Summary
When Jay and Arty learn that their father gave up their apartment because the landlord raised the rent, they become suddenly terrified that they are going to have to stay with their Grandma. They beg their father not to make them stay there, but he insists that it's for the best while he's gone. He tells them that he's convinced Grandma, even though she was unsure about it, and that they have to be on their best behavior when Grandma comes out to talk to them.
Eddie goes back into the bedroom and the boys fret about the possibility of Grandma saying "Yes," strategizing about how they might be able to convince their father not to leave them with her. "I'm going to break something. What's her favorite thing in this room?" says Arty. Jay urges him that they have to be on good behavior because their dad needs to take the job so he can pay back his debts. While arguing, Jay accidentally tears Arty's collar, and the two brothers fret about how this will pique their Grandma's judgment. After Arty accidentally slams Jay's finger in a drawer, Jay begins to cry. Eddie comes out and finds the chaos, and scolds the boys for being such a mess. When he threatens to send them outside, they tell him they very much want to live with Grandma, and are just worried about her not letting them.
The Kurnitz boys are interrupted by Bella, who comes out of Grandma's room and throws herself on the couch weeping. She tells Eddie that Grandma was mean to her, but he comforts her by telling her that Arty and Jay are going to come live with her and Grandma, which makes her happy. She asks Eddie to stay too, telling him that Grandma is mean, but he tells her that they'll be fine and sends her to go lie down in the bedroom so Grandma can talk to the boys, but she wants to stay.
Grandma, an older and imperious German woman, comes out of the bedroom and greets the boys sternly. She immediately notices that Jay has been crying and tells him, "Big boys shouldn't cry." She then asks them who is the smarter of the two, and Arty says that Jay gets good grades and he is better at sports. When she asks them to tell her why they want to live with her, they do their best to flatter her, but Arty tells her that they have no place to go. Immediately, she launches into a monologue about why she doesn't want them to live with her, that she doesn't like to talk and she works every day, and that they will not be happy there.
She goes on to say that ever since Eddie married the boys' mother, they never came around and that she turned them all against her. Referring to Eddie, she says, "He cried in my bedroom. Not like a man, like a child he cried. He vas always dot vay...I buried a husband and two children und I didn't cry. I didn't haff time...Dot's how I vas raised. To be strong. Ven dey beat us vit sticks in Germany ven ve vere children, I didn't cry...You don't survive in dis vorld vitout being like steel." She ultimately decides not to let the boys stay with her, tells Bella to get them ice cream cones, then instructs her to come back and massage her legs.
When Grandma is done admonishing him, Eddie stands up to her, assenting that he was always a crybaby, but insisting that his late wife, Evelyn, did not turn him away from his mother, but only turned him towards "loving...caring...holding someone when they needed holding." He then says, "I'm sorry about not bringing the boys out here more. Maybe the reason I didn't was because I was afraid they'd learn something here that I tried to forget...."
As they start to go, Bella asks the boys what they like to eat, preparing for them to stay. Everyone is silent as they realize that Bella has remained oblivious to the entire conversation, but when they try and tell her that Grandma isn't letting them stay, Bella still cannot accept it, saying, "It's going to be such fun with you both here." Grandma tries to tell her that they are not staying, but Bella won't accept it, and threatens to go to "the Home" if Grandma sends them away. The scene ends with everyone else in shock, while Bella beams in excitement.
Scene 2 opens with the sound of a train and a letter from Eddie to the boys read in voiceover. He tells them he is moving through a number of states and that he misses food from home. Suddenly we are in the apartment, and we see Arty and Jay reading the letter late at night. In the letter, Eddie tells them he's developed an irregular heartbeat and the doctor told him not to travel, but that he's going to anyway. Hearing this, Arty and Jay plot about ways they could make money for their father. Arty offers, "What if one night we cut off Grandma's braids and sold it to the army for barbed wire?"
Bella enters the apartment and tells the boys that something wonderful just happened to her. Soon enough, Grandma emerges from her bedroom and scolds Bella for being out so late and for going to the movies so much. Grandma demands that Bella hand over the movie magazine she bought, and Bella eventually does before rushing into her room. After telling the boys to turn off the light, Grandma goes back to bed.
Scene 3. Another letter from Eddie tells the boys that he had to take a week off to rest, but that he plans to make up the lost time. The boys are in the apartment alone while Grandma and Bella are out. As Arty jumps around, Jay notices a black Studebaker outside, and tells Arty it's "the two guys who came looking for Uncle Louie." Suddenly, Bella enters, upset, and tells the boys a "sacred secret": she's met someone at the movies, an usher named Johnny, and she plans to get married. She tells them that Johnny has a learning handicap like her, and that they plan to open a restaurant together. Bella says they need $5000 to open the restaurant, but that Grandma won't give her the money.
Arty and Jay are shocked to learn that Grandma has money that she hides in the house, and Bella tells them, "10 or 15 thousand. I'm not supposed to tell anyone." She asks the boys to keep her secret, then tells them that she wants to call the restaurant "La Bella Johnny." When Bella goes in her room, Jay wants to find Grandma's money, "borrow" $9000, and send it to their father.
Analysis
In this section, the premise of the play is revealed, as we learn that Arty and Jay will be left behind with their eccentric and dysfunctional extended family while their father is away settling his debts. Having caught a glimpse of just how whacky and inconsistent their extended family is, the audience already has a sense of why Arty and Jay would not want to be left behind, and the cause of their anxiety is clear. As the boys scramble to think of reasons why they shouldn't stay—"I'm dangerous, Pop," offers the 13-year-old Arty—the audience is meant to see the humor in their desperation, their terror at being left alone with their vindictive Grandma and their flakey Aunt Bella.
A comical amount of pressure is put on the young teens, Arty and Jay, which adds dramatic tension and comedy to the proceedings. Particularly, the boys' anticipation of meeting with Grandma takes on a pressurized and doomed quality when their father tells them that they have to impress her so she will let them live with her. Basically homeless, the boys are under a lot of pressure to help their father secure his job and pay his debts, but living with their mean old grandmother is the last thing they want. These competing priorities make for high stakes as well as high comedy.
A lot of tension is built around the entrance of Grandma Kurnitz. The audience has heard a lot about her from different characters without ever having laid eyes on her, and the image that the other characters paint is not particularly flattering. The boys remark on the fact that she allegedly beat her children when they were young, which is the cause of Bella's arrested development. Eddie treats her like she is a highly fragile object, preparing for the meeting between her and her grandsons with over-the-top care. Additionally, Bella reacts emotionally to her mother's sternness.
When Grandma Kurnitz finally does emerge, she is at once intimidating and humanized, a relic of old-fashioned European seriousness. Quickly, the audience realizes that the rift between her and her progeny is about her immigrant temperment, having lived through so much. She is serious and stern because her life has been difficult. She scolds Jay for having cried, asks them bluntly which one is smarter, and is vigilant about making sure that the boys will be clean and well-behaved. The contrast between her grave strictness and Arty and Jay's charming earnestness, the intergenerational tension between first and third generation immigrants, creates a comic theatrical landscape.
Two characters that markedly contrast with one another are Bella and Grandma, and it is this difference in temperament that keeps the narrative going. Just when it seems like Grandma will turn them all out onto the streets, Bella's arrested development and her misunderstanding of the interaction between Grandma and her grandsons makes it so that they must stay. Where Grandma is cold-hearted, unaffectionate, and undeniably "adult," Bella is sweet to the point of obliviousness, trapped in a perpetual childhood. Where Grandma has no pity for the young boys, who she only sees as a nuisance and a testament to her son's disloyalty, Bella loves the boys like they are her own, and delights in making them a home in the apartment in Yonkers.
