Upward Mobility, by ​Judy Kronenfeld

​Upward Mobility

—after an untitled photograph by Vivian Maier (U.S.A.), dated September 29, 1959.
https://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/street-4/#slide-44
 
Old clothes, old clothes—the two-note medieval-sounding cry of the “rag and bone man” rose from the alley behind the six-floor Bronx apartment house our small family lived in: threadbare jackets, spatulas with burned handles, beef and lamb bones were thrown down to him from above, packed into the bag he shouldered. I didn’t consider, as a child, that he must have walked long distances through more than one borough, and many, many alleyways. I didn’t know that he sold what he collected to makers of paper, fabric, glue or soap. Before supermarkets were the go-to places, the “vegetable man” parked his horse and pushcart laden with fresh produce near a shopping center a few blocks from our building. Better dressed than the “rag and bone man” or the “vegetable man,” the “Fuller Brush man” rang our doorbell, and if my mother deigned to look, would open his case of cleaning implements. But she usually politely declined to buy, and he’d sigh almost inaudibly as he repacked. In my immigrant city, commerce was everywhere—however humble.

On cold-weather trips to Manhattan my mother and I would have to stop for a paper bag of hot roasted chestnuts from a street vendor; the scored skins of the chestnuts peeled open as they roasted, sending up an enticing starchy-sweet aroma. In any season, we could share a mid-afternoon pretzel like the six or seven dozen visible in the seller’s basket in Maier’s photo: soft pretzels— briefly boiled, like bagels, before they were baked—zesty with nuggets of coarse salt, crunchy on the shiny outside, soft within. Mom and I, wearing our “street dresses” and low heels, as required for shopping trips to Manhattan in the 50s (and much of the 60s), might have passed this very corner, since just across the street from the pretzel seller sitting in the sun is a Barton’s Bonbonniere chocolates shop, that successful business started by a family of brothers who fled Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss—the city my mother had emigrated from with her family in 1927. My mother loved Barton’s; even their Easter chocolates were “kosher for Passover.” I didn’t think about profit and loss in my teens, and so wouldn’t have wondered whether this corner was a desirable one, whether those pretzels in the basket were getting stale in the sun while the crowd strode by, showing no interest. I probably wouldn’t have noticed that the pretzel-seller looks tiredly away, a pen quiet in her left hand, her brow slightly creased—like my father’s might be on a slow mid-afternoon, no customers inside drinking egg creams, when he stood outside his new, tiny, lower Broadway luncheonette in his smock jacket, arms folded across his aproned belly. 

It was normal for me, home on college vacation from Massachusetts, to wait for mom to scrub the luncheonette’s floor of miniscule black and white tiles with a mop and bucket reeking with ammonia on a “half-day” Saturday—the store already closed—normal to wait for her to wipe the sweat off her face and change from her smock and deep-pocketed apron into her street dress, before we set off on a clothes-shopping trip for me.
 
I wish the man in the fedora and sport jacket would suggest a pretzel would be just the thing to the woman he was with, and turn around and retrace his steps to buy a couple.  

It was normal for me to sleep in on those winter and spring vacations from school while my parents got up before 5 A.M. to drive to Manhattan and open up shop. It was normal for my father (who had also come from Eastern Europe—from Germany in 1934, the year after Hitler came to power) to provide a fifth of their modest yearly earnings to match the half-scholarship I received from the New York Club of my Ivy League college, starting in the fall of 1960. 

The position of the lady with the soft little dark hat—head turned to her left, tipped down—seems to echo the position of the-there-but-for-the- grace- of-God pretzel seller in her unglamorous babushka, smock and apron. I wish that lady with her velvety hair adornment would open her purse and buy some pretzels. I wish the man glancing in the pretzel-seller’s direction, who looks like a boat captain in his whites, would discover a yen for half a dozen to take home.

Dad had graduated from being a factory foreman to being a small proprietor, though it meant standing behind a wide-open window taking in coins for candy bars, gum, and cigarettes in all weathers, his legs aching. He attended the fountain as well, dispensing those carbonated chocolate milk egg creams, and Cokes made from syrup and seltzer, but had already begun to yearn for the dry and warm gift shop with a closeable door that would finally come, years later, as opposed to this “wet” luncheonette.

I quit a summer job six weeks before I started college, even though it was obtained for me by an uncle. Miserably hot work in the office of a bias-binding factory. I couldn’t deal with the surreal boss who refused to direct the fans into the office because he had no functional filing system and didn’t want the orders and bills to fly about. I delivered a parcel he gave me to an address near Wall Street, and never returned. My parents—particularly my mother—were very upset with me, yet didn’t make me beg the boss to take me back. 

My Eternal Gratitude, Mom and Dad. And My Apology.  

​Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems will be published by Inlandia Books in early 2025. Currently, Judy is obsessed with Vivian Maier’s street photos; she has published poems on these in MacQueen’s Quinterly and in The Memory Palace.