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 Chapter 6 "My First Christmas" Read along with Jerry! Click here to hear this excerpt from the Grammy(R)-nominated book on tape from BDD Audio. Within the space of one year in the Depression -- 1933 to 1934 --we moved from South 5th Street to 131 Meserole then to Siegel Street, then to the end of Siegel Street. I never was told what caused these departures. At our last Siegel Street apartment, the rickety wooden staircase to our five-room cold-water flat turned slightly before reaching the second floor. The five of us stood on a landing that faced two apartments. The one on the right belonged to us. My mother turned the key and we were looking into a kitchen that had a gas range, a bathtub with a porcelain cover, a coal stove, and a door leading to the bathroom we would now share with strangers. One room to the front overlooked the street, while the other four led to the backyard. Suddenly I realized we had dropped to life's lower scale. We could no longer afford the luxury of steam heat. At that moment I knew we were no longer the chosen people. It was as if God had decided to put us out of His kingdom. Jews had always had steam heat. After my mother fully took in the bleak surroundings and fully digested the indignity of having to share a toilet with people of unknown origin, she said: "We're only going to be here a couple of months." Her eyes avoided my father, who stood by catatonically, unable to control the events that had brought us to this horrible place. We had traveled the grand distance of five blocks, transporting our personal belongings in shopping bags, the furniture by pushcart. "Let's get unpacked," my mother said. My father moved quickly, simulating an army going into battle, grabbing cartons of dishes, pots, whatever came into his hands. He was trying to maintain his manhood. At that moment -- six years old, going on seven -- I wanted to take over. I was sure I could do better than he. "It's cold in here," my mother says. "We need some heat. Make a fire." My father hurried into the next room and returned with some scraps of wood. "We need coal," my mother said. "I've found some!" my father shouted triumphantly, dropping the wood and coming back with a bucketful of coal. The huge black stove stared at us like some monster at feeding time. We had never had to face one of these before. My father stuffed newspapers into the bell of the stove, then wood, then shiny black chunks of coal. He tossed in a lit match, and in a few seconds smoke filled the apartment, choking us. "Can't you put it out?" my mother shouted. "There's a thing here someplace," my father said, looking for the damper. Smoke was everywhere. "You picked this place!" my mother screamed. "Don't you know how to work the stove?" "I'm a nothing," he yells back. "You made me a nothing." My brother and sister were crying. I could hear them even though I couldn’t see them. I wish I were an orphan, I tell myself. I don't belong to these people, I told myself. I placed an invisible shield between my ears and the words they said to hurt one another. "Stop crying," I said to Doreen through the smoke. "Everything will be all right." I become a father to Arnie and Doreen. Suddenly the bathroom door opened. A short middle-aged woman in a dark dress stood in the doorway. "What's wrong?" she says in a thick Italian accent. "I'm your next-door neighbor." She heads straight for the stove. "You no open the damper," she explained, grabbing a handle on the stove and shoving it forward. "You gotta smoke in the whole house. The fire engines is gonna come." The smoke stoped pouring out of the stove. "We just moved in and it was cold," my mother says. "We never did this before." The woman looked at us as if we were immigrants who had just landed. "You gotta start slow," she says. "Gotta have patience. Use a little bit of wood, then put the coal on one at a time. Then you got a good fire. It can go all night." "Thank you," my mother said. "I'm Bella. This is Willie and our kids." "I'm Mrs. Palazzo. My daughter and I live next door. We and you share the same bathroom. There's a lock, see? You want privacy, you just turn it." She pointed to the little screw latches on both doors to the bathroom, hers and ours. "You no sleep in the back room," Mrs. Palazzo said, pointing. "The heat don’t go back too far. Better you sleep together in one room, near the stove. It's nice and warm." "Thank you," my mother said. "Anytime you want something, you call." From that moment the Palazzos and the Stillers were neighbors. When she left we dropped everything and went to sleep. All five of us in one bed. Tessie was Mrs. Palazzo's only daughter. She was a Roman beauty in her twenties. Her olive skin and classic features made her seem like a goddess. She loved kids. She'd come in and play with us. She knew what we were thinking. She could wrap us around her little finger. My mother and Tessie got to be friends. They'd smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and talk about things. We never knew what they were talking about, but it fascinated us. We'd watch them for hours. It was sometime in December just before Christmas that we first noticed the lights on a tree blinking on and off in the Palazzo apartment. We could see the lights through the frosted glass of the Palazzos' bathroom door. And, as it turned out, Tessie could see the silhouettes of our faces against her frosted glass. One night she pulled open the door. "What are you looking at?" she said, as if catching us in some forbidden act. "Your tree," we whispered. "Don't you have one?" she said, peering into our apartment. She saw we didn't. A revelation. A couple of nights later she knocked on our door and very apologetically, seemingly on tiptoe, asked my mother if it would be all right to invite the children in to sit under the tree. "They don't have to do nothin,' " Tessie said. "They can just come in and sit there under the tree." My mother's face turned white. Arnie, Doreen, and I sat waiting for her answer. The doors between both apartments were now open. We could see the lights twinkling on and off, the peppermint candy canes, the colored balls, the icicles, the little Santa Clauses, the stockings filled with gifts. My mother looked at the three of us and very quietly said: "I'm sorry, I don't want to offend you, Tessie, but in this house we don't celebrate Christmas. That's why we don't have a tree. I hope you understand." Tessie stood for a moment, then silently walked back through the bathroom into her apartment. "I hope you kids will understand someday," my mother said to us. "We don't celebrate Christmas." We watched the lights on the Christmas tree blink on and off, and then we went to bed. A few nights later, while listening to Eddie Cantor on the radio, we heard what had to be loud arguing in Tessie's apartment; lots of crying and cursing. There was a man in the apartment. "Marry you? I wouldn't marry you," we heard Tessie say. "Besides, you're already married, you bum. You're nothing to me." "I love you, Tessie. I'll get a divorce," the man's voice pleaded. "You lied to me, you S.O.B." "But I love you." "I don't love you," Tessie said. "Even if I'm carrying your child, I don't love you. Understand?" "Make her understand," the man begged Tessie's mother. "I'm good. I make a good dollar. Tell her not to treat me this way." As the argument grew more intense, we turned up the radio to blot it out, so as not to be eavesdropping. We couldn't help but notice through the frosted glass the shadows of Tessie, Mrs. Palazzo, and a small man moving frantically back and forth in front of the Christmas tree. "Don't you understand?" Tessie screamed again. "I'll have the baby but not you." The man said: "I won the race today. I rode a winner at the track. I'm giving you everything." "I don't want your f&*king money!" Tessie screamed. All of us in our own apartment forgot Eddie Cantor. We were now glued to the drama going on next door. "Okay," the man said. "If you don't take the money I'm flushing it down the toilet." There was a silence, and then Tessie's bathroom door swung open. We could make out the figure of the little man through the frosted glass of our own bathroom door as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. I could see him waving them over his head, as if it were some bomb he was about to throw. There was another silence, then the sound of the toilet chain. I could visualize the bills falling into the toilet. Without saying a word I yanked open our bathroom door and screamed: "Take the money, Tessie, take the money!" as the bills went swirling to a watery grave. Copyright © 2000 by Jerry Stiller View archives |
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