A Book of Great Worth Page 11

  Arrow’s cynicism extended to his personal views as well as his political ones. Although he was usually discreet about his own experiences with marriage, he was critical of marriage as an institution, was dismissive of children, sarcastic about romance.

  And though he was certainly still attracted to women, my father said, he was generally dismissive of them. Often, referring to a woman he knew or even a strange woman passing by on the street, he would use the offensive terms “slut” or “whore” or the Yiddish kurveh and nafkeh, which translate to much the same.

  “Women are the capitalists of the domestic world,” my father heard him proclaim on several occasions. “Men do all the labour, women reap the rewards. Children, once they pass the age of pure innocence, are the complicit middle class. Is the wife really so different from the boss?”

  This would invariably provoke a predictable response from the fellows who shared a table with him: “I’m the boss in my family,” one or several of them would loudly insist.

  “So you may think,” Arrow would reply, aiming a wink at whoever he thought was most sympathetic to his view. “In many factories and mines and on the railroads, the unions believe they call the tune. They can halt work with a whistle from the steward. But who is on the best terms with their bankers, would you say – the workers or the owners?”

  Again, this would produce a predictable response. “That may all be true on the shop floor, Arrow,” someone would protest, “but in my household, I am the boss, believe me.”

  “So you may think, so you may think,” Arrow would say, and again that condescending wink.

  “There really wasn’t anything about him a woman would find appealing,” my father said, “except, maybe, the challenge.”

  That must have been it, because, according to my father, women seemed to find him irresistible. At the Café Royale, there were always women around him, hanging on his every sour word, and he seemed never to be at loss for female company for the theatre, dinner or union dances.

  My father recounted an incident he recalled vividly: “We were seated at a table, Arrow, myself and several others, including a woman named Lily Siegel, a poet. The name of another woman was mentioned and Arrow sneered, ‘that one’s just a cunt surrounded by a body.’ Excuse my language. Lily winced but she said nothing, just kept smiling. It was left to me to object.” He shook his head.

  “Some women have a weakness for such things,” my father said with a perplexed sigh and a wink to me. “They’re all do-gooders, you know, women.” Comments like that were usually said outside of the hearing of my mother. She would be in the living room, reading or listening to music. My father would be sitting at the kitchen table in his undershirt, drinking port from a water glass. “They think they can save lost men, reform bad ones.” He gazed into his glass, then took a sip. “But some men can’t be saved.”

  One of the women attracted to Leon Arrow, my father noticed, seemed to have a proprietary interest in him, taking his arm as they walked, sugaring and stirring his coffee for him. She was a tall, nicely dressed woman, a looker, with bobbed honey-coloured hair often partly covered by fashionable hats. Her name was Henrietta Himmelfarb and she worked, my father learned, as a designer for the garment company her father owned.

  He also learned, early one mid-winter week, that she and Arrow had abruptly gotten married on the weekend, having taken the overnight train to Maryland, where there was no waiting period, then back before Monday morning.

  “I was carried away,” Arrow confessed to my father, with just a touch of sheepishness to his usually brash tone. “Swept off my feet.”

  “Aren’t you taking a chance, though?” my father asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, your other marriages...”

  “Oh, that,” Arrow said dismissively, as if that matter of inconvenience had entirely slipped his mind but was nevertheless of little consequence. “What Henrietta doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” He gave my father a penetrating look, as if daring him to reveal the secret. “Nor anyone else.”

  The newlyweds took up housekeeping in an apartment on West Seventy-Eighth Street, a long subway ride from the Café Royale and the Lower East Side where Henrietta worked and Leon Arrow carried out his mysterious comings, goings and discussions. Soon, it became known that the new Mrs. Arrow was pregnant, and had left her job, and that her disapproving family had cut her off. Since money was never an issue for her husband, that should not have been a problem, but apparently it was, my father said. “Somehow, he had overextended himself.” The rumour was that the party was as displeased with Arrow’s behaviour as the bride’s family was with hers and had pulled his leash tight.

  For the first few weeks of this arrangement, my father continued to run into Arrow occasionally on East Broadway and at the Café Royale on evenings, both men bundled up in overcoats, scarves and hats against the unusual February cold, and after this had happened two or three times, my father jokingly greeted him, “That wife of yours has kicked you out already, Arrow? And in this weather?” to which his friend first blanched, then reddened. “That’s no concern of yours, Morgenstern,” he said sharply.

  My father, chastened, began to apologize but Arrow waved it off and they turned to other conversation as if nothing had happened. But a few days later, my father became aware that he hadn’t seen Arrow for a while, and, thinking back, realized it hadn’t been since the day of that exchange. Several more days followed without Arrow making an appearance at the café. When he did return, it was in the form of a changed man, subdued, pale, shaky. He actually seemed smaller, my father said. His limp seemed more pronounced.

  “Arrow, what is it?” my father inquired.

  They sat down at a table and ordered coffees. Arrow’s eyes were red, as if he had been many hours without sleep or even had been crying, although that seemed so unlikely my father shook the idea away.

  “Henrietta...” he began, faltering. “There was an accident...”

  “Is she all right?” my father asked.

  “She’s...she’s dead.”

  “Good Lord, man, what happened?”

  “An accident,” Arrow repeated, but gradually, in fragments, my father got the story out of him, or some semblance of it: Arrow had taken her for an abortion, and she’d seemed fine afterwards, but soon after they returned to their apartment she’d begun to hemorrhage. He’d hesitated in taking her to the hospital and then, when he did, the two of them drenched in her blood, it was too late. She died in the taxicab on the way.

  “My God,” my father said.

  When he looked up, my father told me, Arrow’s face was ashen and fat seemed to have drained from his cheeks, so pinched were they.

  Things went very badly for Leon Arrow after that, my father said. The hospital, of course, had reported the incident of Henrietta’s death to the police and Arrow was soon brought in for questioning. From that point, the situation spiralled downward quickly. A warrant for his arrest from Minneapolis was discovered – it seemed that his first wife had pursued him through the courts for child support and somehow news had surfaced of the second marriage in Detroit, where child support had also been ordered; payments for both were long overdue, and he had been found in contempt of court in absentia. He wound up serving two consecutive prison terms, one in New York for bigamy and his involvement with the abortion, and somewhere in the Midwest for the contempt and another bigamy charge, seven years in all. It could have been even worse had the marriage to the dancer in Pittsburgh ever come to light.

  When Arrow came out of prison, he drifted back to New York and eventually found work with the plumbers’ union, where he still had contacts, though, by this time, it had long since purged itself of most of its known Communists. But he was a broken man in many ways, my father said, and his bitterness could make him unpleasant company. They saw each other infrequently – that lunch at the Automat when I’d met him and been so unimpressed was one of those rare occasions – and my father said Arrow n
ever spoke of his personal life so he didn’t know if he had married again, if there had been any more women.

  My father had testified as a character witness at Arrow’s trial in New York. He pleaded not guilty, of course, claiming he was a victim of circumstances. The bigamy, he testified and his lawyer argued, was no more than an oversight, certainly not a criminal act. As to the abortion, he swore he knew his wife was undergoing a medical procedure at the clinic he brought her to, but no more, and his lawyer argued passionately that Arrow had been punished enough by Henrietta’s death. My father, somewhat reluctantly, testified that Arrow was a good person, concerned with his fellow man, and that he’d never heard him boast of any wrongdoing. This was true enough, but when he was cross-examined, my father had to admit he was aware of Arrow’s previous marriages, that he spoke openly of them.

  All of this would weigh heavily on my father a couple of years later when he met the woman who would be my mother and started to think seriously of marriage himself. It was an institution cloaked in ritual and mystery, with its vows of love, honour and obedience, and Arrow, it seemed to my father, had violated every tenet of those vows, and with barely a thought or a regret. Yet he was not a bad fellow, not really. He hadn’t entered into his marriages as a sexual predator or with the intention of bilking the women of their savings or from any other ulterior motive. He had been, he’d confessed at his trial, “careless,” and that was the word that stayed with my father.

  It gave my father pause to think that it might be possible to distort so easily the very best of intentions.

  • • •

  A Distant Relation

  The same year, late in the last century, that my grandfather left his wife and children to cross the ocean to New York, where it was thought he might make a better life, his older brother, whose name was Isaac, left his family as well and went, with a similar purpose, to Montreal.

  The two brothers had never been close. As children, only two among many brothers and sisters on a farm, they had been rivals for their often absent father’s attention, and as adults they had little in common – Joseph, my grandfather, a newspaper writer and editor, an intellectual of sorts, Isaac a brawler and a fixer, good with his hands. This characterization, apparently, was the extent of what my grandfather had to say about his brother. In their new countries, they did not have any direct contact, but, through other relatives, they heard news of each other, and, consequently, my father was dimly, disinterestedly, aware that he had an uncle and aunt, and a brood of cousins, in Canada. Why one brother had come to one North American country while the other went to the other, my father didn’t know – perhaps their destinations had merely been an accident. All he did know, in fact, was that he had relatives in Montreal, a city that, while it was considerably closer, seemed as distant and exotic as the cities of Poland and Russia that figured in his father’s recollections. In his own travels, north into upstate New York and New Hampshire, and west into Ohio and Illinois, my father never gave these relatives a thought.

  So when, early in 1930, he met his cousin Reuben one evening in the crowded Automat on Pearl Street, he was flabbergasted. They were first cousins, sons of brothers, with a noticeable similarity in the shape of their faces and features, but the distance between them was more than one merely to be measured in miles or the texture of blood.

  My father, who was a reporter at The Day, was with Vogel, his counterpart at The Forward, the Socialist paper. Together, the two men, rivals but friends, kept their eyes on the city’s teeming garment district and its boisterous, muscular unions. On this night, they were eating together because, within the hour, they were due at a meeting of Local 37, the cutters, who were agitating for a strike within the industry – the merits of which my father, who was opposed, and Vogel, who was enthusiastically in support, were arguing. And they were at the Automat because the union meeting hall they’d soon be heading towards was nearby.

  My father was eating hotdogs and beans, for which he had deposited three nickels into the slots beside the glass window, one of dozens of such windows in the wall separating the dining area from the kitchen. On his tray was a cup of almost white coffee, from which he sipped as he ate, and a bowl of red Jell-O with a crown of whipped cream; both of these had cost a nickel extra. He had squeezed bright yellow mustard over his plate and was eating with gusto, aiding his fork with a crust of bread.

  Vogel, who rarely ate, was slurping from a cup of black coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. He was a small man, little larger than a child, with a narrow skull, and already had the same nervous mannerisms which, years later, when I came to know him, were always so noticeable: a twitch in his eyelid, an irritation in his ear that made him continuously tap at the base of his jaw with his fingertips. Both men were in their thirties, my father a year or two older than his friend, unmarried, dressed in dark suits and ties, in good health, their hair still thick and dark, though my father’s was beginning both to fade and thin.

  To their table now stepped a man whom, my father would later say, when he recounted this story, he looked up at with a shock of recognition. He had never seen the man before, but knew with certainty that there was a link between them.

  “So, you’re Morgenstern?” the man said, in Yiddish, a vaguely accusing tone in his odd voice that suggested he would not accept a denial.

  “Sure,” my father said. “And you? I know you, maybe?”

  “You know me, no,” the man replied, allowing a small lifting at the edge of his lips, lips that were remarkably like my father’s own. “I’m your cousin, Rueben, from Montreal.” The man was about my father’s age, perhaps a few years younger, and, like my father, was of medium height, medium build. He was wearing a dirty wool overcoat, dark blue but with a jaunty red stripe running along the bottom, and rubber galoshes, the buckles undone. He extended his hand. “I asked for you at the paper. A very nice young woman said I might find you here. I worried how I would know you but she said I shouldn’t, that I would know you immediately. She was right.”

  “There is a slight resemblance,” my father allowed, reluctant, for reasons he couldn’t then fathom, to admit how great it was. “But tell me – Reuben, did you say? How did you even know of me? I knew I had relatives in Montreal, but not their names or anything about them. Yet you knew of me, knew where to find me.”

  My father’s cousin emitted what struck the other two men as a peculiarly mirthless laugh. “Come now, Morgenstern, don’t be so modest. People in all directions of the compass read the works of your illustrious father and brother in the pages of The Morning Journal and The Day. Even in Canada, even in Montreal.”

  “That I can believe,” my father said. “And me?”

  Reuben shook his head in protest. “Again, false modesty, cousin. Even you, though you’ve changed your name, are well known.”

  Reuben excused himself and went to get a cup of coffee for himself and second cups for my father and Vogel. The two friends exchanged glances. “A flatterer,” Vogel said, with obvious distaste. “This one, I don’t like the looks of, Morgenstern.”

  My father laughed. “He looks just like me.”

  “Like brothers,” Vogel admitted, tapping his jaw. “But looks like is one thing. It’s the look in his eye I don’t like.”

  Reuben returned with the coffees on a tray and sat down. The two cousins exchanged news of their families, and, while my father finished his meal, he learned that his uncle had died but his aunt by marriage still enjoyed her health and that he had half a dozen cousins in addition to Reuben, all grown, most of them still in Montreal. The family business, a furrier shop, had fallen on hard times, however, and had recently closed its doors. When my father pushed aside his tray and lit a cigarette, the cousin leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I could have a private word with you, maybe? It’s a matter of...what would you say? Delicacy?”

  “Don’t mind me,” Vogel said, implying that he might merely turn away and not listen, but he rose and joined two other men at a n
earby table, Isaac Singer, the novelist, and Jacob Javelit, a compositor at The Forward.

  “Delicacy means one of two things,” my father said, not unkindly. “Women or money. Or both.”

  His cousin smiled ruefully. Like my father, his hair was starting to recede from his high forehead, and he passed his palm over his skull now in a nervous gesture, patting the hair into place – a gesture my father recognized with a shock as identical to one of his own father’s. “Right on both counts. It’s taken all my savings to bring us to New York. Things are not so good in Montreal. The shop, as I told you, closed, and I haven’t been able to find anything. I hoped things would be better here.”

  “I might be able to help you find something,” my father interrupted. “I know some people.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Reuben said, looking grateful. “In the meantime, there’s a place to live to worry about. Food on the table. For myself, I wouldn’t ask. I have a wife, a child.”

  My father allowed himself a moment to think of his own father and the uncle he’d never met, men who had left their families behind while they sought their fortunes in another country. Why would this man take his wife and child with him, he wondered, exposing them to whatever risk there might be? He also thought about Reuben’s other options. My father was far from the man’s only relative in New York, of course. He thought of his own father, then editor of The Morning Journal, who was famous for his frugality. He thought of his older brother, but approaching Sam for a loan would be akin to slamming a door on one’s own foot. He thought of his younger brothers, but Izzy had a young wife and two small children of his own and Henry was in law school, and was himself the recipient of occasional assistance from my father. Nathan had moved to Pennsylvania, where he had turned his skill as a silversmith into business, and was rarely heard from. “Certainly I can lend you some money,” he said.

  “Loan, of course,” Reuben said quickly. “I’m not asking for a gift. I’m not asking for charity. It’s a loan, and I ask only because of the woman and child. That should be understood.”