Carriage Trade (32 page)

Well, it made me a little nervous having all that money lying around the house, you'd better believe it. But I also made sure the news got back to number fourteen Henry Street that my new husband had savings of over a thousand dollars, though I naturally didn't say where he kept it.

Oh, my. You've never seen such a change come over a man as came over my father when he heard that! Suddenly he forgot all about sitting shivah for me. Suddenly it was shalom, shalom! Come for dinner! Come for the lighting of the shabbat candles! Suddenly my new husband was like his long-lost son. He was always full of baloney, my father, but I did love him, and I loved my mother, and it was nice that we were all one big happy family again. That thousand dollars was all it took to do it.

It was during these family gatherings that both my mother and my father got interested in my new husband's business methods, and my new husband got interested in my mother's millinery business and the good customers like Mrs. Astor. It was my father who suggested that my husband might take some of his savings and open a little shop where my mother could sell her hats. Abe liked the idea, and that was how he got rid of his pushcart and we all got into the millinery business. You see how it all hangs together now, don't you? Because it was in the millinery business that my husband made his real money.

At first, our shop was also on Norfolk Street—just a little place. But it was so successful that we soon needed more room, and so in 1920 we rented space on 14th Street, just off Union Square, which was still the fancy shopping area, where all the rich women bought their clothes. By then, my mother mostly just designed the hats. I helped too. But we had four girls in the back room who did the cutting and the sewing and the trimming. My husband ran the store and kept the books. My father pretty much kept out of our hair—too busy scribbling questions in the margins of his Talmudic texts, arguing with God.

Nineteen-twenty was also the year that Abe's and my first child was born. We named him Solomon Tarcher, in honor of my husband's father, Samuel, the shoe repairman, who had died the year before. People often did that. The first initial of the baby's name was in honor of a relative who had recently died. So that was the birth of the man who became Silas Tarkington. “Born in abject poverty,” the obituary said. Ha! When my baby was born, I had both a nursemaid and a wet nurse for him. My milk was short. With both my children, my milk was short. All the women in my family have had that trouble, I don't know why.

Oh, he was a beautiful baby! Once when I was wheeling him in his carriage, a strange woman stopped us and said, “That is the most beautiful baby in the Bronx! That is the most beautiful baby in the Bronx!” She said it twice. I forgot to tell you that we'd moved to the Bronx by then, to a beautiful apartment in a new building right on the Grand Concourse. My husband was certainly a good provider. And Solly was such a well-behaved baby. He hardly ever cried. And when he was old enough for school, he did so well. He brought home such wonderful report cards, always with wonderful comments from his teachers. It was only after his sister Simma was born that he began to change.

I'm not saying it was Simma's fault. Perhaps it was because I waited nine years to have another baby. I've often thought that. But he was terribly jealous of the new baby. Perhaps that was natural, because he'd been the kingpin so long—like the only child—that he couldn't stand having to share any of my attention with a baby sister. But a new baby just does take more time and care and attention than a nine-year-old boy. There was just no way I could pay as much attention to Solly as I had before. It used to frighten me. He'd be with her, and I'd hear her screaming, and I'd rush into the room. “I was only playing with her, Mama,” he'd say to me, but I worried that he wasn't playing with her, that he was hurting her, and after a while I decided I couldn't leave the two of them alone in a room together. I was terrified that he'd try to harm her in some way. And she was a sickly, colicky baby, too.

Right about that time, his grades in school began getting worse. His teachers would write me notes, saying,
Solomon needs to apply himself more
. “What does that mean?” he'd ask me. “What does it mean,
apply
myself more?” “It means you've got to work harder, study harder. Have you done all your homework for tomorrow?” “Of course I have,” he'd say. But still the notes came home.
Solomon's homework assignments were incomplete again. Again!
He'd been lying to me, but what could I do? By then it was the Depression, times were hard, and my husband and I were working harder than ever in the shop, trying to make ends meet. And times kept getting worse. Women weren't willing to spend fifty dollars on a hat. They weren't even willing to spend five dollars. Mrs. Astor had died, and there didn't seem to be any more women like her left in the country, let alone New York City.

Yes, I think it was waiting those nine years that did it. If his sister had been more of a contemporary, less of a rival, it might have been different. But during those nine years I was so busy helping my husband build his business I couldn't even think about having another baby. Those nine years … and then the Depression hit us. Oh, my.

Solly began hanging around with a different crowd of boys, an older crowd, a tough crowd from the East Bronx, a crowd I didn't like and I told him so. It went in one ear and out the other. The Bronx was changing. It was not so nice anymore. Even the Grand Concourse was not so nice. In our building, apartments were getting robbed. The
shvartzers
were moving in. “Should we move?” I asked my husband. But moving is just about the most expensive thing you can do. Our nice new building was getting to smell bad. There was rubbish in the streets. It was getting worse than the Lower East Side ever was.

Then I discovered that Solly had been playing hooky. The truant officer came to our door. “Your son has not attended school for the last three weeks,” he said. He'd been going off each morning with his books, supposedly to school, but he'd never gotten there. God knows what he'd been doing, running around with that fast new crowd of his. Some of those boys had cars—stolen cars would be my guess. I spoke with him. His father spoke with him. We pleaded with him. It all fell on deaf ears.

At thirteen he was supposed to be bar mitzvah. He refused. He had refused even to go to
shul
. And at sixteen he announced that he was going to quit school altogether. His father and I begged him not to do this. “What are you going to do?” his father asked him. “I'm going to work,” he said. “I'm going to make a million dollars.” “You can't work for me,” his father said. “I can't afford to hire any extra help in the store.” This was 1936, the Depression was at its worst, three of the four girls in the back of the store we'd had to get rid of, and we were down to just one. My mother had developed Parkinson's, and just the three of us were doing everything—the one girl, my husband, and me. “Yes, where are you going to work?” I asked him. “Nobody's hiring anybody.”

“What about your famous friend, Mr. John Jacob Astor?” he asked me, kind of freshlike. “How did he make his money?” “In furs,” I told him. “Then I'll go into the fur business,” he said. “Just see if you can find
any
job, Mr. Know-It-All,” I said to him.

Well, I must say, he made good on that promise. He did find a job, schlepping furs on a rack for a manufacturer on Seventh Avenue, and for the next few years we didn't see too much of him. He'd found a place to live, he told us, somewhere on the West Side near his job. And I must say he seemed to be making good money. I didn't know there was that much money to be made schlepping furs on a rack, but whenever he showed up he always seemed to have plenty of money in his pockets, plenty of nice new clothes. “I'm on my way to making my first million,” he used to say, showing off the fat bankroll in his billfold. Well, his father and I thought, times were beginning to get a little better. Once, on my birthday, he turned up at our place and gave me a solid silver tea set: teapot, hot water pot, sugar, and creamer on a solid silver tray. Once, for his father's birthday, it was a solid gold Bulova watch. “Well,” my husband said, “maybe he's becoming a success after all.”

Pearl Harbor came, and we didn't hear from him for a long time. Maybe he's been drafted into the army, we thought, because he was that age, and naturally we worried. But then, in December of 1943, he showed up again with Hanukkah presents for all of us: a gold necklace for me, silver hairbrushes for his father, and even a silver ring with a diamond in it for his sister, Simma, though it was too big for any of her fingers and she had to wear it with a piece of adhesive tape around it. Simma was fourteen then. “Do you suppose he stole these things, Mama?” she asked me later. It was an omen.

“It's been so long since we've heard from you,” I said to him. “We thought maybe you'd been drafted into the army.”

“Flat feet,” he said with a wink.

I don't know for sure, but I never believed that. I think he just never bothered to register for the draft. A mother should know that, shouldn't she? If there was anything the matter with her son's feet?

Anyway, the worst moment came a few years later, in 1949. A policeman came to our door. He had a warrant for Solly's arrest. Grand larceny, they called it. Grand theft. Of course he didn't live with us, and we didn't know how to find him. But somehow they found him. And they arrested him. Oh, my … oh, my.… Do you need to keep that machine running? Yes … turn it off.

Fine. I'm better now. It was just remembering all that. They arrested him for selling fur coats off the racks he'd been schlepping in the streets. His boss had been missing certain garments for some time. He suspected it was one of his employees, and he sent out a company spy to try to catch whoever it was. Solly was schlepping a rack of mink coats down 34th Street, and this spy approached him and said he was interested in buying a mink coat for his wife. Solly offered to sell him one for five hundred dollars, and that's how they knew who it was.

Oh, my. I'm not saying it's all right to sell garments that belong to the boss, but was it right for the boss to catch him that way? With a spy he sent out? Somehow, it just doesn't seem right to me.

Naturally, we were devastated, his father and I. Abe met with the boss and offered to pay full retail for all the missing garments. He went down on bended knee, begging. But the boss had a heart of stone. He wouldn't let Solly off. He refused to drop the charges. And so there was a trial, and Solly was convicted, and the judge sentenced him to ten years in the state penitentiary, upstate in Hillsdale. Ten years!

Of course his father and I were heartbroken. Abe wanted to sit shivah for him, but I wouldn't let him. I remembered how I'd felt when my own father did that to me, and I reminded him of that. What does sitting shivah mean? I asked him. It means meaningless.

But it broke poor Abe's heart. He was never the same after. I know it shortened his life. It had to. After that, he suddenly looked old. He died just a few years later, in 1954. His only son in prison. It was too much for him. He died of a broken heart. So young, only sixty-six.

Solly could have come to the funeral. They would have let him. But he would have had to come to the synagogue in handcuffs and shackles, and he didn't want anybody to see him like that, and I can't say as how I blame him. I could understand that.

But the good thing that came of it—there's a good side for every bad side, my mother used to say—was that when we went through my husband's things we kept finding all these little bankbooks, hidden under his underwear and in places like that. He still didn't really trust banks, and so, instead of putting all his money in one bank, he put it in a lot of different ones—a thousand dollars here, five thousand dollars there. “Don't put all your eggs in one basket,” he used to say. And when we added up all the money in the different banks, it came to over a million dollars! Just think of that!

My late husband, may God rest his soul, hadn't made any will, so the court ordered that the money be divided three ways, between Solly, in prison in Hillsdale, and Simma and me.

I must say that Solly must have behaved himself at Hillsdale, because, instead of making him serve the full ten years, they let him out in a little over six. Time out for good behavior, they call it. They let him out in 1956.

The first I heard of it was in a telephone call from his parole officer. I remember the man's words exactly. “Your son is now completely rehabilitated, Mrs. Tarcher,” he said. “To be honest with you, we in the New York State correctional system have never seen such a complete rehabilitation of a prisoner in our lives.” In fact, he said, in the whole history of New York prisons, as far as he knew, there had never been a case that had turned out as well as Solly. He'd made a complete turnaround, he said, and it really did the prison people's hearts good to see it. A former felon was turned into a model citizen, just like that, and the parole officer agreed that my early training of him had a lot to do with it. He told me how I was certainly an admirable mother, and how much the prison people, and Solly too, appreciated it, everything I'd done. “Your son Solomon has seen the error of his ways,” he told me. “He is like a whole new man, and he is ready to embark upon a whole new and productive life.” Solly would be sticking to the straight and narrow from now on, he told me. And he told me that now everybody in the New York State prison system was just hoping for a little more assistance from me. “I am confident we can count on you for that, Mrs. Tarcher, can't we?” he said.

I thought that was the best news I'd had in years. I'll never forget that nice parole officer's name. It was Moses Minskoff.

“Just tell me what I can do for you, Mr. Minskoff,” I said to him.