A Book of Great Worth (20 page)

On the night in question, though, a brisk, overcast night in late March, 1936, my father had had one or two drinks too many. He had a meeting to cover, so didn’t go home at the usual time for dinner and the evening with his family. Instead, he had dinner and several drinks with his good friend Vogel, his counterpart at
The
Forward
. The two men then attended the meeting, a boisterous gathering of the membership of Local 37 of the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which was then locked in negotiations with the owners of the garment district dress factories that lined lower Seventh Avenue. Afterwards, my father went back to the office to write his story, in which he reported that a strike was imminent, again taking a drink or two from the bottle in his drawer. By the time he climbed the steps to the Coney Island apartment, stopping at each landing to catch his breath, he was weary and unsteady on his feet. His fingers were chilled and he fumbled with the key.

Covering meetings and coming home late was not unusual for my father – he would do it at least once a week, often twice. Usually, he would creep into a dark
apartment, its silence punctuated only by the steady breathing of my mother and sisters in sleep and the occasional groan from the pipes, and he would undress quietly in the dark and slip into the warm bed without causing any disturbance, marvelling at his good fortune –
that he had a comfortable home to come home to, a loving wife, darling children, things that, only a few years earlier, he had thought had somehow permanently eluded him, that he had grown too old for.

On this particular night, though, the lights were on when he opened the door, and even through his blurry eyes he could tell immediately that something was not right.

“Bertie?” my father called.

My mother came out of the bathroom into the en
trance hall. The front of her housecoat was drenched, her hair was in disarray and her face was flushed. “Oh, Harry, thank goodness you’re here. Esther’s sick.”

My sister Esther, ten years older than me, was then not yet five. She had been out of sorts that morning when my father left for work, with a mild fever and complaining that her head hurt. This was obviously something more serious.

My father said nothing for a moment and my mother continued: “She’s burning up with fever. I’ve got her in the tub, cooling her off. We really have to take her to the hospital.”

“Of course,” my father said. He and my mother shared a brief hug of reassurance, and he turned his head so she wouldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath, though she was quite used to it.

Then my father turned to go into the bathroom, shedding his overcoat. My sister Esther is fair, with blue eyes and dirty blonde hair that, in childhood, was quite pale. Her hair was long and usually tied into braids, but on this day, because of her headache, my mother had left it loose; now, it was bunched up into a loosely fitting bathing cap, lending her a slightly comical look. She lay on her back in a tub half filled with cool water, naked and pale as the belly of a fish except for her face, which was flushed bright red. My father stood in the doorway, frozen, for what was only a moment but seemed to him like an intolerably long time, taking this
in. She was awake, with tears dribbling down her en
flamed cheeks, but her mouth formed a small smile. “Hello, Daddy,” she said weakly.

My father felt a flash of shame, his trance breaking. “My god,” he said, “Esthella, baby, it’s all right, we’re going to get you to a doctor,” then he stepped forward, intending to get down on his knee beside the tub.

The bathroom floor was wet. A crumpled towel lay beside the tub where my mother had been kneeling as she sponged Esther before my father’s return. As he stepped forward, his right foot landed on the towel, which slid forward. My father teetered for a moment, then fell with a crash onto the floor, banging his left shoulder against the tub. He shouted out an obscenity, something he rarely did and never in front of his wife or children. Pain stabbed through his shoulder and, even worse, his ankle, which had twisted sideways as he fell.

“Harry, my god, are you okay?” my mother cried. She raced into the bathroom, narrowly avoided slipping
on the wet floor herself, and knelt beside him. My fa
ther, already starting to get to his feet, brushed her aside. “I’m okay, Bertie. It’s nothing.”

The whole thing, start to finish, had taken only seconds, but my father knew it wasn’t nothing. His ankle was seriously twisted and the pain that raced up his leg as he placed weight on it was excruciating. But the pain served one useful purpose, clearing my father’s head.

“Get her dressed,” he told my mother. “I’ll call a taxi.”

Ten minutes later, my mother and father emerged
from the doorway of their apartment building with Es
ther, dressed and wrapped in a blanket, whimpering in my father’s arms. My mother held my sister Judy, who was not yet three; there was no one with whom she could be left, so they had no choice but to rouse her protesting from sleep and take her along. My father’s shoulder was aching with dull pain – putting his coat back on had been agonizing – but was bearable, even with his daughter’s slight weight; his ankle, though, fired hot bright bolts of pain through his leg with every limping step. Rain had started to fall and they stood in the shelter of the doorway for a minute as they waited for the taxi. He pressed his hand against Esther’s burn
ing forehead and whispered into her ear, “It’s okay, Es
thella, Daddy’s got you, it’s okay.”

My father had no idea whether his daughter’s situation was serious or slight, but he feared the worst. Being a devout atheist, he had no god to direct prayers to, but that didn’t prevent him from composing them on occasion, and in that brief pause in the doorway, he proposed a bargain with the universe. If only Esther would be spared, he would never again allow himself to be so drunk – as drunk as he’d been that night, so drunk that he had done himself harm, that he had delayed, not thought clearly, even if only for a few moments; so drunk that he might have done others harm –
never again would he allow himself to be that way.

Then the taxi was there, they were in it and on their way, my father grateful to be off his feet, the cab’s windshield wipers clacking away thought.

Coney Island Hospital was just a few minutes away on Ocean Parkway near Avenue Z. Judy had been born there and my parents knew it well. The taxi pulled up at the emergency entrance and my mother, who had sat Judy down on the seat between her and my father, got out and came around the car to open my father’s door. He stumbled out, gasping, Esther pressed tightly against his chest. For a moment he teetered, and was sure his leg would collapse under him, but he shot out his left hand to steady himself against the door of the
taxi, that motion reigniting the pain in his shoulder. Es
ther shifted in his arms, threatening to slip from his grip, but once he had righted himself he was able to pull his left arm back in, redistributing her weight in time. He didn’t think about his wife and other daughter, about the cab driver and the fare, but concentrated all his attention on the hospital door, which was swinging open, a white-uniformed nurse pushing a wheelchair appearing through it like one of the angels he had read about as a boy, welcoming them to heaven.

“She’s burning up,” my father croaked, surrendering his first-born into the nurse’s arms.

In another ten minutes my father sat in the same wheelchair gritting his teeth as an intern pried off his
heavy black shoe and began to manipulate his ankle, al
ready swollen to almost twice its normal size. Every movement of the doctor’s hands sent excruciating pain flooding through my father’s lower body. My mother and Esther had disappeared through a curtained doorway with another doctor, and Judy, cranky and snivelling, had been taken by a nurse to a small room with colouring books and a cot. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine, won’t you, honey,” the nurse said. My father had tried to follow my mother and Esther but was met with similar assurances and worried frowns over his limp. A nurse with a thin line of perspiration on her upper lip like a faint moustache had pushed him down into the wheelchair and there he sat for a few minutes waiting, his entire body now throbbing, the pain in his ankle
scorching up through his right leg and into his pelvis, the pain in his shoulder radiating down his arm, all the way to his fingers. His throat burned and even his head was aching, locked in a tight grip that pressed against
his temples, keeping thought at bay, though he re
mained conscious of the steady stream of doctors and nurses
coming in and out of the room that my mother and Es
ther had been taken into, their faces unreadable.

An intern in a white jacket, a man who looked little
older than the teenaged boy who ran errands in my fa
ther’s office, materialized in front of him, immediately sinking to his knees.

“This looks really nasty,” the intern said. He composed his face to express seriousness, but it couldn’t completely mask delight. My father grimaced in response. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a drink, some whisky, maybe?”

The intern let his grin emerge. He wore a wispy moustache, obviously grown to make him appear older. “You find some, I’ll join you. In the meantime, relax.” He stood up and probed the muscles in my father’s shoulder with unsympathetic fingers. “You’re holding yourself so tight, you’re just making this worse.”

My father slumped with exhaustion as he was wheeled to have X-rays taken – the intern was right, when he willed his muscles to loosen, the pain in his shoulder began to subside. Even the ache in his head seemed to lessen.

While he waited for the technician to adjust his equipment, my father gazed through a rain-stained window at darkness softened by the glow of an exterior light. He could see an ambulance driving into the frame of the window, then disappearing from view, the frame going dark again. He thought of the bargain he had proposed, just minutes earlier, and renewed it. Never again, he thought. He had offered up such bargains to the gods of the universe before, with smaller stakes, over smaller matters, and then proceeded to forget them, to let his end down, he knew that. But this was different, this time he meant it, and he assumed his intention and resolve were clear.

The X-rays showed the injury to my father’s shoulder to be no more than a bad bruise. He was given an ice pack, and then the doctor and nurse forgot about it. But the ankle turned out to be more than sprained. It was broken and would need to be set painfully and placed in a plaster of Paris cast. First he was told that someone, a specialist, was being telephoned and would be there within an hour, then that another emergency had precluded that; he would have to wait until morning. It was now way past midnight, so he would just have to grit his teeth and endure the pain for another six hours or more, the intern cheerfully told him. “It’s only pain,” he said.

My father took some grim satisfaction in this
development, interpreting it to mean that the universe
– or whatever was out there – had accepted his bargain, or had perhaps upped the ante slightly, that his condition should be worse so that his child’s could be better. And it was. My mother soon joined him, relief clear on her face. Esther’s fever was already down, and she was asleep. They would keep her overnight and watch her, but the doctor didn’t think it was anything too serious. “Just one of those mysterious childhood things,” he said, a diagnosis he was obviously satisfied with. My father nodded his head in agreement. It was hard to be an atheist when the universe operated with such apparent purpose.

Years later, my father would only remember that Esther had been burning up with fever and had thrown her parents into a panic. Perhaps, as the doctor had suggested, it had just been one of those baffling childhood ailments that come and go without apparent explanation, leaving no discernible mark.

My father was changed, though, or so he believed.

He recalled that my mother looked in on Judy, who was sleeping peacefully on a cot in the playroom, and then went to fetch two coffees in paper cups while my father sat in a strangely calm repose and communed with the pain in his ankle. The coffee when it came, hot and milky, would be soothing in its own way, and would suffice to stifle his craving for something stronger. But there was a brief period after the intern left, when all the nurses were busying themselves elsewhere and my mother had not yet returned, that he was alone with his demons in a small bare room, his leg extended. They had given him morphine and the pain was retreating in almost noticeable waves, like soldiers quitting a battlefield. The muting of the pain served, though, to make his desire for both a drink and a cigarette more acute. His body cried out for both. There were sure to be cigarettes in his jacket pocket and a small flask, half full of rye whisky, in the inside breast pocket of his coat. He didn’t know what had become of either. When my mother came back, he would ask her to find his jacket and bring him a cigarette – surely there could be no objection to that. As for the flask, no, he would forego that. Yes, he had promised only that he wouldn’t again be drunk, not that he would never drink again, like converted sinners caught up in religious fervour who
vowed never to touch another drop. A drink now, he felt certain, would not be a breach of the bargain he had made, it would not put Esther in jeopardy, would
not compromise his word. Still, he thought, it was bet
ter to be safe. He had been careless, he knew, just that, but that was bad enough. He would try not to be careless again.