Kol Nashi - Women's Voice of Israel
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The Last of the Hatmakers
Sara sewed. A discolored smock stained with the abuse of many working days covered the greater parts of her frame, while to the rest of her form, her arms, was layered a second set of sleeves that proceeded up to the elbow, and then a denim or second apron was pinned across her front. The breast of the denim, where she held the hats against herself in the effort of sewing a tight ribbon, was outlined in dark fuzz, the residue of the hat powders and hat felt that had lain upon her. The hat covered her lap without touching it, the angle of her hand so designed as to insure that her body never imposed upon her work, and so intent was she at holding the felt to affect its satisfaction that one can say, perhaps, hers was a trade made in heaven. .
Her fingers themselves were clean and remarkably untouched, a sign of grace, for the hat always demanded its perfection and she must manage its finish with the purity of a baby’s bath. Back erect yet slopping forward, arms raised at a heightened pose, thighs, legs immobile on the floor, she cradled her work within the treadle of her body pushing it forward to its completion So that subsumed somewhere twixt fantasy and toil life did move; but whether Sara the agent of the design or its product this was hard to define.
Her workbench in front of her held the spindles of ribbon, the variated browns and grays of the trimming art; and with it, their dull colored thread-mates, all of which appeared in a patternless monotony decipherable only to the trimmer. One bright spot sat among the melancholy of hues, a little cardboard box of happy desire, feathers. In the belly of the box were piled the reds and yellows awaiting their fate, waiting to be chosen as compliment to the finished piece Perhaps an inch and a half high, they alone signaled spontaneity in an otherwise orthodox fashion.
To the right of the trimmer’s bench was the sewing machine for the leathers, the sewing machine for bindings, and against her back stood the partition between retail and the shop; then , left, one could navigate through the hatter’s machines on the way to the toilet. No one used it much but it was there. Above, a loft had been built to hold the numerous boxes and wares of the establishment. Once the store had been a saloon, but now all that remained of its idle hours was the intricate tile floor long since overtaken by all the rest; hat bodies in various stages of makings claimed the density that remained and one minuscule isle or two led to the same singular destination, the hatter. A black soot covered what was visible of floor and shop metal, and beyond the soundless timidity of Sara’s bench we hear the hatter’s flange, the pulley of the rope and the sigh of culmination as it reaches the top, the thud of the fall and our master at work - the shop, the proletarian soul at his the trade.
Sara paused, put the thimble, needle and scissors in their places to get up. But this required art as her contest with the overhead loft had not as yet been decided. Like the amoeba her body flows into the shape of an opening. But once done, with an awaiting stretch she rotated her shoulders, removed the sleeves, unpinned the apron, unbuttoned the smock and
called, “Jake, I’m packing in early. I’ll finish the dozen tomorrow. Bring the plate home so I’ll wash it out…don’t forget, Jake!..I’m leaving….. Jake!” She walked toward the front of the store, passed the toilet, made a face, “I'll wait till home.” The coat was on, the hat was on, her pocketbook’s clutched tightly against the transgressions of the world; then once out the door she looked back at the store window - the Santa Claus, the red velvet, Christmas 1967- “Jake’s right, it pays to put money into the window’. - and then above the window at the broad black letters, “Neil Hats…Buy at Cost”
Behind the store is the chicken market famous throughout Jersey City for the numbers racket it harbors in the back behind the stench of live animals in the front. At any time the anti-christ can be seen making their way to the rear to disappear in their levy of the poor. When they still had had a shocked*, Sara had bought her chicken there, but now no more. Then her son Arnie would beg Mommy to see the zoo, but now Arnie was studying, abroad. Now she hurried along in the nippy weather past the chicken market, past empty stores and gated fronts, past the wasted witnesses to the city’s winter tottering in her path, and past the mounds of rags collected in heaps along the sides of the street that now and then call out. Steeling herself in revulsion, she increased her pace and with each step measured the distance more ahead. Almost. The late afternoon wind had reclaimed whatever warmth the day had offered as she passed into the streets beyond and from the gates of hell.
Sara, the next afternoon was again working at her bench. She was straining to hear that welcome sound of a customer at the door. The door had been locked for a while now with Jake opening only for customers he knows. Christmas, as we’ve seen, is a few weeks away and they’d long since been filling in their stock with hopefully the right choices. With resources at a margin, this is the difference between making and loosing a buck, which brings us to the knocking we hear at the door. Sara’s been alerted and called out, “Jake…a customer, go see….Jake, go see,” and anxious not to loose a sale she squeezed out of her place and went to the door. With great disappointment she peered through the gated glass to see who it was. A kid, perhaps twelve, certainly no more than thirteen stood motioning to come in, and only in deference to the cold, she found herself opening the door; “Jake,” she called out with a bit of humor, “You’ve got a customer”.
As Sara later related to Etty her daughter, the kid beamed at the boxes with their shiny emblems lining the store row upon row, regiments of soldiers standing in their places at military attention. They overlay the walls in checkers of black and brown that in some parts reached the ceiling; countless, endless numbers and in each was a hat about ready to enter the world; and behind this marvel that can be found nowhere else stands bossman himself, while a mist of steam covered his hands and features and racks of unfinished “bodies”** lay piled near him. The steam gurgled, it halted, it started again, it hissed as bossman raised the iron and the felt body in its helplessness submitted to its baptism. To all this, the kid in his rapture stared. For in each of the round boxes above sat a hat to crowned his face and before him the mirror to light upon his new majesty
“Who’s the new dude?”, Jake’s mirror asked, as the hattted face looked into its reflection and beneath the brim that only a master’s hand can shape, its eyes examined the wonder of a three sided glass and the hatter delicately bent the mirror to enhance the shade, the shadow and the man. Front, right, left he viewed himself. Our salesman bowed with sureness, then opened another box and another for the kid’s approval while the face in the mirror strung one more dream to another. “Whom shall I be in my new life”, as he lifted his head a bit on the slant, “Perhaps bossman himself? Mirror mirror on the wall who’s most beautiful of all”, and he fingered the hat slowly, knowingly and from the tips of his hands pleasure climbed to his heart; and across his face was stretched a smile from chin to ear that spread upon his nose and into his eyes with laughter. And they saw his teeth and he was handsome.
Whereupon he laughed and laughed large, and for a moment something stopped in Sara as she watched and took flight in a leap that had disappeared in her before it was named; but a space in time the length of a needle’s tip, too quick to be remembered in thought, the flight had left its prick. Inside the denim where the wheels of memory had mapped the grooves of light and darkness, Sara called such wounds love, and her thimble halted as she prodded Jake on for the youth without money to pay.
“I thought he would bust when he saw himself”, she had said to Etty; for Jake rushed back and forth to please the fancy of the custom customer who strutted and primed himself before them. There was Jake, the very best of his stock open, again slyly adjusting the mirror and lights to clinch the sale and there stood the youth preening himself in fantasy, and with more than a bit of showmanship working the crowd. Then from the many suitors displayed of narrow, wide, light brown, and deep beige ribbons... ah!ah!ah!. Breathing in deeply, an imperial look having taken his face, one could see he’d come to a decision.
So our young man gave orders as to how he wanted his hat done, on and on, until at last he’d come to his choice of feather. The sale had been executed with every ceremony and Jake smiled. Sara smiled. They now expected the reverie to end. They waited, they looked. Jake wished him a “Merry Christmas”, walked to the door and bowed. But he didn’t leave. “Oh, said the mirror, “Glory be, a Christmas Prince was crowned in me”
Thus began Sara’s waiting; at any time he might be there, leave some payment, call out, “I is here Mr. Bossman. Comin for my hat real soon”, then again vanish for days. With little time to Christmas, Etty had warned her,” Mamma just give it to him, he’s only a kid…what are you trying to prove?” But Sara had decided to teach him responsibility and in truth each payment left on the bench had thus far shown her to be right; but when on Christmas week the hat still lay in its box of splendor near her bench she became filled with remorse. “Mamma, do you know where he lives? His name?”and when to her further regret she answered Etty, “No”, again she’d go to the door.
Christmas week was busy and prosperous; all the old regulars helped out: There was Jimmy, full Indian of sad and exotic stories who once upon a time had taught Jetty to drive, itself a minor miracle and Mike Keaveny, the landlord, who with his two other unmarried siblings lived above the store; the three had been born in the hey day of Mayor Hague when the saloon downstairs had thrived with Irish politics and favoritism. Now with neighbors and stores and those who’d once lived above them all gone, the Keavenys clung to their scanty city pensions and bossman’s Christmas. Mike always stood guard: he eyed the customer's moves and covered his own with homemade banter laced with jokes and genial attention. Finally was Stan, the outside salesman, and his perennial Christmas invocation, “Jake, they’re so dead drunk take another ten from them, from here they go straight to the saloon anyway.” As for who manned the cash register, Jake didn’t use it; he preferred his own two pockets treatment, one coming in and one going out. But this year the old hatter Mr. Canova was gone, and with him that bundle of papers always in some corner or other, that something about “workers unite” and Canova, himself, quietly saying, “Even with those we hate we share the same fate though demagogues will say otherwise”
It’s Christmas Eve, the prince they’d crowned was hatless somewhere on the streets as the last rush of buyers within signaled the closing in minutes more, and the tired pair began to ready for home. ”Where is he? What have I done, she cried aloud “ My days are always endings” and she unpinned the apron and called, “ Jake, packing in? “Jake, you alright?” Then she turned toward the cold, the opened door and there the youth who had kept his word. “Merry Christmas Mrs. Jake”, he smiled and bowed. Merry Christmas to you too Sir, and many, many more”, she beamed.
But in the summer of 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the paroxysm of rioting that followed bequeathed to the city a curse that feeds inside her; the bereaved who burned air and wind from one to the other of inner cities of America left these streets rubbled, boarded, torn; and they fled, all those with legs to leave from this place of Egypt empty of birthright where men eat their meat in bones.
“Jake, you’d better come down, they’re axing the store”, Keaveny phoned that summer night. So Jake went, alone, and in the aftermath he pleaded, “ Barney you’re not gonna take my hats?”and heard, “What am I going to do with them? Who’s buying mine? And if I do take them, can I pay you,”.
But when you ask the pair where did it all go wrong, they’ll always start with JFK, the first hatless president and ipsofacto the death of a waning trade, which is as good an explanation as any for the disappearance of a custom old without beginning and how things go from one to the other and round and round. For it may have been JFK’s individual right to show his face in the unshaded beauty of all his princely inheritance, but if only the individual then where is the bond. “Barney, only $2000 for the whole lot?”
So Sara saw the awaiting truck and her things taken from her; and she wanted to run and comfort them, to wring back her companions of machines and ribbons with whom she’d trimmed the hats and eaten her bread from youth, and instead standing in the street of shrouds she must let them pass. But because this is the story of fellowship and union, one day Barney called, “Jake, I’ve got a store in Cleveland, you can have it, all of it, for the $2000 I owe.” And this is how the 62 year old Jake took his 62 year old wife on their journey from East to mid-west where they had the very best store and the very best time in their lives.
.
Posted by saraeli at 8:53 AM
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Newer Post Older Post Home
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Pages
* דף הבית
* The Last of the Hatmakers
Followers
Blog Archive
* ▼ 2011 (3)
o ▼ October (2)
+ The House
+ The Last of the Hatmakers
o ► September (1)
+ The House
About Me
saraeli
View my complete profile
Watermark template. Powered by Blogger.
No comments:
Post a Comment