A Book of Great Worth (10 page)

“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 fa
ther 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 low
ered his head, looking to his oversized feet for an an
swer 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 be
yond 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 be
fore 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 ideas 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 Re
beccah 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
T
he 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.