A Book of Great Worth (16 page)

Vogel, who rarely ate, was slurping from a cup of black coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. He was a small man, little larger than a child, with a narrow skull, and already had the same nervous mannerisms which, years later, when I came to know him, were always so noticeable: a twitch in his eyelid, an irritation in his ear that made him continuously tap at the base of his jaw with his fingertips. Both men were in their thirties, my father a year or two older than his friend, unmarried, dressed in dark suits and ties, in good health, their hair still thick and dark, though my father’s was beginning both to fade and thin.

To their table now stepped a man whom, my father would later say, when he recounted this story, he looked up at with a shock of recognition. He had never seen the man before, but knew with certainty that there was a link between them.

“So, you’re Morgenstern?” the man said, in Yiddish, a vaguely accusing tone in his odd voice that suggested he would not accept a denial.

“Sure,” my father said. “And you? I know you, maybe?”

“You know me, no,” the man replied, allowing a
small lifting at the edge of his lips, lips that were re
markably like my father’s own. “I’m your cousin, Rueben, from Montreal.” The man was about my father’s age, perhaps a few years younger, and, like my father, was of medium height, medium build. He was wearing a dirty wool overcoat, dark blue but with a jaunty red stripe running along the bottom, and rubber galoshes, the buckles undone. He extended his hand. “I asked for you at the paper. A very nice young woman said I might find you here. I worried how I would know you but she said I shouldn’t, that I would know you immediately. She was right.”

“There is a slight resemblance,” my father allowed, reluctant, for reasons he couldn’t then fathom, to admit how great it was. “But tell me – Reuben, did you say? How did you even know of me? I knew I had relatives in Montreal, but not their names or anything about them. Yet you knew of me, knew where to find me.”

My father’s cousin emitted what struck the other two men as a peculiarly mirthless laugh. “Come now, Morgenstern, don’t be so modest. People in all directions of the compass read the works of your illustrious father and brother in the pages of
The
Morning Journal
and
The Day
. Even in Canada, even in Montreal.”

“That I can believe,” my father said. “And me?”

Reuben shook his head in protest. “Again, false modesty, cousin. Even you, though you’ve changed your name, are well known.”

Reuben excused himself and went to get a cup of coffee for himself and second cups for my father and Vogel. The two friends exchanged glances. “A flatterer,” Vogel said, with obvious distaste. “This one, I don’t like the looks of, Morgenstern.”

My father laughed. “He looks just like
me
.”

“Like brothers,” Vogel admitted, tapping his jaw. “But looks like is one thing. It’s the look in his eye I don’t like.”

Reuben returned with the coffees on a tray and sat down. The two cousins exchanged news of their families, and, while my father finished his meal, he learned that his uncle had died but his aunt by marriage still enjoyed her health and that he had half a dozen cousins in addition to Reuben, all grown, most of them still in Montreal. The family business, a furrier shop, had fallen on hard times, however, and had recently closed its doors. When my father pushed aside his tray and lit a cigarette, the cousin leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I could have a private word with you, maybe? It’s a matter of...what would you say? Delicacy?”

“Don’t mind me,” Vogel said, implying that he might merely turn away and not listen, but he rose and joined two other men at a nearby table, Isaac Singer, the novelist, and Jacob Javelit, a compositor at
The
Forward
.

“Delicacy means one of two things,” my father said, not unkindly. “Women or money. Or both.”

His cousin smiled ruefully. Like my father, his hair was starting to recede from his high forehead, and he passed his palm over his skull now in a nervous gesture, patting the hair into place – a gesture my father recog
nized with a shock as identical to one of his own fa
ther’s. “Right on both counts. It’s taken all my savings to bring us to New York. Things are not so good in Montreal. The shop, as I told you, closed, and I haven’t been able to find anything. I hoped things would be better here.”

“I might be able to help you find something,” my father interrupted. “I know some people.”

“That would be wonderful,” Reuben said, looking grateful. “In the meantime, there’s a place to live to worry about. Food on the table. For myself, I wouldn’t ask. I have a wife, a child.”

My father allowed himself a moment to think of his own father and the uncle he’d never met, men who had left their families behind while they sought their fortunes in another country. Why would this man take his wife and child with him, he wondered, exposing them to whatever risk there might be? He also thought about Reuben’s other options. My father was far from the man’s only relative in New York, of course. He thought of his own father, then editor of
The
Morning Journal
, who was famous for his frugality. He thought of his older brother, but approaching Sam for a loan would be akin to slamming a door on one’s own foot. He thought of his younger brothers, but Izzy had a young wife and two small children of his own and Henry was in law school, and was himself the recipient of occasional assistance from my father. Nathan had moved to Pennsylvania, where he had turned his skill as a silversmith into business, and was rarely heard from. “Certainly I can lend you some money,” he said.

“Loan, of course,” Reuben said quickly. “I’m not asking for a gift. I’m not asking for charity. It’s a loan, and I ask only because of the woman and child. That should be understood.”

“Of course,” my father said. “Understood. How much do you need?”

Reuben didn’t hesitate. “Fifty dollars is the sum I had in mind. Is it too much? We could manage on forty. Fifty would give me more time to find something. It sounds like a lot, maybe...”

My father held up his hand. “That’s all right. I can manage fifty. Better that than you should have to borrow somewhere else later, or have to come back to me. I don’t have that much with me, of course.”

It should be understood that fifty dollars was a fairly large sum of money at the time, what five hundred would be today, or a thousand. But, as it happened, my father was doing well, even though it was only a few months since men in expensive suits had plummeted through the air from tall buildings a short walk from where he now sat. It was an anomaly he would eventually pay for, but, at the depths of the Depression, a few years later, he would be making the princely sum of seventy dollars a week and he earned not far from that now. He lived modestly, in a boarding house, not out of meanness but because of the convenience, and often ate in restaurants, but his tastes were far from expensive. He had no automobile and few women friends, though he had recently made the acquaintance of the woman who would be my mother. What money he did spend was in the cafés and bars of the Lower East Side and along Broadway, at the theatre, which he often frequented, and at the used bookshops along East Broadway and Orchard Street where he would often spend more than he should on a rare edition.

He gave his newly found cousin ten dollars from his wallet and made a date to meet him the next afternoon, after he could make a withdrawal from his bank. Reuben pocketed the money, thanked my father profusely and excused himself. “My wife will be so happy,” he said in parting. “It will make her happy to know she’s married to a man with generous relatives. Family is worth more than wealth. The Bible got that right.”

My father lit another cigarette and drank the last of his coffee, now cold. He looked at his watch. Vogel sat down beside him. “Money?” he asked, his eyelid twitching.

“What else?”

“From that one, Morgenstern, you won’t get it back.”

“A regular Sigmund Freud you are, such a judge of character.”

“Character has nothing to do with it, Morgenstern. Even the Bible says don’t lend money. Or borrow it, either.”

“Oh ho, Vogel, now you’re an expert on the Bible. Have you ever actually seen a copy? I can lend you a nice edition.”

“You can laugh, but I don’t like the looks of him. You won’t get it back.”

“You can be so sure, Vogel?”

“From that one? Yes. Besides” – Vogel swatted at his cheek – “with money, you never get it back.”

•••

During the following weeks, my father had little reason to think of his cousin, as he was finding himself increasingly preoccupied with someone else. Not long before the meeting in the Automat, he had attended a gathering of the cutters’ union at which Marcantonio,
the city’s Communist councilman, gave a speech. Af
terwards, a klezmer band took the stage, and my father, although he didn’t dance,
wouldn’t
dance, stayed to have a drink and a bite, to watch the swirling skirts of the girls on the dance floor, before heading to the office to write his story. A man he knew, not that much older than he was, a rabble-rouser in the union named Shally, was there in the company of two attractive young women, and my father approached them with a wink.

“Shally, you’re more of a man than I am if you can handle two women at one time.”

Shally was ordinarily a sour man with little good to say on any subject, but tonight, in the glow of Marcantonio’s speech and the growing sentiment for a strike, he seemed almost merry. He had escaped from a prison in Russia, killing a guard, my father had heard, and had
been expelled from both Britain and France for his ac
tivities, making him no mere trifler.

“And two more at home, Morgenstern, just as pretty,” Shally said slyly.

“You mean these are your daughters?” my father said, with genuine surprise. Shally was the most ordinary looking of men, but the girls, my father thought, were lovely, with flashing eyes and long, wavy hair, one of them a redhead, the other a brunette.

“Sure, they’re my daughters. Who else’s daughters should they be?”

One of them, the brunette, surprised him further by extending her hand. “I’m Berte,” she said. “This is my sister Mars.”

My father shook the woman’s hand and exchanged a glance with her that he felt all the way into his shoulder.

“Here,” Shally said, wrenching his daughter free from my father’s grip, “dance with one of them.” With that, he took her in his arms and went spinning off to the circular rhythm of the clarinet, leaving my father standing dumbstruck with the other young woman, the redhead.

“I’m sorry, I, I don’t dance,” my father stammered. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“Come on, one dance won’t kill you,” the young woman said. Her mouth was very red and she smiled in a wry, lopsided manner.

“No, really, I don’t dance,” my father said. “I’d kill
you
.” He looked over the woman’s shoulder in the di
rection that Shally and his other daughter had spun. “I’m sorry, what did she say her name was?”

“Berte,” the sister said, laughing. “
She’ll
get you to dance.”

•••

A few weeks after they met in the Automat, my father had a telephone call from his cousin inviting him to dinner. Reuben and his small family had taken up residence in a furnished apartment in Brooklyn, a few blocks from Flatbush Avenue, an area my father was familiar with because his brother Izzy had his dental supply shop not too far away. On the appointed evening, he left work at a little after four, bought a bottle of good red wine at a liquor store on East Broadway and strolled slowly towards the subway, enjoying the pleasant early spring air, damp with the melting of a late snow. Even on the dirty, slushy streets of the Lower East Side, redolent with the smells of cooking cabbage and beets and fish, and crowded with people hurrying home for supper, the coming of spring could be sensed, and my father had reason to feel pleased with himself. He took a Lexington Avenue subway to Fourteenth Street, where he transferred to the IRT for the trip under the East River into Brooklyn. When he emerged into the air again, it was already dark and the temperature had dropped a few degrees, forcing him to raise the collar of his raincoat.

Once off Flatbush, the streets, with their trees still bare, were deserted, the buildings narrow, like men standing with their shoulders hunched. He found the address his cousin had provided, a three-story walk-up on Utica Avenue, with no difficulty, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Reuben opened the door at the first knock, almost as if he had been standing close by, awaiting my father’s arrival.

“Morgenstern, come in, come in,” he boomed, too heartily, my father thought. “Wine? That’s too kind. Let me take your coat. Come, meet the wife.”

My father was ushered into the fragrant kitchen and into the presence of a petite, very attractive young woman with blonde hair twisted into a neat bun, and a noticeable bust beneath her modest white shirtwaist
and apron. She was standing by the stove, upon which a pot was steaming, a large stirring spoon in her hand. “Morgenstern, my wife, Rachel. Rachel, this is my famous cousin, Harry Morgenstern, our generous benefactor.”