A Book of Great Worth Read online

  Nevertheless, in his letter to her that night, he began by writing “Dearest Bertie, I apologize a thousand times if anything I may have said gave you offense or hurt your feelings. It was certainly unintentional and perhaps attributable to the tense atmosphere here at the hotel.” And he’d already made certain that the passages he dictated to Bromberg for translation into French, which he now carefully copied out, were especially affectionate. Bromberg, he recalled, had nodded his head in approval as he scribbled.

  The following day, Saturday, there was no letter from my mother. My father, surprised, exclaimed: “Surely there’s mail delivery on Saturday in Chicago,” to which the desk clerk assured him there was, though only one, in the morning. There would be no further delivery until Monday morning. But by that time, my father knew, he would be on his way home, as it now seemed certain the summit would conclude Sunday afternoon, carefully timed to make the headlines of Monday morning’s newspapers. There would be a pickup at noon, however, the desk clerk told him, and though he wasn’t sure if a letter he posted today would get home before him or afterward, he sought out Bromberg after breakfast and dictated one final message in French. “I love you and count the minutes, the seconds, until once again I hold you in my arms,” he dictated, blushing. He realized with sudden horror how deeply he had opened himself to the other man’s scrutiny, but it was too late now for modesty. “Until then,” he went on, his voice trembling with emotion, “I will be only a shadow of myself, a hollow man, waiting to be filled once again by the sweet liquor of your love.”

  Bromberg raised his heavy head and gave my father a frank look, and smiled with satisfaction as he returned to his task, his jowls quivering. “You’re a poet, Morgenstern,” he said, “a blessed poet.”

  That evening, there was a banquet, thrown by the Illinois branch of the federation, and the Blackstone Hotel’s best hall was filled with the cream of the leadership of the state’s unions. Meany gave one of his trademark thunderous speeches, though he omitted most of the key announcements, which were being held for the following day. Afterwards, there was much drinking and when my father went to bed he barely had time to whisper “Goodnight, darling Bertie” to his pillow before he was asleep. The following day, as he had expected, there was a press conference shortly after noon, but there had been enough leaks that my father already had most of his story written. A few quotes pasted in and he was ready to dictate into the telephone to the rewrite man awaiting his call on the city desk in New York. Afterwards, there was plenty of time to pack, and he and Vogel shared a taxi to Union Station. That night, he slept on the crisp sheets of a Pullman berth dreaming of his own bed.

  Once back in the city on Monday morning, the expense account clicked off and my father took the subway from Penn Station to Coney Island, where my parents had a small apartment on West Twenty-First Street near Surf Avenue, within scent if not sight of the ocean. He lugged the big suitcase up the two flights of stairs and paused outside the door to catch his breath before turning the key. “Bertie, children, I’m home,” he called. There was no response. My father put the suitcase down and walked down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. Dishes were in the sink but there was no other sign of life. “Bertie?” he called again.

  He found my mother in their bedroom standing by the window. She didn’t turn when he called her name from the doorway and he could see from the movement of her shoulders that she was crying. “Bertie, what on earth?”

  He took her by the shoulders and turned her around. Her eyes and nose were red and her cheeks glistened. “You’re a h-h-h-horrible man,” she managed to hiccup out.

  My father was dumbstruck. In the five years they’d been married they’d had arguments, even one memorable fight, and there had certainly been tears before, but nothing like this, the cause so completely mysterious. “What are you talking about, Bertie?” he demanded.

  “What I’m talking about? The terrible things you said. The vile things you wrote about your own children, and about me, all week.” She paused to blow her nose with a handkerchief she had balled in her hand. “And today’s letter...oh, Harry, how could you do such things? How could you tell me about those women?”

  My father looked at her with amazement. At first, it seemed to him that she was speaking nonsense but gradually it began to dawn on him what might have happened. “I said things? When? Where?”

  “In your l-l-l-letters,” my mother hiccuped. “Your horrible letters.”

  “In my letters...I said these terrible things in French?”

  “Yes,” she spit out. “That made it all the worse.” She gave him then a pointed look, as if she too were perhaps beginning to understand.

  “Bertie, Bertie,” my father crooned, stroking my mother’s auburn hair, which, at the time, she wore loose around her shoulders. “I have a confession to make.” Later, he would think about what he would have to say to Bromberg. And whether a punch in the fat, malicious bastard’s nose would be appropriate. As for now, it was enough that she was in his arms.

  From that day on, he determined, there would be no more French spoken in his house, no more French in their letters, no more secrets, no more deceptions, harmless or not – harmless! – no more lies, white or any other kind.

  Outside the bedroom window, on the street below, children were playing. Through the glass, my parents could hear the muffled sound of their shouts, but not the words.

  • • •

  A Bargain

  My father used to say that my mother was the one in the family who wore the pants. As he said it, he would invariably be wearing pants himself, either the pants of his suit or a pair of the Sears catalogue blue jeans my mother ordered for him, and she would be wearing one of her many floral-print skirts, so the remark was surely meant to be ironic, though at the time, and until I went off to college and learned its delicious meaning, irony was a concept I was unfamiliar with, and what my father said was merely puzzling. The closest my mother ever came to wearing pants was the voluminous denim culottes she put on to tend her garden in the summer. Beyond those, and the one-piece swimsuit she wore when we went to the beach, I never saw her out of a skirt or dress, though she would occasionally walk around the house in her slip for a while after coming home from work. She was never embarrassed to be dressed that way in front of me, and so I in turn was never embarrassed to see her.

  I think what my father meant by the remark was that my mother made all the big decisions in their life together. Another of his favourite remarks – again, ironically – was that he made the big decisions, on war and peace, world hunger, the economy and other weighty matters, while my mother contented herself with the small decisions, those related to the family and household, things like spending money, feeding and clothing them and the children, what movie to go to and so on. My father also often said that he and my mother did everything around the house together, with him doing the physical labour and my mother “supervising,” if it was something to do with the outside, and her doing the work and him supervising if it was inside – chores like the dishes and the laundry. All of these comments – conveyed in a joking voice but with a serious undertone – related to my father’s often-expressed grievance that my mother was “bossy.”

  It was true that she almost always got her way. But not always. My father liked a drink now and then, meaning several times a day. I don’t know how many. She would have liked him not to drink at all. His concession to her was rarely to drink his preferred rye whisky in her presence – never at home, but he would let his guard down and have one or two at family gatherings where liquor was flowing. “I’m just doing this to be polite,” he would say, a little too loudly but usually with a wink, and the uncles would smile. But he kept a flask in the inside pocket of his overcoat – and when, a few years later, he became a commuter, another in the glove compartment of his car. There was also a bottle in the bottom drawer of his desk at work, and during the course of his day he made occasional stops at barrooms where he was a familiar cus
tomer. At home, at night, usually seated at the kitchen table in his undershirt, he would have a glass or two of sherry or port, usually the cheapest brands. My mother bought it for him, and that’s what he specified, the cheapest, which, I imagine, also appealed to her own sense of frugality. This was her concession to him, these fortified wines, “a gentleman’s drink,” he would say when he unscrewed the bottle, as if to imply it was no drink at all then, and didn’t count.

  Although I was a witness to them all through my growing up, this to-ing and fro-ing, these nuances of their life together, it wasn’t until I was grown and involved in a relationship of my own that I came to understand the delicate balance they had constructed and maintained. Well, not understand, but begin to.

  Long before that, before my birth even, my father had a bad experience with drink, so bad that, even though he did not give up drinking, he vowed he would never again be drunk, really drunk, in that state where he could not count on his own abilities or judgment, where he was of no use to anyone.

  I heard about this experience, as might be expected, after I had my own first bad encounter with drink, when I was seventeen, drank too many illicit beers while out with my friends, and, on the way home, indelicately put the family car in the narrow river branch that ran alongside the road that led to our place in the country, where we’d finally moved the year before – a return to rural life my parents had quit when my sisters were approaching college age. This was the finest car we had ever owned, a Lincoln less than ten years old, with leather seats and power windows, which we had purchased cheaply the year before from my mother’s sister Mars, who was married to a lawyer and so the best off of her siblings, and I was terrified that I’d damaged it, more frightened of that than what might happen to me – in the split second that the car was airborne before landing in the shallow water, I issued a silent prayer that I pay whatever price might be due, not the car.

  But, miraculously, I wasn’t hurt, and even the car received only a minimum of damage, the mud it settled into more an affront to the Lincoln’s dignity than anything else. Really, what happened to me was not exceptional; what was memorable was the story my father told me afterwards.

  My parents and my two sisters lived in an apartment on West Twenty-First Street, near the corner of Surf Avenue, in Brooklyn, Coney Island to be more exact, not within sight but, as my father put it, within smelling distance of the ocean. From their living room window, which faced south, they could see the top of the Parachute Jump on the Boardwalk and, in the summer, hear the shrieks of riders on the Cyclone. My mother was left alone every day with the children, both of them still too young even for kindergarten, while my father escaped to his own world of work, first riding the Surf Avenue bus, then descending into the dark cavern of the Stillwell Avenue subway station and emerging within half an hour on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the East Broadway station, a short walk to The Day. “If anyone needed a drink,” my father said, “it was her, not me.” My mother, for reasons of her own, rarely drank more than a few sips from a glass of wine at family events. But my father, as I’ve said, kept a bottle in the drawer of his desk, even in those early days, and he had a drink from it as soon as he arrived at work, presumably to brace himself for the rigours that lay ahead. Later he would have a drink or two with lunch, and another drink or two with some cronies before catching the subway for the return trip to Coney Island. Walking home from the bus, he would often stop at a tavern on the corner of Mermaid Avenue and Twenty-First Street for a glass of beer – which he believed would hide the odour of whisky on his breath – before tackling the three flights of stairs that led to wife and children with whom, almost always, he would be loving husband and father, revealing no sign of the alcohol he’d consumed during the day other than a mellow disposition. My father had a temper, but he rarely displayed it.

  On the night in question, though, a brisk, overcast night in late March, 1936, my father had had one or two drinks too many. He had a meeting to cover, so didn’t go home at the usual time for dinner and the evening with his family. Instead, he had dinner and several drinks with his good friend Vogel, his counterpart at The Forward. The two men then attended the meeting, a boisterous gathering of the membership of Local 37 of the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which was then locked in negotiations with the owners of the garment district dress factories that lined lower Seventh Avenue. Afterwards, my father went back to the office to write his story, in which he reported that a strike was imminent, again taking a drink or two from the bottle in his drawer. By the time he climbed the steps to the Coney Island apartment, stopping at each landing to catch his breath, he was weary and unsteady on his feet. His fingers were chilled and he fumbled with the key.

  Covering meetings and coming home late was not unusual for my father – he would do it at least once a week, often twice. Usually, he would creep into a dark apartment, its silence punctuated only by the steady breathing of my mother and sisters in sleep and the occasional groan from the pipes, and he would undress quietly in the dark and slip into the warm bed without causing any disturbance, marvelling at his good fortune – that he had a comfortable home to come home to, a loving wife, darling children, things that, only a few years earlier, he had thought had somehow permanently eluded him, that he had grown too old for.

  On this particular night, though, the lights were on when he opened the door, and even through his blurry eyes he could tell immediately that something was not right.

  “Bertie?” my father called.

  My mother came out of the bathroom into the entrance hall. The front of her housecoat was drenched, her hair was in disarray and her face was flushed. “Oh, Harry, thank goodness you’re here. Esther’s sick.”

  My sister Esther, ten years older than me, was then not yet five. She had been out of sorts that morning when my father left for work, with a mild fever and complaining that her head hurt. This was obviously something more serious.

  My father said nothing for a moment and my mother continued: “She’s burning up with fever. I’ve got her in the tub, cooling her off. We really have to take her to the hospital.”

  “Of course,” my father said. He and my mother shared a brief hug of reassurance, and he turned his head so she wouldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath, though she was quite used to it.

  Then my father turned to go into the bathroom, shedding his overcoat. My sister Esther is fair, with blue eyes and dirty blonde hair that, in childhood, was quite pale. Her hair was long and usually tied into braids, but on this day, because of her headache, my mother had left it loose; now, it was bunched up into a loosely fitting bathing cap, lending her a slightly comical look. She lay on her back in a tub half filled with cool water, naked and pale as the belly of a fish except for her face, which was flushed bright red. My father stood in the doorway, frozen, for what was only a moment but seemed to him like an intolerably long time, taking this in. She was awake, with tears dribbling down her enflamed cheeks, but her mouth formed a small smile. “Hello, Daddy,” she said weakly.

  My father felt a flash of shame, his trance breaking. “My god,” he said, “Esthella, baby, it’s all right, we’re going to get you to a doctor,” then he stepped forward, intending to get down on his knee beside the tub.

  The bathroom floor was wet. A crumpled towel lay beside the tub where my mother had been kneeling as she sponged Esther before my father’s return. As he stepped forward, his right foot landed on the towel, which slid forward. My father teetered for a moment, then fell with a crash onto the floor, banging his left shoulder against the tub. He shouted out an obscenity, something he rarely did and never in front of his wife or children. Pain stabbed through his shoulder and, even worse, his ankle, which had twisted sideways as he fell.

  “Harry, my god, are you okay?” my mother cried. She raced into the bathroom, narrowly avoided slipping on the wet floor herself, and knelt beside him. My father, already starting to get to his feet, brushed her aside. “I’m okay, Bertie. It’s
nothing.”

  The whole thing, start to finish, had taken only seconds, but my father knew it wasn’t nothing. His ankle was seriously twisted and the pain that raced up his leg as he placed weight on it was excruciating. But the pain served one useful purpose, clearing my father’s head.

  “Get her dressed,” he told my mother. “I’ll call a taxi.”

  Ten minutes later, my mother and father emerged from the doorway of their apartment building with Esther, dressed and wrapped in a blanket, whimpering in my father’s arms. My mother held my sister Judy, who was not yet three; there was no one with whom she could be left, so they had no choice but to rouse her protesting from sleep and take her along. My father’s shoulder was aching with dull pain – putting his coat back on had been agonizing – but was bearable, even with his daughter’s slight weight; his ankle, though, fired hot bright bolts of pain through his leg with every limping step. Rain had started to fall and they stood in the shelter of the doorway for a minute as they waited for the taxi. He pressed his hand against Esther’s burning forehead and whispered into her ear, “It’s okay, Esthella, Daddy’s got you, it’s okay.”

  My father had no idea whether his daughter’s situation was serious or slight, but he feared the worst. Being a devout atheist, he had no god to direct prayers to, but that didn’t prevent him from composing them on occasion, and in that brief pause in the doorway, he proposed a bargain with the universe. If only Esther would be spared, he would never again allow himself to be so drunk – as drunk as he’d been that night, so drunk that he had done himself harm, that he had delayed, not thought clearly, even if only for a few moments; so drunk that he might have done others harm – never again would he allow himself to be that way.

  Then the taxi was there, they were in it and on their way, my father grateful to be off his feet, the cab’s windshield wipers clacking away thought.