A Book of Great Worth Read online

  Whenever my father went out of town, my mother wrote him letters, one a day. Usually, because he would only be gone a few days, she didn’t mail them – even in those days, when the mail was faster and more reliable than it is today, they wouldn’t have reached him in time. She wrote the letters, on sky-blue stationery and using a silver-tipped Shaeffer pen she’d won at college, folded them neatly, inserted them into envelopes that she addressed, in her precise, slanting hand, to “my darling Harry, care of the special place in my heart,” and tucked them away in the top drawer of their dresser, where she kept her jewelry box and other things of her own. When he came home, she’d present him with these letters, and he’d read them one a day for the next few days, as if they were actually arriving in the post.

  “I bought Esther a new doll,” my mother would write, referring to my eldest sister, who was then around four, “and I’m dying to see how she likes it. I didn’t give it to her today because I wanted to wrap the box up pretty with paper and ribbons. In the morning, it’ll be sitting at her place on the breakfast table.”

  “So how did Esther like the doll?” my father would ask, although he had, in fact, already seen his darling golden-haired daughter playing with it.

  “I can’t tell you that,” my mother would tease. “You’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s letter.”

  In one of these letters, which always contained words of endearment and longing, and often scraps of poetry, my mother closed with these words, “Je t’aime.” She had been born in Paris and, though her father, who was on the run from the czar’s secret police, took his small family to England before she could speak, she always said that French was her true tongue. She didn’t actually learn it until she was in college, but then it came to her as easily as if it had merely been forgotten. Still, she had only two years of study, and little chance to use it after she married my father, so she was far from fluent.

  My father’s first languages had been Yiddish, which was still his working language, and Polish, long forgotten. He spoke English “like an American,” as he said, and could read bits of German, Latin and Greek, which he had taught himself, but could neither read nor speak any French. He knew the phrase she used, though, and he responded one day, when he had occasion to leave her a note, by concluding with another phrase he’d picked up: “Je t’adore.”

  My mother, jumping to the wrong conclusion, was thrilled. “I didn’t realize you knew French,” she said.

  My father, who didn’t approve of lying, wished to avoid the commission. “There’s lots about me you still don’t know, Bertie,” he said obliquely, a knowing smile playing about his lips.

  After that, my mother began to pepper her letters to my father with French phrases: affaire de coeur, billet doux, lettre d’amour, passion grande and the like. Reading these letters in her presence on his return from a trip, my father would nod knowingly, sometimes getting a sense of the meaning from the context – he was not a linguist by any means, but he had a good feel for language – other times not, but saying nothing or little directly in response. This would not have struck my mother as odd, necessarily, since, as a rule, he didn’t comment on everything in her letters, certainly not the idioms, the turns of phrase.

  So it was that the harmless deception – no, more a little joke he was having at her expense than a deception, really, that’s what he would later explain to us children when this story was told – went undetected and caused no problem for many months. There was still a certain shyness in my mother’s relationship with my father, even after several years of marriage and two children, and it’s unlikely that she would have dreamed of challenging him, even if a reason to do so had occurred to her. Better, she might have thought, to look the other way.

  The trip to Chicago was occasioned by a crisis not only in the garment trades, which were plied by thousands of New Yorkers and so most absorbed my father’s attention, but throughout the union movement. The Depression had touched bottom, or so it appeared, and the economy was weakly beginning to raise its head. Roosevelt, who my father thought was a great man, had introduced certain legislation and more was promised. There were stirrings of war in Europe. The soup lines and breadlines were shorter than they had been even a year or two earlier, and the gatherings of men to be found idling in front of the pool halls and saloons along Delancy Street and the Bowery were thinner. There were more jobs, but the pay was as poor as ever, and the mood of the workers and their leaders, who had held their hands and tongues so long, was darkening. Something was changing, something was about to happen – my father said he could smell it in the air as he walked the narrow, cobblestoned streets of the Lower East Side, could hear it ringing in the voices of men. George Meany, the great leader of the American Federation of Labor, had called a meeting of the presidents of the unions of the federation that was to be more like a council of war than a convention in the true sense. The meeting was to last for five days, perhaps more, at the Blackstone Hotel on Chicago’s south side, far off the city’s beaten path. The press was invited, not to attend the daily sessions themselves, but to wait outside for any pronouncements that might come at the end of each day.

  Including the train ride to and fro, my father would be gone for at least a week, perhaps as much as ten days, and he had to borrow a suitcase large enough to accommodate all he would need from his brother Sam, who had travelled in Europe. As she packed his neatly folded shirts and underwear and his extra suit, complete with wooden hanger, my mother composed a letter in her mind, smiling at the thought of his surprise and pleasure when he opened the suitcase in what she imagined would be a lonely hotel room to find the first of her daily letters, already there. She sat down at the wobbly kitchen table and wrote the letter, beginning, “Mon cheri,” and ending, as had now become her custom, “Je t’aime.” In between, since there was really no news to convey, she poured out her love, pride, anxiety and anticipation of loneliness.

  “Until you are back in my arms, they will ache with your absence, I will rise in the morning with my arms extended into the shape of you,” she wrote, in English. Then, with just a bit of difficulty, in French: “Seulement par écrit suis-je capable dèxprimer l’énorme de mon amour pour toi, de faire allusion à sa portée, son envergure, sa hauteur, son épaisseur, sa texture, à son bourdonnement. En te parlant, même dans le noir, je perds les moyens de m’èxprimer, je ne suis qu’humilité devant la pureté de ton amour. J’en suis réduite à la simplicité de cette humble phrase: Je t’aime, Berte.”

  • • •

  My father rode to Chicago in style on the evening Broadway Limited. His newspaper, The Day, was prosperous and he was able to afford a bed in a compartment for two, which he shared with his friend and colleague Vogel, who covered labour for the rival Forward. On expense allowances, the two of them took their meals in the dining car, drinking French wine from good crystal and stirring real cream into their coffee with sterling silver spoons. Some fifteen years earlier, as a young man seeking his fortune, my father had ridden a similar train to Cleveland, then on to Chicago, then back to Cleveland, where he lived for a several years before returning to New York. On those trips, though, he’d travelled coach, sleeping sitting up in his clothes and sweat, eating salami sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and drinking coffee from a Thermos. “I always wondered what kind of swells rode in the sleepers,” he remarked to Vogel.

  “Sons of bitches,” Vogel said, tapping his ear, a characteristic gesture. “Rich sons of bitches like us.”

  “Maybe not so rich,” my father said.

  “All right, don’t be so fussy,” Vogel said. “Employed sons of bitches. You think there’s that much of a difference?”

  This bit of irony provoked smiles from both men, as they had both prospered during, if not from, the Depression. Circulation of the Yiddish press remained high and both men not only had jobs but relatively well-paying ones.

  Another indulgence the two men allowed themselves was a taxicab from the Union Station to the Blackstone Hot
el, and my father recalled later that he even tipped the bellhop a quarter, more than double his usual dime. He turned to the unfamiliar suitcase the bellhop had placed on the bed and began to unpack. “Vus is dus?” he said aloud, in surprise, as the slim blue envelope, with its familiar handwriting, fell out from between two shirts he was unfolding. The envelope was addressed, as usual, to “my darling Harry,” and he sat on the edge of the bed as he read the enclosed letter, not once but twice, not understanding all of it but overcome with emotion nonetheless. He was not a man who believed in any higher power than fate and he said no prayers, but he mumbled something now, a thanks for his great good fortune to whomever or whatever might be listening.

  In the bar downstairs, my father spotted Bromberg from The New York Times drinking alone. He was an enormous man whose gabardine suits were specially made for him, “by a tentmaker,” Vogel liked to say. He was an aloof, cultivated man, not a man to have friends, but he had a slight liking for my father that my father, who admired the man’s graceful writing style, cultivated. Vogel, who had an intense dislike for him, was nowhere to be seen so my father approached the Times man. “Bromberg, may I join you?” he asked.

  “Certainly, Morgenstern,” the fat man replied, lifting his funnel-shaped amber glass. “The draught is exceptionally good. It’s German.” He smiled sheepishly and waved his free hand in a gesture that seemed to indicate a mixture of embarrassment and resignation.

  My father signalled to the barman and sat down. Bromberg seemed unusually friendly, perhaps because the two men were so far from home, and my father, on impulse, pulled out my mother’s letter. “How’s your French, Bromberg?”

  “Good,” Bromberg said sharply, as if annoyed at the question. He had travelled widely in Europe and my father had seen him at meetings they both were covering reading slim volumes of poetry in French.

  “If you can avoid looking at the English passages, I’d appreciate it,” my father said. “It’s the French I’m interested in.” He neatly folded the letter so that only the paragraph in question was face up and handed it to Bromberg. He felt awkward but was dying to know what my mother had written.

  Bromberg looked at the letter, up at my father and down at the letter again. He set his glass of beer on the table and brought the letter closer to his face, squinting slightly. “The light here...”

  “Maybe later would be better...”

  “No, that’s fine.” Bromberg nodded his head slightly as he read, his thick, puckered lips moving almost imperceptibly, as if he were in prayer, until they spread into a broad smile. “Morgenstern, a jewel like you should ask for a raise. You can’t possibly be getting as much as you deserve.”

  “A jewel?”

  “That’s what this woman thinks you are.”

  My father hesitated, embarrassed. “What does she say?”

  Bromberg waved the letter airily before bringing it close to his face again. “This may not be it exactly, but something like this:

  “‘Only on paper is it possible for me to express the enormity of my love for you, to hint at its scope, its breadth and width and height, its thickness, its texture, the hum it makes.’” Bromberg raised his eyes to interject, “This is some admirer you have, Morgenstern. Sorry.” He resumed his translation: “‘Speaking to you, even in the dark, my powers with words are crippled, I am humbled by the purity of your love. I am reduced to the simplicity of this humble phrase: I love you.’”

  There was silence after Bromberg finished reading. The two men sipped their beers. My father glanced at the clock over the bar – there was still an hour before they were to be at the dinner which would open the gathering. “I have another favour to ask,” he finally said.

  • • •

  Late that night, after he had telephoned his story of the evening’s activities to New York, my father sat at the table in his room in his undershirt, carefully copying the words that Bromberg had written for him on a napkin. His handwriting was always poor and now, slightly drunk, it was bad enough that he felt the need to copy out the letter a second time. “It was a thrill to find your letter amidst my shirts and underwear,” he wrote, in English. “A thousand miles or ten, it doesn’t matter how much geography is between us, how many railroad ties, we could not be closer. Your words pierce me like arrows, going straight to my heart, the sweetness of your smile racing through my veins.”

  Here, he switched to the words Bromberg had written as he had dictated: “Jusqu’à ce que je te tienne à nouveau dans mes bras, crois bien que je suis à toi et à toi seule, que mon coeur n’appartient qu’à toi.”

  He looked at the strange words until his vision began to swim, trying to make sense of them. He noted the toi repeated over again and knew it was “you,” saw with a momentary blush the bras but knew it meant “arms,” recognized Je suis as “I am” and coeur as “heart.” That much French he knew. To reassure himself, he checked the other side of the napkin, where he had written the message to be translated, pronouncing the words aloud: “Until I hold you again in my arms, believe that I am yours and yours alone, that my heart belongs only to you.”

  Satisfied, he sealed and stamped an envelope printed with the hotel’s return address and padded in his socked feet down the hall to the brass mail chute beside the silent elevator. “Good night love,” he whispered as he dropped the letter through the lidded slot, thinking that it was an hour later in New York and that my mother might well be up at this hour, feeding the baby, that she would feel his thought.

  In the morning, when he came down to breakfast, there was a letter from her awaiting him at the front desk, written and posted the same day he left the city. “How I await your reply to my letter,” she wrote, the slanted rhythm of her hand pulling him immediately into the universe of her blue stationery and washing him over with an immense feeling of loneliness. And in French: “Comme je me languis de tes mains, de ta parole, de tes lèvres sur les miennes.” Then, in English again, “The children, too, miss you. Esther spent all afternoon drawing you a picture of our building so you’d remember where you’re to return to.”

  And sure enough, folded in with the letter, was a large sheet of scrap newsprint scribbled over with crayons: a tall rectangle studded with small squares, on one side the ocean, on the other railroad tracks leading off the page and a locomotive with an engineer in a striped hat. In one of the squares was a blonde smiling face and a waving arm, Esther herself. The drawing was bordered with hearts and Xs for kisses. “Look at this, Vogel,” my father said, handing the drawing over the breakfast table. “I’ve told you a hundred times you should have a wife and children.”

  “What woman would have me as a husband?” Vogel said sourly over the lip of his coffee cup. “What child would have me as a father?”

  My father smiled tolerantly and turned his attention to a napkin, upon which he scrawled “My darling, it’s been mere hours since your letter but already the hours hang heavy as I wait for the next.”

  At lunchtime, my father conferred with Bromberg, who came up with this translation: “Ma chérie, il ne s’est passé que quelques heures depuis ta dernière lettre et déjà les heures me pèsent dans l’attente de la prochaine. Quant à toi, j’en suis sûr, beaucoup de choses te tiennent occupée et tu ne penses pas à moi.”

  My father glanced at what the other man had carefully printed out and shook his head with wonder. “So many words.”

  “Yes,” Bromberg agreed, “the French are verbose. Never one word when two will do.”

  The following day’s letter contained another drawing by my sister, more outpourings of passion and tenderness in both English and French and, because it was written the day after his departure, was filled with household news: Esther’s skinned knee, Judy’s colic, a letter from the bank. By the end of the week, though most of his time was devoted to the events unfolding around him, with declarations of war on the business world and news of strategies emerging daily from the summit, through either official pronouncements or unofficial leaks
, my father’s head was plugged with such family trivia and his ears rang with the musicality of French phrases conveying promises, pledges, entreaties, enticements. And Bromberg, who continued to be amused by his assignment, had been drawn closer and closer into what my father now felt had become a conspiracy of sorts.

  Each afternoon at three, the two men would meet in the hotel bar and Bromberg would translate whatever French passages there might be in that day’s letter from my mother, reading them out loud in a cultivated voice that retained, after the four years the enormous man had spent at Harvard, only the faintest traces of his upbringing in the Bronx. Then my father would dictate a few sentences or two of reply and Bromberg, scribbling on a napkin or the back of an envelope, would produce a version in French. There was some trust involved, as my father had no way of knowing for certain what his colleague wrote, but he was confident that Bromberg’s command of spelling, grammar, diction and syntax in French were impeccable. What was there to be concerned with?

  On Friday, with just one or, at the most, two days left to the labour summit, an unexpected note of alarm crept into my mother’s daily letter. “My darling Harry,” she began as always, “I was surprised by the tone you took in your response to my news about Judy’s recurring cough. I assure you I’m not being overly protective.” This puzzled my father since he recalled no accusations, and certainly no tone, in the letter he’d written two days earlier – or was it three? Suddenly he was confused about how long it took letters to go from New York to Chicago and back again. This letter was dated Thursday, so should be responding to what he had written Wednesday, but perhaps it was Tuesday. Had he taken such a tone on Tuesday? It was so far back, and so much had transpired at the meeting since then, he couldn’t be sure. At any rate, the crossness of my mother’s own tone immediately disappeared as she turned to other subjects, so he gave it no further thought. And if her passages in French, when Bromberg translated them for him that afternoon, were briefer and seemed less passionate, that surely was his imagination playing tricks on him.