A Book of Great Worth (24 page)

“You really think so?”

My mother rolled her eyes upward, as if to seek support from the angel of the ceiling. “Men are so blind.”

“If you’re right, all the more reason to give her sympathy and support,” my father said after a moment.

“You think so?” my mother said sharply.

At times like these my father would often retreat to his books, forming his own private library wherever he was sitting, the world shut out by an invisible, soundproof barrier as he pored over the pages of his latest acquisition. Although he had gone no further in school than the fifth grade before he’d been required to begin to help support his family, and English was his third language, after Yiddish and Polish, he was partial to Shakespeare and – inexplicably – the American Civil War, but his deepest passion was for the classics, and his most treasured possession was a richly illustrated edition of Caesar’s
Wars
in Latin that he had taught himself to read. He had paid Fushgo ten dollars for the Caesar, more than four times the portion of his weekly allowance that he allotted to himself for books and, with the interest Fushgo charged, it had taken more than a month for him to pay it off. In later years, he would acquire huge volumes of Dante rich with Blake
engravings, and, though he wasn’t at all religious, a va
riety of Bibles, in several languages, their oiled leather
bindings giving off a smoky aroma of history, damna
tion and salvation. At this particular time, he was engrossed in a book that appeared to have been handwritten, in the manner of monks, in a language he had not been able to identify. The handwriting was skillful and consistent throughout the several hundred pages, the unintelligible words clearly scripted in a faded blue ink, the enlarged capitals at the beginning of each new paragraph shadowed in a red the shade of dried blood.
There was no date, no publisher’s name or city, no il
lustrations that might serve as clues to the book’s origin, and the title and author were just as indecipherable as the text itself. The leather of the binding was so thick – more like a slab of oxblood hide used for making shoes than the soft black grainy cloth publishers used – and the spine so warped the book could not be fully closed, and when it lay on a table it seemed like a head whose
jaws had sprung open, eager to share the untapped wis
dom within it. “For you, Morgenstern,” Fushgo had said when he produced the book for my father. “Read this and you’ll learn much the same wisdom you acquire conversing with your Anna.” And he laughed, Fushgo, spraying the dark air of his shop with tobacco-scented breath.

For hours at a time my father would sit poring over the book, comparing the strange script with works from his collection in Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, not that he thought this language could be any of those but hoping for some clue, some similarity of characters that would provide a hook, an opening through which he might shoulder to some dim understanding of the message the old pages indifferently held. One night when he had come home early he was sitting at the kitchen table engrossed in the magic letters, my mother asleep in their room, when Anna came home from the café, her small shoulders rising in their inevitable shrug to my father’s raised eyes. She came and sat beside him and he poured them both glasses of the cheap port he favoured for drinking at home. She sipped hers, then wrote this note: “I fear I may never find Abraham.”

“Surely not,” my father said. Then, after a long silence: “But you should give some thought to what you’ll do, just in case. Have you written to your parents?”

Anna hesitated, then wrote: “Neither can read.”

“And the neighbours? A friend or
landsman
who could read a letter to them.”

Anna shook her head. “There is only me,” she wrote. “I must return to them soon.”

My father nodded. “You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want. Bertie is irritable, I know, but it’s the baby, not you.” He put his hand on hers, marvelling at its smallness, the way her entire hand, even the slender fingers, disappeared beneath the cup of his palm.

Anna smiled and wrote: “You’re very kind.”

She gestured towards the book and my father slid it to her. “This is a book of great worth,” he said.

She bent over it, puzzled, then raised her head, her cheeks and mouth and eyes molded into a quizzical smile of such sweetness that it pierced my father like an arrow fashioned of the finest, purest gold.

“Eskimo?” she wrote.

•••

As my father’s one indulgence was his books, my mother’s was her piano. It was an upright Baldwin of indeterminate age, the ivory of its keys yellowed like Fushgo’s ancient teeth. It had been purchased at a second-hand shop on the Bowery with one hundred dollars it took her three years to save and had been lifted by rope and tackle along the outside wall of the building and brought into the apartment through a window. My mother had studied the piano as a child and music for two years at college. She’d long since given up any ambitions of the concert stage, but her greatest delight was to sit at the piano in the evening, the music students of the afternoon just an unpleasant taste in her mouth, the children in bed and my father not yet home from work or, perhaps, enveloped in one of the overstuffed chairs reading, one ear cocked, and play the concerti and sonatas of Mozart, which were her passion, and Chopin, which my father preferred. Since the third month of the pregnancy, the lessons had been cancelled and my mother, her head light, stomach lurching, legs and fingers aching, had sat not once at the piano, and the apartment resonated in the evening with a silence that seemed more like a presence than an absence.

Into this silence, where one would have thought she would be comfortable, Anna intruded, passing this note to my mother one evening: “When you are out and I won’t disturb you, may I play the piano?”

“Of course,” my mother said with irritation. She rarely left the apartment but when she did she could care less what happened in her absence. “You play?”

Anna nodded, smiling shyly.

“Let me hear.”

“Won’t your head hurt?” Anna wrote.

“My head’s fine today. I’d play myself but my fingers have rubber bands around them.”

Anna sat at the bench and raised the cover, exposing the Baldwin’s soiled smile. She raised her chin, facing the window that looked out – past the roof of the hat factory across the street – at the ocean, stretching with calm indifference towards the horizon and the old world beyond it. After a moment, she began to play. Chopin. The Fifth Concerto. My father, who had been in the bathroom shaving, came to the door with a broad smile on his lathered face, saying “That’s wonderful, Bertie,” then filled the doorway in confusion, looking from my mother, who stood by the window, to Anna at the piano and back again.

“I’m sorry, my head
is
hurting,” my mother said after a while.

My father’s appendicitis attack came completely without warning. At dinnertime, he had a sandwich, salad, coffee and piece of cheese Danish at the Garden Cafeteria, then went for a short walk to allow the food to settle before stopping at Fushgo’s for a chat and a drink from the bottle the bookseller kept behind his counter. He began to feel ill immediately after downing the shot, and Fushgo had to help him back to the newspaper office where he sat at his desk taking deep gasps,
his face drained of all colour, until the ambulance ar
rived. My mother was telephoned from the hospital and she came at once, leaving the children with Anna, who had been just about to leave for her nightly visit to the Café Royale. The appendix was removed that night and when my father awoke from the ether the next morning, my mother was sitting on a straight chair beside his bed, his hand in hers. She’d been there all night and her face was etched with pain and exhaustion.

“Who’s the patient?” my father said. “I should get up, you should get into this bed, the way you look. Or better yet, we should both be in it. The way you look.” He squeezed her hand.

“It’s too narrow,” my mother said, smiling.

“Too narrow?” my father said. “According to who?”

She told him what the doctors had said. He asked for a cigarette and she told him they were forbidden. He told her about the drink he’d had with Fushgo. “It’s the first time liquor’s ever hurt me,” he said. They laughed and gazed at each other fondly.

“Anna’s with the children?” he asked after a while.

“Yes.”

“Thank God we have her. Especially now.”

My mother didn’t say anything right away. Then: “She’ll be a great help while you’re here, yes. But when you’re home I’d like to have Sarah come.”

My father was silent.

“It’s been over a month. We can’t be responsible for the woman forever. She’s taking advantage of your kindness.”

My father nodded slowly. “After I’m home,” he said.

He was in hospital for four days and was under strict orders to rest and not go back to work for a week after he went home. The attack had come on a Friday and he was released on the following Tuesday. By the doctor’s orders, he shouldn’t have gone back to work until the following Wednesday, but the city editor phoned and he went on the Monday. He felt fine, if a little tired, the incision, already beginning to scar over with bright pink flesh shiny as fingernails, just a little tender. On Thursday afternoon, feeling completely fit, he went by train to Lakehurst, not thinking a thing of it.

It was well after midnight when he came home, my mother asleep, the living room dark. He’d served his editor as well as he could, though he’d retreated from the scene soon after he began to bleed and was unable to attract the attention of any of the medical people who rushed to the airfield. In the town itself, he found a small hospital already beginning to be overwhelmed by the flood of injured from the accident site, and, while he was waiting, telephoned in his story. After several hours, a nurse whose hair had slipped out of its careful bun into shreds of haphazard grey cleaned his wound
of the coagulated blood crusting it and bound him se
curely in bandages wrapped around his lower chest and belly. No doctor was available, though, so no stitches were taken, and it was this delay – the opening required seven stitches the following day, when he reported to the hospital where he’d originally been treated – that caused the odd shape and thickness of the scar he carried the rest of his life.

My father went to the kitchen and poured himself a whisky from the flask he kept in his raincoat pocket, drank it quickly and poured another. The ceiling light spilled through the doorway into the living room and he could see there was no one sleeping on the sofa. He went into the bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed and took off his shoes. My mother, who had been sleeping lightly, rolled over and opened her eyes, reaching out her hand to touch his arm.

“Harry? What time is it?”

“Almost one. Go back to sleep.” He bent over her and kissed her head.

“How was it?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“No, I didn’t play the radio.”

“I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Okay.” She rolled over.

“Anna’s not back from the cafe?” my father asked.

“She’s gone.”

“I thought not till next week.”

“We had an argument,” my mother said. “I asked her to go.”

“I see,” my father said. He tried to imagine what such an argument would have been like, the flurry of notes being scribbled, torn from the pad, crumpled, thrown to the floor.

“I’ll tell you in the morning. Sarah’s coming in the evening.”

He took off his shirt and went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. He stepped into the small room where my sisters slept and gazed down at them, muffled in darkness but glowing haloes around their heads formed by the street light from the window drawn to their hair. He bent over each head and kissed it. In the kitchen, he slowly drank the whisky he’d poured. A dull red stain the size and shape of a strawberry had gathered on the bandage just below and to the right of where, he believed, his heart lay. His body was exhausted but his mind raced, filled with the dazzle of flame, its surprisingly loud roar, the plaintive voice of the radio man, “get out of the way, get out of the way, get this Johnny, get this Johnny.” He walked across the living room to the shelf and found the book written in the mysterious language and took it back to the kitchen. He sat at the table, the open book in front of him, and looked first at its inscrutable script, then up at the icebox, standing silent and white against the wall. From the living room, he thought he heard the tinkling of piano keys, the first tentative notes of a Chopin concerto, but it was only the sound of an automobile passing on the street below, rising through the warm night air and the open window. His side ached, just beneath the strawberry stain by his heart, and he didn’t know if it was the incision, or something else.

• • •

The Barking Dog

The war in Europe began; the Depression ended. Re
ally, it was almost like that. At
The Day
, where my father had been a reporter for fifteen years, there was unrest. The paper had kept its head above water all through the bad years but salaries were frozen. The staff was lucky to have jobs, lucky to have salaries as high as they’d been before the Crash – my father made seventy dollars a week, which was a fine income compared to many others. But now, after ten years, the journalists wanted more. The war hadn’t really begun, but everyone could see it coming. The Depression wasn’t really over, but there were signs it would be. Some of my father’s colleagues were reasonable, others were more demanding; the union leaders were mostly Communists and, my father said, were glad to have a chance. Fascists must be fought, at home as well as abroad. Before my father knew it, it was spring and he was on strike.