A Book of Great Worth Read online

  Coney Island Hospital was just a few minutes away on Ocean Parkway near Avenue Z. Judy had been born there and my parents knew it well. The taxi pulled up at the emergency entrance and my mother, who had sat Judy down on the seat between her and my father, got out and came around the car to open my father’s door. He stumbled out, gasping, Esther pressed tightly against his chest. For a moment he teetered, and was sure his leg would collapse under him, but he shot out his left hand to steady himself against the door of the taxi, that motion reigniting the pain in his shoulder. Esther shifted in his arms, threatening to slip from his grip, but once he had righted himself he was able to pull his left arm back in, redistributing her weight in time. He didn’t think about his wife and other daughter, about the cab driver and the fare, but concentrated all his attention on the hospital door, which was swinging open, a white-uniformed nurse pushing a wheelchair appearing through it like one of the angels he had read about as a boy, welcoming them to heaven.

  “She’s burning up,” my father croaked, surrendering his first-born into the nurse’s arms.

  In another ten minutes my father sat in the same wheelchair gritting his teeth as an intern pried off his heavy black shoe and began to manipulate his ankle, already swollen to almost twice its normal size. Every movement of the doctor’s hands sent excruciating pain flooding through my father’s lower body. My mother and Esther had disappeared through a curtained doorway with another doctor, and Judy, cranky and snivelling, had been taken by a nurse to a small room with colouring books and a cot. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine, won’t you, honey,” the nurse said. My father had tried to follow my mother and Esther but was met with similar assurances and worried frowns over his limp. A nurse with a thin line of perspiration on her upper lip like a faint moustache had pushed him down into the wheelchair and there he sat for a few minutes waiting, his entire body now throbbing, the pain in his ankle scorching up through his right leg and into his pelvis, the pain in his shoulder radiating down his arm, all the way to his fingers. His throat burned and even his head was aching, locked in a tight grip that pressed against his temples, keeping thought at bay, though he remained conscious of the steady stream of doctors and nurses coming in and out of the room that my mother and Esther had been taken into, their faces unreadable.

  An intern in a white jacket, a man who looked little older than the teenaged boy who ran errands in my father’s office, materialized in front of him, immediately sinking to his knees.

  “This looks really nasty,” the intern said. He composed his face to express seriousness, but it couldn’t completely mask delight. My father grimaced in response. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a drink, some whisky, maybe?”

  The intern let his grin emerge. He wore a wispy moustache, obviously grown to make him appear older. “You find some, I’ll join you. In the meantime, relax.” He stood up and probed the muscles in my father’s shoulder with unsympathetic fingers. “You’re holding yourself so tight, you’re just making this worse.”

  My father slumped with exhaustion as he was wheeled to have X-rays taken – the intern was right, when he willed his muscles to loosen, the pain in his shoulder began to subside. Even the ache in his head seemed to lessen.

  While he waited for the technician to adjust his equipment, my father gazed through a rain-stained window at darkness softened by the glow of an exterior light. He could see an ambulance driving into the frame of the window, then disappearing from view, the frame going dark again. He thought of the bargain he had proposed, just minutes earlier, and renewed it. Never again, he thought. He had offered up such bargains to the gods of the universe before, with smaller stakes, over smaller matters, and then proceeded to forget them, to let his end down, he knew that. But this was different, this time he meant it, and he assumed his intention and resolve were clear.

  The X-rays showed the injury to my father’s shoulder to be no more than a bad bruise. He was given an ice pack, and then the doctor and nurse forgot about it. But the ankle turned out to be more than sprained. It was broken and would need to be set painfully and placed in a plaster of Paris cast. First he was told that someone, a specialist, was being telephoned and would be there within an hour, then that another emergency had precluded that; he would have to wait until morning. It was now way past midnight, so he would just have to grit his teeth and endure the pain for another six hours or more, the intern cheerfully told him. “It’s only pain,” he said.

  My father took some grim satisfaction in this development, interpreting it to mean that the universe – or whatever was out there – had accepted his bargain, or had perhaps upped the ante slightly, that his condition should be worse so that his child’s could be better. And it was. My mother soon joined him, relief clear on her face. Esther’s fever was already down, and she was asleep. They would keep her overnight and watch her, but the doctor didn’t think it was anything too serious. “Just one of those mysterious childhood things,” he said, a diagnosis he was obviously satisfied with. My father nodded his head in agreement. It was hard to be an atheist when the universe operated with such apparent purpose.

  Years later, my father would only remember that Esther had been burning up with fever and had thrown her parents into a panic. Perhaps, as the doctor had suggested, it had just been one of those baffling childhood ailments that come and go without apparent explanation, leaving no discernible mark.

  My father was changed, though, or so he believed.

  He recalled that my mother looked in on Judy, who was sleeping peacefully on a cot in the playroom, and then went to fetch two coffees in paper cups while my father sat in a strangely calm repose and communed with the pain in his ankle. The coffee when it came, hot and milky, would be soothing in its own way, and would suffice to stifle his craving for something stronger. But there was a brief period after the intern left, when all the nurses were busying themselves elsewhere and my mother had not yet returned, that he was alone with his demons in a small bare room, his leg extended. They had given him morphine and the pain was retreating in almost noticeable waves, like soldiers quitting a battlefield. The muting of the pain served, though, to make his desire for both a drink and a cigarette more acute. His body cried out for both. There were sure to be cigarettes in his jacket pocket and a small flask, half full of rye whisky, in the inside breast pocket of his coat. He didn’t know what had become of either. When my mother came back, he would ask her to find his jacket and bring him a cigarette – surely there could be no objection to that. As for the flask, no, he would forego that. Yes, he had promised only that he wouldn’t again be drunk, not that he would never drink again, like converted sinners caught up in religious fervour who vowed never to touch another drop. A drink now, he felt certain, would not be a breach of the bargain he had made, it would not put Esther in jeopardy, would not compromise his word. Still, he thought, it was better to be safe. He had been careless, he knew, just that, but that was bad enough. He would try not to be careless again.

  • • •

  Music by Rodgers, Lyrics by Hart

  These days, envelopes come to my house almost weekly offering to make me a millionaire. All I have to do is open them and look inside; I may already be a winner.

  I never am, and I’ve largely stopped looking, but these letters remind me of a time when my mother and her friend Moishe Cahan entered magazine and grocery store contests with a vengeance, the same sort of grim determination that drives a gambler to the slot machines and card tables.

  My father took a dim view of these pursuits. “This is foolishness, Bertie,” he would complain, a hand-rolled cigarette burning in the ashtray and the first of his several evening glasses of port or sherry in front of him on the chipped Formica kitchen table, as my mother, still in her housedress and apron, sat across from him, the dark curls that adorned her head falling over her brow as she scribbled furiously in a steno pad, making rhymes. “Flour, hour, our, scour, dour, power,” she was writing in the light blue ink she favoured, using
the silver-tipped pen she’d won in college for high marks in French. In my father’s moral lexicon, foolishness was one of the worst sins a person could fall prey to, even worse than larceny, which could perhaps be explained by need – hungry children, for example. Foolishness was a moral failure for which its author could have only himself to blame. He would never have thought of my mother as a fool, but he did believe some of her actions were foolish, and was always quick to say so. The contests she pursued, the jingles and slogans she composed, clearly fell into that category in his view.

  “But what does it hurt?” my mother asked absently, brushing away a lock of chestnut hair as she looked up. She gave my father a crooked little smile, half innocence, half impudence. “Is my jingle any more foolish than your sherry? Now really.”

  My father, who was a newspaper reporter, was employed all through the Depression, actually made a good wage, and had no desperate need for instant riches; neither, of course, did my mother, but, as a young mother with first one, then two small children at home, and my father gone all day and often into the evening, she did have a craving for diversion.

  Moishe, on the other hand, was in conspicuously dire straits. The Crash had come during his final year of architecture school, forcing him to drop out. He worked sporadically as a draftsman – an occupation he would sourly continue with when times got better – but mostly he was unemployed, disappointed and at loose ends, in need of something to do with his restless, birdlike hands. His wife, Rachel, who had been my mother’s best friend since high school, also had two young children to look after, but her poetic, abstract mind didn’t lend itself to the riddles, puzzles and other concrete challenges of the magazine and radio contests that attracted her husband and my mother, though she didn’t frown on them the way my father did.

  There were certain expenses involved which, because my parents had money and the Cahans didn’t, my mother undertook to cover. These were postage, of course, but also the purchasing of certain products: labels had to be scissored from cereal boxes and flour sacks, protective seals gingerly snipped from beneath the lids of peanut butter, jam and pickle jars. My mother could rationalize these purchases easily enough – she had to shop anyway, and most of the products were ones she might well have bought, contest or no, though not always in such large numbers. But it wasn’t the money my father begrudged, or even, since he wasn’t the jealous sort, the growing intensity of the relationship between my mother and her friend’s husband, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table in the Cahans’ cramped apartment in the Bronx, near the Grand Concourse, or at my parents’ only slightly larger place in Coney Island, their heads close together as they pored over pencil and paper or some reference book, or falling helplessly together on the carpeted living room floor in bursts of giggles as they laboured over a limerick or a jingle while my father and Rachel, who had been attempting to carry on a conversation, looked on with slightly amused expressions; no, it was the wasted time he thought was foolishness, especially since, in his view, the chances of them actually winning anything was highly unlikely, the contests being either rigged or impossible. Testimonials in the magazines from previous winners he always dismissed as “cock-and-bull stories.” Earlier in his career, in Cleveland, he had written the bintel briefs, the advice to the lovelorn column, and no one knew better than he how little one could rely on what one read.

  “But it’s my time,” my mother responded when my father complained of the hours she spent thumbing through dictionaries, encyclopedias and the thesaurus out of which the answers to puzzles and the rhymes for jingles emerged. Although it seemed frustratingly impossible that he might actually sell any, Moishe had even taken on a commission job as an encyclopedia salesman to give them access to more reference books, and many of these works were stacked on the coffee table in the living room and on the kitchen counter of my parents’ apartment, just as they must have been in the Cahans’. “And what else should I be doing with my time, Harry? I can’t wash and fold diapers all day long.”

  My mother had spent two years at Hunter College before she married, and her education was one thing my father, who had only gone as far as the fifth grade and was largely self-taught, was jealous of; it was a matter of great pride to him that he had come so far, that he made his living writing, with so little schooling, and it irritated him that she didn’t take more advantage of what she had. Never mind that her education, and Moishe’s even greater one, were great assets in their pursuit of the contests, where knowledge of things as trivial as the states’ capitals and as arcane as Greek myth and European history could be invaluable; he would have liked to have seen her writing poetry, which Rachel Cahan did, or reading serious books, like the Freud and Shakespeare he himself was partial to, to improve her mind, not reference works in hopes of winning some money – “filthy lucre,” he sneered – or a new stove or living room ensemble.

  In fact, my mother did write poems, and after her death my sisters and I found some of them, folded and bound with a blue velvet ribbon along with love letters she and my father had written to each other during their occasional separations in their early years together, when my father, who covered the labour beat, would travel out of town on stories.

  As it happened, he was away on just such a trip when my mother and her friend finally won a contest.

  •••

  As he did every summer, my father went to Atlantic City that year, 1936, to cover the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union convention. He was gone for barely more than a week, but in the six letters my mother wrote to him (four mailed, including two that came back after his return, marked “addressee no longer here,” and two left unmailed for him to read on his return), she expressed such longing that it might have been a month, or a year. These letters were all written in English, my parents having forsworn French after the painful misunderstanding of a year earlier. She felt, she wrote on the third day, “like the wife of a seafarer, one of those whaling men or merchant marines who would be at sea for years on end, while their families lived their own closeted lives in Liverpool or New Bedford. It’s only the boardwalk at Coney Island, and I know your feet are walking on a similar boardwalk no more than a hundred miles from here, but I feel like I’m on one of those legendary widow’s walks, my face wet with a mixture of sea spray and tears.” This from a woman whose parents had both been born in central Russia, far from any large body of water, though she herself was born in Paris and crossed both the English Channel and the Atlantic before she was four years old. How my father could say she was wasting her education when she was capable of hyperbole like that, I don’t know.

  It was during my father’s absence that my mother and Moishe got word that their efforts had finally paid off.

  The contest in which they had success was sponsored by a flour company and involved the writing of a jingle – the winning entry was to be professionally produced and become part of the company’s radio advertising campaign. More importantly, first prize was five thousand dollars – an enormous sum in those days – and a cruise to the South Seas; though it’s hard to imagine such pleasure cruises continued through those Depression years, apparently they did. The jingle my mother and Moishe wrote is lost, so I can’t record it here; they didn’t win first prize, and their contribution was never used by the flour company. They did win third prize, though, which was one thousand dollars, a set of stainless steel pots and pans and other kitchen paraphernalia and a certificate redeemable at the grocer’s for up to one hundred dollars worth of selected food products.

  When my father came home from his trip, on Sunday evening, he was greeted by a nearly hysterical wife, two overexcited small children and a kitchen that looked, he used to say, like it had been hit by a tornado: the sink was filled with dirty dishes, the countertops were crowded with more dishes, open jars and boxes of food, the floor was filthy, particularly in one corner where a suspiciously fragrant stain still glistened. This was so unusual that he immediately assumed some calamity had befallen his
family in his absence.

  “Where were you?” my mother demanded. “I phoned and couldn’t reach you.”

  “Bertie, what’s happened?” my father gasped in reply, genuinely alarmed.

  “I tried to ph-ph-ph-phone you,” my mother stammered, tears streaming down her face. “No one knew where you were.” First she hugged my father, then she stepped back and began to beat his chest with her hands. He allowed her to do this for a few seconds, then gathered her into his arms, where she nestled as still as a wounded bird taken into hand. Through the shouting of his young daughters, who were grabbing at his trouser legs, my father could hear the soft shuddering of her sobs.

  “I was sharing a room with Vogel, to save a few dollars,” my father said when he understood why my mother had become so anxious, and this explanation stood unchallenged, then and down through the years of family lore.

  “They said you checked out,” my mother said weakly. “I was beside myself, I couldn’t...”

  “I did check out, of course,” my father said. “I couldn’t very well tell them at the front desk what I was doing. But I told them at the office. If you had phoned there, they could have told you.”

  “I didn’t think.”

  “I didn’t think, Bertie. I didn’t think to let you know. It was Thursday, there were just a few days left and it didn’t occur to me that you’d call.” He paused. “Why did you call?” He stood back, holding my mother at arm’s length.

  “Oh...” A smile broke across my mother’s tear-stained face, the slightly crooked smile that had softened my father’s heart the first time they met and still had as firm a grip on him as it would continue to have for many years to come. “Oh, I completely forgot. We won, one of our jingles, Moishe’s and mine. Third prize. A thousand dollars. I was so excited, I was calling to let you know.”