied, “I don’t know,” and shrugged her shoulders after Hoda and jigged her baby up and down as though they were dancing too.
Hoda clomped down the stairs and surveyed the happy, red-faced, sweating crowd with a great, laughing, loving look, and plunged into their midst, dancing and swinging her elbows. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have a partner at first. There was dance enough in her for two. And a lot of the dances were horas and shers and other round dances and square, and they always needed extra people for sets when some old lady started clutching her chest or panting too hard to move. And people could feel in Hoda’s happy, creamy face that this was what she was here for, big young kid, for the dancing, never getting tired though she puffed and gasped, always willing to come in again, for one more round and one round more. Hoda had heard somewhere that fat people are light-footed when it comes to dancing, and she was glad she had found out that she was one of that kind. She could feel herself rising and dropping and pivoting and cavorting, easily, lightly, gracefully. People even remarked on it sometimes, complimenting her on her ease of limb and tirelessness, and Hoda, without false modesty, agreed, which sometimes made them laugh a little. But she didn’t care. She had always known, even when she was a little kid, that she really could dance if she wanted to, her own way, not hanging on to a silly chair and pointing her toesies, and she wanted to now and how!
People began to expect her at weddings, and if she arrived a little late some wag was likely to say to her, “Noo Hoda! You’ve turned up at last. I said to myself, ‘So where’s our Hoda? What kind of wedding will this be without Hoda? You might as well not hire musicians!’” Or someone would yell out a crack like, “You can start the celebration now. Hoda’s here!” Hoda didn’t mind. She would make some crack back and shout, “Let’s go!” in her hoarse, resonant voice, and whirl into the dance. After a while to be expected is almost like being invited.
It was not only the dancing that drew her, eventually, to celebrations in the public halls. With the dancing came other things, came the opportunity to make eyes at her partners, make eyes like the heroines did in books, like that actress she saw on the screen in the moving picture palace that she and Pop the Polack sneaked into that time when the cashier had left, and they saw nearly the whole thing for free. Hoda could make big-eyes and narrow-eyes and up-and-down-eyes and sideways-eyes and one-brow-twitch-eyes and drop-eyes and flutter-lid-eyes and all kinds of other variations while she was dancing, so that her partner never knew what he was going to see the next time she faced him, as though her whole face was dancing too. She didn’t say a word, except with her eyes, when he would begin to slip in special hand movements, touching and squeezing, getting in a quick feel and watching to see if she really meant what she was saying with her eyes. And soon he was finding it necessary, through newly discovered exigencies of the dance, to draw her close more frequently, push in when he should be backing out, and finally to grunt a short, urgent question in her ear, not realizing that his eyes had already been speaking, as eloquent as, if perhaps less versatile, than her own. Hoda responded with a little, low laugh from the glamorous depths of her dream, and, like the heroine of the silent film she had seen, managed, by making with her eyes and hands, though never losing time to the music, to ask her own mutely eloquent question, “How much?”
