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But I miss the old times. Every Thursday night I would
clean out the shop window. And every Friday morning Papa’d
set up the new one. While Brooklyn slept Papa turned the
window of Michtom’s Novelty Store into a candy fantasy.
That’s Michtom, rhymes with "victim," which is what Papa
was in Rus sia, where the po liti cal bear was always at the throat
of the Jews, but is not what he is now. In the Old Country all
Michtoms were victims but here in Brooklyn we found the
land of gold. In Brooklyn we got everything. Well, nearly
everything.
Papa, all he has left of his entire family is three sisters.
The Queen, Aunt Beast, and Aunt Mouse. That’s not their
real names. It’s just what my sister, Emily, and I call them.
The oldest, Aunt Golda, The Queen, she’s like a mother to
Papa. He would like if she would come to Brooklyn to visit
once in a while, but she never does. Papa’s sisters, they live on
the Lower East Side, in Manhattan, and they don’t cross the
river. Aunt Beast hates the river. Hates it. Well, I’m not crazy
about it, either. No one in our family is. But at least we cross
to visit them. The aunts, they never come to see us.
In my opinion Uncle Meyer more than makes up for our
lack of visiting Michtom aunts. Uncle Meyer is Mama’s
brother. Mama pretty much raised Uncle Meyer on her own.
Now he lives a seven- minute walk from here, down on Fulton.
But he’s over at our place all the time.
Uncle Meyer is a free thinker. He, Mama, Papa, they sit
around the kitchen table. Yakita, yakita. The world twists its
ankle in a pothole, Uncle Meyer calls a meeting. I stick around
when Uncle Meyer comes. I keep my mouth shut and my ears
open, packing stuffed bears, or cutting mohair, what ever needs
doing. I don’t even think about slipping away when Uncle
Meyer comes. You can learn a lot from grown- ups sitting
around a kitchen table. Used to be they spent hours there, but
lately we can hardly find the kitchen table. Mama and Papa
and their bear business. It’s everywhere.
So these days, when Uncle Meyer tells me, "Pull up a
chair, Joseph," you bet I do, even if the neighborhood guys
are waiting a game for me, which they never used to do and
which you’d think would make me happy. Except if they’re
waiting a game for me and I’m late or I don’t show at all,
they’re angry. They used to just start playing as soon as
enough guys showed up on the street. If I made it, great. If I
didn’t, well, that was okay, too. I liked it better that way. I don’t
like too much attention on me.
At home I work. I listen. I look. At breakfast, Uncle
Meyer drinks Mama’s tea, barely letting it cool. I don’t know
how he does it. He bolts down that scalding tea like a man dying
of thirst, then drums his fingers on the empty china. His
fingers are like bananas. Not the color. The shape. Long fingers.
I look at my hands and hope they finish up like Uncle
Meyer’s. Papa’s hands are okay. But they’re small, like lady
hands. And they smell like vanilla. I don’t want little, sweetsmelling
hands like Papa. I want hands that can wrap around
a baseball and send it whistling over home plate. Strike- out
hands. That’s what I want. That’s what Uncle Meyer’s got.
Uncle Meyer, I don’t know why, but he never married.
He’s younger than Mama but at thirty, he’s looking kind of
old to me. I don’t know. Maybe he’s such a free thinker, he
thinks marriage would get in his way.
He’s not single due to lack of free- thinking females. There’s
no shortage of them in Brooklyn. In the Michtom house alone
we got two, Mama and Emily. Mama. She’s the freest thinker I
know. She’s Papa’s princess. Has her way in everything. On the
occasions when she and Papa disagree, Mama sends me and
Emily out of the room with Benjamin. "Let me have a moment
with your father," she’ll say. She never yells, she never nags. As
the door closes, I hear, "Now, Morris ..." and then her voice
goes a little up, a little down, a little soft, a little warm, and then
comes the laughter, "the laughter of Mama’s victory," Emily
calls it, and when we come back into the kitchen Mama is
perched on Papa’s lap, her head tucked into his neck, her skirt
draped over his legs, and Papa, he is so bewitched by Mama he
doesn’t know even the day of the week anymore.
Excerpted from Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse, Copyright © 2008 by Karen Hesse. Excerpted by permission of Feiwel & Friends, a division of Macmillan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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