E.
Later, toward the end of summer, when the watermelons are ripe, our business does even better. We cut the melons into many slices and sell them for a penny a slice. If God helps out with a delicious melon, we really make out well. If a few slices remain on the stand, we have a good supper, because you can’t keep cut melon for another day or it will turn. I and Mendl and Pinni pray to God to have more watermelon slices left over.
F.
These items have a limited season. After the summer, it’s no more champagne, no more watermelon! But cigarettes have no particular season and are sold all year round. We do a very good business with them. There are all kinds of cigarettes. Some cost a penny apiece, some cost two for a cent. Cigarettes are also something you can sneak and smoke in secret. Then something awful happened. I once sneaked a cigarette, and we were smoking it, Mendl and I — he a puff, I a puff. It would have gone smoothly, but Bruche sniffed out that we were smoking. She told my brother Elyahu, who taught me a lesson about cigarettes I’ll never forget! It wasn’t so much the cigarette that bothered him as the fact that it was Shabbes. That Peysi the cantor’s son would smoke on Shabbes — reason enough to kill him! Even my mother went along with him for something like that. The dog deserves the stick. From that time on we don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. I can’t even stand the smell.
G.
In addition to cigarettes, we also sell Yiddish newspapers and magazines. We don’t do a great business with them, but our friend Pinni has something to read. He doesn’t leave a single newspaper unread. Once he sticks his nose in, it’s hard to tear him away. He’s drawn to the papers, he says, like a magnet. He’s even tempted to write something for the papers himself. He’s already been to East Broadway several times where the papers are printed. What he does there, he doesn’t say. I’m afraid he takes some of his songs along, because when they deliver the stacks of papers, our friend Pinni leaps up and grabs one before anyone else. He leafs through and searches through every page. His hands actually tremble. Then he jumps up and runs off to East Broadway. My brother Elyahu asks him what he has to do on East Broadway. Pinni tells him he’s looking for a business. Elyahu asks him, “Aren’t we doing business?” Pinni answers, “You call this a business? A family of seven people living from one little stand? Some business!” My brother Elyahu is puzzled. “How do you get seven people out of five?” Pinni counts on his fingers. He and his Teibl are two. My brother Elyahu and his Bruche are four. My mother is five. And the two kids make seven. By kids, he means Mendl and me.
H.
My mother is resentful. She sticks up for me and my friend Mendl. She says we earn our keep honestly. Early in the morning, before the stand opens, we deliver the morning papers to our customers. Then we go to school. (Yes, we’re going to school.) And after school we help “attend to the business.” My mother uses those very words. She is now speaking more than half in English. She knows chicken and kitchen, but gets them mixed up. She says, “I’m going into the chicken to salt the kitchen.” We laugh at her, and she laughs too.
XVI
HELLO, OLD PAL!
A.
One early morning Mendl and I are running around delivering the morning newspapers to our customers when suddenly someone claps me on the back and calls out, “Hello, old pal!”
I turn around and see — Motl, Big Motl! It’s the same Motl who dragged around with us in Cracow, Lemberg, Vienna, and Antwerp. If you remember, he taught me how to do a governor in my side and was a ventriloquist. He left with the emigrant gang much earlier than we. While we were still trying to find our way in London Whitechapel, he was doing all right in America. He already had a job in a cleaning store, which he still has. I ask him, “What kind of job is it?” He explains as we walk that it’s a kind of cleaning factory where they clean and press clothing. “How do they do it?” I ask.
“They put a pair of washed, creased pants into a sort of machine between two ironing boards. In a separate little oven the boards are heated up. A person pulls down the boards — you have a pair of pressed pants!”
B.
“And what are your jobs?” Big Motl asks of me and Mendl.
“We deliver newspapers,” I say. “We bring papers to customers before we go to school. And when we come home from school, we help with the business. We have a stand on a street corner, and we’re making a living.”
“Oho!” says Big Motl. “Your English is pretty good. How much do you make a week, two businessmen like yourselves?”
“On average,” I say, “we can take in about a dollar a week and sometimes a dollar and a quarter.”
“Is that all?” says Big Motl scornfully. “I make three dollars a week. What’s the name of this gentleman?” He points to my friend. I tell him his name is Mendl. Motl laughs and says Mendl is a stupid name. What kind of a name is Mendl? “What else should his name be?” I ask. He thinks awhile and says he’d do better to be called Mike, not Mendl. Mike is a much nicer name.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Max,” he says.
“If that’s so, I should be called Max too. My name is also Motl.”
He says, “Sure, you’re called Max,” and he leaves. “Goodbye, Max! Goodbye, Mike!”
We decide to meet at the movies the following Sunday. We exchange addresses and go our own ways.
C.
Sunday after dinner I and my friend Mike, who was not so long ago called Mendl, go to the movies to see the great movie star Charlie Chaplin. My brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni also come along. All the way to the movies they talk about Charlie Chaplin, what a great man he is, how much he gets paid, and the fact that he is a Jew. But these two can never agree on anything — what one says, the other one says the opposite. So my brother Elyahu says, “In what way is Charlie Chaplin so great?” Pinni answers that they don’t pay just anyone a thousand dollars a week. My brother Elyahu asks him how he knows that — did he count his money? Pinni says he read it in the papers. And how does he know Charlie Chaplin is a Jew? Pinni says that’s what they say in the papers. My brother Elyahu asks him further, “How do the papers know? Were they at his bris?”
Pinni says, “The papers know everything. That’s how we know Charlie Chaplin is a mute from birth, and that he can’t write or read. And that his father was a drunkard. And that he himself was once a clown in a circus.”
My brother Elyahu hears him out and says coldly, “And maybe the whole story is a lie?” Pinni becomes enraged and says my brother is a nudnik. I agree with Pinni. Even though my brother Elyahu is my own flesh and blood, he’s an awful nudnik. What’s true is true.
D.
We have just approached the ticket office when we hear a voice: “How do you do, Max? How are you, Mike?”
It’s Big Motl, whose name is no longer Motl but Max.
“Don’t buy any tickets,” says Max. “I’m treating with tickets today,” which means he’s buying our tickets. He pulls a half dollar from his pocket and tosses it to the girl sitting at the little window and asks for three tickets in the gallery.