A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “Thank God, this will all seem very far away from Mohegan Lake,” Pearlman concluded, shaking my father’s hand.

  Within a few days, my father was on a train upstate to Peekskill, where he was met at the station by Mrs. Pearlman, a tall, graceful woman in a brocaded dress, with the scent of lilacs clinging to her, and was driven in a magnificent four-door Dodge touring sedan to the Pearlman country home, at Mohegan Lake, a further distance of some fifteen miles. My father had ridden in streetcars, of course, but he’d never been in either a train or an automobile, let alone one driven by a woman, let alone a woman as enthralling as Mrs. Pearlman, and his head was spinning by the time they arrived at the estate, where a barking black and white sheepdog raced out to greet them. He was ushered through the front door of a large house sheltered by a ring of imposing oak trees.

  There he was introduced to Betty, a local woman who cooked and cleaned at the house, and the two children, Benjamin, who was seven, and Esther, who was five. They eagerly clambered around him, the boy peppering him with questions, the girl offering for his inspection a red-headed doll.

  “We’ll have lots of fun,” my father assured the children.

  He had noticed a stream flowing beneath a bridge they had crossed just before arriving at the house, and he asked Benjy if he had a fishing pole. “When I was your age I loved to fish in the pond on our farm,” my father told the boy. “It’s been a while, but you don’t forget how.”

  Then he asked the children which was their favourite subject: reading, writing or arithmetic. They looked at him blankly.

  “Oh, the children are on vacation for the summer,” Mrs. Pearlman said lightly, and she sang, slightly off-key: “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.” Like her husband, she was in her thirties, but looked younger, with long honey-brown hair that she wore loose around her shoulders like a schoolgirl, and startling green eyes set off by a complexion that was pale and flawless. By this time, my father, who had not yet been with a woman, had fallen deliriously in love with her. The dizziness this caused added to his confusion.

  “Then what...?” he began.

  “Didn’t my husband explain?” Mrs. Pearlman asked, exasperated. “Your job is merely to talk to the children. In Yiddish.”

  The children were sent outside to play and she explained the situation. Her husband’s family had originally been German speakers, but over the years in New York had lost most of their knowledge of that language. English was what they spoke at business, at home, with their friends. Her husband knew no Yiddish beyond a few words, and, my father realized, had listened to his discourse without any real comprehension. But Mrs. Pearlman was a Litvak. She had come to America, to Chicago, as an infant with her parents, who were Yiddish speakers and never mastered the language of their new county, but she herself had grown up speaking English in school and, having left home early for college, a brief career as a designer, then marriage, her Yiddish was very rusty. The children, therefore, had none at all. Even the nanny-cum-housekeeper the family employed in New York was no help – she was a Negro woman from the South.

  Now here, she explained to my father, was where things became complicated. She and her parents had been estranged for many years. “I won’t go into it,” she said, giving my father a frank look. “You seem to be an intelligent man. I’m sure you can imagine.”

  Actually, my father had no idea what she was talking about, but he gave her his complete, rapt attention.

  “Now, through a most fortuitous circumstance, I’ve become reconciled with my parents. I’ve been to see them. They’re invited here and will be visiting in August. They’re old now. My father...” She hesitated. “Things are different. Middle of August. That’s when they’re to arrive. That gives you more than six weeks.”

  My father’s job, he realized, was to familiarize the children with Yiddish so that they could speak to their grandparents, whom they were about to meet for the first time. “I could do it myself,” Mrs. Pearlman said, “but my Yiddish is so poor I’d just be giving them bad habits, I’m sure. And children don’t listen to their mother anyway.” She laughed gaily. “I just want you to spend time with them, as a big brother would. The Yiddish aside, we’d been thinking of hiring someone as a companion to them. There are no other children in the vicinity, and Benjy and Esther were so restless and lonely last summer. So talk to them, play with them, take them places, go fishing with them, as you suggested, but speak to them in Yiddish. And make sure they learn to speak to you.”

  •••

  “Watch that Holstein, Harry!” Schmidt snapped impatiently.

  It didn’t take much to set the farm manager off. When this happened, due to my father’s slowness or clumsiness or failure to understand and execute a command immediately, his already ruddy cheeks grew even redder and a vein in his thick neck jumped.

  My father frowned but said nothing. Dealing with the children was child’s play compared to keeping this man satisfied. Any barnyard error committed by my father was met by a display of temper and curses in German by Schmidt, who seemed to be testing him, and gradually it dawned on my father that sooner or later the older man would no longer be satisfied with apologies and acquiescence, that Schmidt was seeking an opportunity to knock him to the ground in a display of masculine superiority. My father was not afraid of a fight – even before leaving school at thirteen he’d had his share of schoolyard tussles, and could usually hold his own – but was fond of a quote he’d come across in his reading of Shakespeare, that the better part of valour was discretion. My father had no doubt Schmidt could easily trounce him, and he’d resolved to avoid provoking the farm manager. He gritted his teeth, held his tongue.

  The Pearlman country estate, my father had quickly learned, was a working farm of nearly sixty acres. In the large red barns, there were stanchions for twenty milk cows, which grazed in a meadow along the stream he’d noticed on his arrival. There were also chickens, a black and white border collie and an aging horse named Yarmulke. On the other side were fields of hay, soybeans and corn. The farm was operated by this disagreeable fellow Schmidt, a Prussian Jew who struck my father as more the former than the latter. He was tall and thickset and wore jodhpurs and shiny boots, in which he walked with a slight limp. My father took an immediate dislike to him, although he became fond of Betty, the young housekeeper, who was his wife. Schmidt, a veteran of the Prussian army, had been farm manager for several years; the Pearlmans inherited him when they bought the place the year before. He ran the farm as if it were a battalion, but his wife, a shiksa who’d grown up in a small nearby town, was sweet-natured, patient and flirtatious. She made it her business to inquire of my father about his favourite dishes, and things he disliked.

  “If you are cooking it, I’m sure I’ll like anything set before me,” he assured her.

  The farmyard formed a triangle, with the barn at one corner, the small white house the Schmidts lived in, the original farmhouse, at the second and the Pearlmans’ large new house at the third.

  The Pearlmans owned an apartment in the city, two floors in a large brownstone on upper Central Park West, but were spending the summer at the farm. Robert Pearlman took the train to Peekskill on Friday afternoons, always immaculately dressed despite the heat of the ride, and spent the weekend with his family. Monday mornings, he went back to the city, where he was looked after during the week by the black woman they employed. To the amusement of the family, this good woman, who had been raised on a sharecrop farm in Alabama, had no interest in going to the country, not for the summer, not even for a weekend, so my father never met her.

  My father had heard about people so rich they could have two homes, but he’d never met any before, and he found the situation he was in – the elegant Pearlmans, the blustery Schmidt, the demanding children, not to mention the task he’d been set – formidable and inhibiting. But he quickly found that it was easy for him to fit in, though he doubted he would ever reach the point where he would be comfor
table.

  Within the confines of the farmyard triangle, it seemed to my father, was an artificial, idyllic world. The Pearlmans, despite their wealth, were Socialists and believed, to the extent possible, in equality. Everyone was part of one large family, himself included, and racial and class distinctions disappeared. Although the Schmidts had their own house, everyone ate Betty’s wonderful meals together in the Pearlman dining room, the hired staff sharing the same food as the employers, and side by side. They even had cocktails together, nightcaps, really, every evening before bed.

  Everyone called each other by their first names – Robert, Hillary, which was Mrs. Pearlman’s name, Benjy and Esther, of course, Betty and Harry, the name my father had begun to call himself a few years earlier. Even Schmidt, whose first name was Ernst, though my father continued to think of him as Schmidt. The two men definitely didn’t like each other – when they were introduced, Schmidt frowned when he shook my father’s hand and felt the softness of his palm. “You should be in the army, young man,” he said, sizing my father up. “There will be war in Europe soon. Any day, in fact. You’ll want to be prepared.” He routinely pronounced my father’s name, Harry, with a mixture of amusement and contempt, as if it were a girl’s name or, at any rate, one he considered unsuitable for a man.

  Schmidt often strutted around the farm carrying an ugly-looking over-and-under shotgun, claiming to have killed a chicken-thieving fox on a number of occasions, and laughed contemptuously at my father’s aversion to guns.

  Despite this enmity, the two men were thrown together in the chores of the farm. As a condition of his employment, my father was expected to spend a couple of hours a day helping Schmidt, who always reverted to calling my father by his last name once the others were beyond earshot. This meant herding in the cows morning and evening and actually helping with the milking; forking out the stalls afterwards; and, as the crops progressed – soybeans and clover for the cows, and corn for sale and the family’s own use – more chores related to cultivating, fertilizing and harvest. When they were together, Schmidt would bark out orders – and occasionally indulge in a short, sharp display of temper – but otherwise they would work in silence. Occasionally a simple-minded but powerfully built man from the nearby village would come to help out. He was called Oscar.

  My father’s days quickly fell into a routine. Up at six, chores in the barn, breakfast with the children, back to the barn briefly, the rest of the day with the children, chores in the evening, helping to put the children to bed, a nightcap with Hillary, Betty, Schmidt and, on weekends, Robert, then to his room in the attic for a few minutes with a book – he was reading a collection of Poe stories and Leaves of Grass that summer, books that would become lifelong favourites – before falling into a motionless, exhausted sleep.

  At the same time that he excused himself, Schmidt and Betty would also withdraw to their own home, leaving the Pearlmans or, on weekdays, Hillary alone. My father would sometimes awaken from feverish dreams, and lie motionless in his damp bed thinking of Hillary, alone in her own bed a floor below. Or, on weekends, he would imagine her in Robert Pearlman’s arms, and his cheeks would burn. At times, too, his thoughts would turn to Betty, a vivacious brunette who was not much older than he was, but my father would shake his head violently before a picture of the pleasant young woman in the arms of her brutish husband came into focus.

  Although the children were my father’s chief concern, and they dominated his time and attention, it was that hour after the children went to bed that he soon found himself most looking forward to in the day, most cherishing afterwards. Unless it was cool and rainy, in which case cocktails were served in the living room, in front of a fire, the adults would meet on the screened-in porch, which faced west to the meadow and pond, and from which splendid sunsets could be observed safe from mosquitoes. Hillary mixed martinis and, pouring a glass for my father, her hands always brushed against his, deliberately, he was sure. When Robert Pearlman was at home, of course, his position as head of the household was clear, and he set the tone and dominated the conversation. But in his absence, anarchy reigned on the Pearlman porch during cocktail hour, or so it seemed to my father. Hillary and Betty often sat together on a wicker sofa, their knees pressed together like schoolgirls, and chattered about what my father thought of as womanly matters: cooking, clothes, the children. My father, who invariably sat in a green Adirondack chair across from them, would sometimes be drawn into these light conversations, though he had little to say. Schmidt preferred to stand, pacing restlessly around the room and offering brief occasional pronouncements on the weather, the state of the crops, politics or, invariably, the growing threat of war in Europe.

  “When it comes,” he liked to predict, “there will be no standing on the sidelines. Will we be with Germany? Or against her? Harry, where will you stand?”

  If Robert Pearlman was present, this was sure to provoke a spirited argument. He was opposed to war, and if there was one, he believed, England and the Americas should stay well clear of it.

  Of more interest to my father than the conversation was the exchange of glances that ricocheted around the cozy room, especially in Robert’s absence. He, of course, could not help but cast fleeting looks of adoration at Hillary, try though he did to keep them furtive. For her part, Mrs. Pearlman usually ignored these looks, but occasionally she would raise her head and meet his gaze, returning his timid glance with what he was sure was a meaningful one of her own. But meaning what?

  My father also became aware that Betty, cheerful, innocent Betty, was similarly casting glances in his direction, and her manner with him was frequently nothing short of flirtatious. And it was patently obvious that Schmidt was gazing, as often as he decently could, at the wife of his employer, all the while attempting to divert attention by running his hand across his smoothly shaven chin. It also gradually became obvious to my father that Schmidt, when not gazing at Hillary, was scowling at him, and that his rancour seemed to grow in direct proportion to the amount of attention that Mrs. Pearlman gave him.

  Years later, when my father would tell this story, he would remark at this point that it was only his youth and inexperience that prevented him from being overwhelmed by the sexual frisson and intrigue darting like dragonflies after mosquitoes beneath the slowly turning fan in the Pearlman porch as, outside, darkness gently fell over the countryside.

  •••

  The stream my father had noticed the first day had been dammed at the end of the meadow, creating a pond where the cows drank, pausing in their endless chewing to dip their dark muzzles deep into the water. The pond was remarkably like the one my father remembered from the family farm in Galicia. There were small fish and eels in the pond, and my father and Benjy became expert at luring them with worms and minnows. As a boy, half a world away, he’d fished with a stick cut from a branch and a string. Now, just a decade later, he and Benjy made use of new rods and tackle that Pearlman had purchased in the city for them. Even Esther enjoyed the fishing, though she couldn’t bear to touch either bait or fish. As the summer progressed, Betty became equally expert at turning the fish into a succession of memorable meals. Even the unpleasant-looking eels, when cooked in a soup with lots of salt and pepper, were made pleasing by her clever hands.

  “What, are we becoming Catholics, fish on Friday?” Robert Pearlman jokingly complained the first time he enjoyed the fruits of these fishing expeditions, and he tousled his son’s hair, causing Benjy to squirm with pleasure. “Harry, you’re supposed to be teaching them Yiddish, not Latin.”

  Later, this joking complaint was picked up by Schmidt, who darkened it into “What, fish again?” and then, “Not fish again!” But, my father noticed, Schmidt always ate every bite.

  As they lounged by the pond in the July heat, their poles by their sides, my father and the children chattered as if he were indeed their big brother, talking about fish, baseball (Benjy was mad for the Yankees, then suffering a string of losses) and anything else that c
ame into their heads. They went for walks about the farm, played catch, threw sticks for the tireless sheepdog, Kalev, which was Hebrew for “dog,” and took rides on the broad back of the gentle Yarmulke. And my father told story after story, of life on the farm in Galicia, of the trip across the Atlantic, of life on the Lower East Side, which, to the children, was as foreign as what he referred to as “the old country.”

  From the beginning, my father would speak to the children in Yiddish, first putting names to simple things – rock, pants, sky, dog – then incorporating them into simple sentences. As Hillary had specified, he didn’t bother with the niceties of grammar, spelling or anything to do with the reading or writing of the language. This was strictly conversational Yiddish, and the children were quick learners. By the end of July, he had them chattering away as if Yiddish were their mother tongue – at least, that’s what Hillary remarked. She was very pleased, and she put her hand on my father’s and squeezed it warmly as she said so.

  “You’ve done wonders with them, Harry. You should consider a career in languages. Perhaps you should start thinking about college.”

  My father blushed with pleasure. “All I do is talk to them,” he said truthfully. There was neither skill nor guile involved.

  The date for the arrival of the grandparents drew closer and the children’s excitement grew.

  “What will they be like?” Benjy wanted to know.

  “Will they love me?” Esther asked.

  My father told the children about his own grandparents, his mother’s parents, whom he had last seen on the day he, his mother and his brothers Izzy, Nathan and Henry set out by ox cart from their village for Amsterdam – a long, ardous trip of several weeks – to take ship to America to join his father, Sam and Ida, who had gone a year earlier. He had kissed them goodbye, first his bubba, on her cheek, then his zaida, on his forehead because his beard tickled, knowing that he would probably never see them again. My father had cried that day, though he didn’t tell the children that. Instead, he said, “There were no tears, because they were so happy for us.”