Closets
Mark Russ
"Do you want to hide in your closet?" Micky asked Sandra, his friend down the block.
"Why would I want to do that?"
"It's dark and quiet and no one will know we're there!"
Sandra shrugged. "OK."
Micky followed Sandra into her bedroom and opened the closet door. It contained only a few dresses, two pairs of identical polyester pants, one in red and one in green, a heavy wool cardigan, and well-worn white Mary Janes on the floor.
"Are these all your clothes?" Micky asked.
"No. I have the rest in the dresser over there."
Micky walked into the shallow closet and sat on the floor. He told Sandra to sit next to him and then he reached up and closed the door. A stale odor of sweat and leather rose from the Mary Janes, but Micky didn't mind. The two six-year-olds sat in silence for a few minutes.
"What happens now?" Sandra whispered.
The question had never occurred to Micky.
"Sometimes when it's really quiet, I can hear ringing in my ears," Micky offered.
"Oh," Sandra said, looking puzzled. "How long do we sit here?"
"As long as we want." Micky could not understand why she was in such a rush to leave. "Now comes the best part.”
"What's that?"
"When you open the door and the cool air hits your face,” Micky said as he pushed the door open. “Feel that?” Micky could tell from Sandra's smile and wide eyes that she thought it was the best part, too.
~ ~ ~
Micky first discovered closets when he was four. Standing outside his New Jersey row house, he’d grabbed a handful of pebbles from a deep crack in the sidewalk to see how far he could throw them and accidentally struck the grill of a parked Chevy wagon directly in front of him. The sound of pebbles on chrome resonated like so many marbles dropped on a tin roof. Certain he had caused terrible damage, he ran into his house, flew up the stairs, and hid in the small closet in his room. He sat there in terror for a very long time until he realized no one was looking for him. The air of his room greeted him like the chill from their Frigidaire.
When Micky wasn’t hiding in tight dark spaces, he liked to sit on the stoop of his house with his favorite possession, a plastic green water pistol. He happened upon the toy while walking down his block one day and finding it near his neighbor’s trash can. It worked great at first, but eventually began to leak. After that, he had to refill the gun as quickly as the water leaked out using a small, dented saucepan. The best he could do was pull the trigger and squeeze a few drops of water mixed with air. On such days he sat there expressionlessly, the useless water pistol in his hand.
"Vat ya doin, Milty?" His father had just come home from work at Roebling Steel, a job Leo would say he got “thanks to the Nazis.”
"Not Milty. Micky."
"OK, Micky."
"Nothin," Micky responded without making eye contact. "My water gun’s broken."
"You shouldn't play mit guns."
Micky focused on his father's deformed hands, the knuckles permanently swollen. These too had been gifts from the Nazis.
Micky refilled his pistol with the little bit of water remaining in the saucepan. His father walked past him, up the steps and into the house, shaking his head in disapproval.
"Esther!" Micky heard his father yell up to his wife, the way he did every night when he came home from work. He heard him trudge up the staircase to the bathroom on the second floor and cough up phlegm.
No one called Micky to the table for dinner. No one had to, so unvarying was the routine. As soon as Leo got home, Esther put out a quarter of a cantaloupe for each diner and returned the remaining quarter to the refrigerator. The appetizer was followed by a klops, a large gray meatball cooked in onions without sauce, or occasionally roasted chicken. Alongside the meat was a baked potato cut in half. A bottle of Heinz ketchup was available for the klops or chicken, and a stick of Fleishmann's margarine for the potato. For dessert, there was kompot, Del Monte's fruit cocktail. Micky saved the red cherry halves for last. No one spoke.
After dinner, Leo lay on the living-room floor in front of the TV, hands behind his head, with his feet perched on the steps to the bedrooms to relieve the swelling in his legs after a long day standing at work. No one disturbed him during the velt nayes, the world news. Focusing on the news allowed the effects of the thinly disguised Jew-hating taunts from his coworkers to recede. The men at the plant especially liked to make fun of his Yiddish accent. At least once a week Esther and Micky heard about "der daych," the sadistic German foreman at Roebling who condoned these regular abuses.
"Relax, Leo. They don't mean nothin'. It's all in good fun,” der daych would say.
Leo never complained or spoke back at the factory. He needed the job. Esther grew silent on hearing these incidents and Micky scampered off to pee.
~ ~ ~
Leo and Esther were sweethearts before the war and survived the camps together. Separated at Ravensbrück, they were sent to the same subcamp, where Esther was put to work forging British currency and Leo built aircraft for the Luftwaffe. Despite the risks of communicating, the two managed to keep tabs on one another. Their eyes met at the morning count. Sometimes they were assigned jobs in adjacent workshops. They pooled their food scraps when they could.
Liberation came and went. Broken people, Leo and Esther were splints for the other. They moved aimlessly from DP camp to DP camp until good fortune finally came their way and they made their way to America in 1949. Trenton, New Jersey.
"Trenton makes, da voild takes," Leo was fond of saying. “That’s vat it says on da bridge when you drive in. Such a city. Such a country!”
It was time to start a family because the family they had was mostly gone. They managed one child, a son, Milton. The boy was named for Leo's father Mendl, who was thought to have been gassed in Sobibor along with his mother Rokhl, though no one knew for sure. Esther's sister Khave, the only other survivor in the family, had arrived in Vineland, New Jersey with her husband a year before. Chicken farmers.
"Milton is a fine American name," Khave advised the couple before the bris. But after a few years of merciless taunting from the neighborhood’s Billys and Sallys and Pennys and Johns, Milton told everyone his name was Micky.
Leo and Esther were as adept at parenting as they were at naming their son. Esther couldn’t hold the child comfortably; she kept adjusting the position of her arms, never finding the sweet spot. The baby’s helplessness frightened her. When he cried and could not be comforted, she did not know what to do.
Milton drank from his baby bottle well into his third year. He continued this way even when the last rubber nipple cracked, and it began to leak milk down the fat folds of his neck.
“Again mit der bottle?” Leo reprimanded Esther when he got home from work. His son was reclining in front of the Philco black and white, watching Looney Tunes and sucking on his milk.
"He's so stubborn, a real akshn," she said. Esther had tried to take the bottle from Milton on many occasions. Each time he would desperately carry on, kicking and screaming, like a tenacious calf unwilling to give up the teat.
"I…want…my…bottle! I…want…my…bottle!" This tirade went on in an incessant, sing-song whine, so loud the neighbors could hear. The struggle often ended when he crawled on all fours to his mother's nylon stockinged feet. He rubbed them with his hands, then caressed them with his face and nose, inhaling whatever comfort he could, sobbing as he begged. Esther gave in and that was that.
Leo glanced at Esther and saw her defeated expression.
"Don't vorry, he von't haf a baby bottle under da khupa."
After dinner, Leo would take over the TV watching, focusing on the world news with Walter Cronkite. He was amused that the anchor’s surname meant “sickness” in Yiddish. After the sign-off, Leo would do his own take. "And dat's da vay it is," he’d say.
~ ~ ~
"Mommy?" asked Micky the day before school was to start. They were in the kitchen; his mother was ironing boxer shorts.
"Vat is it?"
"I'm afraid to go to first grade." He looked at his scuffed shoes, then at her bare stockinged feet.
"Dare’s not’n to be afraid of. It's just school. You’ll get used to it."
He hadn’t gotten used to kindergarten. He had the teacher with the reputation of locking children in closets. One day, too afraid to ask his teacher for permission to use the boys’ room, he peed through his husky corduroys. "Come here," the teacher beckoned when she saw his wet crotch. Micky’s eyes fixed on the coat closet. But no: the teacher reached into the closet for an oil cloth, an item meant to protect tabletops from kindergarten hazards, and wrapped it around his waist. He was humiliated. And he didn’t make a single friend all year. Once, during recess, when he was about to drink from the communal water fountain in the schoolyard, Micky heard a voice from the line of kids behind him waiting to drink.
“Hey kid, your mother’s callin’!”
Micky pirouetted. She wasn’t there. The prankster slashed ahead and greedily gulped water from the fountain. Micky’s face flushed. He looked for his mother again, then back to the fountain. The spouting water could not quench his thirst.
"How can I go to first grade?” Micky asked his mother. “I don't know anything!"
Esther shook her head. “Dat’s vie you go to school.”
“I don’t know how to read,” Micky pleaded. All he’d done in kindergarten was finger paint.
His mother put down her ironing. “Deddy and I learnt to read in night school and ve didn't even speak English,” she replied. She returned to the boxers on the ironing board in front of her, and Micky went out to the stoop, his water pistol and saucepan in hand, trying to squeeze every drop of water he could from his broken gun.
~ ~ ~
Esther, unaware that mothers accompanied their children to school on their first day, sent Micky off to first grade on his own. He approached the school building and saw kids with mothers and even a few with both mothers and fathers. His heart beat faster as he navigated the forest of parents holding their children’s hands and engaging in playful conversations. Pinballing into adults and children, not knowing where to go or how to be, made him dizzy. Eventually, the parents left, and the children were asked to form lines according to the grade they were entering. He took a breath, the first, he thought, in a long time.
Micky was assigned to Miss Temple’s class. “She’s so young,” he heard a girl sitting next to him say. “I heard she’s nice,” another girl twittered. Micky noticed that she smiled a lot, even when she spoke. He loved it when Miss Temple gave him one-on-one time at his desk. She crouched low so the edge of her dress just touched the floor and cocked her head toward his, helping him sound out the words.
“'Let’s go for a walk,” said Alice,’ his teacher read by his side. “Now you read the next line."
“’Can…Spot…come…too?’” Micky read.
“Excellent, Micky! Your reading is really coming along.” When Miss Temple said “coming along,” she meant it could be better. But Micky didn’t care much what she said. The smell of her hair, just inches from his face, was exhilarating.
His nervousness about school quickly dissipated. In no time he could read like the other kids. He started hanging out with a group of boys at recess, the smarter boys in the class, and developed a reputation for being good at dodgeball. One evening he showed his spelling test to his mother.
"Another A. Very nice, Milton." Micky's mother called him Milton on such occasions.
"I'm going to be a 'Great Jewish Leader' when I grow up," Micky blurted out. He got this idea while staring at the Goldberg Funeral Home calendar. November had a picture of Moses on Mount Sinai holding the Ten Commandments, brilliant light shooting from his head toward the heavens.
"Very nice, Milton." A barely perceptible smile crossed her lips, but then quickly disappeared.
As Micky gained friends, he learned more about his classmates and their families.
“When are we going to buy a car?” Micky asked his father.
“Vat? Da bus isn’t good enough for you?”
Micky carried on and would not let it go just as he had not let go of his baby bottle.
“Do you know vat a car costs?”
Micky had no idea.
Truly, Micky’s family did not need a car. They rarely went anywhere. He heard boys at school talk about driving to a restaurant to eat. He asked if they could do that, too.
“My food isn’t good enough for you?” his mother asked.
“Do you know vat ve ate in da cemps? Shtayner!” Leo shouted. Micky’s Yiddish was good enough to understand they ate rocks. And that was the end of any talk of cars or driving to restaurants.
~ ~ ~
The next afternoon, Micky’s mother’s face turned ashen as she placed the handset onto the receiver of the black wall phone. “Your fadder hed a heart attack at voik today.” She collapsed into a kitchen chair and broke down sobbing.
Micky started crying too. He didn’t know what a heart attack was, but it sounded like a very bad thing. He ran to his mother and threw his arms around her. She didn’t stop crying, and she didn’t hug him back. Standing by her chair, Micky caressed her shoulder. They remained this way for a very long time until his mother finally gathered herself and stood up from her chair.
“I’ll make you dinner den I’ll go to da hospital,” she said, wiping her tears. “You’ll stay mit Sandra and her mother.”
“But…”
“Da hospital doesn’t let children visit.”
The dinner routine and hospital visits continued for a week or so until his father came home. Micky learned an unfamiliar word, convalescence. It meant his father had to stay in bed for months and needed complete rest. He was only allowed out of bed to use the bathroom. Everything else would strain the heart that had been attacked.
“Stop benging mit da ball!” his mother would yell. “It makes such a recket! You’ll disturb your fadder!” To Micky’s ear, “disturb” from his mother was like Miss Temple’s “coming along.” It meant Micky was likely killing him. Micky had always assumed his father was safe from attack since the Nazis had gone, but now he understood that he and the Nazis had some things in common.
For months, Micky lived with the burden of thinking he had contributed to his father's condition. After all, the attack happened the week after Micky had brought up the car and the restaurants. He assuaged his guilt by waiting on his father hand and foot. He brought him his meals. He brought him his Jewish Daily Forward. He helped change the bed linens. Knowing his father could not go down the stairs to watch the world news, Micky would watch Walter Cronkite in his place and report back to his father every evening.
“Such a voild,” his father would say. “Tomorrow breng me betta news.“
Micky had not said a word about his father’s situation to Miss Temple or anyone at school. When Miss Temple gave the class an assignment to make a drawing of a chore they did at home, Micky drew his father in bed while he stood at the foot, a tray in his hands.
“Micky, what's that you've drawn?” Miss Temple asked.
“I bring my father food and stuff because he can't do it for himself since his heart…” Micky started to well up.
Miss Temple put her arm around Micky and walked him to the hallway. She told him what a heart attack was. She said it was probably because his father smoked too much and had had a hard life. When they re-entered the classroom, she hung his drawing on the bulletin board next to all the others. “It is clear that Micky loves his father very much to take care of him that way,” she said to the class. Micky wiped his tears.
The assignment turned out to be preparation for asking the students to take on chores in the classroom. Miss Temple called it “good citizenship.” The list of jobs was long and included chalkboard eraser clapper, plant waterer, goldfish feeder, bulletin-board manager, fire-drill officer, show-and-tell master-of-ceremonies, pretzel-stick merchant, size-order monitor, and sashes boy. Micky’s ears perked at the announcement of the last job.
Sashes were a special kind of closet where the students hung their coats, jackets, sweaters, and anything else they brought with them to school. They were the mother of all closets, consisting of floor-to-ceiling overlapping panels that travelled in heavy-duty grooved runners. They spanned the length of the classroom, and considerable force was needed to push the panels opened and closed. This, Micky thought, was the perfect job for him. He boldly raised his hand to volunteer.
"Micky, you would like to be the sashes boy?" Miss Temple asked.
Suddenly, a second hand shot up.
"Timmy, you are also volunteering for this job?"
Timmy was a tall, awkward Irish boy with a freckled baby face, red hair, and a reputation as a troublemaker. Miss Temple decided the sashes could use the combined strength of the two, so both he and Timmy were appointed sashes boys.
Timmy's interest in being a sashes boy soon became clear. At the end of each day, Timmy would shove Micky into the closet, close the sashes, hold them closed, and let out a high-pitched giggle. Micky played along and feigned distress. After a few minutes Timmy would open the sashes to find Micky quietly sitting on the floor. Timmy would leave with a stupid, self-satisfied smile on this face.
Until one day when the prank became serious.
"Hey Micky. Let's stay in school after everyone else is gone. We can run around the halls, look in our teachers' desks, and do whatever we want. Whaddaya say?"
Micky was tempted but wary.
"Are you chicken?"
"No."
"This is the plan. When the dismissal bell rings, make sure you and me are at the end of the line. Instead of leaving the room, we run for the sashes and hide."
"OK." Micky was still nervous, but it sounded simple enough.
~ ~ ~
"BRINGGGGG!" The bell sounded and off they went. They waited a while in the sashes until the coast was clear.
“Let’s go,” Timmy whispered and opened the sashes. He shoved Micky in and abruptly shut the panels. Micky’s head hit the back wall.
Despite the headache, Micky sat calmly on the closet floor as usual, occasionally demanding his release. But five minutes, ten, fifteen passed, and Timmy had not let him out. The closet was not airtight, but it was stifling and hot. The ringing in Micky’s ears became intense. He banged on the panel. "Come on, Timmy. Let me out!" he yelled. "This isn't funny anymore!" Ten bangs, twenty bangs. No response.
Micky tried with all his strength to force the sashes open, but they would not budge. He tried kicking the panel open but could not get leverage to generate enough force. He felt around the dark closet for anything he might use to help him get out. Nothing. But in the very corner of the closet his hand hit upon a shoe, then its mate. They were high heels, probably Miss Temple’s. She sometimes wore shoes like that when parents or the principal came to visit. Otherwise, she wore her usual flats. He held one shoe in his hand, brought it to his nose, and sniffed the insole. Then he did the same with the other. The odor of leather and foot was soothing. The ringing in his ears stopped.
It was time to get out, for real. Micky shifted his body so he could press his back against the plaster wall and kicked the sash panel with both feet. After five such blows, the bottom of the panel exploded out of its runner, and he was free.
Timmy was standing there, the moonlight from the tall windows illuminating his rageful glare.
"Look what you did, you Jew-boy jerk!"
"What I did? You're the jerk!" Micky retorted. Micky had never been called a Jew-boy. The words triggered a fury he had never experienced. "Say you're sorry!"
It was clear Timmy had no such intention. The stupid smile returned to his lips.
Micky jumped the bigger boy and threw him to the ground. He punched him in the stomach over and over again, and in the face for good measure. It was only when Timmy began to beg for mercy that he stopped. As soon as he did, Timmy jumped up and ran from the classroom. Micky, exhausted, returned to the closet and lay on the floor, cradling Miss Temple's shoes in his arms.
~ ~ ~
Leo was home in bed as usual. Now Esther was working to keep the family afloat. Good with her hands, she’d found a job as a saleswoman at Fishman's Jewelers on State Street and quickly learned to do simple watch and jewelry repairs. Still, her salary was only half of what Leo had earned.
“I hev to get back to Roebling,” Leo said when she came home from work and checked on him. “We can’t survive on just your pay.”
"You need to rest,” she reminded him. “And after all, ve got through much voise."
"Yes, but dat vas before ve had Milton.”
She looked around. "Vere is Milton? Maybe at Sandra’s?" She prepared dinner, as she always did, job or no job. Thirty minutes went by and still no Milton. "That’s funny,” she told Leo. “Milton is alvays home by dinnertime. I’ll go get him." But when she buzzed Sandra’s apartment at the building on the corner, Sandra’s mother said she hadn’t seen him. And he wasn’t outside on the street or on anyone’s stoop. “Maybe the school will know someting?” she asked Leo. She turned off the oven, leaving the mostly cooked chicken inside, walked the six blocks to the school, and rang the bell. An elderly Black man with gray hair and matching beard came to the door.
"Help ya, Ma’am?"
"Tank you. I am looking for my son, Milton. He is in Miss Temple's class. He never came home."
"The children left hours ago. And the teachers too. The kids call me Pops. I’m the custodian."
"Can ve look around? Maybe someting heppened to him."
The two walked up and down halls, stopping in the gym and auditorium, calling out his name.
"Let’s try his classroom,” the custodian said. He led Esther up a flight of steps to Miss Temple's room, unlocked the door, and ushered Esther in. At first, when he turned on the lights, nothing seemed amiss. Then he saw a boy's legs protruding from inside the sashes.
"He's in here!” he said.
The voices woke Micky. He threw the shoes he’d been cradling in his hand to the corner of the closet and sat up, legs crossed, squinting because of the brightness of the light in the classroom.
"Mom?"
"Vat heppened to you?"
Micky proceeded to tell his mother and the custodian the whole story—except the part about what he did to Timmy.
Esther turned to the custodian. "Tank you Mr. Pops…I don't know vat ve vould have done if not for you. Milton, let's go home and tell your fadder you’re ok."
Micky, still sitting on the floor of the closet, got up slowly and followed his mother out of the classroom.
"Mommy, wait. I forgot to tell you something. Timmy called me a Jew-boy jerk. I made his nose bleed.”
Esther’s shoulders slumped. “Good.”
“What did he mean?”
“He doesn’t like Jews.”
“Why?”
Esther stopped. Micky couldn’t see her face but heard her whimper. This was the second time he had seen his mother cry. He clasped her hand in his. The calendar image of Moses and the Ten Commandments flashed through his head.
Esther released her hand and wiped her tears with a handkerchief she pulled from her bag. "Your dinner will be cold." She continued walking down the hall.
"Thanks for coming to get me, Mom."
"Dat's vat mudders do."
Like ironing and making klops and buying husky pants, Micky thought.
Micky followed, head bowed, several steps behind.
"And dat's da vay it is," Micky muttered to himself as they left the building. The cool night air rushed over his face.
Mark Russ
"Do you want to hide in your closet?" Micky asked Sandra, his friend down the block.
"Why would I want to do that?"
"It's dark and quiet and no one will know we're there!"
Sandra shrugged. "OK."
Micky followed Sandra into her bedroom and opened the closet door. It contained only a few dresses, two pairs of identical polyester pants, one in red and one in green, a heavy wool cardigan, and well-worn white Mary Janes on the floor.
"Are these all your clothes?" Micky asked.
"No. I have the rest in the dresser over there."
Micky walked into the shallow closet and sat on the floor. He told Sandra to sit next to him and then he reached up and closed the door. A stale odor of sweat and leather rose from the Mary Janes, but Micky didn't mind. The two six-year-olds sat in silence for a few minutes.
"What happens now?" Sandra whispered.
The question had never occurred to Micky.
"Sometimes when it's really quiet, I can hear ringing in my ears," Micky offered.
"Oh," Sandra said, looking puzzled. "How long do we sit here?"
"As long as we want." Micky could not understand why she was in such a rush to leave. "Now comes the best part.”
"What's that?"
"When you open the door and the cool air hits your face,” Micky said as he pushed the door open. “Feel that?” Micky could tell from Sandra's smile and wide eyes that she thought it was the best part, too.
~ ~ ~
Micky first discovered closets when he was four. Standing outside his New Jersey row house, he’d grabbed a handful of pebbles from a deep crack in the sidewalk to see how far he could throw them and accidentally struck the grill of a parked Chevy wagon directly in front of him. The sound of pebbles on chrome resonated like so many marbles dropped on a tin roof. Certain he had caused terrible damage, he ran into his house, flew up the stairs, and hid in the small closet in his room. He sat there in terror for a very long time until he realized no one was looking for him. The air of his room greeted him like the chill from their Frigidaire.
When Micky wasn’t hiding in tight dark spaces, he liked to sit on the stoop of his house with his favorite possession, a plastic green water pistol. He happened upon the toy while walking down his block one day and finding it near his neighbor’s trash can. It worked great at first, but eventually began to leak. After that, he had to refill the gun as quickly as the water leaked out using a small, dented saucepan. The best he could do was pull the trigger and squeeze a few drops of water mixed with air. On such days he sat there expressionlessly, the useless water pistol in his hand.
"Vat ya doin, Milty?" His father had just come home from work at Roebling Steel, a job Leo would say he got “thanks to the Nazis.”
"Not Milty. Micky."
"OK, Micky."
"Nothin," Micky responded without making eye contact. "My water gun’s broken."
"You shouldn't play mit guns."
Micky focused on his father's deformed hands, the knuckles permanently swollen. These too had been gifts from the Nazis.
Micky refilled his pistol with the little bit of water remaining in the saucepan. His father walked past him, up the steps and into the house, shaking his head in disapproval.
"Esther!" Micky heard his father yell up to his wife, the way he did every night when he came home from work. He heard him trudge up the staircase to the bathroom on the second floor and cough up phlegm.
No one called Micky to the table for dinner. No one had to, so unvarying was the routine. As soon as Leo got home, Esther put out a quarter of a cantaloupe for each diner and returned the remaining quarter to the refrigerator. The appetizer was followed by a klops, a large gray meatball cooked in onions without sauce, or occasionally roasted chicken. Alongside the meat was a baked potato cut in half. A bottle of Heinz ketchup was available for the klops or chicken, and a stick of Fleishmann's margarine for the potato. For dessert, there was kompot, Del Monte's fruit cocktail. Micky saved the red cherry halves for last. No one spoke.
After dinner, Leo lay on the living-room floor in front of the TV, hands behind his head, with his feet perched on the steps to the bedrooms to relieve the swelling in his legs after a long day standing at work. No one disturbed him during the velt nayes, the world news. Focusing on the news allowed the effects of the thinly disguised Jew-hating taunts from his coworkers to recede. The men at the plant especially liked to make fun of his Yiddish accent. At least once a week Esther and Micky heard about "der daych," the sadistic German foreman at Roebling who condoned these regular abuses.
"Relax, Leo. They don't mean nothin'. It's all in good fun,” der daych would say.
Leo never complained or spoke back at the factory. He needed the job. Esther grew silent on hearing these incidents and Micky scampered off to pee.
~ ~ ~
Leo and Esther were sweethearts before the war and survived the camps together. Separated at Ravensbrück, they were sent to the same subcamp, where Esther was put to work forging British currency and Leo built aircraft for the Luftwaffe. Despite the risks of communicating, the two managed to keep tabs on one another. Their eyes met at the morning count. Sometimes they were assigned jobs in adjacent workshops. They pooled their food scraps when they could.
Liberation came and went. Broken people, Leo and Esther were splints for the other. They moved aimlessly from DP camp to DP camp until good fortune finally came their way and they made their way to America in 1949. Trenton, New Jersey.
"Trenton makes, da voild takes," Leo was fond of saying. “That’s vat it says on da bridge when you drive in. Such a city. Such a country!”
It was time to start a family because the family they had was mostly gone. They managed one child, a son, Milton. The boy was named for Leo's father Mendl, who was thought to have been gassed in Sobibor along with his mother Rokhl, though no one knew for sure. Esther's sister Khave, the only other survivor in the family, had arrived in Vineland, New Jersey with her husband a year before. Chicken farmers.
"Milton is a fine American name," Khave advised the couple before the bris. But after a few years of merciless taunting from the neighborhood’s Billys and Sallys and Pennys and Johns, Milton told everyone his name was Micky.
Leo and Esther were as adept at parenting as they were at naming their son. Esther couldn’t hold the child comfortably; she kept adjusting the position of her arms, never finding the sweet spot. The baby’s helplessness frightened her. When he cried and could not be comforted, she did not know what to do.
Milton drank from his baby bottle well into his third year. He continued this way even when the last rubber nipple cracked, and it began to leak milk down the fat folds of his neck.
“Again mit der bottle?” Leo reprimanded Esther when he got home from work. His son was reclining in front of the Philco black and white, watching Looney Tunes and sucking on his milk.
"He's so stubborn, a real akshn," she said. Esther had tried to take the bottle from Milton on many occasions. Each time he would desperately carry on, kicking and screaming, like a tenacious calf unwilling to give up the teat.
"I…want…my…bottle! I…want…my…bottle!" This tirade went on in an incessant, sing-song whine, so loud the neighbors could hear. The struggle often ended when he crawled on all fours to his mother's nylon stockinged feet. He rubbed them with his hands, then caressed them with his face and nose, inhaling whatever comfort he could, sobbing as he begged. Esther gave in and that was that.
Leo glanced at Esther and saw her defeated expression.
"Don't vorry, he von't haf a baby bottle under da khupa."
After dinner, Leo would take over the TV watching, focusing on the world news with Walter Cronkite. He was amused that the anchor’s surname meant “sickness” in Yiddish. After the sign-off, Leo would do his own take. "And dat's da vay it is," he’d say.
~ ~ ~
"Mommy?" asked Micky the day before school was to start. They were in the kitchen; his mother was ironing boxer shorts.
"Vat is it?"
"I'm afraid to go to first grade." He looked at his scuffed shoes, then at her bare stockinged feet.
"Dare’s not’n to be afraid of. It's just school. You’ll get used to it."
He hadn’t gotten used to kindergarten. He had the teacher with the reputation of locking children in closets. One day, too afraid to ask his teacher for permission to use the boys’ room, he peed through his husky corduroys. "Come here," the teacher beckoned when she saw his wet crotch. Micky’s eyes fixed on the coat closet. But no: the teacher reached into the closet for an oil cloth, an item meant to protect tabletops from kindergarten hazards, and wrapped it around his waist. He was humiliated. And he didn’t make a single friend all year. Once, during recess, when he was about to drink from the communal water fountain in the schoolyard, Micky heard a voice from the line of kids behind him waiting to drink.
“Hey kid, your mother’s callin’!”
Micky pirouetted. She wasn’t there. The prankster slashed ahead and greedily gulped water from the fountain. Micky’s face flushed. He looked for his mother again, then back to the fountain. The spouting water could not quench his thirst.
"How can I go to first grade?” Micky asked his mother. “I don't know anything!"
Esther shook her head. “Dat’s vie you go to school.”
“I don’t know how to read,” Micky pleaded. All he’d done in kindergarten was finger paint.
His mother put down her ironing. “Deddy and I learnt to read in night school and ve didn't even speak English,” she replied. She returned to the boxers on the ironing board in front of her, and Micky went out to the stoop, his water pistol and saucepan in hand, trying to squeeze every drop of water he could from his broken gun.
~ ~ ~
Esther, unaware that mothers accompanied their children to school on their first day, sent Micky off to first grade on his own. He approached the school building and saw kids with mothers and even a few with both mothers and fathers. His heart beat faster as he navigated the forest of parents holding their children’s hands and engaging in playful conversations. Pinballing into adults and children, not knowing where to go or how to be, made him dizzy. Eventually, the parents left, and the children were asked to form lines according to the grade they were entering. He took a breath, the first, he thought, in a long time.
Micky was assigned to Miss Temple’s class. “She’s so young,” he heard a girl sitting next to him say. “I heard she’s nice,” another girl twittered. Micky noticed that she smiled a lot, even when she spoke. He loved it when Miss Temple gave him one-on-one time at his desk. She crouched low so the edge of her dress just touched the floor and cocked her head toward his, helping him sound out the words.
“'Let’s go for a walk,” said Alice,’ his teacher read by his side. “Now you read the next line."
“’Can…Spot…come…too?’” Micky read.
“Excellent, Micky! Your reading is really coming along.” When Miss Temple said “coming along,” she meant it could be better. But Micky didn’t care much what she said. The smell of her hair, just inches from his face, was exhilarating.
His nervousness about school quickly dissipated. In no time he could read like the other kids. He started hanging out with a group of boys at recess, the smarter boys in the class, and developed a reputation for being good at dodgeball. One evening he showed his spelling test to his mother.
"Another A. Very nice, Milton." Micky's mother called him Milton on such occasions.
"I'm going to be a 'Great Jewish Leader' when I grow up," Micky blurted out. He got this idea while staring at the Goldberg Funeral Home calendar. November had a picture of Moses on Mount Sinai holding the Ten Commandments, brilliant light shooting from his head toward the heavens.
"Very nice, Milton." A barely perceptible smile crossed her lips, but then quickly disappeared.
As Micky gained friends, he learned more about his classmates and their families.
“When are we going to buy a car?” Micky asked his father.
“Vat? Da bus isn’t good enough for you?”
Micky carried on and would not let it go just as he had not let go of his baby bottle.
“Do you know vat a car costs?”
Micky had no idea.
Truly, Micky’s family did not need a car. They rarely went anywhere. He heard boys at school talk about driving to a restaurant to eat. He asked if they could do that, too.
“My food isn’t good enough for you?” his mother asked.
“Do you know vat ve ate in da cemps? Shtayner!” Leo shouted. Micky’s Yiddish was good enough to understand they ate rocks. And that was the end of any talk of cars or driving to restaurants.
~ ~ ~
The next afternoon, Micky’s mother’s face turned ashen as she placed the handset onto the receiver of the black wall phone. “Your fadder hed a heart attack at voik today.” She collapsed into a kitchen chair and broke down sobbing.
Micky started crying too. He didn’t know what a heart attack was, but it sounded like a very bad thing. He ran to his mother and threw his arms around her. She didn’t stop crying, and she didn’t hug him back. Standing by her chair, Micky caressed her shoulder. They remained this way for a very long time until his mother finally gathered herself and stood up from her chair.
“I’ll make you dinner den I’ll go to da hospital,” she said, wiping her tears. “You’ll stay mit Sandra and her mother.”
“But…”
“Da hospital doesn’t let children visit.”
The dinner routine and hospital visits continued for a week or so until his father came home. Micky learned an unfamiliar word, convalescence. It meant his father had to stay in bed for months and needed complete rest. He was only allowed out of bed to use the bathroom. Everything else would strain the heart that had been attacked.
“Stop benging mit da ball!” his mother would yell. “It makes such a recket! You’ll disturb your fadder!” To Micky’s ear, “disturb” from his mother was like Miss Temple’s “coming along.” It meant Micky was likely killing him. Micky had always assumed his father was safe from attack since the Nazis had gone, but now he understood that he and the Nazis had some things in common.
For months, Micky lived with the burden of thinking he had contributed to his father's condition. After all, the attack happened the week after Micky had brought up the car and the restaurants. He assuaged his guilt by waiting on his father hand and foot. He brought him his meals. He brought him his Jewish Daily Forward. He helped change the bed linens. Knowing his father could not go down the stairs to watch the world news, Micky would watch Walter Cronkite in his place and report back to his father every evening.
“Such a voild,” his father would say. “Tomorrow breng me betta news.“
Micky had not said a word about his father’s situation to Miss Temple or anyone at school. When Miss Temple gave the class an assignment to make a drawing of a chore they did at home, Micky drew his father in bed while he stood at the foot, a tray in his hands.
“Micky, what's that you've drawn?” Miss Temple asked.
“I bring my father food and stuff because he can't do it for himself since his heart…” Micky started to well up.
Miss Temple put her arm around Micky and walked him to the hallway. She told him what a heart attack was. She said it was probably because his father smoked too much and had had a hard life. When they re-entered the classroom, she hung his drawing on the bulletin board next to all the others. “It is clear that Micky loves his father very much to take care of him that way,” she said to the class. Micky wiped his tears.
The assignment turned out to be preparation for asking the students to take on chores in the classroom. Miss Temple called it “good citizenship.” The list of jobs was long and included chalkboard eraser clapper, plant waterer, goldfish feeder, bulletin-board manager, fire-drill officer, show-and-tell master-of-ceremonies, pretzel-stick merchant, size-order monitor, and sashes boy. Micky’s ears perked at the announcement of the last job.
Sashes were a special kind of closet where the students hung their coats, jackets, sweaters, and anything else they brought with them to school. They were the mother of all closets, consisting of floor-to-ceiling overlapping panels that travelled in heavy-duty grooved runners. They spanned the length of the classroom, and considerable force was needed to push the panels opened and closed. This, Micky thought, was the perfect job for him. He boldly raised his hand to volunteer.
"Micky, you would like to be the sashes boy?" Miss Temple asked.
Suddenly, a second hand shot up.
"Timmy, you are also volunteering for this job?"
Timmy was a tall, awkward Irish boy with a freckled baby face, red hair, and a reputation as a troublemaker. Miss Temple decided the sashes could use the combined strength of the two, so both he and Timmy were appointed sashes boys.
Timmy's interest in being a sashes boy soon became clear. At the end of each day, Timmy would shove Micky into the closet, close the sashes, hold them closed, and let out a high-pitched giggle. Micky played along and feigned distress. After a few minutes Timmy would open the sashes to find Micky quietly sitting on the floor. Timmy would leave with a stupid, self-satisfied smile on this face.
Until one day when the prank became serious.
"Hey Micky. Let's stay in school after everyone else is gone. We can run around the halls, look in our teachers' desks, and do whatever we want. Whaddaya say?"
Micky was tempted but wary.
"Are you chicken?"
"No."
"This is the plan. When the dismissal bell rings, make sure you and me are at the end of the line. Instead of leaving the room, we run for the sashes and hide."
"OK." Micky was still nervous, but it sounded simple enough.
~ ~ ~
"BRINGGGGG!" The bell sounded and off they went. They waited a while in the sashes until the coast was clear.
“Let’s go,” Timmy whispered and opened the sashes. He shoved Micky in and abruptly shut the panels. Micky’s head hit the back wall.
Despite the headache, Micky sat calmly on the closet floor as usual, occasionally demanding his release. But five minutes, ten, fifteen passed, and Timmy had not let him out. The closet was not airtight, but it was stifling and hot. The ringing in Micky’s ears became intense. He banged on the panel. "Come on, Timmy. Let me out!" he yelled. "This isn't funny anymore!" Ten bangs, twenty bangs. No response.
Micky tried with all his strength to force the sashes open, but they would not budge. He tried kicking the panel open but could not get leverage to generate enough force. He felt around the dark closet for anything he might use to help him get out. Nothing. But in the very corner of the closet his hand hit upon a shoe, then its mate. They were high heels, probably Miss Temple’s. She sometimes wore shoes like that when parents or the principal came to visit. Otherwise, she wore her usual flats. He held one shoe in his hand, brought it to his nose, and sniffed the insole. Then he did the same with the other. The odor of leather and foot was soothing. The ringing in his ears stopped.
It was time to get out, for real. Micky shifted his body so he could press his back against the plaster wall and kicked the sash panel with both feet. After five such blows, the bottom of the panel exploded out of its runner, and he was free.
Timmy was standing there, the moonlight from the tall windows illuminating his rageful glare.
"Look what you did, you Jew-boy jerk!"
"What I did? You're the jerk!" Micky retorted. Micky had never been called a Jew-boy. The words triggered a fury he had never experienced. "Say you're sorry!"
It was clear Timmy had no such intention. The stupid smile returned to his lips.
Micky jumped the bigger boy and threw him to the ground. He punched him in the stomach over and over again, and in the face for good measure. It was only when Timmy began to beg for mercy that he stopped. As soon as he did, Timmy jumped up and ran from the classroom. Micky, exhausted, returned to the closet and lay on the floor, cradling Miss Temple's shoes in his arms.
~ ~ ~
Leo was home in bed as usual. Now Esther was working to keep the family afloat. Good with her hands, she’d found a job as a saleswoman at Fishman's Jewelers on State Street and quickly learned to do simple watch and jewelry repairs. Still, her salary was only half of what Leo had earned.
“I hev to get back to Roebling,” Leo said when she came home from work and checked on him. “We can’t survive on just your pay.”
"You need to rest,” she reminded him. “And after all, ve got through much voise."
"Yes, but dat vas before ve had Milton.”
She looked around. "Vere is Milton? Maybe at Sandra’s?" She prepared dinner, as she always did, job or no job. Thirty minutes went by and still no Milton. "That’s funny,” she told Leo. “Milton is alvays home by dinnertime. I’ll go get him." But when she buzzed Sandra’s apartment at the building on the corner, Sandra’s mother said she hadn’t seen him. And he wasn’t outside on the street or on anyone’s stoop. “Maybe the school will know someting?” she asked Leo. She turned off the oven, leaving the mostly cooked chicken inside, walked the six blocks to the school, and rang the bell. An elderly Black man with gray hair and matching beard came to the door.
"Help ya, Ma’am?"
"Tank you. I am looking for my son, Milton. He is in Miss Temple's class. He never came home."
"The children left hours ago. And the teachers too. The kids call me Pops. I’m the custodian."
"Can ve look around? Maybe someting heppened to him."
The two walked up and down halls, stopping in the gym and auditorium, calling out his name.
"Let’s try his classroom,” the custodian said. He led Esther up a flight of steps to Miss Temple's room, unlocked the door, and ushered Esther in. At first, when he turned on the lights, nothing seemed amiss. Then he saw a boy's legs protruding from inside the sashes.
"He's in here!” he said.
The voices woke Micky. He threw the shoes he’d been cradling in his hand to the corner of the closet and sat up, legs crossed, squinting because of the brightness of the light in the classroom.
"Mom?"
"Vat heppened to you?"
Micky proceeded to tell his mother and the custodian the whole story—except the part about what he did to Timmy.
Esther turned to the custodian. "Tank you Mr. Pops…I don't know vat ve vould have done if not for you. Milton, let's go home and tell your fadder you’re ok."
Micky, still sitting on the floor of the closet, got up slowly and followed his mother out of the classroom.
"Mommy, wait. I forgot to tell you something. Timmy called me a Jew-boy jerk. I made his nose bleed.”
Esther’s shoulders slumped. “Good.”
“What did he mean?”
“He doesn’t like Jews.”
“Why?”
Esther stopped. Micky couldn’t see her face but heard her whimper. This was the second time he had seen his mother cry. He clasped her hand in his. The calendar image of Moses and the Ten Commandments flashed through his head.
Esther released her hand and wiped her tears with a handkerchief she pulled from her bag. "Your dinner will be cold." She continued walking down the hall.
"Thanks for coming to get me, Mom."
"Dat's vat mudders do."
Like ironing and making klops and buying husky pants, Micky thought.
Micky followed, head bowed, several steps behind.
"And dat's da vay it is," Micky muttered to himself as they left the building. The cool night air rushed over his face.
