A Book of Great Worth (30 page)

Sitting at our table, or stopping by to say hello during the course of our meal, was a cast of memorable characters who might have stepped out of the pages of the Damon Runyon stories I’d been reading on the bus, including a man who had lost a hand while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and a man who had been a Communist and now was, my father said later – this was his phrase – a “rabid anti-communist.”
There was a man who’d been a gangster and earned a reputation breaking strikes but now worked for a union and was, my father said, “a pretty decent chap,” and a reporter from
The
New York Times
, whom I remembered reading about, a man who’d been blinded when gangsters threw acid in his face. And of course my father’s colleague Vogel, who covered labour for the rival Yiddish paper,
The
Forward
. The two had been friends for so long they could almost anticipate the ends of each other’s sentences and there was a warm familiarity between them
I was drawn to. I had met Vogel several times and, in
variably, he would scrutinize me with a narrow-eyed gaze, then turn to my father with a quizzical, “Morgenstern, this is a son?”

A handsome couple particularly caught my attention, a man and a woman holding hands – the woman
a lovely blonde with very sad hazel eyes – who my fa
ther told me only met at gatherings like this because they each had families at home. “They married the wrong
people,” my father said with a wink, leaving me to pon
der the mysterious implications.

I started thinking about these fascinating people, of course, and, inevitably, began to write stories about them in my head – I say “inevitably,” which is how, in retrospect, it seems to me; perhaps, in reality, it was more a matter of chance. If so, then that was a serendipitous piece of chance indeed. Whenever I had a few minutes alone, I jotted down ideas and descriptions in my notebook. The next day, Saturday, while my father covered meetings, I was on my own, walking the Boardwalk and the beach, going for a swim, eating a hotdog loaded with onions and peppers, eying the girls in shorts and halter tops along the amusement park area – some of them my age, some of them older, their bodies riper and even more of a mystery to me. All through the day, I was alive to the sights and sounds swirling around me, coming to me through a new filter, and my head was filled with a jumble of images, faces, voices. It was the voices I paid attention to most.

Heading back to the hotel in late afternoon, I caught sight of that couple I’d started to think of as The Star-Crossed Lovers: “They married the wrong people,” my father had said. How that inflamed my imagination. They were coming out through the door of a hotel far smaller than the one my father and I were staying at,
onto the boardwalk. I was aware there were various in
nocent explanations – a drink with friends, a convention-related meeting – but I chose to believe the more romantic possibility, that only moments before they had been entwined in each other’s naked arms and legs on a bed, while a small electric fan on the dresser stirred the slenderest of breezes in the hot saline air.

I paused to scribble that line down,
“while a small electric fan on the dresser stirred the slenderest of breezes in the hot saline air,”
entranced by the image of the fan – I could see the desultory swing of its blades, hear the faint whine of its oil-deprived motor. Then I hurried to catch up with them as they strolled along the boardwalk, and followed them, at a safe distance, for several blocks, until they disappeared through the door of yet another small hotel, thoroughly confusing me. Had
they been coming from an assignation (a word I’d re
cently learned) or going to one? I knew so little – at thirteen – about the possibilities of these intricate arrangements of the heart that I had no recourse but to fall back on imagination.

I’ve already described this couple as handsome, and they were that, middle-aged, perhaps even in their fifties, but very well put together, the woman a lovely
blonde with the striking legs of a dancer flashing be
neath her soft flowered skirt; the man tall and lean, with a full head of greying hair and wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of Henry Fonda in a courtroom film I’d seen not long before. He was in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled up, and carried the jacket of his seersucker suit over his arm and his panama hat in his right hand, using his left to steer his companion loosely by the waist while her right hand lay lightly on his bare forearm, just ahead of the folded jacket. I saw all of this with remarkable clarity and made mental notes – to be transferred into written form in my notebook as soon as I could – with precision.

The couple gave off an aura that implied that love affairs such as theirs were the exclusive jurisdiction of beautiful people, a misapprehension it would take me some time to disabuse myself of. When they disappeared into the second hotel, I felt bereft, as if I’d been cut off from some amazing, slightly illicit adventure.

That evening, wearing a white shirt tucked into my neatly pressed chinos, I sat with my father and some of his friends – the mis-married couple not among them, to my regret – at a table in a banquet hall, eating a heavy meal, listening to speeches, watching people dancing later as my father drank rye and ginger ale after rye and
ginger ale, and I sipped on a glass that, without benefit of the whisky, looked exactly like his, another small source of pleasure. Vogel sat between us, a small, owl-eyed man with a permanent smear of perspiration on his forehead, and their conversation slipped in and out of Yiddish, inadvertently excluding me and allowing my mind to wander. I was already drunk on conversation, and the incomprehensible sound of their voices formed a pleasing background as, my thoughts racing, I concocted stories about some of the people around me.

Sunday morning, my father was up early to cover yet another meeting, leaving me to sleep in, and later we had brunch together in the hotel dining room: ham and eggs with a strange sauce, pastries, fresh fruit, more luxuries. We walked together on the Boardwalk for an hour, my father’s voice rising and falling in the wind like the seagulls that followed us, always hopeful for a crust of bread or something richer, and then he saw me onto the bus. He still had another few days of the convention.

That afternoon, on the long bus ride home, using a ballpoint pen emblazoned with the name of the hotel we’d stayed at and one of the steno pads my father took notes on, I began writing a story about several of the people I’d met – somehow, in the sluice of my imagination, the former Communist and the married man who loved the married woman merged and became one character, and the former gangster and the blinded columnist developed a grudging friendship. It was a fanciful story, very much in the style of Runyon, but completely different from anything I’d written before.

Until then, my attempts at writing had focused on dogs and horses and ghosts – starting at about age ten, I had been very much in the thrall, in rapid succession, of Albert Payson Terhune with his magnificent collies, Thorne Smith and his debonair ghosts and Booth Tarkington and his trenchcoat-wearing Penrod. But on this particular weekend, I graduated to writing about real people, doing real things, with only a restrained tinge of the romantic colours that had become available to me. The intoxicating power the story cast over me was both exhilarating and frightening.

That was the first real story I’d ever tried to write, but even before that, two nights before, I’d had the crystalline moment in which I realized that I was a writer.

My father and I shared a hotel room – it had two twin beds – and as we’d prepared for bed Friday night, lining up in the bathroom to brush our teeth and use the toilet, I realized that this was the first time since I was little and used sometimes to crawl into bed with my parents that I’d slept in the same room as my father. We undressed together, and that too was a rarity. Summers, we often went to swim at Coney Island, and, when I was younger, he and I would change into our swimsuits together in a public dressing room filled with jostling naked men and boys. I realized I’d never been alone for so long with my father and I’d never been so close to him.

My father had married late and I was the last of my parents’ children. He was about fifty when I was born, and on this weekend he was already in his sixties, his body going soft, his hair thin and grey.

My father’s own father, my grandfather, whom I hadn’t known well, had died only a couple of months earlier. I hadn’t felt much at his passing, and was aware that my lack of tears had caused my father some distress. But I’d been conscious of my father’s sadness, which still seemed to envelop him. I was also extremely conscious, in a way I’d never been before, of death, its power, inevitability and finality.

I saw my father’s body in a new light that night in the hotel room and, as we lay in our beds in the darkness, my father’s voice drifting disembodied in the air above us, talking about the people I’d met that evening, I was struck suddenly and sharply by the certain and unexpected knowledge that he would die – something that, happily, wasn’t to happen for more than twenty years – and I was washed over with a powerful, ineffable
sense of sadness and loss, almost as if the loss had al
ready occurred. It was absolutely the strongest emotion I’d ever had in relation to my father and it shook me.

But at the very same time that I was feeling this unutterable sadness, I was also thinking about how to write about the experience and the feeling, about finding a way, somehow, of expressing what seemed to be inexpressible, and I was already, in my head, actually starting to do just that.

“‘Tomorrow we’ll walk on the boardwalk and watch the waves,’ the man said in the darkness,” I wrote in my mind.

“That will be good,” I had the son respond, somewhat woodenly.

“Good night, son.”

“Good night, Dad.”

Was that my father and I speaking – actual voices hurling words into the darkness of the humming air-conditioned hotel room – or the father and son I was creating, the creatures of my imagination? I didn’t know.

Up until that point, I realized – not then, but later –
I had been attracted to writing because of the writing itself, the thrill of manipulating language – what at writers’ conferences and university creative writing programs we refer to as craft, although I didn’t have much of it at the time. But there are two other important parts to writing, parts I hadn’t even been aware of, and I had just stumbled onto them: I now had something very specific I wanted to write about, and a vision of how I wanted to express it. Along with craft, I was now dimly conscious of art.

My father was talking – a real person, saying real words – but in my head, I was turning him into a character, turning his words into dialogue, thinking about how to get it right. That seemed enormously important.

I was reminded of that note my mother left:
Listen to your father
, she’d written. At that age, thirteen, I’d somehow gotten out of the habit of listening to him; it was a patience I now realized I needed to relearn. I started again to listen to my father that weekend; I’ve been listening to him – even over the thirty-five years since his death – and trying to get it right, ever since.

•

I’ve been working on a series of stories about the character I call “my father” –
loosely based on my own father – for about thirty years. Over that time, many of them have been published in magazines and several in previous short story collections. I had no intention of doing a series, but I liked that first story – it was “The False Moustache” – a lot and wondered if I could use the character in other situations. The story had begun with a spark of truth – a story my father had told many times about a foolish man he’d once known – and the spirit of my father, who had died a couple of years earlier. I had a number of such yarns from my father rattling around in my head, and I soon wrote several more of my own “versions.” Gradually, over many years, I began to think I might have enough of these tales eventually to fill a book.

All of the stories begin, first of all, with the charac
ter of Morgenstern, “my father,” who is very much im
bued with the persona and personality of my own father, and with a seed of truth. There really was a strike at
The Day
, the Yiddish newspaper where my father wrote for years, and he went to work in a silversmith shop, the situation that informs “The Barking Dog.” And he really did work briefly as a tutor/farmhand, the hook that gets “The Farmhand” going. As for “The Family Circle,” there really was a Margoshes family circle, spearheaded by my mother, but beyond that, all three stories are fiction, as are all in the series, though some are more “fictional” than others.

As I continued to return to these stories, in between other writing projects, a few constants began to become clear to me. The most important was that, while the tone of the stories varies considerably, from sombre to comic, they’re similar thematically in that they all show different glimpses of a fundamentally decent man in morally perplexing situations.

All the stories in the series walk that precarious tightrope between memoir and fiction. Of course, they’re not true memoir – they’re about my father, not me, though sometimes I appear briefly, as a child, listening to my father’s tale. Sometimes I (the author) have myself (the character) ask a question or in some other way provide a foil for the character of my father. Mostly, though, the focus is on “my father,” often in time periods before my birth. The stories are written in a blend of first and third person – when the character of myself as a child is on stage, it’s first person; but when the focus is on “my father” alone, it’s third. This bumping together of forms and techniques inevitably raises a question or two in the minds of some readers: is this truth or fiction, and how does the narrator know these things?