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by harmonizing the Irving Berlin standard “All Alone,” although my father had to carry her through the last line, “Wondering where you are / and how you are / and if you are / all alone, too.”
    Once, when my father heard me singing “Button Up Your Overcoat,” he stopped me in midsong. “Mother sings, you listen,” he reminded me. Yet he agreed it was in my mother’s best interest that I stand behind her swirly skirt and when she faltered whisper the words she needed.
    My brother, Willy, and I never resented our parents’ diversions and entertainments, or their fine clothes compared to our shabby ones. Glamorous as movie stars, and drawing admiring attention when they walked arm in arm through the tumultuous streets on their way to work or to the subway, they occupied their own universe. Encouraged by Bubby, who attempted to shield them from the harsher realities of the ghetto, they had the aura of visitors who sometimes invited their children to their parties.
    Bubby maintained an ironclad schedule to which she was devoted. Because of chronic insomnia, she awoke at first light, turned on the gas range in the kitchen to warm the apartment, heated water in the tea kettle toward the hour when we would want to wash our hands and faces, and prepared “fendel” coffee for herself. Although her skills as a chef met no challenge, her coffee was dreadful.
    We did own a percolator, which she pronounced “poker-lady,” but for herself she heated water in a
fendel
—a small pan—and when it boiled she threw in a handful of ground coffee, letting the whole seethe and bubble until it yielded a noxious brown fluid. In theory, the grounds would settle at the bottom of the pan; in fact they would find their way into coffee cups. When I was still drinking from a bottle, the not-too-clean-pan in which my milk was warmed often contained coffee grounds, which I hated. Since my parents slept late, my grandmother prepared percolated coffee for them, or my father had breakfast at some diner close to Wall Street. But she herself drank fendel coffee the day long.
    She ate nothing until she returned from shopping for her daily supplies. Until I started kindergarten, I accompanied her. We set out early and she carried two large black oilcloth bags, which she held in one hand, and held on to me with the other.
    Her first stop was at the poultry market, where women sat plucking fowl of every kind that had been slaughtered under the supervision of a rabbi. I hated the sight of these women with their bent backs and wan faces. From the tops of their heads to their messy aprons to their shoes, they were covered with clouds of feathers from chickens, geese and ducks. Since chicken enhanced most of our soups, Bubby bought two chickens every day—one for soup, and the other for roasting or stew, and when available, goose or duck. Her notion of a three o’clock snack for me was to take a goose liver, place it on a wrinkled brown paper bag and bake it in the oven. When the liver was crisp around the edges, she peeled it from the paper and added a few grains of kosher salt. Not until many years later did I learn that goose liver meant foie gras, an emblematic delicacy for the well-to-do.
    Once we finished buying the fowl, we entered the dairy store, where Bubby tasted the sour cream from a large tin milk can whose handles sported communal tasting spoons affixed to cords that had once been white but were now black. Kufflick, the dairy man, always had a cigarette between his lips and more than once as he passed the sour cream can his ashes fell in the white cream. He sported a long beard and wore a skullcap, or yarmulke, as oily as his thick black unwashed hair.
    When not ladling sour cream or cutting butter from a wooden tub with a sharp-edged paddle, he spent his moments screaming at the cats that slid into his shop whenever the door opened. They lapped up droplets of sour cream that fell to the floor from the tasting spoons. Every now and