A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “Morgenstern, sometimes I wonder how such a dope can manage to climb the stairs, let alone turn the knob on the door.” He pulled his head back when he saw the expression that flashed across my father’s face. “You’ll excuse me, I didn’t mean to defend. But this woman, she’s got me in such a tizzle. This svartze.”

  “Oh, that woman,” my father said, his eyes widening. “She’s here?”

  “Here? That’s nothing. Here I could live with. It’s who she’s got with her that sends shavings up my spine.”

  “Her boyfriend?” My father turned off the water and held his hand up to the light to examine the cut. It wasn’t very deep but the glass had severed a big vein, an artery perhaps, and the blood wouldn’t stop seeping out. “Her husband? Her mother?”

  “Worse,” Shmelke said gloomily. His belligerence had suddenly faded and he stared at the raw wound on my father’s hand as if he were considering how a similar gash would look on his throat. “What happened to your hand?”

  “It’s nothing,” my father said. All of a sudden, he wanted to speak no more of it. All he wanted was to go to his room, drink a whisky and lie on his bed in the dark, where he knew the sound of shattering glass would reverberate in his ears all morning long. “What is it, Shmelke?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Ah, so that’s it.” My father turned back to his hand, wrapping toilet paper around it till it was bulky as a crumpled package.

  Shmelke observed this in silence, pursing his lips like water wings bobbing in a rough sea. “You know, maybe, a doctor?” he blurted out finally.

  My father looked up from his hand into Shmelke’s face and was washed with a wave of disgust. He remembered the blank, stoical eyes of Schecter staring up at him and he felt, suddenly, very tired.

  “Sure, sure,” he said. He brushed past Shmelke. “I’ll see in the morning.” He walked down the hall.

  “And Morgenstern?” There was a plaintiveness in Shmelke’s voice my father had never heard before and it made him stop, his hand on the knob of his own door.

  “Yes?”

  “You could talk to her, maybe?”

  My father turned around. “Now?”

  “Sure, now. She’s in my room, waiting. She won’t go. All night, practically, she’s here. She won’t give me any peace. And Mrs. Lowe...” He nodded towards the stairs.

  “Waiting for what?” my father asked. “Talk to her about what?”

  “Tell her about the doctor you know. Tell her about how safe and sure this doctor is, how they take preclusions and it’s no more than getting your tinsels out, just a little cut and...”

  My father didn’t wait for him to finish. He went down the hall and into Shmelke’s room without knocking. The woman was sitting on the bed, her knees together and her hands clasped on them like a schoolchild waiting to receive her lesson. “Hello,” my father said. “My name is Harry Morgenstern. I live here, down the hall.”

  The woman looked up at him and blinked. She was a small, very dark girl, hardly out of her teens, with a pointy chin and shoulders that didn’t seem to matter. Her face was so dark, my father couldn’t clearly make out her features, but she seemed pleasant enough, though hardly pretty. There was a blue kerchief with little white flowers on her head. “Where’s Louis?” she demanded. Her voice was small but strong, like a rain that seems innocent enough but wets you through.

  “I’m right here, my little flower,” Shmelke said from the doorway. “My friend Morgenstern, the novelist, he’s a man of the world. Believe me, to him this is nothing. He’s seen this sort of thing dozens of times.” He made a snapping motion with his fingers but they wouldn’t connect and there was only a rasping sound. “It’s only a triffle.”

  My father sat on the bed beside the woman. She glared at him but, after a moment, her gaze softened.

  “Why don’t you leave us for a moment, Shmelke? There’s a bottle in my room. Help yourself.” He had to fumble in his pocket with his left hand for the key. They waited until the door had closed, Shmelke’s footsteps sounded in the hall, and another door could be heard opening, then closing. Then my father and the black woman looked at each other again.

  “He’s very stupid, our friend,” my father said simply.

  “Ain’t no friend of mine, not any more,” the woman said. “But stupid, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m not the man of the world Shmelke says I am,” my father said, smiling, “but I can see trouble.”

  “I’ve got plenty to see.” The skin on the woman’s cheekbones was so tight it glistened.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Adrianne.”

  “That’s nice,” my father said. “That’s a nice name.”

  The woman began to cry, lifting her hands to cover her face, the sobs coming soft but steady for over a minute while my father looked away and said nothing. When the sobbing became inaudible, he said: “You don’t want him.”

  “I know that, mister. I acted the fool, but I ain’t no fool.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know. I came here thinking I wanted one thing, but now I don’t know.”

  “A doctor?”

  “A butcher, you mean? No, thank you, mister. I don’t want no coat hangers and razor blades in me. Bad enough what I let get into me in the first place.”

  “Take it easy,” my father said. “I’m not Shmelke. I just asked.”

  “I’m sorry,” Adrianne said.

  They were quiet for a moment. My father looked idly at his hand. A muted red stain was beginning to spread through the toilet paper wrapping like fog spreading through the streets in the Cleveland evening, what seemed now like a lifetime ago. “Does Shmelke have any money?” he asked.

  “That man?” She snorted. “He spends every cent on whisky and such with his fancy friends downtown.”

  “I can give you some money, if it would help.”

  “It would,” Adrianne said simply. It was clear she wasn’t asking, but she wouldn’t refuse.

  My father stood up. “What about him?”

  The woman shook her head sadly. The whites of her eyes were pink now, and her face was blurred, as if it had let go of the bones beneath the skin. “I don’t want to see that poor excuse again.”

  “Wait here,” my father said. He went across the hall to his room, hesitating just for a second before opening the door. Shmelke was sitting on the chair beside the bed, an empty glass in his hand. His reddened ears seemed to flap, like flags of distress.

  My father knelt beside the bed and took some money from its hiding place in his suitcase. There wasn’t much.

  “What are you doing?” Shmelke asked. His voice was tiny, like that of a punished child.

  “Saving your life,” my father said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What the thunder do you think I mean?” my father snapped.

  I know his temper, and I can imagine the way his eyes must have darkened, his moustache bristling. “Her father and brothers would kill you. I’m buying that off. But there’s one condition. You can’t let them find you. You’ll have to leave.”

  Shmelke was speechless, but when my father glared at him, showing no sign of relenting, he said finally: “I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “Tonight would be better, but it’s your neck.”

  “I’ll go early. There are things I have to do, circumcisions I have to attend to...”

  “You know I don’t mean just from here. I mean from New York.”

  “I know,” Shmelke said bitterly. “I’m not stupid.”

  My father started for the door. Blood was beginning to drip on the bills he held in his bandaged hand.

  “I’ll pay you back,” Shmelke said.

  “If you want.”

  “I pay my debts, Morgenstern. I don’t like to be a belcher.”

  My father shut the door and stood in the hall for a moment, staring at the money in his bloody hand. It was all he had, but that didn’t mean anything.
>
  •••

  The following year, my father was keeping company with a woman who might have become my mother, had he been a little less demanding. Years later, he liked to tell stories about this woman, whose name was Debora, and kid my mother that he had settled for the daughter of a fanatic when he could have had a physician for a father-in-law.

  My father was living in Coney Island at that time, in a tiny apartment not far from the slightly larger one he and my mother would share during their first few years together, but Debora’s family was one of those that still maintained a handsome brownstone just north of 125th Street, a home with rich carpets on the parquet floors and servants living in the coach house. So, although he no longer lived there, he was a frequent visitor to Harlem, and he had occasion, once or twice, to pass Adrianne on the street or in the park. She had gone south, to stay with relatives, and had had her child. It was still there, with an aunt, and she was back, living with a man who fixed shoes in a small shop on 125th a few blocks east and tending the infant of a white family, taking it in its stroller for airings in the park, where the sun filtering through the newly opened leaves dappled the grass and benches with blotches of light and dark like footprints in the snow. My father, running across her with the stroller parked beside her bench, her uniform crisp and neat on her small, unremarkable form, paused to admire the infant, inquire about the other and shake his head sadly.

  “It don’t bear thinking about much,” Adrianne said, and he agreed. There was no mention of Shmelke.

  One Saturday afternoon in August, my father and Debora took a shortcut through the park on the way to Columbia University, where they planned to attend a free concert. As they walked, my father was suddenly arrested by a strange sight. A tall man wearing an overcoat was sitting on a bench under a chestnut tree, his ears big as the leaves hanging above his head. The overcoat was buttoned, although it was a warm day, and its collar was raised. The man wore dark glasses and there was a shapeless moustache over his bluish lips.

  My father put his hand on Debora’s arm and steered her to a bench some fifty feet beyond the one where the man with the moustache sat, but facing it. “What is it?” Debora asked. My father shooshed her with a finger to his nose. He crossed his legs and lit a cigarette.

  Several people passed by, including a black nursemaid with a stroller and two small boys in short pants in tow. She wore her hair in braids and her silvery voice rose through the air like a bird’s song as she chastised the lagging boys. They passed on, towards the far side of the park.

  Before my father’s cigarette was half gone, the man with the moustache, who had been nervously turning his head to and fro, became aware of the couple watching him and he bolted to his feet and began to hurry away.

  “Wait here,” my father said. He had to run to catch up with the tall man’s quick strides.

  “Shmelke.”

  “For God’s sake, Morgenstern, my life is in jalopy. Keep your voice down.”

  My father took him by the arm and gestured around. They were alone on a path that led through a small clump of trees. On the street, a hundred yards beyond, a fire engine raced by, its bell clanging. “Look, there’s not a soul in sight. You’re in no danger.”

  “I can’t be too careless,” Shmelke said.

  They sat down on a bench.

  “That false moustache is ridiculous,” my father said. “Why didn’t you grow a real one?”

  “I was going to, but my wife didn’t like it. It scritched,” he said with disgust, as if describing some loathsome insect crawling on his face.

  “Your wife?” my father asked.

  “In Dayton.”

  “I heard you went back to Cleveland.”

  “Are you crazy, Morgenstern? Only to get some clothes.”

  “And in Dayton?”

  Shmelke’s lean shoulders had to struggle against the weight of the overcoat to produce a satisfied shrug. “Not so bad, not so bad as you might think. I’m in business there, producing plays, bringing artists in, musicians, travelling shows. Let me tell you, Morgenstern, what Dayton has for culture, you could put in there.” He raised a thumb, examined it critically, then replaced it with a pinky. “No more than that. In Dayton, they got taste in their elbow.”

  “And you’re married?”

  “Well...not exactly married,” Shmelke shrugged again, the tips of his ears flaring. “Bedthroned. The happy day is next week.”

  “And what brings you here, Shmelke? Taking your life in your hands.”

  Shmelke sighed deeply, the breath rattling through his chest like a cold wind through dead branches, and the brown caterpillar beneath his nose wiggled, one end hanging loose. “There was...there was something I wanted to see. With my own eyes.’’

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted to see if...my wife, the woman to whom I’m intended, that is, Hindel, she would like to have children.”

  “So?” my father said. He took out a cigarette and lit it, wishing he had a bottle so he and Shmelke could share their ritual drink.

  “So,” Shmelke said, spreading his arms, “so I’m not such a thing of beauty, you know, but...and Hindel, well, she is a wonderful woman, but...” His voice trailed off and he looked over my father’s shoulder, as if for inspiration in the trees.

  “But what does all this have to do with your coming here?” my father asked.

  “I wanted to see if...you know, Morgenstern, if the child looks like me.”

  “It doesn’t have a moustache, if that’s what you mean,” my father said. Immediately, he regretted having said that. If there was one thing he had learned in the long years it had taken him to come this far, it was not to hurt people, that it usually came back to him if he did.

  Shmelke took off his dark glasses and my father saw there were tears in his grey, almost colourless eyes. There was no surprise in them, though, as if the man who possessed them had become accustomed to rebuff. He clasped my father’s hand and squeezed it, and for the first time in many months the place where it had been cut began to hurt.

  “Is it so wrong, Morgenstern, for a man to want to see his own springoff? His own child? His own flesh and bones?”

  “No,” my father said. He disengaged his hand and got to his feet. Debora would be wondering where he had gotten to.

  Shmelke made a little sound in his throat and lowered his head, looking to his oversized feet for an answer that had eluded him so far in Cleveland and Dayton and would not easily be found here, either downtown on East Broadway or uptown in Harlem, where some people said the air was thinner.

  My father didn’t mention the money still owing, and neither did Shmelke.

  • • •

  Feathers and Blood

  One day in the spring of 1927, on the same day that Lindbergh was crossing the Atlantic, a young woman by the name of Rebeccah Kristol sent my father a letter from Cleveland with the message: “Now.”

  At that time, my father was already firmly established as a reporter on The Day, the Yiddish-language daily that sent its messages of the toils and joys of Jewish life in New York from the Lower East Side throughout the city and even into the countryside beyond the rivers, and was several years into what would be a lifetime career. In a couple more years, he would meet my mother and everything would change for him. But already there had been a few women in his life, women who, in the telling later, became blurred, indistinct as buildings viewed through fog, perhaps to spare my mother, perhaps merely so that my father, who enjoyed telling stories of his youth, could keep some small pieces of it private, for his own, like good luck coins fingered and shiny in his pocket. He never said so, but I suspect Rebeccah Kristol was one of those coins, not just a friend from the old days in Cleveland, as he described her when he told the story, but one of the women who had been part of his life in those years before my mother, before the time when my sisters and I were given our chance to be.

  Rebeccah was a strong woman, my father used to tell us, a determined woman with ide
as of her own and the courage to put some – if not all – of them into effect. She was a drinker and a smoker, mildly shocking behaviour for a woman in those days, at least in some strata of society – even the society my father and Rebeccah inhabited – as well as a freethinker and free lover, an anarchist follower of Anna Goldman, a dabbler in vegetarianism, frequenter of cafés and theatres, friend of artists and writers, which is how my father, who was a writer himself and part of the Bohemian café circle, such as it was in Cleveland, came to know her.

  The one photograph he had of her, one of several brittle, yellow tintypes from his early days that could be found scattered in among the more abundant family portraits and snapshots of my mother’s childhood and pictures of her and my father as a young couple and we children that filled a shoebox my mother kept in a dresser drawer, revealed Rebeccah as clearly possessed of those qualities of character my father ascribed to her but contained not a hint of the predilections and interests. She is one of only three women in the portrait filled with men, a solemn, formal study of activity suddenly arrested in the newsroom of The Day, circa 1930, more than a decade before my birth. He himself is sitting at a desk in the pose I like best to remember him in, hands poised over the keys of an ancient stand-up typewriter, head slightly lowered, moustache bristling, cigarette dangling from a mouth pursed with concentration, his hair only just beginning to thin, still rich and black. The other men and one of the women are captured in similar freezes, at typewriters or bent over teletype machines, reading, one or two on the telephone, a few with their backs to the camera, and there is a sense of busyness and purpose to the scene that is unmarred by the other two women, who stand, stiff and vigilant at either end of the room, like prim bookends. Rebeccah is the one on the right, in a long black skirt and ruffled white blouse with a bow at the throat, her dark hair in a severe bun, her face partially shielded by thick-rimmed glasses. She was, at the time the photograph was taken, less than thirty, but there is a sort of agelessness about her face, her strong, well-defined features facing the camera with intelligent interest neither youthfully beautiful nor showing any of the decay of years. Her eyes seem to sparkle, and her mouth and chin are firm, as if they were being held into the wind. But her clothes, her hairstyle, even the rigid way she holds her arms by her sides, one hand seeming to be smoothing a pleat in her skirt, all point to a manner of conventionality that runs against the way my father had described her.