Little did she know that while she was sitting there chatting, close to ten billion dollars’ worth of stocks was being wiped out at the New York Stock Exchange – a day that would forever be known as Black Tuesday. Nor could she have imagined that within a few days her bank would close and she and Mordche would lose their life savings.
“At least Mordche has his job,” she thought gratefully, aware that there were more important things in life than one’s life savings – such as one’s life. Only weeks earlier, a doctor had informed her husband that he had diabetes, but that it was no longer a death sentence as insulin had recently become commercially available.
Careful with his diet, Mordche now measured his sugar levels every few hours and injected himself several times a day with the life-saving drug. Finally getting back the energy he had lost during months of illness, he had lined up back-to-back house painting jobs through the painters’ union in which he was active.
One by one the jobs faded away. “No one is moving,” he told his wife, “so no one is painting.” Trying his luck at selling vegetables, he rented a horse and wagon and walked the streets of the Bronx, but was unsuccessful. The competition, he said, was fierce. Night after night Freida Sima took the wilting vegetables home to cook until she put a stop to the enterprise that was costing them money they no longer had.
“That’s how I found out my Mordche was no businessman,” she later recalled.
She also realized that until people would need housepainters it was up to her to support the family. With a nursing baby and a sick husband, she couldn’t go back to the factory. Looking around at the apartment they’d been living in since Shirley was born, she transposed furniture in her head and recognized the possibilities at hand. The next morning a sign went up in her ground floor window – Rooms for Rent. Inquire Within.
The response was almost immediate. Singles and widowers were always looking for an inexpensive place to live. Freida Sima could supply them with an airy room, clean linens, bathroom privileges, and a feeling of home. Harry and Ben moved into the smallest bedroom, Shirley continued to sleep in a corner of her parents’ room, the living room became another bedroom, and the dining room was turned into the living room. Except on special occasions, the family would now eat in the kitchen as none of the roomers received kitchen privileges.
Losing her privacy, having to always be fully and modestly dressed at home, and sharing a bathroom with strangers was a small price to pay for having a steady income, Freida Sima thought. Only once a week did she allow herself the luxury of dreaming what life would have been like had things gone on as they were during her first year of marriage.
Every Friday afternoon she would draw a hot bath in preparation for Shabbos, sinking into the large tub used during the week for everything from washing clothes to keeping live carp before cooking. Closing her eyes and floating in the water, she would remember how she agreed to marry Mordche after knowing him for less than five hours, even before he told her he was a widower with four sons, the older two now in California with his sisters.
“I’m a successful painter,” he told her before they got married. “You will never want for anything!” Shaking the water from her short hair, which was already going white in her mid-thirties, she shook the thoughts of what could have been from her mind and prepared to dress for Shabbos.
