A Book of Great Worth Read online

  He considered the question, and the one contained in a letter which had come that day, a real question, in a real letter, from a real reader: “My husband beats me and the children. What should I do?”

  He had been sitting at his desk in The World newsroom for an hour or more thinking of how to answer this question. It was late, and the newsroom was deserted. There was a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer of his desk. He opened the drawer, took out the bottle and a small glass and poured himself a drink.

  The only answer my father could think of for either dilemma – his own and that of his distressed correspondent – was the one he had written so often in the newspaper: “Follow your heart.” In the dim light of the empty newsroom, the inadequacy of the answer – and its falsity – loomed enormous.

  • • •

  A False Moustache

  In 1924, when my father came back to New York from Cleveland, he moved uptown to Harlem, where he hoped to find independence.

  For several years after dropping out of school at thirteen, my father had knocked around, working at a variety of jobs, usually taking a night class of some sort at the same time from the Arbeiter Ring, the Workman’s Circle, an organization that sought to bring education and culture to the Jewish immigrants, and travelling some. A problem with his feet allowed him to avoid service in the Great War that raged all over Europe, including the area where he’d been born. This had prevented him from having to put his beliefs in pacifism to the test. Instead of taking up arms, he’d served his country by working on a farm, something he already had some experience with.

  Afterwards, he went west, and he had just spent almost four years on a small Yiddish newspaper in Cleveland learning the craft he would earn his living by for the next forty. He liked to tell me, years later, that he would often dream, in the cold rooming-house attic he’d shared with a mouse he called Maleka, of returning to the city he’d once thought didn’t have room for him, the city of his father’s and brother’s friends and influence, their reputation, like a bright morning star, burning on the horizon, forcing men to lift their heads and see.

  In those days, with the Great War still seeming to reverberate in the air above the city like a subway train that has rumbled out of sight but not hearing, Harlem was already beginning to make the change that was to plunge it into the new world. The handsome brownstones that lined 125th Street and its dissecting avenues were starting the painful process of transforming themselves into neat, genteel boarding houses, like capped teeth in a once proud mouth – the smile still warm, but no longer glittering. My father took a room on the second floor of a Lexington Avenue house, just south of 124th Street, that had once belonged to a lawyer with Tammany connections. The lawyer had died in debt and now his solemn parlor was the domain of an aunt who had only her wits and boarders to keep her together. The room was clean, with a scrubbed window behind starched white curtains looking out on the avenue and one slim slice of Mount Morris Park, two blocks west, that wasn’t cut off by the buildings across the way. North of 125th, where the roots were deeper or the money of better quality, my father didn’t know which, there were still families with servants living in the pillared, imposing brownstones, and from his window, on warm afternoons, he could watch the black nursemaids, who lived far south of the pleasant street, strolling with their charges to the park, where they would sit on benches and watch the children play in the sun. He paid twelve dollars a week, and that included coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner sharply at six. When he worked the night shift, as he often did, his landlady packed him a wholesome lunch.

  There was no mouse in the room on Lexington Avenue and, even though the subway ride downtown to East Broadway took almost an hour, my father enjoyed living there, far from the sights and smells that meant something different entirely. And his enjoyment was enhanced somewhat when, after several weeks, he ran into Louis Shmelke in the hall outside his room.

  “Shmelke,” my father said, surprised and pleased, still new enough in his surroundings to be lonely, “what brings you here?”

  “I have to go,” Shmelke shrugged, gesturing towards the toilet at the end of the hall. At the other end, my father could see, a door hung open, the door to the room where, he believed, a travelling salesman with a lingerie firm resided. Or had.

  “So go,” my father said, moving out of the lean man’s way, “but step in on your way back and begin the process again.”

  A minute later, they were lifting their water glasses to the memory of Cleveland. “May that infermal lake from which blows that infermal cold wind overspill its shores and swallow the infermal city up,” Shmelke said, licking his lips with a peculiar slapping sound, like small waves on stones. He swallowed the whisky with a single gulp.

  He was a tall, fleshless man with ears like mushrooms springing out of moist earth, fond of suits a size too large, as if he expected suddenly to put on weight. His lips were the size and colour of the patches on a worn inner tube. He was altogether the most homely man my father had ever known, quite an accomplishment in a world populated by men who worked too hard or kept their heads on too lofty planes to be physically vain.

  “It was my partner, that infermal rascal Goldblatt, who forced me to descend,” Shmelke said in explanation for his presence, both in the city and these modest surroundings. He was a humourless, literal man whose command of his second language was not quite up to his reach.

  “The ticket selling?” my father inquired after a moment’s thought. They had not been friends, by any means, but they’d frequented the same café in Cleveland, a gathering spot for poets, newspapermen, actors, artists, musicians and hangers-on, and he’d known of half a dozen different ventures in which Shmelke was involved. “Artists’ representative” was what he liked to call himself; press agent was closer to the truth; ticket agent was, in fact, what he was the last time my father had heard.

  “Let me tell you, that was no sofa on roses, that expedition. It was a service, a struggle of love, something to do for the people, you know what I mean, Morgenstern? You think I could make a dollar on a thing like that?”

  “Would I argue with you?” my father asked. He poured another two fingers of whisky into the dusty glasses.

  “My partner, what a shlimazel, a head for business he had on his shoulders as big as this.” Shmelke held up his thumb, examined it critically then replaced it with his pinky. “As big as this, no bigger.” He gulped down the whisky with a rubbery slap. “We had these tickets, this big order, something really expressive, for opera, Caruso, no, not him, but someone just as infamous, and it brought in a lot of money. A lot? It made me enervated having that much money so close. And was I right?”

  He slapped his narrow forehead with the palm of his hand. “That infermal shmegegge had a chance – a chance, he called it, a hole in the ground would be more like it – to buy up a whole theatre for Gilbert and Sullivan, so he used all the money from the opera tickets. The whole cat and caboodle.”

  “Sounds like a smart move,” my father said naively.

  “A smart move? Sure, like suicide is smart for the widow and the dolphins.” Shmelke glared at my father as if he were in the company of a fool. My father tipped the bottle over the glasses.

  “So there comes the man from the opera saying where’s the money from the tickets? So what do we say?”

  “Tomorrow?” my father offered.

  Shmelke peered at him with skeptical admiration. “Sure, tomorrow, that’s context. But what happens after tomorrow?”

  “Gilbert and Sullivan is sold?”

  “Morgenstern, no offensive, but you and my infermal partner Goldblatt would be sweethearts, regular darlings, newlyweds you could be.”

  “You couldn’t sell Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  Shmelke’s watery eyes rolled up and almost disappeared into his eyelids. “Morgenstern, you can always sell Gilbert and Sullivan. In Cleveland, Gilbert could be elected mayor, Sullivan the governor of Ohio, maybe.”

  “So what
’s the problem?”

  “Problem? Who said anything about a problem? Morgenstern, you surprise me. Problem? What a cryptic. No problem, believe me. The Gilbert and Sullivan money goes to the opera and that accounting is closed, the book is finished, kaput. A little inconsideration, maybe, when the Gilbert and Sullivan cancels and there’s the refunds to make, but a problem? Noooo.”

  Shmelke glared at my father, challenging him, and, though he was tempted to say he didn’t understand, my father held his tongue. After that, the two men saw each other often, in the hallway outside the toilet, rather than at the dinner table, as my father was then working nights, and often they would share a glass of whisky in my father’s room, occasionally in Shmelke’s. The man did not bathe often and there was an odour in his room that my father found worth the price of his whisky to avoid.

  It was spring when my father moved into the room in Harlem, and the city was opening itself up for him the way leaves and blossoms open themselves up to the insects that float on the warm breezes of April and May. The Jewish life of New York was rich and exciting in those days, its theatre vigorous, its literature strong and searching, its artists bold and sensitive with a freedom growing out of a new sense of purpose after a hundred years or more of lying low. There were half a dozen Yiddish dailies in the city then – his father was editor of one of them, The Morning Journal, and his older brother Sam worked for another, The Day – and the competition between them was fierce, their pages filled with essays on the arts and philosophy, criticism, Talmudic debate, humour, advice on everything from self-improvement to affairs of the heart and body, along with news of the far-flung community and the world at large that owed as much, in its style and presentation, to Hearst and Pulitzer as it did to Spinoza and the learned rabbis of Poland and Russia. My father was a news writer, not an essayist, toiling, like his brother, for The Day, but he loved the company of the great men he drank coffee with in the cafeteria at the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street and at the Café Royale on Second Avenue, in the heart of the Yiddish theatre district known as the Jewish Rialto, where the lights burned all through the night like beacons.

  Sometimes, he would encounter Shmelke there. The tall, skinny man with the pennant ears had secured a position as press agent to a rabbinical council and was also doing publicity work for a hospital in the Bronx. But his heart and soul belonged to the arts and he often could be found in the evenings at the Café Royale and other warm, bright rooms that sparkled through the grey streets of the Lower East Side like fireflies. There were often actors still in makeup and costume, sometimes outlandish costume, at the café, and Shmelke, with his ill-fitting suits and clownish face, could easily have been one of them, my father thought.

  “Morgenstern, Morgenstern, join us. Sit down, my friend. Combine with me a drink. You know Rubenstein and Pashka?”

  “Of course.” My father sat, smiling. Despite the invitation, he knew he would pay for the whisky he ordered.

  “Rubenstein, the steamed violinist, and Pashka, the clammed dramatist. Morgenstern, the novelist and poet.”

  My father knew both men – one a teacher of music at a Hebrew school, the other a stagehand at the Yiddish Art Theatre across the street – and the conversation was good, the evening warm. He lingered, although it was late. Shmelke and he rode home together on the subway.

  “Come in, have a drink,” Shmelke begged. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  My father’s curiosity was stronger than his tiredness and he followed the bobbing head with its ballast ears into the cluttered room, rich with the smell of socks. On the rumpled bed, there was a peaked white cap like those he had seen the black nursemaids in the park wearing. Shmelke snatched it up and twirled it on a finger, grinning darkly.

  There was a bottle of cheap rye on the dresser and my father poured two glasses.

  “You should see her, Morgenstern,” Shmelke said. “An angel, a dark angel, like devil’s food cake, like an animal of the night.”

  My father was moved by the intensity and clarity of Shmelke’s description. He swallowed his drink and took out a cigarette.

  “You’ve had this woman here? In your room?”

  “Right here,” Shmelke grinned, patting the twisted bedclothes. “Why not?” He tossed the cap carelessly onto the bed, shrugging his shoulders. “What do I care what people think?”

  “Very commendable, my friend, but does that include our landlady?”

  The rubbery lips smacked at the rim of his glass. “Depression, depression, Morgenstern, is the soul of valour.” He winked.

  “And the girl? She’s nice?”

  Shmelke laughed, a cackling that reminded my father of the chickens that used to share the kitchen of his mother’s farmhouse in the winter, years before, when he’d been a boy in Galicia. “Nice, what’s nice? To the Café Royale, I don’t intend to bring her. Here, she’s nice.” He pointed to the bed.

  “Is it wise, though, one of those girls?” my father asked cautiously.

  “Morgenstern, of you I’m shameless.” Shmelke fixed him with a stern gaze, the rims of his elephant ears reddening slightly. “A man like you, a spigot.”

  •••

  During that first year of his return to the city, when my father was firmly establishing himself as a newspaperman, and some time before he would meet my mother, he had love affairs of his own, great friendships, nights of talk and whisky and coffee that lasted till dawn, though his lack of formal schooling always made him feel a little inadequate in intellectual circles. He believed in free love, or thought he did, until my mother came into his life and he changed his mind on that subject quickly and entirely. He was active in the Jewish Writers Guild, which got its start at the same time as the Newspaper Guild but soon outstripped its English language rival. He got a raise. And one night, in late summer, he was witness to a murder and wrote a story that made an impression on his editors.

  My father had an interest in labour, but there already was a labour editor on the paper, a stern old man who had been a scholar and teacher in the old country and who wrote with the grace of an albatross. When this man, Jaffe, was busy, my father was often pressed into service to help him if there was a conflict, and on an evening in September he went to cover a meeting of a group of garment cutters who were organizing themselves.

  The meeting was in a small kosher restaurant on Seventeenth Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues. It had been warm when my father left Harlem that afternoon and he had not worn a coat, but as darkness fell it turned cold and a stiff wind was sending newspapers skittering along the empty street as he walked towards the restaurant, the collar of his suit jacket turned up against his neck. A man in a lumberjack’s plaid shirt stood lounging against the plate glass of the restaurant, a toothpick in his mouth.

  “Morgenstern,” the man said.

  “Schechter, hello, you look like you’re ready for heavy labour.”

  “I’m glad you could come,” Schechter said. “Those shits at the English papers, they don’t pay any attention.” He was a big man with a sensitive face who drank coffee occasionally in the Café Royale with a thin actress he was in love with. In Lithuania, my father knew, he had studied to be a doctor, but now he worked in the garment district, his quick fingers racing over patterns with a pair of scissors. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Heavy labour, sure. This is no kids’ stuff, you know.”

  There had been a strike in one of the sweatshops that abounded like blossoms off the stem of lower Seventh Avenue, and then, mysteriously, there was a fire in the building and two of the organizers of the strike were arrested, charged with arson. Schechter himself had avoided the police only by accident. The fire was the work of gangsters, everyone knew, but fighting back was no easy matter.

  My father lit a cigarette and glanced up the street. On the corner, a light burned in a newsstand but the other shops were dark. He would have liked to stand outside and chat with Schechter but it was cold and he opened the door of the restaurant.
“See you inside.” As he moved into the warmth and the clatter of voices from the already crowded tables, he heard the sound of a car on the street but thought nothing of it. The shot rang out just as the door was clicking shut behind him and it didn’t register immediately; even when the glass shattered and Schechter’s shoulders crashed through towards him, he didn’t fully understand what had happened. Then there was confusion, shouting, a man rushing past him, jostling him, knocking him sideways, and he cut his hand on a piece of glass and found himself on his knees, staring into Schechter’s wide open eyes. What he remembered most of that moment, even many years later, was the lack of surprise in them.

  His hand was still bleeding when he got home, hours later, although he had tied a handkerchief around it. Taking notes, telephoning, typing his story, there had been no chance for the wound even to begin to glaze over. The handkerchief was stiff with congealing blood and my father was attempting to take it off, his head lowered, as he climbed the stairs, and he bumped into Shmelke, who was standing at the top of the steps.

  “That woman, she’s here, what should I do?” Shmelke said breathlessly. His massive ears were tinged with red along the rims like warning signs, and his lips seemed bluer than usual.

  “So?” my father said, elbowing past him. “Excuse me. What woman is that?”

  He went to the bathroom and snapped on the light, discarding the bloody handkerchief in the toilet.

  “You don’t understand,” Shmelke whined. He was standing right behind him, his face pressed close to my father’s shoulder. “She’s right here, in my infermal room.”

  “What’s to understand?” my father said. He turned on the cold water tap and plunged his hand into the lukewarm stream. “You should be congratulated, Shmelke. A charming young lady, visiting you here in your own room, and at this hour, no less. Wonderful. You are to be congratulated and I do congratulate you. And wish you good luck.” He was filled with the events of the evening and would have liked nothing better than to share them, again, with anyone interested, even Shmelke, but the man’s single-mindedness irritated him.