Before we left the house, Betty took me aside and asked if Mameh had explained to Celia what happens on the wedding night.
I said, “Probably not.”
Betty groaned. “That isn’t good. I’m telling you, Addie, our Celia is not a strong person. We have to keep an eye on her, you and me.”
But now that Celia was leaving, I realized how much she had watched over me and had put herself between my mother and me. It was going to be awful without her.
—
Celia took Papa’s arm as we walked around the corner to the little storefront synagogue, where Levine and his sons were waiting by the door. The boys looked miserable in new shoes and starched shirts and the groom was blinking as if he had something in his eye.
“Where’s your family?” Mameh said.
Levine only had a few second cousins in America, but their children had gotten mumps, so the whole wedding party was just the eight of us, including his boys.
The shul was in a store where they used to sell fish, and since we were there in August and it was hot, the smell came back. I had only been there for High Holiday services, when it was crowded—especially in the back, where the women sat. But that day you could hear an echo, and it was so dark it took a minute for my eyes to see the old men standing next to the table with the food.
Papa said hello to each of them and asked about their wives and children. He prayed with these men before work every morning, so it was like his club. Mameh didn’t want them at the wedding—she called them schnorrers—moochers. But I was glad they were there. I thought they made things a little more cheerful.
The rabbi came running in and apologized for being late. He had a long white beard with yellow tobacco stains around his mouth, but he had young eyes and clapped Papa and Levine on the back and said “Mazel tov” like he meant it. He picked four men to hold the chuppah poles and called for Levine and Celia to stand with him under my father’s prayer shawl, which was the canopy.
The rabbi sang the blessings, Levine put a ring on Celia’s finger, and they sipped from a cup of wine. After Levine stepped on a glass, the old men clapped and sang “Mazel tov.”
The whole thing was over in a few minutes.
The rabbi shook hands with everyone, even Celia and the little boys, and left as fast as he came. “He has a funeral,” Papa explained.
We ate bread, herring, and honey cake and the old men toasted the wedding couple three times with big glasses of Levine’s whiskey. Celia stood beside her new husband and ate a few bites of cake, but when Jacob started whining and rubbing his eyes she said maybe it was time to go.
We walked with them to the end of the block and watched as they turned the corner.
Betty was crying.
Mameh said, “What’s the matter with her?”
Papa patted Betty on the cheek. “My grandmother used to say it isn’t a wedding if nobody cries.”
—
The apartment was one hundred percent sadder after Celia left. No one smiled at me when I walked in the door, and even though I had the bed to myself, I didn’t sleep any better.
My parents fought constantly. Mameh went back to blaming Papa for the baby who died on the boat. “If you had waited with me until he was born, maybe he would still be alive.”
Then my father would say, “If we stayed and I was killed, then you and all your children would have died with the rest of your family from typhoid or from Cossacks. And if you’d let me take the other boy to the hospital here, he would still be alive.”
That was the first I’d heard about the baby who was born in America before me. He was small and weak from the beginning, but my mother wouldn’t let him out of the house. “No one comes back alive from the hospital.”
He called her stupid.
She called him a failure.
Night after night, they blamed each other and cursed and wore each other out. Papa started going to shul right after supper. Mameh muttered over her sewing until she had a headache. I stayed on my cot as much as I could, and when the days got shorter and it was too dark to read back there, I fell asleep early and got up before the sun. I didn’t mind. That way, I got out of the house before the bickering starte
d again.
This daughter of yours is a firecracker.
Betty said she could get me a job at Filene’s. “The floorwalker has a little crush on me.”