The Matchmaker's Gift(10)
“Looks as if you have another happy customer, Papa.” A young man, perhaps twenty, approached the cart. Like the father, the son wore a black felt hat, though his face was clean-shaven, and his eyes were blue.
“I’m not a customer yet,” Sara said. “We haven’t decided on the price.”
Mr. Tunchel cleared his throat. “The thieves at Sears and Roebuck would charge you three dollars and fifty cents for those. But I will let you have them for a dollar less.”
Two and a half dollars! Sara never imagined they could be so expensive. The money she had earned from running errands and minding babies did not even begin to come close. She removed the spectacles and laid them down on the cart. Without them, the world grew dull again. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said, “but I can’t afford such a sum.” Sara wished that she had never come to the market, that she had never glimpsed the city through Mr. Tunchel’s lenses.
Luckily, the son chose to intercede. “Come now, Papa. Can’t you give the girl a better price?”
“A better price? Better for who? This is why I cannot sleep at night, Jacob! How can I have you take over the business when you want to give everything away for free? How will you provide for your wife and your children?”
“I don’t have a wife or any children yet, Papa.”
“Thank God! If you did, they would starve!”
“Papa, calm down.” Jacob turned to Sara. “How much do you want to pay?”
At this, Mr. Tunchel balled his hands into fists. “Do you hear that?” he shouted to the banana seller. “What kind of salesman asks the customers what they want the price to be?”
“I only have sixty cents,” Sara confessed. “But I can earn the rest of the money. My neighbor needs help watching her baby, and I could bring you ten cents every week.”
“There now,” Jacob said. “That sounds fair.” But before he could hand the eyeglasses to Sara, his father leapt forward and snatched them away. “Jacob, we don’t even know the girl’s name!”
Jacob handed Sara a pencil and paper and asked her to write down her name and address. She added her brother-in-law’s name for good measure. “See, Papa?” he said. “The girl is respectable. Sara will pay us what she can for today, and she will pay us the rest in weekly installments until we have the full amount.”
“The full amount was three dollars and fifty cents,” Tunchel muttered. He ran his fingers through his silver beard; his shoulders shook with a heavy sigh.
Jacob put his arm around his father’s shoulder. “Mama would have wanted you to extend this kindness.” To Sara, he said, “Why don’t you give me fifty cents for today? You can come back next week, when you have more.”
Sara nodded to both the father and the son, but she was so moved that she did not trust herself to speak.
* * *
She was back the next week, and every week after that, dropping off two nickels, ten pennies, a dime. She learned that Jacob was twenty-one years old, and that he attended Columbia University’s School of Optometry, the country’s first university program in the field. “After I graduate,” Jacob told Sara, “I’m going to open a store—a proper shop with displays of all kinds of glasses and a separate room for eye examinations.”
Jacob’s mother had died ten months earlier. Since her passing, Jacob’s father had been pushing him to meet with a shadchan. “He thinks we need a woman in the house, that I should find a bride and settle down. But I don’t like the idea of paying a matchmaker to tell me who I should marry.”
Sara knew there were hundreds of shadchanim working on the Lower East Side. She’d seen their signs in the tenement windows and their advertisements in the local papers. She’d read the Gimpel Beynish cartoons—humorous tales of an unlucky matchmaker—printed in the Yiddish dailies. Like Gimpel, most of the matchmakers Sara knew were older men in tall black hats and satin coats, strict in their religious observances. Not long ago, a shadchan from Lewis Street had knocked on their door to talk to her parents about her oldest brother, Joe. Though her father had sent Sara from the room, she had pressed her ear against the door to listen—not because she was curious about her brother’s prospects, but because she wanted to understand the shadchan’s methods. What kind of questions did he ask? How did he pair one person with another? She wondered whether her sister’s match had been a fluke. Did she really have a gift, as the rabbi believed, or had it been a singular stroke of luck? She thought about telling the story to Jacob, but she was afraid he might think she was foolish.
A few weeks later, on the way to see Mr. Tunchel, Sara spotted one of her sister’s friends. Like most of the shoppers milling about, Miryam Nachman wore a dark wool coat, black wool stockings, and sturdy boots. Sara might not have noticed her at all, except for the strangeness of her hat. An enormous green feather—like nothing in nature—exploded upward from the center of the brim. A plait of velvet ribbon secured the feather in place, along with a cluster of artificial violets. Although the hat itself was lovely, it was sorely out of place among the peddlers on Orchard Street. When Sara caught up to her, Miryam explained that she had taken a job trimming hats for a milliner. With palpable joy, she described the shop, smiling as she recalled the mountains of ribbons, the exotic feathers, and the piles of silk flowers, dyed in every possible shade.