A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “Diamond gets his mail here?” my father asked, raising his eyes to Fushgo, who, despite his stoop, was a tall man.

  “Only invisible letters,” Fushgo said, raising his brows, “delivered by invisible mailmen.”

  The two men exchanged glances redolent of the comfort that they felt in each other’s presence. Both were shy men but they had a mutual love. They’d known each other for a dozen years and, over that time, my father had contributed to Fushgo’s upkeep with the same regularity and consistency of a Christian tithing to his church. Fushgo shrugged his rounded shoulders, raggedly incised by the frayed stripes of his suspenders, and made a comical face with his eyes and blue-lipped mouth that suggested despair over the antics of women.

  “How long since you heard from your brother?” my father asked.

  At the woman’s feet there was a brown cardboard suitcase. In her hands she clutched a blue leather purse from which she produced a pad and pencil, laying the purse awkwardly on the suitcase. She scribbled, looked up, scribbled again, then tore the page loose and handed it to my father.

  “Six months without a word.” Here was where she had hesitated. Then: “Our parents are frantic with worry.”

  My father nodded his head as he read. “Your brother often goes to the Café Royale. Do you know it?”

  The woman shook her head, a look of mild fright briefly passing over her eyes.

  “I’m on my way there now for a bite,” my father said. “I’ll escort you. It’s a twenty-minute walk or so, can you manage?”

  She nodded her head and smiled.

  “Maybe you’ll be lucky and he’ll be there. Or someone will know where he might be found.”

  The woman seemed so grateful that my father was infused with a feeling of well-being that propelled them both out of Fushgo’s shop onto East Broadway with the gentle force of a summer breeze. They turned north on Allen Street, passing Delancey and Houston, then over one block to Second Avenue and carried on for several blocks further north. It was early evening, the weather pleasant, and the streets were still crowded with people. One or two men they passed nodded at my father in recognition but if their faces betrayed surprise at seeing him with an unfamiliar young woman he didn’t notice. My father carried Anna’s suitcase, which seemed so light as to be almost empty, while she clutched her purse to her chest. Because of her silence – he didn’t know at this point whether she was an actual mute or merely too frightened to speak – there was no need to chat, but my father grew expansive and rattled on, describing the scenery through which they passed and, occasionally forgetting, asking her questions she could not – or would not – answer without stopping to write on her pad. “That’s all right,” my father said. “Forget it.” Or: “That was only a rhetorical question. There’s no need to reply.”

  She paused several times, hindering their progress, to gaze into a shop window or down the length of a street they were crossing, and one of the rhetorical questions my father asked concerned the nature of Montreal, for the woman gave the appearance of having stepped directly from the boat or the country. He thought, for the first time in several years, of his unpleasant encounter with a cousin from that city almost a decade earlier and shook his head with distaste. He couldn’t help but wonder if Abraham Diamond was a similar sort of charlatan.

  At the Café Royale, there was no sign of Diamond nor any of the men whom my father thought he might have seen with the poet. Nevertheless, after he had placed the order – a corned beef sandwich with coleslaw and a pickle and coffee for him, strong tea for Anna – he inquired of the waiter, who asked several others. Most didn’t know Diamond but one who did said he hadn’t seen him for several days. Perhaps this evening. Mendel and Solarterefsky, two playwrights my father knew, were at their usual table in a rear corner and he inquired of them as well. Both knew Diamond, and Mendel said he thought he’d seen him in the company of Ishavis Lazen, the actor, who was sure to be at the café that evening, after his performance in a play at the Second Avenue Theatre, just a few doors away. My father had a meeting to cover so he introduced Anna to the two men, spared her the effort of the notes by explaining her situation, entrusted her to their attention and left her there, promising to look in later. “Hopefully, you’ll have found him, you’ll be gone and happily ensconced in his apartment,” he told her. “I’m sure all will be well.”

  My father went to his meeting, where he listened, took notes and afterwards talked to people in attendance. He went back to his office and sat at a heavy oak desk where he wrote an account of the meeting on a standard Royal machine with Yiddish characters. He and another man who was working late had a drink from a bottle of Canadian whisky my father kept in the lower drawer of his desk. He gave his story to Lubin, the assistant city editor, and he put on his raincoat before stepping out into the light drizzle that was falling in the darkness of East Broadway. He walked past Fushgo’s shop, dark as an alley, and the Garden Cafeteria, closed but its lights still shining, and turned north towards the Café Royale, from which, as he approached, he could see light and hear noise spilling. Anna was sitting at the table where he had left her, an island of mute and painful isolation in the midst of the tables crowded with loud men. Mendel and Solarterefsky were gone, there was no sign of Lazen, though the theatres had let out more than an hour earlier and, as he’d feared, there was no sign of Diamond.

  My father sat down and ordered a coffee. “I’m delighted to see you again, my dear,” he said, “but sorry to find you alone. Was there no news?”

  Anna wrote this note: “No. Mr. Mendel was most kind. He and the other gentleman introduced me to several men who know Abraham but no one has seen him for several weeks. There is a possibility he has a job with a touring company. Someone promised to inquire.”

  My father frowned and looked around the café, raising his hand to several men he knew. “Have you eaten?”

  Anna nodded vigorously, but he was struck again by the emaciated quality to her small, smooth face that he found so appealing, the cheekbones high, the skin tight and without lines except for the sheerest hint beside her nose where, though he had yet to see her display the ability, surely she must occasionally smile.

  “Are you sure? The cheesecake here is very good. I wouldn’t mind one myself but I couldn’t manage the whole thing. Would you help me?”

  She agreed and, when it came, ate all but the few forkfuls my father took to put her at ease.

  She looked down at the plate, as if ashamed at the weakness her hunger had revealed.

  “You have a room?” my father asked. “Someplace where you’re staying? Perhaps I should take you there.”

  Anna looked up, then down again. On her pad she wrote: “I had hoped I would find Abraham.”

  “So you have no place?”

  She shook her head and they sat in silence while my father smoked a cigarette and finished his coffee. “I want you to understand,” he said presently, “that I’m a married man, with two wonderful children and a third on the way. So please don’t construe my intentions as anything but the most honourable.”

  Anna wrote: “Surely your wife will object.”

  My father smiled. “Bertie would never turn someone away from her door.”

  Again he carried the suitcase, extending the elbow of his other arm to her on the dark street and, after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. On the long subway ride home he wondered if what he’d said was true, but my mother, of course, would be asleep, and if she did object, he knew, it wouldn’t be until afterwards. Not once, as the subway car lurched through its velvety tunnels or as he made up the bed for her on the sofa in the tiny living room, did he question his motives, not once did he long to heal her wounded tongue with his own.

  •••

  My mother did have a generous heart, and patience that, after three weeks, was beginning to grow thin. She was four months pregnant and suffering greatly, her body wracked by cramps at all times and swept by waves of dizziness and nausea when she moved with
anything but the most deliberate slowness. False calms would arise during which it appeared the worst was over, then the pain and sickness would come crashing back without warning. Inside her, the baby seemed to be warring with the notion of its own life. There was no question but that Anna could be useful. My oldest sister, Esther, was almost six and already in school, but the younger one, Judy, was only three and needed care and attention, and diversion during my mother’s worst times. My father, who always worked into the evenings and often later, saw to the children in the mornings, getting the eldest off to school, while my mother stayed in bed preparing herself for the day ahead, but in the afternoons, after he’d gone, the little one often grated on her nerves, Esther was soon home demanding to be heard and there was a meal to prepare, then bathing. As the pregnancy deepened and the nature of the ailment became clearer, a plan had taken shape to have my mother’s younger sister Sarah join the household to help her; Anna’s presence made that unnecessary. She immediately took charge; at the same time, her presence grated on my mother, aggravating her already stripped nerves. By day, Anna helped in the apartment, relieving my father of some of his morning duties, but, more importantly, being there in the afternoon, playing with the younger one, keeping her quiet and amused while my mother lay propped up against pillows on her bed reading detective novels and feeling the muscles in her legs slowly turn to jelly. Sometimes, rising to go to the bathroom, my mother would open the bedroom door and find Anna and my sister sitting side by side on the piano bench, the little girl enthralled as Anna’s fingers silently raced over the keys my mother hadn’t touched in weeks, just above them, producing a music only the two of them could hear.

  In the evenings, the guest took the subway to Manhattan and the Café Royale where, like an urchin awaiting her drunken father, she sat at a table by herself and passed notes to people asking: “Have you seen Abraham Diamond?” My father often dropped in on her there and, if his work kept him late, would stop at the café on his way home to give her company on the long subway ride, which still frightened her.

  My mother, without accusing him of anything, clearly resented the attention he paid to the girl. “Three weeks and still no sign of that brother,” she said on a Saturday. Anna had taken the girls for a stroll on the boardwalk and she and my father were alone at the breakfast table.

  My father shrugged. “It appears he’s gone with a company on a road trip. No one seems to know for sure where they are or when they’ll be back. What do you mean brother?”

  “Oh, Harry, it’s as clear as the nose on your face that the man is her husband. Or her lover. God knows if there really are worried parents in Montreal. The woman has been abandoned.”

  “You really think so?”

  My mother rolled her eyes upward, as if to seek support from the angel of the ceiling. “Men are so blind.”

  “If you’re right, all the more reason to give her sympathy and support,” my father said after a moment.

  “You think so?” my mother said sharply.

  At times like these my father would often retreat to his books, forming his own private library wherever he was sitting, the world shut out by an invisible, soundproof barrier as he pored over the pages of his latest acquisition. Although he had gone no further in school than the fifth grade before he’d been required to begin to help support his family, and English was his third language, after Yiddish and Polish, he was partial to Shakespeare and – inexplicably – the American Civil War, but his deepest passion was for the classics, and his most treasured possession was a richly illustrated edition of Caesar’s Wars in Latin that he had taught himself to read. He had paid Fushgo ten dollars for the Caesar, more than four times the portion of his weekly allowance that he allotted to himself for books and, with the interest Fushgo charged, it had taken more than a month for him to pay it off. In later years, he would acquire huge volumes of Dante rich with Blake engravings, and, though he wasn’t at all religious, a variety of Bibles, in several languages, their oiled leather bindings giving off a smoky aroma of history, damnation and salvation. At this particular time, he was engrossed in a book that appeared to have been handwritten, in the manner of monks, in a language he had not been able to identify. The handwriting was skillful and consistent throughout the several hundred pages, the unintelligible words clearly scripted in a faded blue ink, the enlarged capitals at the beginning of each new paragraph shadowed in a red the shade of dried blood. There was no date, no publisher’s name or city, no illustrations that might serve as clues to the book’s origin, and the title and author were just as indecipherable as the text itself. The leather of the binding was so thick – more like a slab of oxblood hide used for making shoes than the soft black grainy cloth publishers used – and the spine so warped the book could not be fully closed, and when it lay on a table it seemed like a head whose jaws had sprung open, eager to share the untapped wisdom within it. “For you, Morgenstern,” Fushgo had said when he produced the book for my father. “Read this and you’ll learn much the same wisdom you acquire conversing with your Anna.” And he laughed, Fushgo, spraying the dark air of his shop with tobacco-scented breath.

  For hours at a time my father would sit poring over the book, comparing the strange script with works from his collection in Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, not that he thought this language could be any of those but hoping for some clue, some similarity of characters that would provide a hook, an opening through which he might shoulder to some dim understanding of the message the old pages indifferently held. One night when he had come home early he was sitting at the kitchen table engrossed in the magic letters, my mother asleep in their room, when Anna came home from the café, her small shoulders rising in their inevitable shrug to my father’s raised eyes. She came and sat beside him and he poured them both glasses of the cheap port he favoured for drinking at home. She sipped hers, then wrote this note: “I fear I may never find Abraham.”

  “Surely not,” my father said. Then, after a long silence: “But you should give some thought to what you’ll do, just in case. Have you written to your parents?”

  Anna hesitated, then wrote: “Neither can read.”

  “And the neighbours? A friend or landsman who could read a letter to them.”

  Anna shook her head. “There is only me,” she wrote. “I must return to them soon.”

  My father nodded. “You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want. Bertie is irritable, I know, but it’s the baby, not you.” He put his hand on hers, marvelling at its smallness, the way her entire hand, even the slender fingers, disappeared beneath the cup of his palm.

  Anna smiled and wrote: “You’re very kind.”

  She gestured towards the book and my father slid it to her. “This is a book of great worth,” he said.

  She bent over it, puzzled, then raised her head, her cheeks and mouth and eyes molded into a quizzical smile of such sweetness that it pierced my father like an arrow fashioned of the finest, purest gold.

  “Eskimo?” she wrote.

  •••

  As my father’s one indulgence was his books, my mother’s was her piano. It was an upright Baldwin of indeterminate age, the ivory of its keys yellowed like Fushgo’s ancient teeth. It had been purchased at a second-hand shop on the Bowery with one hundred dollars it took her three years to save and had been lifted by rope and tackle along the outside wall of the building and brought into the apartment through a window. My mother had studied the piano as a child and music for two years at college. She’d long since given up any ambitions of the concert stage, but her greatest delight was to sit at the piano in the evening, the music students of the afternoon just an unpleasant taste in her mouth, the children in bed and my father not yet home from work or, perhaps, enveloped in one of the overstuffed chairs reading, one ear cocked, and play the concerti and sonatas of Mozart, which were her passion, and Chopin, which my father preferred. Since the third month of the pregnancy, the lessons had been cancelled and my mother, her head l
ight, stomach lurching, legs and fingers aching, had sat not once at the piano, and the apartment resonated in the evening with a silence that seemed more like a presence than an absence.

  Into this silence, where one would have thought she would be comfortable, Anna intruded, passing this note to my mother one evening: “When you are out and I won’t disturb you, may I play the piano?”

  “Of course,” my mother said with irritation. She rarely left the apartment but when she did she could care less what happened in her absence. “You play?”

  Anna nodded, smiling shyly.

  “Let me hear.”

  “Won’t your head hurt?” Anna wrote.

  “My head’s fine today. I’d play myself but my fingers have rubber bands around them.”

  Anna sat at the bench and raised the cover, exposing the Baldwin’s soiled smile. She raised her chin, facing the window that looked out – past the roof of the hat factory across the street – at the ocean, stretching with calm indifference towards the horizon and the old world beyond it. After a moment, she began to play. Chopin. The Fifth Concerto. My father, who had been in the bathroom shaving, came to the door with a broad smile on his lathered face, saying “That’s wonderful, Bertie,” then filled the doorway in confusion, looking from my mother, who stood by the window, to Anna at the piano and back again.

  “I’m sorry, my head is hurting,” my mother said after a while.

  My father’s appendicitis attack came completely without warning. At dinnertime, he had a sandwich, salad, coffee and piece of cheese Danish at the Garden Cafeteria, then went for a short walk to allow the food to settle before stopping at Fushgo’s for a chat and a drink from the bottle the bookseller kept behind his counter. He began to feel ill immediately after downing the shot, and Fushgo had to help him back to the newspaper office where he sat at his desk taking deep gasps, his face drained of all colour, until the ambulance arrived. My mother was telephoned from the hospital and she came at once, leaving the children with Anna, who had been just about to leave for her nightly visit to the Café Royale. The appendix was removed that night and when my father awoke from the ether the next morning, my mother was sitting on a straight chair beside his bed, his hand in hers. She’d been there all night and her face was etched with pain and exhaustion.