A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “A thousand dollars!” Beyond that, my father was speechless, much to my mother’s delight. He was a practical man and whatever doubts or disapprovals he had harboured about her time-consuming hobby seemed to vanish at the mention of that sum – not a possible or projected or dreamed of amount, but a reality, more than ten times the amount of his weekly salary. “You have the money?”

  “Not yet. I had to write back and confirm that I was who I am and live at this address. They’ll send a certified cheque by registered letter.”

  “That you are who you are...” my father echoed, still trying to absorb the news.

  “And half of it is for Moishe, for the Cahans. You know that, Harry.”

  “Of course.”

  “They can really use it. Moishe was beside himself when he found out, and Rachel was in tears. They were here for dinner Friday night. That was when I phoned you...” Her smile faded but didn’t disappear. “Then we were both in tears.”

  Of all the arguments, fights and crises my parents had in their long marriage, none was as happily ended as this one, what my mother would, years later, refer to as “the time your father disappeared and I made three hundred dollars.”

  “It should have been five hundred,” my father would grumble.

  Then they would always laugh, both of them, as if the two events had been causally linked, as if it had taken my father’s disappearance to allow my mother to win the money, although, in fact, she had won the money before she knew of his disappearance, and wouldn’t have known of his disappearance at all – he would not, in fact, have “disappeared” – had she not won the money and, as a result, tried to telephone him. The winning of the money, my father’s safe return to her, to his family, to the tiny apartment in Coney Island, these were all remembered as a happy time, deliciously happy, if all too brief.

  •••

  Moishe Cahan was a short, heavy-set man whose thick mat of hair on chest and shoulders startled me, a boy of five or six, years later when the Cahans visited us once in the summer and he took off his shirt; so thick was the hair on his chest, he seemed more apelike than human. My mother used to swear that he was a kind, gentle, humorous man when she first knew him, that Rachel had plucked herself a peach, but the man I knew was bitter, irritable, stern. I went from feeling apprehensive about him to strong dislike during that visit, when I saw him slap the face of one of his sons, Manny, a few years older than me, for not immediately coming when he was called. This change in his personality was the result of the bad hand the Depression had dealt him, my father said. It was because of that, I suppose, and my mother’s deep affection for Rachel, that my parents didn’t allow the disagreement over the division of the contest prize to ruin their friendship, although my father only barely concealed his distaste for the man and, after Rachel’s death, communication between them and Moishe – his children long grown – trickled to an annual greeting card, then to nothing.

  “I should get seven hundred dollars,” Moishe said.

  My mother, startled, didn’t respond, but my father, for all his earlier disapproval and ridicule, was now an active participant in the venture. “Why is that, Cahan?” he snapped. They were at the Cahan apartment, which gave the other man a slight advantage. My father had brought a bottle of rye whisky along and the two men had already enjoyed a celebratory glass, complete with l’chaim, mazel tov and other toasts.

  “Several reasons, Morgenstern. One, I discovered this particular contest. Berte, you’ll bear me out?”

  This was true, although my mother would surely have come across it too. The contest was advertised in both Woman’s Day and Family Circle, magazines that both she and Rachel picked up for a nickel each where they did their shopping. That Moishe, who scoured the magazines the moment Rachel brought them home, had come across the ad first was only a testament to his idleness, not his greater zeal, but my mother didn’t say that. She cast a glance at Rachel, who averted her own eyes.

  “Two, I wrote the first line of the jingle.”

  “You wrote them together,” my father protested. “All of them. I saw you with my own eyes.”

  “Yes, we did. I don’t deny that. But every jingle, every poem, begins with a first line, and that is the most important line. Look at Shakespeare’s sonnets – he didn’t even title them, and we know them by their first lines. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ ‘My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun’...” Moishe’s hands, which were hairy on the back but were unexpectedly small and well shaped, an architect’s hands, flew excitedly about as he talked.

  My father was an admirer of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as Moishe well knew. “‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,’” he shot back.

  “Exactly,” Moishe said, ignoring the sarcastic tone. “The first line sets the direction and tone of a poem. Isn’t that right, Rachel?”

  All eyes turned to Rachel now. She was a better poet than my mother, though not necessarily better than my mother might have been, had she worked at it harder, but she possessed the enviable cachet of having published some of her poems, not only in the literary magazine at Hunter College but in several of the small, mimeographed journals produced in Greenwich Village, where she and my mother had shared an apartment before their marriages. But Rachel didn’t answer. She stood up abruptly and turned her back on her husband and her friends, going to stand beside the open living room window and stare stolidly down at the streetscape below, where women sat gossiping on stoops and children played on the sidewalk, their voices lifting gaily in the heavy summer air. Though it was still early evening, her own children were already in their beds, a rule of their strict father’s, and my sisters were at home with a sitter.

  “Well, it is right,” Moishe persisted. “Don’t you agree, Berte?”

  “In a poem, yes,” my mother said slowly.

  “And in a jingle too. The first line sets the direction, the tone...everything. It isn’t the jingle entire, but without it, the jingle cannot be.”

  “But Berte wrote the jingle with you,” my father began again, marshalling his forces. “You wrote it together, like Rodgers and Hart. You think Rodgers gets more money because people come out of the theatre humming his music even though they can’t remember the silly words Hart writes?”

  “That’s entirely different, Morgenstern. Without the words, there’s no song, without the music, there’s no song, they’re equal partners. Here, we both wrote the jingle, yes, I don’t deny that. I give full credit to Berte for her contribution, you know that, but I wrote the first line. Without that, the jingle couldn’t have been what it became. We wouldn’t have won.”

  “Third prize,” my mother said quietly.

  “If you’d used Bertie’s first line, maybe you would have won first prize,” my father said defiantly.

  “Your darling wife didn’t write a first line,” Moishe said quickly. He thrust his chest out aggressively and clenched his fists. “I did, and we were away to the races. The jingle practically wrote itself. Isn’t that right, Berte?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Listen, there were other times when Berte wrote the first line. If one of those had won, I’d be saying she should get a larger share.”

  My father threw up his hands and made a noise of exasperation. “Did you ever talk about these things? Bertie?”

  But my mother wasn’t listening to him. She’d gotten up and approached Rachel. She stood two or three feet behind her friend, gazing not at her, exactly, not over her shoulder, either, but at an indefinite point just above Rachel’s shoulder. The two women stood motionless, two slender, dark-haired young women in similar light-coloured cotton skirts and sleeveless white blouses. My mother wore sandals; Rachel was barefooted. Rachel wore a tortoiseshell barrette in her hair, which was a coarse, crinkly black; my mother wore the blue velvet ribbon my father had given her in hers. Slanting evening sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating their hair, their shoulders, their hands; my father couldn’t see their faces. They st
ood so motionlessly that, when my father glanced at them, they appeared almost as if they were figures in a painting, perhaps by Monet, two women, sisters perhaps, perhaps lovers, certainly not rivals, caught in a moment of eternal time like flies enraptured by amber.

  “Maybe you’re right, Cahan,” my father said after a long moment.

  “I think he is,” my mother said softly. She turned to gaze at her husband and there was on her face a look of such surprise and gratitude, an admixtured look such as he had never before seen, that it thrilled him to his bones. “Moishe wrote the first line.”

  “The first line is the most important,” my father said. “And this one is a good first line. Not that I know anything about jingles. You two are the experts. But it’s...catchy. It...catches...” His voice drifted off. My mother had turned back to Rachel, who hadn’t moved, and this time she stepped closer, putting her hands lightly on her friend’s arms, and my father found himself also engaged with hands – Moishe Cahan had come across the room with his extended, and the two men were shaking now, as if solemnizing an agreement.

  “I knew you’d see it, Morgenstern,” Moishe said.

  When the cheque arrived, all four of them went to the Cahans’ bank and it was cashed and the money divided according to the agreement reached that evening, seven hundred to the Cahans, who, my mother would say, “needed it much more than we did,” three hundred to my mother, who set it aside for my sisters’ college education. Afterwards, my father bought ice cream cones for them all. The shopping certificate, by agreement between my mother and Rachel, also went to the Cahans, but both households wound up with stainless steel pots and pans and other utensils, and many of them were still in my mother’s kitchen when she died. My sisters and I shared them.

  Though they all remained friends and continued to see each other regularly – more so during the war, when Moishe was overseas with the Signal Corps and Rachel alone, less so after he returned and found a full-time job – there were no more contests; despite their great success, my mother and Moishe seemed to have lost their zeal for the competition. Actually, my father believed that Moishe continued to enter contests on his own. But if he ever won anything, my parents didn’t hear of it. Rachel Cahan continued to write poetry, some of which was occasionally published. My mother continued to write poems too, but they were read only by my father, who had learned to read between their lines.

  • • •

  A Book of Great Worth

  My father was there when the Hindenburg went down, killing thirty-six people.

  Though labour was his specialty and he rarely covered regular news, he had been assigned, because of a staffing problem, to cover the dirigible’s arrival in New Jersey, after its transatlantic flight from Germany. It was only his fourth day back at work after having been off for more than a week for an appendectomy and he was still sore, and after the long train ride to Lakehurst he was feeling quite a bit of discomfort. Gritting his teeth, he interviewed officials and some of the people in the large crowd that had come to watch, then found a chair where he could ease himself while he waited.

  Ropes had been set up to keep the crowd at some distance, but that was more for the safety and convenience of the passengers than the sightseers, so he was no more than one hundred metres from where burning debris began to fall immediately after the explosion. Like everyone else there, my father was stunned by what happened. Heat blasted into his face as if he had opened the door to an oven and peered in to check the roast. His eyes flooded with tears, an automatic response of the body, he supposed, to protect them from the heat. Standing up to get a better view of the arrival in the moments just before the explosion, he was just a few steps from the radio man, chattering into his microphone, “Here it comes ladies and gentlemen, and what a sight it is, a thrilling one, a marvelous sight,” then continuing to broadcast after the eruption of fire, which seemed, my father used to say when he told the story, literally to split the sky with dazzling colour, and, except in patches when bursts of explosion obliterated his voice, he could hear him clearly:

  “It burst into flames, get out of the way, get out of the way, get this Johnny, get this Johnny, it’s fire and it’s flashing, flashing, it’s flashing terribly...this is terrible, this is one of the worst catastrophes in the world...oh, the humanity and all the friends just screaming around here...I don’t believe, I can’t even talk to people whose friends are on there, it, it’s, ah, I, I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen, honest it’s a mass of smoking wreckage and everybody can hardly breathe and talk and screaming, lady, I, I’m sorry.”

  My father’s account of that day – it was May 6, 1937 – became a favourite story, and my sisters and I and our cousins would often beg for a retelling. Everyone was running and, after a moment in which he was frozen in place, transfixed, my father was too, he said. His notebook and pen were in his hands and his mouth, he remembered, was open, and he ran, thinking not of his story or even of helping people – those in the dirigible or directly below it seemed beyond help, he said – but of his own safety, something which, when he would tell this story, years later, he conveyed without any discernible sense of shame but rather a small pride in his prudence. But when he had reached a safer distance and stopped to catch his breath and, scribbling in his pad in that illegible shorthand of his that used to fascinate me so much, begun to record the sights and sounds billowing in front of him like a film running haywire through a projector, only then did he feel the pain and wetness in his side and, holding open his suit jacket, see the spreading blossom of blood soaking his shirt.

  His first thought was that he had been injured by a flying piece of debris, like the shrapnel or flak in the Great War he had heard so much about, but then he realized it was nothing that romantic or dangerous, that the stitches closing his incision had merely given way under stress and that, like a corroded bathroom fixture, he had begun to leak.

  At that time, my father and mother were living in a small third-floor apartment in Coney Island with my two sisters; my birth was still four years away but my mother was pregnant with a child who, had he lived, would have been my brother or, perhaps, rendered my conception unnecessary. In addition to the four of them, there was a fifth person crammed into the small set of rooms: a living room with the apartment’s one partial view of the ocean, jammed with an overstuffed sofa, upon which the guest slept, and two frayed easy chairs, rough bookshelves, a coffee table, lamps and my mother’s piano, at which she instructed several wooden-fingered neighbourhood children; a kitchen so small that two people could barely stand at the sink to wash and dry the dishes; one small bedroom that was my parents’; and an even tinier room, not much bigger than a large closet but described as a den, in which my sisters slept, the eldest in a small bed, the younger on a folding cot permanently unfolded. This guest was a young woman my father had met several weeks earlier and invited home with him. She had come from Montreal in search of a man she described as her brother, a poet whom my father knew slightly. She had, on a slip of grimy, much-folded paper, the name and address of Fushgo’s bookshop, through which the brother had told her he could always be reached. There, standing in one of the narrow aisles sandwiched in among the groaning walls of second-hand books my father loved to browse through, he’d met her.

  “Morgenstern, I’m glad you stepped in,” Fushgo said, beckoning him over. “A damsel in distress. Just the ticket, you are.” He indicated the tiny woman standing beside the cash drawer so drably dressed and standing in so unimposing a posture that my father had at first failed to notice her. “This is Anna,” Fushgo said, winking in the sly way he affected when he was trying to interest my father in a book beyond his means. “She is that rarest of women. She cannot speak.”

  My father was presented with a woman of indeterminate youthful age – she could have been sixteen, so smooth and clear was her skin, or thirty, so severe was the expression of her cloud-grey eyes – whose dirty yellow hair coiled like a tangle of unruly wool down the back of her tatter
ed shawl, which at one time had been maroon. Everything about her was in disarray – the buttons of her white blouse askew, the hem of a slip showing beneath that of her pleated grey wool skirt, even the laces of her high shoes undone – but her clothing and hair, even the nails on the fingers of the small white hand she extended to my father, were clean, and she smelled of the sea, not the rank, oily waters of the East River that often shouldered its way on the back of fog along the Lower East Side, where he worked, or the flat, hotdoggy smell of the beach at Coney Island, but the bracing salt spray of the pounding surf at Far Rockaway, where he and my mother would sometimes go walking with the girls on Sunday afternoons. “Show, show,” Fushgo grunted, prodding her with a sharp, tobacco-stained finger.

  The woman offered my father a small sheet of paper obviously torn from a pad, and freshly so, judging by the clean, ragged edge, and already scribbled on with a sharp-pointed pencil. He took it from her, noticing that her delicately veined hand trembled. On the paper, in a handwriting that was both clear and immature, was written in a mixture of Yiddish and English: “My name is Anna Fishbine, from Montreal, in Canada. I am seeking my brother, Abraham Diamond, the poet, who receives his mail at this shop. Can you assist me?”

  My father had several small weaknesses – schnapps and cigarettes among them – but only one great one, and that was his love of books, not merely reading them, a love which in itself could have been satisfied by the public library, but of possessing them, feeling their weight on his knee and the rough textures of their bindings on his fingers as he read, seeing the satisfying substance of them on the shelves he had constructed in the living room, the heavy dusty aroma wafting off their old, roughly cut pages as they lay open on the kitchen table. New books, with their crisp, clean jackets and unsoiled pages failed to impress him the way a book with a life and a history behind it did, so he was an addict to Fushgo’s constantly replenishing stock and devoted to the man himself, his irritating mannerisms, come from a lifetime of communing with dead authors at the expense of living readers, notwithstanding. But my father, who had from time to time seen the poet at the Café Royale and had exchanged words with him on one or two occasions, had never encountered Diamond at the shop.