A Book of Great Worth Read online

  Just before he screwed his face closer into the pillow and fell asleep, as quickly and firmly as a stone being dropped into water, he half opened his eyes and murmured: “That was wonderful, darling, don’t you agree?”

  She hadn’t said anything, just watched, in the flickering light of the lamp, as he fell asleep. She’d insisted he leave the lamp burning, so she could see him, those brilliant cat’s eyes, so he could see her, because he was so beautiful and she wanted to feel beautiful. But after they started, he had closed his eyes, and it had seemed to her he could have been anyone. Just the same, there had been a moment, as he slid into her, a moment above the pain as her nerve endings and skin responded on their own, when they had moved together as one, when her passion had risen with the alacrity all those months of courtship seemed to have been foreshadowing and their breaths had merged into one fierce, staccato rhythm. She thought about that moment as she stood along the railing, her teeth chattering with cold, her eyes streaming with tears as they stared blankly into the darkness below. There had been that moment, that was all. There had even been one moment when, allowing her imagination to run wild, she had believed she might love him. But it had just been that one moment, and then it was gone.

  • • •

  A Romantic Secret

  A few years after his return to New York from out west, but before the introduction to my mother that would change his life, my father met and became friendly with a man to whom he would always refer, usually accompanied by a wink, as “the notorious Leon Arrow.”

  Years later, when I was a teenager, I met this Arrow myself, but whatever appeal he had had for my father was lost on me. My father’s stories of his friend’s past – notorious indeed – and the reality of the man I met were so much in conflict that I was immediately confused.

  At that time, he was working as a middle-level functionary in the Bronx offices of the Plumbers, Pipefitters and Joiners Union, a job more involved with bookkeeping and paper shuffling than organizing or negotiating. To me, it seemed a fairly humdrum occupation, totally lacking in any of the drama or glamour I knew – from reading Steinbeck and Dos Passos and from hearing my father’s tales of the old days – some work in the labour movement possessed. Moreover, he was a nondescript, dishevelled man inhabiting what was to me still the mysterious upper middle ages of life: short, slump-shouldered, pot-bellied and lame, a combination that produced a slightly comical imbalance in his posture and walk; balding, with a rim of mouse-coloured hair above his ears and running behind his skull, as if he were wearing ill-fitting earmuffs; and wearing wire-rimmed glasses that failed to conceal the hangdog, always moist brown eyes behind them. He looked, in short, like a lot of the men who were my father’s friends or colleagues, whom I would sometimes meet on the rare occasions when I visited him at the newspaper office, and who to me – twelve and thirteen and fourteen at the time – were of very little interest. Notorious? My father’s adjective seemed misplaced.

  But I did have some interest in this Arrow, not because of his appearance or occupation but because of what my father had told me of his past. He was a reformed Communist who had renounced not only his former beliefs but his former comrades and so lived in a sort of social netherworld, distrusted by both his former friends and his new colleagues, not really liked by anyone, with the exception of my father, who, though wary, was loyal to a fault. He was a husband and father long separated from his family, having left them somewhere in the Midwest – Minnesota, my father thought – to pursue single-mindedly his political goals. And now, those goals unrealized, the beliefs that fuelled them turned to ashes, he found himself alone, guilty and bereft. He had been injured – the cause of his limp – and arrested in the improbably named city of Winnipeg somewhere in the heart of Canada, during a brawl that climaxed what my father described to me as the infamous General Strike of 1919, when the flooding of the job market by thousands of returning soldiers further inflamed the labour movement of that backwater city, and he had spent several years in a Canadian prison before being deported. And he’d served another term in prison later on for a crime about which my father was vague. But even more fascinating than all that to me was this: he was a man, my father had told me, “with a romantic secret.” What that secret was, my father wouldn’t say.

  “He is a man with a colourful past, that’s for sure,” my father said, somewhat enigmatically.

  “Romantic secret” – what a powerful phrase that was for me at my impressionable age. I too had romantic secrets, but they were, I knew, trivial, even on their own and certainly in comparison to those of a man who had been beaten, jailed, his life turned inside out. So I was curious to meet Leon Arrow and, one summer afternoon when, at my father’s invitation, I had taken the subway into Manhattan to have lunch with him, and he told me his notorious friend would be joining us, I was pleased.

  But when I actually met the man, as I said, my interest quickly cooled. I already knew that his job was a far cry from the activities of his swashbuckling past, but this was true of a number of my father’s friends, as it was even of my father himself: he once had aspirations to be a novelist and poet, but he made his living as a reporter covering the labour beat for a Yiddish newspaper. “Life is compromise,” he was fond of saying. “Things don’t work out as you plan. And,” he would add with a wink, “sometimes that’s just as well.”

  With that in mind, even at thirteen or fourteen, I could see Arrow’s present lot in life as a price he was paying for the excesses of his youth. If anything, that made him even more fascinating to me. But Leon Arrow’s physical appearance was in such contrast to the romantic figure I had imagined – someone drawn and haunted but ruggedly handsome, like Humphrey Bogart, say, or Ronald Coleman – that I couldn’t help but avert my eyes, and I bit my tongue to keep from laughing out loud at the cruel irony of his name, Arrow, implying something straight and true and sharp. My father saw this, and perhaps Arrow did as well; at any rate, the conversation between the two men, which so far had been limited to welcoming pleasantries, soon shifted to Yiddish, deliberately excluding me. I ate my tuna salad sandwich and cherry Jell-O – we were at the Automat on Pearl Street, not too far from my father’s office and one of his regular haunts – and took my leave after a decent interval. “Nice to have met you, young man,” Arrow said as he shook my hand. His grip was firm and he looked me in the eye with a frank, unblinking gaze, as if he were seeing beyond my skin, appraising the inner me, the real me, as if in rebuke for my failure to afford him the same courtesy. Behind his smudged spectacles, his softened brown eyes, the colour of coffee as my father drank it, with a good splash of milk, seemed lively and intelligent. On the subway back to Brooklyn, I couldn’t help feeling that I had somehow missed an opportunity.

  “Don’t judge books by their covers,” my father said that evening, referring to the lunch. He didn’t say it sharply.

  It wasn’t till I was grown that my father told me more about his friend, revealing his secret.

  •••

  Leon Arrow arrived in New York some time in 1927, my father said, through a circuitous route, and with three marriages already behind him. There would be at least one more.

  He was an organizer for the Communist party, active in the plumbers’ union – which was then overrun with Communists, my father explained – and a veteran of the Wobblies, the legendary One Big Union. “There was a hint,” my father said, “that he was not just an organizer for the Communists, but a Soviet agent of some sort. These people were secretive, so it was hard to tell.”

  My father had no problem with Communists in those days – indeed, he would marry a woman whose father was active in the party and had taken part in Bolshevik activities in Russia. It was only later, after the Communist-led strike at my father’s newspaper, The Day, that he soured on the party, which he felt had beguiled and betrayed the strikers.

  The two men first met at the Café Royale, a Lower East Side hangout for intellectuals and artists on Second Avenue that my
father frequented. My father was neither a true artist nor an intellectual, by his own admission, but had inclinations in that direction and was interested in such people and the hangers-on who flocked around them, among whom he cheerfully classified himself. Leon Arrow was also such a hanger-on, for reasons of his own that weren’t apparent, since few if any members of the plumbers’ union spent time there, though leaders of the various garment workers’ unions did, and labour ferment and strategy was often a topic of conversation at the Royale’s tables. The two men took a liking to each other and, under the influence of schnapps at a nearby saloon, Arrow’s tongue became looser than it should have been.

  “Three marriages – and no divorces?” my father said with surprise after hearing the other man’s revelation.

  “No,” Arrow admitted ruefully. “It wasn’t deliberate, Morgenstern. These things happen.”

  Arrow, my father learned, was the son of a Minneapolis hardware wholesaler who had modified the family name from Aronofsky. He’d fallen out with his family (“bourgeois shits,” he called them) while still in his teens and found a job, through a friend of a friend, as a plumber’s assistant. He was, by his own admission, foolish in love and married a girl entirely unsuited to him, although, my father told me, “it would be hard to say what type of woman would have been suited to him, he was so sour a man.” But my father admitted he didn’t know Arrow in his youth, and he might then have been of a more positive frame of mind. The man’s time in prison had a profound effect on him, my father believed. “When I met him,” my father said, “he was an entirely unlovable man. He could be likeable, though. That’s what drew me to him, obviously.”

  With this first wife, Arrow had two children, in rapid, unthinking succession. She was a woman who might well have fit in with his family, and although love was soon gone he was a conscientious if not devoted husband and father. He was a conscientious worker as well, and it was within reason to believe that he would have his plumber’s journeyman ticket soon, and someday, perhaps, be in business for himself. Then, already leaning to the left, the result of passionate tavern conversations with other young tradesmen, he was caught up in the deeper passion of the One Big Union movement as it swept across the American heartland. It was this that led him, along with several friends, across the border into Canada when they heard talk of the general strike fomenting in Winnipeg. They wanted to be part of it, to see if there were lessons that might be applied to Minneapolis.

  With some of his fellows, Arrow, who had an impetuous nature, was swept up in the excitement of the strike, and on Black Sunday, when the Mounted Police charged the marchers, he joined in the group of hotheads who set a streetcar on its side. As it toppled, Arrow slipped and fell, and felt a piece of metal, an ornament on the exterior of the streetcar but with all the weight of the streetcar behind it, brush against his ankle – “just a kiss,” he told my father, “but enough to break the bone.” He was arrested with a stout stick in his hand as he attempted to hobble away – a policeman testified at his trial that Arrow brandished the stick as a weapon. His American citizenship was further held against him and he was sentenced to three years at Stony Mountain Prison for violations of the Riot Act. During his time there, he did much to keep the water in the old jail’s rusty pipes flowing, and he was released after only two years, and summarily deported.

  All during his absence he heard nothing from his family in Minneapolis, neither his parents and siblings – whom he didn’t try to contact but must surely have known of his plight – nor his wife, to whom he dutifully wrote several times. No reply. His feelings of love for his wife had long since been extinguished, and now his sense of responsibility towards her and the children, a boy and girl who, at this point, would have been five and four, and whom, he realized, he barely knew, was seriously weakened, thin as a thread about to snap. As a result, on his release, Arrow felt little compunction about ignoring his obligations to them, he told my father. “Fuck them,” he said with a casual shrug of his shoulders. Still, had he been deported to Minneapolis, he might well have tried to find them, but for some reason he was sent instead to Detroit, where he succumbed to the easier path, finding work at one of the numerous parts plants that catered to the automobile industry, making hoses and fittings.

  He was only twenty-five, a healthy young man, lonely and hungry for companionship and sex, and was soon enmeshed in a romance with a waitress at the café where he occasionally took a meal. She was “a nobody, a nothing,” he told my father with a dismissive wave of his hand. Nonetheless, things followed their natural course and “hardly before I knew it, we were married,” he said. A divorce from the first wife was merely overlooked, not ignored, “an oversight,” Arrow said. “I had every intention...then I was overtaken by events.”

  History soon repeated itself. In prison, Arrow had met some Communists and become attracted to their ideas. In Detroit, he joined the party and became increasingly active. Love cooled between him and his new wife, and when the party sent him on a mission to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he left her behind, without any clear plan in mind, though he suspected she was just as glad to see the back of him. In Pittsburgh, there was another woman, this time a dancer at a nightclub with, he told my father, “looser morals than I was used to.” He was swept away and, when she became pregnant, they married. Again, divorce from the woman he was no longer in contact with was overlooked.

  “If you think I am a criminal in this matter, think again,” Arrow insisted. “I’m a victim of circumstances.”

  “Circumstances largely of your own making,” my father replied.

  “Well, all right then. Of stupidity, I plead guilty. But criminal intent, no.”

  “And the dancer?” my father asked.

  “I told you, her morals were loose. No, I’m being generous – she had no morals. She was a tramp, but she fancied herself an artiste. She didn’t even care if we married. It was I who insisted, for the sake of the child. She couldn’t care less if I was divorced or not.”

  So when the party sent him to New York, he went with pleasure, glad to shake the dust of the Midwest, which he pronounced “a shithole, one big shithole filled with smaller shitholes,” from his feet. The latest wife and child were also left behind, with no ceremony. By this point in Arrow’s recounting of his life, my father had developed some distaste for the man, as it appeared to him that it was Arrow who had exhibited the loose morals, not the dancer, but he was intrigued enough by him and his story that he was willing to hold his nose.

  Arrow was then about thirty, still in good health, still lonely, still hungry. He was short but, as my father described him, good looking, fit and athletic, despite his limp, with a full head of dark wavy hair, usually Brylcreemed back, and penetrating brown eyes that women, apparently, found especially attractive. He always had a suspiciously large amount of money in his pocket for drinks and meals, and he often treated the artists he fell into conversation with at the Café Royale. He dressed well too, certainly better than any plumber or other tradesman my father had ever known. “If a woman saw him walking down the street, she might well think ‘there goes a good catch’,” my father said. Indeed, his limp, which was not so bad as to be repellant or make him an object of pity, suggested some dangerous living in his past, and made him even more attractive to women, my father believed. “Women like a suggestion of weakness in a strong man,” my father said, with a wink.

  Had a woman whose eye was caught by Arrow drawn closer, though, she might well change her mind, my father thought. The man had so dark a view of life, so sour a disposition, it was hard for my father to imagine any woman wanting to spend much time with him. Unlike most Communists and other left-wingers of my father’s acquaintance, who believed in a better life, or the Revolution or some other brighter tomorrow, Leon Arrow was thoroughly cynical, believing the worst of most people – with Marx, Lenin and Stalin notable exceptions – and situations. His adventure in Winnipeg and his time in prison, where he claimed to have witnessed unspeak
able behaviours, on the part of both inmates and their guards, had certainly soured him.

  “The revolution will come,” he would pronounce, “not because we make it come, want it to come, will it to come, but because it will on its own. It’s inevitable. A proper reading of Marx makes that clear. To struggle against it is unthinkable. To work for it is merely to hasten the day of its certain arrival, and to be on the side of the angels, such as they are. But to think that life will be automatically better, well, that would be naive, even foolish. Life will be what it will be. If we struggle to make it better, it might be.”

  Even the leadership of the Communist Party – sacrosanct for most members – was cast in a cynical light. “You think that when we are in charge, we will be better, more humane, more reasonable?” Arrow would ask rhetorically. “Why would you think that? The system will be better, of course, so our leadership will seem better. Beyond that, who can say? Our leaders are certainly better men than the leaders of the capitalists and reactionaries, but they are only men, not gods or even saints. Mistakes? We all make plenty, and so do they. As for myself, I can only say that I am a man like any other. I don’t think anyone else can claim more.”

  This position was so in contrast to what one normally heard about the party from its adherents that my father couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t a pose, something to make Arrow more approachable to those who feared or distrusted Communists and communism. “But later,” my father said, “when he left the party, when he became embittered – well, more bitter, I should say – when he became a vocal anti-communist, there wasn’t really all that much of a change in what he had to say. He changed his stripes but underneath he was the same tiger.”