A Book of Great Worth Page 19

  “He’s the boss’s son,” my father reminded her.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother said.

  “What if I tell him to quit, go to university, live in a garret and drink wine? His father will be sore at me. What if I tell him to write poetry on weekends, keep his nose clean and learn the business? He may think I don’t take him seriously and resent it. Giving advice can come back and bite you on the behind.”

  Giving advice happened to be something my father knew about. Years earlier, in Cleveland, he had written an advice to the lovelorn column, questions as well as answers at first, which still embarrassed him to admit. On more than one occasion, advice he gave had produced results that were far less than satisfactory.

  “How do you know he wants your advice?” my mother asked.

  “Why else show me the poems?”

  “Maybe he just wants to hear what you think of them,” she said, drawing a fine distinction.

  “Maybe,” my father said, without much conviction.

  “But you said he’s such a nice young man,” my mother protested after a minute of thought.

  “Nice, yes. The boss’s son, also yes.”

  The next day, it was fine outside and my father suggested to Goldman that they take their brown bags to the little park a few blocks away on Delancey and eat on a bench. They ate their sandwiches, commented on the burgeoning foliage of spring and the passersby and enjoyed the sunshine on their faces. Goldman seemed anxious but didn’t press. “That must have been some love affair,” my father finally said, choosing his words carefully. “She must have been some woman.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The poems.”

  “Oh.” Goldman blushed and looked away. “Poetic licence,” he said after a moment.

  My father looked at him, not at all certain what he was driving at. “You mean...”

  “I’m a homosexual, Morgenstern,” Goldman blurted out. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course.” My father glanced at his young friend, then away. He’d heard of such people, of course, read about them, but had never met one, not that he knew of. He had no idea what they might do, what they might feel.

  They’d finished their lunches and now they got up and began to stroll through the park, my father taking the lead. “Maybe poetry’s not the best way to write of such things,” he offered.

  “It fooled you, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it...it made me ask you...”

  “But I didn’t have to tell you. I could have hidden behind the images of the poems. The poems stand on their own, speak for themselves. Maybe poetry’s exactly the right way to write of such things, Morgenstern.”

  “If writing about such things is required,” my father said. They’d come to the end of the small park and they turned around.

  “And isn’t it?” Shel Goldman asked.

  “Ah,” my father said. “That’s the question.”

  So engrossed were they in conversation that they returned to the shop a few minutes late. Reubens gave them a sharp glance as they took their places at their benches and my father knew that, had he been on his own or with any of the other men in the shop, the foreman would have come over with a cutting word. Friendship, a shared history, a shared love of old books, none of that mattered on the shop floor. He saw that Callahan had also noticed the late return. He sat glowering at his bench, directly across the shop from my father’s, hurling scowls in my father’s direction like burning spears. But it was none of the Irishman’s business, and my father merely shook his head and got quickly to work.

  Over the next few weeks, as the weather turned from mild to balmy, my father and Shel Goldman took many lunches in the park and walks, although they were careful not to return late again. My father and the younger man, each with his own problems, became friends, though how close my father couldn’t say.

  On one of their early walks, Goldman’s hand brushed against my father’s sleeve and my father’s arm involuntarily jerked.

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Morgenstern,” Goldman said.

  “My dear Goldman, I didn’t think I had.”

  “I thought perhaps you...” the younger man began.

  “Certainly not. That was the farthest thought from my mind.”

  “I can assure you, Morgenstern...”

  “Don’t say another word, Goldman.”

  And without giving it any thought, my father extended his own right hand and the two men shook warmly. After that, while engaged in conversation, my father would often lightly touch the younger man on the arm or shoulder as a deliberate gesture of friendship.

  •••

  Often on these lunch-break walks, Goldman would show my father a new poem. Like the first batch he’d seen, they were short, vivid love poems, but my father read them in a new light, with new understanding.

  “This is deep,” he offered after reading one such poem that moved him. Up till then, he had successfully avoided making comments that implied any judgment other than generalized approval.

  Now, Goldman looked up with frank appreciation on his face. “Thank you, Morgenstern,” he said.

  “Have you...considered publication?” my father ventured.

  “No,” Goldman said quickly. “No, I couldn’t. You know, I haven’t even shown them to anyone other than you.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Morgenstern. It’s hard to talk to people about certain things. My father, my family, would be horrified if they knew. But you...I saw in you, right from the first day, a man with an open mind.”

  “Now I’m doubly flattered.” My father laughed with pleasure. “I hope I haven’t disappointed you.”

  “No, not at all.”

  They walked in silence, heading back towards the shop, both of them suddenly conscious of the time.

  They reached the door and paused. “Do you really think they might be suitable for publication?” Goldman asked.

  My father smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid I’m not the man to ask that, Goldman. What I know about such things you could put in a candle holder.”

  Later that same afternoon, as my father was lingering in the men’s room for a few puffs of a cigarette, Callahan came in. “Ah, I would have expected to find you in here with your sweetheart,” the goldsmith spat.

  “I beg your pardon?” my father said.

  “The Goldman boy. Aren’t you two special friends?”

  My father was so astounded he could think of nothing to say. He shook his head in disgust, stubbed out his cigarette and went back to work. He was surprised, first of all, that Callahan knew or even suspected Goldman’s secret, which he, my father, would never have guessed himself; and amazed that the Irishman had linked the two of them, though whether he really believed it or was merely being mischievous my father couldn’t know.

  Now he had three problems, he explained to my mother that evening. He had already told her, as delicately as he could, what Goldman had revealed to him, and was somewhat surprised that she knew what the term referred to. My mother, who had attended Hunter College for two years, was constantly surprising my father.

  “Now I have the question of his poetry to be careful about, this other matter, even more inflammatory, and on top of it all, this Nazi Irishman,” he said.

  My mother shook her head in sympathy. All she had to worry about were looking after the two girls, preparing meals for them all and her pregnancy, which was then in the morning-sickness phase.

  “Did he ask for advice about the poems? Young Mr. Goldman?” she asked.

  “Not really” my father admitted. “Neither about writing poetry nor about the poems themselves. But about whether to seek publication.”

  “And you told him?”

  “What could I tell him other than what do I know of such things?”

  “And has he asked advice about...the other matter?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Well...” My mot
her smiled. “You are an authority on matters of the heart.”

  He laughed. “No, I don’t think Shel Goldman will seek the counsel of Yenta Schmegge.” That was the name under which my father had written the advice column years before.

  “And as for the Irishman,” my mother said, “don’t let him provoke you, Harry.”

  “This you don’t need to tell me, Bertie,” my father said.

  But the very next morning, the goldsmith did provoke my father.

  “You like strikes so much, why ain’t you over there walking on the picket line with your Red friends?” he asked as my father passed by his bench.

  My father, who was usually the most mild-mannered of men, replied with a comment he immediately regretted.

  Callahan dropped his tools and bounded around his bench with a surprising agility and speed. “What in thunder...” my father began, but before he could say more Callahan’s head butted into his chest. The goldsmith was a short, stocky man, and the force of his assault sent my father’s glasses flying and my father himself to the floor, where he lay for a moment, dazed. Then the Irishman began to kick him.

  This roused my father, who grabbed Callahan’s legs and pulled. The goldsmith fell to the shop floor in a clatter. Then the two men were on their knees, trading blows. My father was taller but lighter than his adversary, but he was surprisingly strong and he held his own. But before either man could inflict much damage, the other men in the shop were clambering around them and burly arms pulled them apart.

  “Enough!” Reubens commanded. Callahan and my father staggered to their feet but were restrained from moving towards each other. My father was conscious of Goldman’s hands on his arms. The foreman looked first at one man, then the other. “Good, both of you have drawn blood. So it’s a draw.”

  Goldman handed my father his glasses and he put them on. Indeed, he could see a trickle of blood coming from Callahan’s nose, which produced in him a surprising feeling of satisfaction, and when he gingerly touched his lip his fingers came away wet and red.

  Reubens continued to glower at the two men, and my father was sure he’d be fired. But the foreman only shook his head. “Jackasses! You think this is Kaplan’s Gym? Get back to work.”

  Everyone returned slowly to their benches. My father took up his welding torch but, before he even had it lit he laid it down again and went into the bathroom. He was washing his face in the grimy sink when he heard footsteps and his head jerked up. “It’s just me, Morgenstern.”

  My father dried his face with a paper towel. “Nice bunch you have working here, Goldman,” he said. His lip winced with pain as he smiled.

  “That was about me, wasn’t it, Morgenstern?”

  “You? No. No. What makes you say that?”

  The younger man didn’t reply. The two men looked at each other. After a moment, Goldman stepped into the stall and tore off a length of toilet paper. He carefully folded it in half, then quarters, then eighths. “Hold still, Morgenstern.” He came close, raised his hand and, with surprising delicacy, patted a drop of blood from my father’s lip. He smiled weakly, as if it were his lip that was bruised. “A mark of honour,” he said.

  My father shook his head. “There’s no honour in blood, Shel.”

  At lunchtime, the two men took their paper bags as usual and walked in silence to the park. They ate their sandwiches in silence. My father gazed at the blue, cloudless sky, at the bright green canopy of leaves of the oak trees that lined the path. He listened to the honking of horns and the rumble of taxis on Delancey Street. He waited for Goldman to speak again. Eventually, though, he took the lead.

  “For God’s sake, Goldman, the poems, publish them. Write more. Think of yourself.”

  The strike at The Day dragged on through the summer and into the fall, then through the winter. It appeared it would never end. The war in Europe worsened and a pall of gloom hung over the Lower East Side. My father moved on from Goldmans’ to a smaller shop where he was given more difficult tasks and the pay was commensurately better. His young friend had already left, “to pursue his star,” my father used to say. He moved to the West Coast and my father never heard from him again. In the seventh month of her pregnancy, my mother miscarried. The dead child was the boy she badly wanted. His sacrifice, like that of another miscarried baby a few years earlier, made my own life possible because, a few months after the strike abruptly was settled, my mother became pregnant yet again. My father and his colleagues at The Day were betrayed by the Communists who led them and went back to work at notably lower wages, but considered themselves lucky to be back behind their desks. Slowly, over the next few years, as the United States entered the war and the economy boomed, the bosses relented and wages rose to the level they’d been at before the strike, and even above that, but long before that my parents had lost their dream house.

  • • •

  The Family Circle

  When my father’s cousin Glicka was a young woman of nineteen, she met a man from somewhere in Canada and went to live with him, somewhere far in the west and north where Eskimos ate whale blubber in round ice houses and the sun never set. That was the family story, at any rate. “How can you sleep in a place like that?” my uncle Henry, who had a philosophical bent, would ask whenever the subject came up, though it rarely did. She died in her third childbirth, we’d heard, and her memory receded, but my father, who I believe had been sweet on her as a child, although he was only fourteen when the older Glicka disappeared from his life, never forgot. Should the subject of Canada ever arise – it also rarely did – my father would always ponder an invisible point on the ceiling and, with a faraway cast in his eye, comment: “My cousin Glicka went to live there but, alas, she died.” No doubt he also thought of his cousin Reuben, who had visited once from Montreal, but he rarely mentioned him or his siblings, whom he knew nothing about.

  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” my mother would sometimes say in rejoinder, a bit mysteriously and smiling wryly, but my father insisted she was the nicest of his cousins, the children of his Uncle Abe. My mother disapproved of Abe’s flock, and with good reason. This large and unruly brood – the sons and daughters of Uncle Abe, who was himself no shining example, and his put-upon wife, the inexplicably named Gloria (so put-upon, in fact, that she died young, mysteriously so by all accounts) – were all wastrels or scoundrels, or had married ones.

  Some of their children were already grown and they too seemed to be set on wayward or questionable paths. Only Glicka, who had disappeared from the scene early on, had, apparently, escaped the taint of her family.

  My father’s father was named Joseph and was always called that; but his younger brother Abraham was invariably called Abe. That in itself spoke volumes about the differences between the two men. Joseph had been the editor of a newspaper covering the burgeoning Jewish world of the Lower East Side, a respected columnist, a distinguished scholar whose multi-language library, encased behind glass doors in the study of his large Brooklyn apartment, fascinated me as a child. Abe had been the owner of a candy store in the Bronx and, during Prohibition, produced moonshine in his back room. As for their children, well, among my father’s siblings were another journalist like him, a lawyer, a dental technician with his own denture business and the owner of a successful umbrella factory in Pennsylvania. Even my aunt Ida had married reasonably well, to a photographer who had his own shop. Abe’s children, on the other hand, were in real estate and insurance sales – how low can you get? my mother would ask – and one, cousin Meyer, was actually in prison, for fraud. Another cousin, Murray, now in the trucking business, had gotten his start as a bootlegger at his father’s knee. Among Glicka’s sisters, one was married to a man who gave his occupation as accountant but was well known to be a bookmaker, while the other, now disgraced and living in Florida where no one knew her, had been briefly married to a schoolteacher who took an excessive interest in his female students. Compared to these, Glicka, who had merely moved to a distant country f
or love and died in childbirth, seemed like a saint.

  All of this was largely academic – relations between the clan of Joseph and that of Abe had never been good, and after the deaths of the two old men, who had barely spoken to each other for years, the members of each camp mostly lost contact with the other. And, within the clan of Joseph itself, brothers and sister, who once had their aged parents as a focal point, also began drifting apart, seeing each other less and less frequently.

  “This is a shame,” said my mother, who herself came from a close family, and she invented a family circle to bring us all closer together.

  “This will be nothing but toil, and heartache,” my father cautioned, though he did it with a wink to us children, suggesting he wasn’t completely serious. “When it comes to family, best to let sleeping bears lie.”

  But my mother persisted, and, for most of the Fifties and into the early Sixties, twice a year she would organize a large gathering of the descendants of Joseph and his good wife, Leah, whom I knew as bubba: once in the summer at Uncle Henry’s lakeside cottage in the Catskills, and once in the winter, at the home of one or another of the New York uncles, Izzy or Sam or Henry, or our own apartment in Brooklyn, not far from where my grandparents had lived. These reunions would be attended by all of my father’s siblings, even my uncle Nathan, in from Pennsylvania, and their spouses, children and the few grandchildren who had already appeared. They were pleasant enough, with plenty of good food, drink and talk, but it was generally conceded that, were it not for my mother, they wouldn’t occur and the family, as a family, would likely cease to exist – which is exactly what eventually did happen when my mother died. But long before that, disharmony was sown by the approach to the family circle of our distant cousin Henrietta, whose existence had previously been unknown.

  The letter was addressed to my mother and was postmarked in Whitehorse, YT, which, a quick search through the atlas revealed to be the Yukon Territory, in northern Canada. The name on the letter, Henrietta Dumont, was unfamiliar to all of us.