I
always have a fondness for Jewish people at Christmas time. I remember one dark
winter night the week before Christmas many years ago, when Marge Coyle came to
the door and spoke with my mother, their heads inclined, their words cloaked in
adult whispers. She handed my mother a slip of paper that Mommy clutched in her
protective palm. It was a furtive, conspiratorial handoff as if they were
passing contraband.
The
next day my brother Gerard and I walked fifteen blocks through the streets of
The Bronx with our mother, following that mysterious piece of paper like a
treasure map that brought us at last to Abie’s Toy Shop on West Kingsbridge
Road. It was for Gerard and me like unearthing a chest of pirate’s gold.
Abie’s
was, in fact, the answer to a Christmas prayer. My father, a bakery mechanic,
had been laid off some weeks earlier, caught up in a wave of consolidations
among the three national bakeries that still operated plants in the Bronx in
1961. It was to be a very humble Christmas. Still, we clung to our family
holiday traditions. My mother assembled the cardboard fireplace with its red
and white painted bricks and perched it snugly against the living room wall. We
hung our stockings from its cardboard mantel. My brothers and sisters and I
jostled daily to see who would get to open the new window of the advent
calendar. And we got the tree.
Every year we walked with my father down to Elm
Place, a block away on E. 188th Street, to Mike Sedano’s tree lot
outside The Mayo Inn. Dad and Mike would dicker awhile, then seal the bargain
by spitting on their hands, shaking on the deal, and going inside the bar for a
ball and a beer as the six of us sized up the tree outside. In perhaps my
father’s proudest moments, we’d follow him home, Rose Ann, Elizabeth, Gerard,
and I carrying the trunk, and Richard and little Christopher in the rear holding
the tapered branches of the treetop in our annual family Christmas parade. The
scent of freshly cut balsam filled the house. After the tree was decorated and
draped with tinsel, we’d arrange the Nativity scene beneath it and then we’d
lie for what seemed hours playing “Colors,” in which we’d announce in turn, “I’m
looking at something . . . red,” and the rest of us would offer,
“Is it this?” “Is that it?” all the while Christmas carols jingled from the
record player.
The
Coyles were tenants in our building, decent, caring people who couldn’t bring
themselves to celebrate the season of giving with their two sons, knowing that
my parents had no toys for their six children that year. And so, as people of
goodwill do in every time and place, they made arrangements.
Our
working class Bronx neighborhood in the Irish Catholic enclave of Tiebout
Avenue didn’t have much daily contact with Jewish people—or with many
Protestants, for that matter. In fact, as far as I was aware, we barely knew
any Jews. We used to know Terry and Herbert and their kids Bonnie and Howie, of
course—friends in our previous neighborhood—but we’d lost contact with them
years ago. There were the Siegels up in Apt. 4B and Mrs. Aaron in 2A with the
strange little mezuzas beside
their doors. And the Jewish family, the Starkys, in
the building across the alley,
refugees from the Nazi atrocities in the war who were persecuted still by
some people in the neighborhood. And then there was Mrs. Weinstein, the kind
old woman several neighborhoods to the north, whose sidewalk Warren Bacon,
Gerard, and I would shovel for a dollar and steaming, frothy cups of hot
chocolate. But aside from Mr. Abromowitz, who owned the dry cleaners shop just
around the corner, we had little contact with Jewish people in our daily
affairs. Like the other parochial neighborhoods surrounding our parochial
school, we were growing up, for the most part, among people just like
ourselves.
So
Abie was as much a novelty to Gerard and me as was his toy store. A small
white-haired man with bushy brows and deep set eyes, he sat alone behind the
counter of his narrow shop, rising to greet us as we entered. My mother muttered
something to him in the hushed and reticent tone of one who knew that she was
about to accept charity. I heard her mention Mr. Coyle, and Abie’s face
brightened. His eyes, it seems to me now, conveyed the memory of one who had
himself known what it was to want over the years. It wasn’t exactly
deprivation—proud working class people would never allow themselves to use that
word, for we never thought of ourselves as poor, and I can barely bring myself
to use it now. But Abie’s eyes knew what it was like to be bruised by life.
“Ah,
yes, yes, of course . . . come right in, mother,” he said in a grainy voice
that made me want to clear my throat. “I vant that you should fill these bags .
. . .” He moved in a shuffling
gait, his arm gesturing in a wide, sweeping arc toward a pile of bags on the
floor behind the counter, as if we would somehow be doing him a favor by
complying with his wish.
The
toys in Abie’s Toy Shop were displayed everywhere. Toys of every imaginable
description were stacked on shelves, hung from peg boards, or dangled like
temptation from the ceiling. It was a child’s vision of paradise, and Gerard
and I were lost in the luxury of it all: trucks and games and balls and skates,
Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, Mr. Potato Head and Fort Apache sets, cowboy hats
and guns in holsters, spinning tops and yo-yos galore, as far as the eye could
see.
But as we were leaving, burdened by our
bundles slung over our shoulders, what I remember most was the kind, knowing
smile on Abie’s face. “Vat for?” he responded to my mother’s humble thanks.
“Merry Christmas, Mother, Merry Christmas,” he said with a gentle nod.
We
made our way home through the holiday crowds that afternoon faster than we had
come, despite—or perhaps because of—the sacks we carried. Old enough to be entrusted
with the source of this bounty, at 13 and 14, Gerard and I were drafted into
the conspiracy of adults in hiding the toys and their source from our younger
brothers until—Christmas Eve come round at last—they would appear,
mysteriously, under the tree. There would be no coal in the stockings that year
after all, thanks to Santa Claus, Mr. and Mrs. Coyle, and a kindly old Jewish
man named Abie.
-- Thomas D. Kersting
