A Book of Great Worth (23 page)

My father was presented with a woman of indeterminate youthful age – she could have been sixteen, so smooth and clear was her skin, or thirty, so severe was the expression of her cloud-grey eyes – whose dirty yellow hair coiled like a tangle of unruly wool down the back of her tattered shawl, which at one time had been maroon. Everything about her was in disarray – the buttons of her white blouse askew, the hem of a slip showing beneath that of her pleated grey wool skirt, even the laces of her high shoes undone – but her clothing and hair, even the nails on the fingers of the small white hand she extended to my father, were clean, and she smelled of the sea, not the rank, oily waters of the East River that often shouldered its way on the back of fog along the Lower East Side, where he worked, or the flat, hotdoggy smell of the beach at Coney Island, but the bracing salt spray of the pounding surf at Far Rockaway, where he and my mother would sometimes go walking with the girls on Sunday afternoons. “Show, show,” Fushgo grunted, prodding her with a sharp, tobacco-stained finger.

The woman offered my father a small sheet of paper obviously torn from a pad, and freshly so, judging by the clean, ragged edge, and already scribbled on with a sharp-pointed pencil. He took it from her, noticing that her delicately veined hand trembled. On the paper, in a handwriting that was both clear and immature, was written in a mixture of Yiddish and English: “My name is Anna Fishbine, from Montreal, in Canada. I am seeking my brother, Abraham Diamond, the poet, who receives his mail at this shop. Can you assist me?”

My father had several small weaknesses –
schnapps
and cigarettes among them – but only one great one, and that was his love of books, not merely reading them, a love which in itself could have been satisfied by the public library, but of possessing them, feeling their weight on his knee and the rough textures of their bindings on his fingers as he read, seeing the satisfying substance of them on the shelves he had constructed in the living room, the heavy dusty aroma wafting off their old, roughly cut pages as they lay open on the kitchen table. New books, with their crisp, clean jackets and unsoiled pages failed to impress him the way a book with a life and a history behind it did, so he was an addict to Fushgo’s constantly replenishing stock and devoted to the man himself, his irritating mannerisms, come from a lifetime of communing with dead authors at the expense of living readers, notwithstanding. But my father, who had from time to time seen the poet at the Café Royale and had exchanged words with him on one or two occasions, had never encountered Diamond at the shop.

“Diamond gets his mail here?” my father asked, raising his eyes to Fushgo, who, despite his stoop, was a tall man.

“Only invisible letters,” Fushgo said, raising his brows, “delivered by invisible mailmen.”

The two men exchanged glances redolent of the comfort that they felt in each other’s presence. Both were shy men but they had a mutual love. They’d known
each other for a dozen years and, over that time, my fa
ther had contributed to Fushgo’s upkeep with the same regularity and consistency of a Christian tithing to his church. Fushgo shrugged his rounded shoulders, raggedly incised by the frayed stripes of his suspenders, and made a comical face with his eyes and blue-lipped mouth that suggested despair over the antics of women.

“How long since you heard from your brother?” my father asked.

At the woman’s feet there was a brown cardboard suitcase. In her hands she clutched a blue leather purse from which she produced a pad and pencil, laying the purse awkwardly on the suitcase. She scribbled, looked up, scribbled again, then tore the page loose and handed it to my father.

“Six months without a word.” Here was where she had hesitated. Then: “Our parents are frantic with worry.”

My father nodded his head as he read. “Your brother often goes to the Café Royale. Do you know it?”

The woman shook her head, a look of mild fright briefly passing over her eyes.

“I’m on my way there now for a bite,” my father said. “I’ll escort you. It’s a twenty-minute walk or so, can you manage?”

She nodded her head and smiled.

“Maybe you’ll be lucky and he’ll be there. Or someone will know where he might be found.”

The woman seemed so grateful that my father was infused with a feeling of well-being that propelled them both out of Fushgo’s shop onto East Broadway
with the gentle force of a summer breeze. They turned north on Allen Street, passing Delancey and Houston, then over one block to Second Avenue and carried on for several blocks further north. It was early evening, the weather pleasant, and the streets were still crowded with
people. One or two men they passed nodded at my fa
ther in recognition but if their faces betrayed surprise at seeing him with an unfamiliar young woman he didn’t notice. My father carried Anna’s suitcase, which seemed so light as to be almost empty, while she clutched her purse to her chest. Because of her silence –
he didn’t know at this point whether she was an actual mute or merely too frightened to speak – there was no need to
chat, but my father grew expansive and rattled on, de
scribing the scenery through which they passed and, occasionally forgetting, asking her questions she could not – or would not – answer without stopping to write on her pad. “That’s all right,” my father said. “Forget it.” Or: “That was only a rhetorical question. There’s no need to reply.”

She paused several times, hindering their progress, to gaze into a shop window or down the length of a street they were crossing, and one of the rhetorical questions my father asked concerned the nature of Montreal, for the woman gave the appearance of having stepped directly from the boat or the country. He
thought, for the first time in several years, of his un
pleasant encounter with a cousin from that city almost a decade earlier and shook his head with distaste. He couldn’t help but wonder if Abraham Diamond was a similar sort of charlatan.

At the Café Royale, there was no sign of Diamond nor any of the men whom my father thought he might have seen with the poet. Nevertheless, after he had placed the order – a corned beef sandwich with coleslaw and a pickle and coffee for him, strong tea for Anna – he inquired of the waiter, who asked several others. Most didn’t know Diamond but one who did said he hadn’t seen him for several days. Perhaps this evening. Mendel and Solarterefsky, two playwrights my father knew, were at their usual table in a rear corner and he inquired of them as well. Both knew Diamond, and Mendel said he thought he’d seen him in the company of Ishavis Lazen, the actor, who was sure to be at the café that evening, after his performance in a play at the Second Avenue Theatre, just a few doors away. My father had a meeting to cover so he introduced Anna to the two men, spared her the effort of the notes by explaining her situation, entrusted her to their attention and left her there, promising to look in later. “Hopefully, you’ll have found him, you’ll be gone and happily ensconced in his apartment,” he told her. “I’m sure all will be well.”

My father went to his meeting, where he listened, took notes and afterwards talked to people in attendance. He went back to his office and sat at a heavy oak desk where he wrote an account of the meeting on a standard Royal machine with Yiddish characters. He and another man who was working late had a drink from a bottle of Canadian whisky my father kept in the lower drawer of his desk. He gave his story to Lubin,
the assistant city editor, and he put on his raincoat be
fore stepping out into the light drizzle that was falling in the darkness of East Broadway. He walked past Fushgo’s shop, dark as an alley, and the Garden Cafeteria, closed but its lights still shining, and turned north
towards the Café Royale, from which, as he ap
proached, he could see light and hear noise spilling. Anna was sitting at the table where he had left her, an island of mute and painful isolation in the midst of the tables crowded with loud men. Mendel and Solarterefsky were gone, there was no sign of Lazen, though the theatres had let out more than an hour earlier and, as he’d feared, there was no sign of Diamond.

My father sat down and ordered a coffee. “I’m de
lighted to see you again, my dear,” he said, “but sorry to find you alone. Was there no news?”

Anna wrote this note: “No. Mr. Mendel was most kind. He and the other gentleman introduced me to several men who know Abraham but no one has seen him for several weeks. There is a possibility he has a job
with a touring company. Someone promised to in
quire.”

My father frowned and looked around the café, raising his hand to several men he knew. “Have you eaten?”

Anna nodded vigorously, but he was struck again by the emaciated quality to her small, smooth face that he found so appealing, the cheekbones high, the skin
tight and without lines except for the sheerest hint be
side her nose where, though he had yet to see her display the ability, surely she must occasionally smile.

“Are you sure? The cheesecake here is very good. I wouldn’t mind one myself but I couldn’t manage the whole thing. Would you help me?”

She agreed and, when it came, ate all but the few forkfuls my father took to put her at ease.

She looked down at the plate, as if ashamed at the weakness her hunger had revealed.

“You have a room?” my father asked. “Someplace where you’re staying? Perhaps I should take you there.”

Anna looked up, then down again. On her pad she wrote: “I had hoped I would find Abraham.”

“So you have no place?”

She shook her head and they sat in silence while my father smoked a cigarette and finished his coffee. “I want you to understand,” he said presently, “that I’m a married man, with two wonderful children and a third on the way. So please don’t construe my intentions as anything but the most honourable.”

Anna wrote: “Surely your wife will object.”

My father smiled. “Bertie would never turn someone away from her door.”

Again he carried the suitcase, extending the elbow of his other arm to her on the dark street and, after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. On the long subway ride home he wondered if what he’d said was true, but my mother, of course, would be asleep, and if she did object, he knew, it wouldn’t be until afterwards. Not once, as the subway car lurched through its velvety tunnels or as he made up the bed for her on the sofa in the tiny living room, did he question his motives, not once did he long to heal her wounded tongue with his own.

•••

My mother did have a generous heart, and patience that, after three weeks, was beginning to grow thin. She was four months pregnant and suffering greatly, her body wracked by cramps at all times and swept by waves of dizziness and nausea when she moved with anything but the most deliberate slowness. False calms would arise during which it appeared the worst was over, then the pain and sickness would come crashing back without warning. Inside her, the baby seemed to be warring with the notion of its own life. There was no question but that Anna could be useful. My oldest sister, Esther, was almost six and already in school, but the younger one, Judy, was only three and needed care and attention, and diversion during my mother’s worst times. My father, who always worked into the evenings and often later, saw to the children in the mornings, getting the eldest off to school, while my mother stayed in bed preparing herself for the day ahead, but in the afternoons, after he’d gone, the little one often grated on her nerves, Esther was soon home demanding to be heard and there was a meal to prepare, then bathing. As the pregnancy deepened and the nature of the ailment became clearer, a plan had taken shape to have my mother’s younger sister Sarah join the household to help her; Anna’s presence made that unnecessary. She immediately took charge; at the same time, her presence grated on my mother, aggravating her already stripped nerves. By day, Anna helped in the apartment, relieving my father of some of his morning duties, but, more importantly, being there in the afternoon, playing with the younger one, keeping her quiet and amused while my mother lay propped up against pillows on her bed reading detective novels and feeling the muscles in her legs slowly turn to jelly. Sometimes, rising to go to the bathroom, my mother would open the bedroom door and find Anna and my sister sitting side by side on the piano bench, the little girl enthralled as Anna’s fingers silently raced over the keys my mother hadn’t touched in weeks, just above them, producing a music only the two of them could hear.

In the evenings, the guest took the subway to Manhattan and the Café Royale where, like an urchin awaiting her drunken father, she sat at a table by herself and passed notes to people asking: “Have you seen Abraham Diamond?” My father often dropped in on her there and, if his work kept him late, would stop at the café on his way home to give her company on the long subway ride, which still frightened her.

My mother, without accusing him of anything, clearly resented the attention he paid to the girl. “Three weeks and still no sign of that
brother
,” she said on a Saturday. Anna had taken the girls for a stroll on the boardwalk and she and my father were alone at the breakfast table.

My father shrugged. “It appears he’s gone with a company on a road trip. No one seems to know for sure where they are or when they’ll be back. What do you mean
brother
?”

“Oh, Harry, it’s as clear as the nose on your face that the man is her husband. Or her lover. God knows if there really are worried parents in Montreal. The woman has been
abandoned
.”