A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “Who’s the patient?” my father said. “I should get up, you should get into this bed, the way you look. Or better yet, we should both be in it. The way you look.” He squeezed her hand.

  “It’s too narrow,” my mother said, smiling.

  “Too narrow?” my father said. “According to who?”

  She told him what the doctors had said. He asked for a cigarette and she told him they were forbidden. He told her about the drink he’d had with Fushgo. “It’s the first time liquor’s ever hurt me,” he said. They laughed and gazed at each other fondly.

  “Anna’s with the children?” he asked after a while.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God we have her. Especially now.”

  My mother didn’t say anything right away. Then: “She’ll be a great help while you’re here, yes. But when you’re home I’d like to have Sarah come.”

  My father was silent.

  “It’s been over a month. We can’t be responsible for the woman forever. She’s taking advantage of your kindness.”

  My father nodded slowly. “After I’m home,” he said.

  He was in hospital for four days and was under strict orders to rest and not go back to work for a week after he went home. The attack had come on a Friday and he was released on the following Tuesday. By the doctor’s orders, he shouldn’t have gone back to work until the following Wednesday, but the city editor phoned and he went on the Monday. He felt fine, if a little tired, the incision, already beginning to scar over with bright pink flesh shiny as fingernails, just a little tender. On Thursday afternoon, feeling completely fit, he went by train to Lakehurst, not thinking a thing of it.

  It was well after midnight when he came home, my mother asleep, the living room dark. He’d served his editor as well as he could, though he’d retreated from the scene soon after he began to bleed and was unable to attract the attention of any of the medical people who rushed to the airfield. In the town itself, he found a small hospital already beginning to be overwhelmed by the flood of injured from the accident site, and, while he was waiting, telephoned in his story. After several hours, a nurse whose hair had slipped out of its careful bun into shreds of haphazard grey cleaned his wound of the coagulated blood crusting it and bound him securely in bandages wrapped around his lower chest and belly. No doctor was available, though, so no stitches were taken, and it was this delay – the opening required seven stitches the following day, when he reported to the hospital where he’d originally been treated – that caused the odd shape and thickness of the scar he carried the rest of his life.

  My father went to the kitchen and poured himself a whisky from the flask he kept in his raincoat pocket, drank it quickly and poured another. The ceiling light spilled through the doorway into the living room and he could see there was no one sleeping on the sofa. He went into the bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed and took off his shoes. My mother, who had been sleeping lightly, rolled over and opened her eyes, reaching out her hand to touch his arm.

  “Harry? What time is it?”

  “Almost one. Go back to sleep.” He bent over her and kissed her head.

  “How was it?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “No, I didn’t play the radio.”

  “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  “Okay.” She rolled over.

  “Anna’s not back from the cafe?” my father asked.

  “She’s gone.”

  “I thought not till next week.”

  “We had an argument,” my mother said. “I asked her to go.”

  “I see,” my father said. He tried to imagine what such an argument would have been like, the flurry of notes being scribbled, torn from the pad, crumpled, thrown to the floor.

  “I’ll tell you in the morning. Sarah’s coming in the evening.”

  He took off his shirt and went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. He stepped into the small room where my sisters slept and gazed down at them, muffled in darkness but glowing haloes around their heads formed by the street light from the window drawn to their hair. He bent over each head and kissed it. In the kitchen, he slowly drank the whisky he’d poured. A dull red stain the size and shape of a strawberry had gathered on the bandage just below and to the right of where, he believed, his heart lay. His body was exhausted but his mind raced, filled with the dazzle of flame, its surprisingly loud roar, the plaintive voice of the radio man, “get out of the way, get out of the way, get this Johnny, get this Johnny.” He walked across the living room to the shelf and found the book written in the mysterious language and took it back to the kitchen. He sat at the table, the open book in front of him, and looked first at its inscrutable script, then up at the icebox, standing silent and white against the wall. From the living room, he thought he heard the tinkling of piano keys, the first tentative notes of a Chopin concerto, but it was only the sound of an automobile passing on the street below, rising through the warm night air and the open window. His side ached, just beneath the strawberry stain by his heart, and he didn’t know if it was the incision, or something else.

  • • •

  The Barking Dog

  The war in Europe began; the Depression ended. Really, it was almost like that. At The Day, where my father had been a reporter for fifteen years, there was unrest. The paper had kept its head above water all through the bad years but salaries were frozen. The staff was lucky to have jobs, lucky to have salaries as high as they’d been before the Crash – my father made seventy dollars a week, which was a fine income compared to many others. But now, after ten years, the journalists wanted more. The war hadn’t really begun, but everyone could see it coming. The Depression wasn’t really over, but there were signs it would be. Some of my father’s colleagues were reasonable, others were more demanding; the union leaders were mostly Communists and, my father said, were glad to have a chance. Fascists must be fought, at home as well as abroad. Before my father knew it, it was spring and he was on strike.

  It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Through most of the Thirties, my parents and their young family – my two sisters – had lived in a cramped apartment in Coney Island, saving their pennies. Just the year before, they had finally realized their dream: they’d bought a small piece of land in New Jersey, on a country road not far from Princeton, and, using plans drawn by their friend Moishe Cahan, who had left architecture school after the Crash to work as a draftsman, supervised the construction of a house, a dream house with three bedrooms, a kitchen bathed in light and a stone fireplace. In late January 1939, two months before my father went on strike, they’d moved all their belongings into the new house and he became a commuter, riding in the smoking car of a rattling New Jersey Central local train mornings from Princeton Junction to lower Manhattan, and back again in the evening. Now he was taking the train every morning to walk on a picket line. There was a mortgage as big as Yankee Stadium and, in addition to my mother and two small children, two goats, two ducks, a dog and a cat to feed. Strike pay was ten dollars a week.

  To make matters worse, my mother had just learned she was pregnant again.

  Every penny they’d saved had been sunk into the house, so there was no cushion. Most of their relatives, on both my father’s side and my mother’s, and friends had fared more poorly than them during the Depression years, so there was no one to borrow from.

  “We could sell Esther,” my father said, straight-faced.

  “NO!” my sister shrieked. She had turned eight just a week earlier.

  “Ah, who would buy her anyway.” And my father grabbed her and smothered her with tickles. “We’ll sell Judy instead.”

  “NO!” Now my other sister was adding to the bedlam.

  “You’re right, too small. No good for anything... except...tickling...”

  “It’s no laughing matter, Harry,” my mother scolded.

  “That’s why I’m laughing.”

  They both laughed at that, ruefully, but it was one
of the last times for a long time that they’d find anything funny.

  Years earlier, before my father had begun to write and followed his father and oldest brother into the newspaper trade, he had worked as a silversmith. Another older brother, Nathan, had already entered that trade and was doing well at it – eventually, he would have a job fashioning silver handles for canes and expensive umbrellas at a company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, would rise to be a foreman, then a manager, and wind up buying the company and becoming rich. But at the time my father, just nineteen or twenty, was looking for a job, Nathan was employed at the firm of Tiffany and Co., makers of fine lamps. He recommended my father, and he was hired as an apprentice. In all, my father worked there for two or three years, first doing the smallest and simplest of jobs, later graduating to more complex handiwork. He enjoyed the work, but at night he would scribble stories and poems on sheets of scrap newsprint from the newspaper where his father was the editor, and dream of being a writer.

  Now, twenty-five years later, my father put his hat in his hands and went to the Tiffany shop on Delancey Street to beg for a job.

  No one then working at Tiffany’s had been there in my father’s day, and there were no open jobs there at any rate, but someone suggested he try Goldmans’, down the street. There, he found, to his surprise, that a man named Arthur Reubens, who’d worked by his side at Tiffany’s years before, was the foreman. Reubens, like my father, was an admirer of rare old books, and over the years the two had occasionally run into each other at Fushgo’s bookshop on East Broadway.

  “So you’ve given up on that crazy idea of being a writer, Morgenstern,” Reubens remarked dryly when my father walked into the shop, as if it had been only weeks since he’d left the trade, not years.

  “Right now it’s given up on me,” my father said. Everyone knew about the strike at The Day, now in its third week, and everyone on the Lower East Side knew my father, who wrote a popular column, worked there, so there was no need to explain.

  The two men shared a laugh and shook hands warmly. Reubens offered my father a job on the spot and had him working the very next day. My father wasn’t clear whether there really had been an opening or if Reubens, out of kindness, had created one.

  Goldmans’ was an old establishment with a reputation. It had been founded before the turn of the century by two brothers who’d worked as skilled craftsmen in Berlin and they quickly developed a demand for their fine tableware, candlesticks, menorahs and decorative pieces, in both silver and gold. The original Goldman brothers were dead now, and even their sons, Gerson and Sidney, were nearing retirement age. They made appearances every day, but mostly confined themselves to the front office, to buying supplies and marketing to the Fifth Avenue shops that carried their wares. They left the actual running of the workshop to the much-trusted Reubens.

  There were a dozen men in the shop, of various nationalities, “a regular League of Nations,” my father told my mother appreciatively. “The Goldmans don’t care who you are as long as you can do the work.” Among the men was Shel Goldman, Gerson’s son, who was just learning the trade. In a few years, the business would belong to him, as Sid had never married, but for the moment he was just another hand in the shop, doing what Reubens told him to do.

  On my father’s first morning at work, Shel Goldman came over to say hello and my father was impressed by the young man’s good nature. “Welcome to the sweatshop,” he said with a wink, offering his hand. As The Day’s labour reporter, my father had written countless articles about the sweatshops of the garment district and the struggle by the unions against them. “You got tired of covering strikes and decided to see them from the inside out?” Goldman asked amiably.

  “Of strikes I’ve seen plenty,” my father said. “But what can you do?”

  Perhaps inevitably, there was also a man who took an instant dislike to my father. This was Pat Callahan, a big, redheaded goldsmith of such high skill that his eccentricities, irascibility and barely concealed anti-Semitism were tolerated. When they were introduced, Callahan took one look at my father’s soft white hands and new dungarees, snorted in disgust and turned back to his bench without a word. My father was flabbergasted.

  “Pay no attention to Paddy,” Reubens said with a shrug, just loud enough so that Callahan could hear. “He’s the resident grouch.” Some of the other men laughed but my father felt uneasy. Callahan was lighting his torch and, with that in his hand and in his leather apron, he looked formidable. Not a good man to get on the wrong side of.

  Over the next few days, my father learned to stay out of Callahan’s way. He was, Reubens assured him, more bark than bite. But still, the foreman added, “Who needs a barking dog at your heels?” The evening before, after work but before catching his train home, my father had spent an hour on the picket line at The Day, and there was a heckling group of men from the Bund across the street, in black leather jackets like German storm troopers. One of them had a snarling police dog on a short leash and the memory made my father shiver.

  Reubens put my father to work on candlesticks and menorahs. Other, more skilled men made the parts, and my father’s job was limited to welding pieces together and final polishing. He was given a bench next to Shel Goldman’s; he was doing similar work. It was natural, then, that my father got to know the younger man better, and he took a liking to him. My mother would pack a lunch for my father, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on thick-sliced pumpernickel bread, a wedge of cheese and an apple, and a Thermos of coffee, which my father liked milky and sweet. Lunch breaks at the shop were staggered and, invariably, when he took his break, Goldman was going off on his as well and the two men would find themselves eating together in a small windowless room at the rear of the business office that served as a lunchroom. The two women who worked in the front, looking after correspondence and the books, had done what they could to prettify the lunchroom, tacking pages from a Currier and Ives calendar on the walls and arranging gingham placemats on the wobbly tables.

  “In the old days,” my father remembered, looking around on the first day, “when Reubens and I worked at Tiffany’s, we’d walk down to Orchard Street and have the free lunch at Stinky’s.”

  “Free!” Goldman said, impressed.

  “Well, you bought a schooner of beer, three cents, then you helped yourself. Trays of black bread, sliced meat and cheese, pickles.”

  “First the beer, though.”

  “Sure, first the beer.”

  “And at inflated prices, I’m sure.”

  “I suppose. You could get the same glass of beer for two cents some places.”

  “So there’s no free lunch. That it, Morgenstern?”

  My father smiled. He thought about how the free kisses my mother had lavished on him had led to the diaper bucket, the mortgage, lunch in a paper bag. “No free lunch, Goldman. You’re right about that.”

  Shel Goldman was a thin, ascetic-looking man with the hands of a concert pianist or a jeweller – not a metal smith – and dark, haunted eyes that made my father wonder if he was recovering from a tragic love affair. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could ask another man about, but it wasn’t long before my father found out.

  •••

  As it turned out, Shel Goldman was a poet and, as soon as he felt sufficiently comfortable with my father, he was pressing some of his work into the older man’s hands. By this time, a few weeks into my father’s employment at Goldmans’, the two men were eating their sandwiches together daily and had come to enjoy each other’s company.

  In his own younger days, my father had written poems and two novels, which had been serialized in the Cleveland newspaper where he’d worked. But he felt his literary days were behind him. At The Day, he wrote news stories and articles every day and a weekly column that had a large following; that seemed to satisfy his writerly impulses. As for literature, he explained, he read novels now, didn’t write them. And it was a long time since he’d even read a poem, other than my mother’s,
let alone written one.

  “Just wait till you have children,” he told Goldman with a laugh. “Art goes out the window.” But he cheerfully accepted the younger man’s handwritten pages and read them with interest on the train ride home to Princeton Junction that evening.

  My father would always willingly admit that he’d never been much of a poet. He was self-taught, having consumed Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Rilke, whom he considered gods, and he had a well-earned command of the written word, at least in Yiddish. But he had a tendency to go on and on that had seemed more suitable to novels. Goldman’s poems, though, were short and pithy, filled with vivid images and startling metaphors that had my father shaking his head with admiration. They were love poems, written in English, and they expressed a painful longing for a departed lover, a beautiful, enigmatic woman, sensuously described, who, if the poems were to be believed, had spurned all emotional advances while encouraging physical contact, allowing herself to be both available and distant. “That’s one mystery solved,” my father thought.

  That night, after the girls had been put to bed, he showed a few of Goldman’s poems to my mother, who was also a lover of poetry. At college, she’d read Verlaine and Rimbaud in French and had written some poems, and continued to write occasionally, though she considered herself no more than an amateur. “He’s good,” she agreed. “Too good to be wasting himself in a metal shop. You should encourage him.”