A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “She was a changed woman when she came to New York,” my father said as he showed me the picture, anticipating my thought. “Whatever happened to her in that love affair, in that marriage, in that boat ride, it turned her inside out.” He carefully deposited the photograph back into its protective envelope, along with a few others from the same era, and looked at me. “She never lost her intelligence, of course, or her taste, but her curiosity about the world shrivelled up, and she became the sort of person she had always disliked, a closed sort of person. As if she were making up for something.”

  All of that, my father used to say when he told the story, was so much more perplexing because of the kind of woman she had been, “a woman who” – and here, if they were in the room, my mother and sisters, who were quite a bit older than me, would grimace, my sisters actually groaning – “had all the intellectual and creative abilities and instincts of a man.” When she’d sent him that note, he’d kept his promise and gotten her a job, as a bookkeeper at The Day, where she would remain all her working life, rising to be chief bookkeeper, the austere, darkly dressed, slightly plump woman with a wart on her nose who would greet me so cheerily on those infrequent occasions when I’d visit my father in his office, where even the air in the newsroom was redolent with the smell of printer’s ink wafting in from the black-walled pressroom downstairs. He’d gotten her the job, helped her settle in and been as much of a friend to her as he could. But they’d never been really close again, not close enough for her to go beyond telling him what had happened, to why.

  It began, he knew, when she’d met the man, a salesman who had worked his way up to manager of a small haberdashery on Lake Street in downtown Cleveland, then bought out the widow of the man he’d worked for. His name, my father thought, was Greenspan, although that didn’t seem to matter. Nothing about him, my father said, seemed to matter, since the problem was within Rebeccah.

  The first time I can recall hearing the story, when I was six or seven, and for several retellings afterwards, my father explained that she had had earlier sweethearts, and that her husband-to-be was jealous. This had “caused problems,” my father said with a wink, “but nothing that feminine wiles couldn’t cope with.” Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, the story changed accordingly, and my father explained the “problem” was that Rebeccah was not a virgin, a condition that was sure to cause displeasure for her husband – “not all husbands,” my father added quickly, “but some men care, and this one definitely.” And, finally, at some point during the year I went away to college, on one of those short but intense visits home, the story came full cycle, my father relating with head-shaking wonder the facts he had come to know in detail some time later, after she’d come to New York: how, to stave off discovery, she’d planned and carried out the simple subterfuge, as brilliant and easily accomplished as the friend who had coached her had promised. It had gone well, my father said, but afterwards, as the husband lay sleeping, Rebeccah had walked the deck of their honeymoon cruise ship, staring into the dark, impenetrable waves of Lake Erie, and come to some – to my father – inexplicable resolve. She went back to their cabin just for a few minutes, to throw a few things into a suitcase, then she’d hidden in a washroom until the ship docked in fog-shrouded Buffalo and disembarked with the first crowds, losing herself amid the noise and crowds on the dock.

  It was sometime soon after that that she’d written the note to my father, the fulfillment of some late-night café pledge he’d made when they’d been close, that when she was ready to leave Cleveland, where some family obligation he was never clear about kept her bound, and escape to New York, where he was now headed, she would let him know and he would help her find a job, help her make what, in those days, and for a woman, was still a difficult passage. The note she sent – and he was sorry, my father always said, he hadn’t saved it – didn’t have to say more than it did, because he knew from that one word, “Now,” all he needed, really: that she was ready to come, that she wanted his help, and more, that it was a cry for help, a signal for freedom.

  •••

  His name, in fact, was Greenspun, Aaron Greenspun, whose family had settled in Akron, where an uncle became the first Jew to serve on a city council in Ohio. He had yellow eyes, like a cat’s, and Rebeccah, dreaming of them, thought his name should more truly be Goldspun, so did it seem those eyes must have been fashioned. He was tall, well built, like a Greek god, Rebeccah told her best friend Belle and the other women she drank coffee with at the café – who pursed their mouths in impressed wonder as they gazed at the rumpled, round-shouldered men arguing at the next table, then giggled at the perceived possibilities – and had only the slightest curved Semitic nose in his otherwise smooth and blandly featured face to betray his origins. He was altogether beautiful, “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Rebeccah told her friends, conscious of her choice of words. Her attraction to him frightened her.

  They had absolutely nothing in common, shouldn’t have even met except there was a family connection, Rebeccah’s one weakness. A Greenspun cousin had married a Williams cousin – Williams being Rebeccah’s mother’s family name, the Americanized version of Wilchevski that her father, Rebeccah’s hard-headed, bristly bearded grandfather, had adopted in one of those Ellis Island subterfuges that had smoothed the wrinkles from so many Russian and Polish names. The old man, long dead now, had begun as a peddler but had worked his horse and wagon into a stand, then a small shop, then Williams Brothers, one of Cleveland’s better furniture stores, proving his abilities as a merchant and his sagacity, he always claimed, as a name-picker. That side of the family – the store was now run by Rebeccah’s uncles Meyer and Robert – seemed to have much in common with the Greenspuns of Akron and their one Cleveland offshoot, all of them prosperous, right-thinking family people who erected big brick houses near the lakefront and gave work to coloured maids who, as Uncle Meyer once explained to Rebeccah, would be jobless and go hungry otherwise, “which you, I suppose, Miss High And Mighty, would rather see?”

  Rebeccah herself was considerably different. She had had the good fortune, she liked to tell her friends, of “marrying smart,” referring not to herself but to her mother. Jacob Kristol was a working man and union organizer with rough hands and an intelligence striving to free itself of an inadequate education, not a trader, by any means, but a man who would smile when he saw children stealing apples from a street vendor. He had had three years of school in Russia, then another two in New York’s Brownsville, enough to give him sufficient English to go to work, at a factory manufacturing umbrella handles, but the bulk of what he knew of the world came from night school, correspondence courses, workshops put on by the union and a voracious appetite for reading that had made him, in his old age, a favourite of the librarians at the stately Carnegie branch in downtown Cleveland, where he would spend most of his afternoons from the time of his retirement until his death, in the reading room, crumpled over Crime and Punishment, which he was reading for the fourth time. He’d come to Cleveland as a young man, on a freight train with a trio of anarchists, to work and help organize the foundry. Then he’d stayed, marrying, as the Williamses always put it, “above his position,” and fathering two children, a son who took after his mother’s side of the family but died in the war, and a daughter – Rebeccah – who took after him.

  Rebeccah’s devotion to him was, in some respects, her undoing. Jacob Kristol had married late, so he was already an old man through most of the time his daughter knew him, retired before she was through with school and dead before she had barely reached twenty. But his impact on her was powerful, making her different from most of the girls she went to school with, leaving her bored and dissatisfied with the few boys who were willing to penetrate the veil of sarcasm and feigned intellectualism with which she clothed herself, and she would have liked to have fled from the small city provincialism of Cleveland when she graduated, but her father’s failing health kept her at home. Then, when he died, a pledg
e to him that she would look after her mother, who was also ailing, continued to keep her bound. By this time, she had a job, an apartment and a life of her own, and had discovered the small café society of artists and poets, actors and anarchists who frequented the cluster of cafés and delicatessens along River Avenue on either side of the Rialto Theatre, where touring companies from New York would stage the latest in Yiddish productions.

  “You’re too good for this narrow stage,” one of the actors – a handsome man with a cleft in his chin who went on to have a career in Hollywood under a new name – told her after they’d made love on the mattress of straw-filled ticking in her small, darkly lit loft. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “And you’ll make me a star?” Rebeccah asked, batting the long, artificially thickened lashes of her large, luminous eyes.

  “Seriously,” the actor said. “You’re too beautiful, too intelligent to let yourself stifle in this ridiculous city where it’s always either too hot or too cold.”

  “And in your bed, the temperature is better controlled?” Rebeccah asked.

  My father tried too. “Come with me to New York,” he told her when he was getting ready to leave. He had spent almost four years in Cleveland at a small Yiddish newspaper, a worthwhile apprenticeship, and now felt he was ready to go home, and he would have liked to take her with him, this beautiful creature with wild, tangled hair and nicotine and paint stains on her long, delicate fingers, like some sort of souvenir of the great hinterlands across the Hudson River, proof of his passage.

  Rebeccah kissed him, gently, like an echo. “You know I can’t, Morgenstern,” she said. “But I will someday.”

  “Will you let me know?” my father asked fervently.

  “I’ll let you know when I’m ready,” Rebeccah said.

  Before that happened, she met Aaron Greenspun.

  Perhaps she’d meant it, always meant to leave, to find a broader world to the east, in New York, where so much of the nightly café talk centred, perhaps even in Paris, where she longed to study art at the Sorbonne, but time passed, her mother lingered, then died, freeing her from her final bond, but still, somehow, she stayed, and before she could muster her energies for that flight, he appeared, changing everything.

  It was at a family gathering, the first one of any real consequence since the marriage of the cousins, and he was there, being led through the gauntlet of Williamses by Aunt Ruth, who took Rebeccah fondly by the hand when she came to her.

  “And this is Rebeccah, our darling black sheep.”

  The black sheep was a tag Rebeccah had smilingly endured for years, even before her father’s death, but tonight, with her hair in a wooly, swirling halo around her head and dressed all in black, even to her stockings, the tag seemed exceptionally appropriate, and she was radiantly bewitching, a fact that was hardly lost on the tall, handsome man in Aunt Ruth’s tow. Nor was her effect on him lost on Rebeccah. They smiled at each other and a current of sexual tension crackled between them like an electric spark running along a twist of broken copper wire.

  “The black sheep? More like a black diamond,” Aaron said, in Yiddish that was almost cultured in its precision.

  “Coal, you mean,” Rebeccah said. She gave him her most radiant smile, showing all her teeth, and made a noise that was somewhat like a hiss.

  “No, no, a sheep, a poor little lamb,” Aunt Ruth said, putting her arm around Rebeccah and rocking her gently against her shoulder. “This child just lost her mother, my darling sister, so treat her gently.”

  “Aunt Ruth, that was almost two years ago.”

  “And still unmarried. Just a lamb, a poor lost lamb, but a black lost lamb, so what’s to do with her?”

  Aunt Ruth gave both their hands a squeeze and looked from face to face, then seemed to make a decision. “Be nice to each other, children. Rebeccah is a lost black lamb; Aaron is a stranger, a Jew among Jews, of course, but a stranger nonetheless.” She moved on, making no indication that he should follow.

  Aaron shifted his weight from one lean hip to the other and cleared his throat. If Rebeccah truly was a black sheep, he was a white shepherd, dressed in grey trousers with a sharp crease – just the kind, her father used to say, the bosses use to cut the throat of the working man – and a white linen jacket with an ironed handkerchief in the breast pocket. And his yellow eyes, gazing shyly at her. “A white knight,” Rebeccah said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s you. I’m the black sheep; you’re the white knight.”

  “A white night,” he said, gesturing with his chin towards the window to underline his pun, “that’s once a year if you’re lucky, don’t you agree? A full moon, starry sky, not a cloud.”

  Rebeccah smiled at him. There was an attraction, of course, and no sense in denying it, but she already knew enough about him, from family gossip, to know better. She took the edge of her lower lip gently between her teeth and made a decision.

  “That’s too dizzying an abstraction for this poor lamb,” she said, and began to move away.

  His hand on her arm brought her up short. “Wait.” He looked embarrassed by his abrupt gesture. “I’d like to see you again.”

  “Again? I’m just going across the room to have a canapé. My stomach is growling. Look over there in a moment and you’ll see me.”

  “I mean,” Aaron said, twisting his resolve, “again, after this. Some place else. Perhaps we could have a meal.”

  “I don’t like to cook,” Rebeccah said with suspicion.

  “I mean in a restaurant,” he said in sudden English, as if it were a secret he wanted no one overhearing to understand.

  She took a step back and looked him over, from the top of his sandy brown hair, neatly parted in the centre of his well-shaped head, down along the smooth contour of brow, nose, cleanly chiselled mouth and chin, the starched white collar, down the perfectly tied necktie, the immaculate linen jacket, pausing for a moment at his crotch, where, despite the loose drape of his trousers, she believed she saw a barely perceptible movement, then down the crease of the trousers to the glimmering black wings of his oxfords, then up again, letting her eyes take their time while he stood motionless, waiting their verdict. “I want you to know,” she said finally, “that you represent just about everything that I detest and abhor about this society, capitalism at its most rapacious, mercantilism at its basest, petty bourgeoisie mentality at its narrowest, dandyism, masculine superiority, class and sexual arrogance...” Her hand darted out from her side in a palm-up gesture of dismay, as if she were overwhelmed by the enormity of the list she was prepared to recite, but her voice trailed off.

  Aaron observed her with the same aloof detachment she had spent on him, a small smile seeping into his lips, and he shrugged, a shrug coloured with a boldness that made her think she had, perhaps, been wrong. “I may represent those things,” he said. “I think you’re wrong, but I won’t argue with you now, here. I may represent them, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean I am them. You are wrong there.”

  Four days later, he showed up at the department store where she worked as a window dresser, resplendent in a blue and white striped gabardine suit and a straw hat, a bouquet of flowers in his freshly manicured hand. “We’re in the same business,” he said as he greeted her with the flow of employees through the staff entrance at six o’clock.

  “Not exactly. You sell, I decorate, though I’ll concede there’s a connection. More importantly, you own, I toil.” But she was pleased to see him, flattered by the flowers he now proffered, making a gallant sort of dip with his head and shoulders, his free hand behind his back.

  “The same business just the same. Mercantilism at its basest. And the fact that you’re a Williams had nothing to do, I suppose, with your getting a job at Loew’s.”

  “I’m not a Williams,” Rebeccah said fiercely. “I’m a Kristol.”

  “Excuse me, no disrespect meant to the memory of your father, who I’m told was a fine man. I regret I never had the plea
sure of meeting him. Working here rather than in the family store eases the conscience, don’t you agree?”

  Rebeccah let a smile slowly form. “That’s a contradiction I’m still grappling with, yes.” She observed him coolly, conscious of the slight pressure at the back of her neck caused by having to tilt her head upward to meet his eyes. “I don’t know that meeting my father would have been a pleasure for you, though. He was a man who said what he thought.”

  “Like his daughter?”

  “Like his daughter, yes.”

  “There’s no accounting for taste,” Aaron said, with a light laugh. “Don’t you agree?”

  He took her to as good a restaurant as was possible, considering the way she was dressed, and afterwards to a place on the lake where they drank wine and danced. He took her home in his automobile, a cream-coloured Packard with shimmering chrome, and, on the street gazed thoughtfully up at the dark windows of her loft, which was on the upper floor of a building that had once been a warehouse and was now honeycombed with small apartments. “You must be lonely there,” he said with warmth.

  “Not really,” Rebeccah answered dryly, considering the options that faced her now. “There are ghosts.”

  But he didn’t ask to come up, didn’t make a move to kiss her good night. Instead, he offered his hand and shook hers vigorously.

  After that, they saw each other often, dining out, dancing, attending the theatre and concerts, going to the museum and galleries. He had little interest in art, he admitted, and a tin ear, but he seemed happy to accompany her wherever she wished to go, and expressed an interest in learning about the many things for which she had passions. He even, on the two or three occasions when she took him, after the theatre, to a nearby café for coffee and pastries, endured the thinly veiled insults of her friends. Rebeccah made no attempt to defend him and watched thoughtfully as he gingerly fended off Belle’s parries, like a man wearing white gloves suddenly handed something slick and foul smelling.