Just One Catch (6 page)

Joey's first memory of his father's voice was a sharp command: One day, Joey wandered close to an open window, curious about the fire escape, and his father called him back. Sometimes at night, strange noises from the street or from the beach a few blocks away woke Joey in fright, and he'd crawl into bed with his parents, warm and content in the space between their bodies. On some afternoons, his father took him riding in the delivery van, letting him press the automatic starter and pretend he was driving. Slowly, they passed through a bewildering mélange of voices—the census reveals an immediate neighborhood teeming with Russians, Germans, Armenians, and Italians. Though Joey's parents rarely took him to synagogue (occasionally, they made exceptions for High Holiday services), he was surrounded by Jews and Jewish culture. Lists of the area's religious institutions at the time (the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Coney Island, Adath Israel, the Jewish Communal Center, and the Coney Island Talmud Torah) indicate large and active memberships.

Sometime before his fourth birthday, Joey had to have his tonsils removed. As he remembered the experience, his father drove him to Coney Island Hospital and left him alone, with a parched throat and little understanding of what was happening. Figures in white moved along the corridors, silent and remote. Where was his father? Why had he gone? How
could
he have gone?

Lee distrusted Isaac even more than Joey did. He recalled riding with the older man in a horse-drawn delivery wagon in Manhattan upon first arriving in the United States. On steep, icy streets, Isaac whipped the horse so brutally, passersby berated him for cruelty. Though Lee claimed his father was never mean to him, he would grudgingly admit, in later years, with tears in his eyes, that the two of them did not have an easy relationship. “There were lots of Jewish criminals around and he didn't want me to turn out bad,” he once explained to his little brother. Isaac's pressure on Lee to work hard and obey him was so intense that, one summer soon after Joey's birth, Lee ran away from home. One morning, he traveled to New Jersey to apply for a job, realized he wouldn't get hired, and, rather than go back to face his father's disappointment, decided on the spur of the moment to board a train west. He was gone for nearly three months, traveling with hoboes, working odd jobs with farmers and ranchers in Arizona and California, sending postcards to Lena to assure her he was all right. Joey remembered the day Lee returned. Isaac was playing with Joey in the street, showing him how to wind the rubber-band propeller on a model plane, when Lee sauntered up to them from a nearby trolley stop. As soon as Lena saw him, she said something like “When you come from California, you've got to take a bath,” and took him inside the apartment. Joey glanced up at his father, who was gripping the model high in his hand: a trembling airplane silhouetted against the sun.

*   *   *

FOR SOME TIME
, Isaac had complained of stomach pains, and Lena noticed his stools were black as coal. Later, she believed the prodigious amount of cake he ate every night led to his bleeding ulcers.

One day, not long after Joey turned four, his family held a party. He hadn't seen his father for days, and Isaac was not around that afternoon. Joey's mother dressed him in a nice suit and pointed to a line of cars parked outside the apartment. The cars' interiors were hot. He didn't want to take a ride. Older boys from the neighborhood, also wearing suits, approached him to try to nudge him into a backseat, but he ran from them, thinking it was a game. Finally, he was forced to make the trip. Everyone got out of the cars in a large garden that had a stone bench and a rail fence. The day was brilliantly sunny. Adults, many of them strangers, fussed over Joey. An aunt he barely knew gave him a dollar. If he heard the word
funeral,
he didn't know what it meant.

Years later, he would learn from his sister that their father had gone into Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for an operation on a stomach ulcer. Apparently, the surgeons stitched him poorly and he died of internal bleeding. He was forty-two years old. Sylvia, not quite thirteen, accompanied Lena on the subway into Manhattan when they received news of Isaac's death; Lena could not read the subway maps. Sylvia got them to Times Square, but she became confused at that point, misidentified a train, and led them astray, deep into the Bronx. The day, and their grief, seemed endless.

Possibly, Lena sent Joey to relatives the week before the burial so he would not be upset by the mourning and the ritual of sitting shivah. Later, he could never recover any memory of this period. In the week following the funeral, Sylvia wore heavy black dresses every day, though the late afternoons were broiling. Finally, one evening, Lena told her, in a gentler tone than usual, to put on something lighter and go down in the street to cool off.

The 1930 census lists Lena as “head” of the household, still without outside employment. Lee (Elias) is recorded as a “bookkeeper.” Lena and the children moved across the street to a slightly cheaper, though similarly sized, apartment (with the first month's rent included free), next to a sandy trench dug for a trolley line, that all the neighbors called Railroad Avenue. The building was owned by an Italian family named Provenzano. Once the Hellers' belongings were out of the old place, Lee handed Joey a broom, picked up another broom, and told his little brother they were going to sweep out the empty rooms they had left behind. When Joey asked why, Lee replied he didn't want the new tenants to think the Hellers were slobs. Shortly after settling into the new place, Lee saved some money and bought Lena a brand-new radio.

What followed was a period of relative calm, at least on the surface; for Joey, it was a cozy, peaceful time. Lee was out of the house, working most days, returning in the early evenings. Lena shopped for, and cooked, dinner every night: smoked whitefish, kasha, and potato knishes deep-fried in vegetable oil. Lena bought these from a neighbor woman who sold homemade foods on the street—the knishes were a nickel apiece. The woman carried them from block to block in a kettle covered with black oilcloth. Sometimes, while cooking, Lena had to pause to break up a spat between Sylvia and Lee; the apartment was small and hot, especially in summer, and tempers grew short. Lena refused to let brother and sister go to bed angry with each other. After dinner, she would often say, half in Yiddish, half in English, that she could use a little ice cream. She'd give Joey a dime and send him off to a nearby soda fountain, with instructions to return with a pint of Golden Glow. The family gathered around the carton and ate all the ice cream on the spot, because they had no refrigerator. These moments were immensely satisfying to Joey. As an adult, he would look back and realize that, on some level, he had already learned not to want more than he could reasonably hope to have. What he had was blessing enough: the Jewish concept of
dayenu
. A pint of ice cream was plenty.

When fall came, Sylvia would sit near an open window in the evenings and do her homework by the light of a streetlamp outside, to save electricity. In the spring and summer, the family rented space to a succession of boarders. The children had to squeeze together in a single room; sometimes, one of them slept in the kitchen. One summer, one of these boarders played classical music every night on the family radio. Joey discerned familiar melodies in some of the performances. With a shock, he understood that playful echoes of Tchaikovsky popped up in big-band tunes such as “My Blue Heaven” and “April Showers”—songs he had heard in the afternoons on “Your Hit Parade.” Without his full awareness, his keen ear had revealed to him some of the secrets of art: the richness of tradition and the impulse to play against it—variation, improvisation, and parody.

He was a precocious reader. Often, after dinner, every member of the family opened a book. Early on, Joey read the Rover Boy series and the tales of Tom Swift. An older cousin on his father's side, a man named Nat Siegel, who worked as an accountant in the city, brought him books.

For a while after Isaac's death, family drop-ins were regular. Many of Isaac's relatives lived in the city, and Lena remained close to them. She welcomed their care and concern, and Sylvia seemed to enjoy their visits, but Lee usually withdrew whenever his father's people came around. His aloofness embarrassed Lena. Though normally courteous and polite, he had inherited his father's reserve. His transition to his new country had been difficult. Years later, in a letter to his little brother, he would recall how the “goyim-Irish” in Coney Island used to call him “Jew-boy.” “I was told [by my playmates] to lie on the ground, open my fly[,] and reveal [my] penis and then all the goyim kids would spit on it,” he wrote. “I raised no objection—that said I was a good kid and then I would be allowed to play with them.”

These experiences, as well as his naturally gentle temperament, pushed Lee beyond self-effacement, toward self-contradiction. At the end of a long day, he would simultaneously affirm and deny he was beat. He would complain about his tasks yet insist they weren't so bad. In these small ways, he implied nothing was what it seemed, and no one really knew him.

His behavior intrigued Joey as much as the laughter and speech of the big, loud people (strangers, though family) who came to see his mother. He would linger in the living room doorway, listening to the group tell affectionate stories about someone called “Itchy.” It didn't occur to him until he was an adult that Itchy was a nickname for his father—a variation of Yitzak, Yiddish for Isaac (the name means “he who laughs”).

Did he miss his father? He wasn't sure. Had he
known
the man? No one asked him what he felt. Lee was now largely in charge of him, correcting his behavior in company, seeking his help with errands, but Lee was not someone he could talk to, even if he knew what to say. Though Lee had assumed a mantle of responsibility, he was still a boy. One day, flirting with a group of girls, he abandoned Joey near Steeplechase (“the Funny Place”). A policeman found the child wandering alone and took him to the station, where Sylvia picked him up.

In
Now and Then,
Heller observed that around this time, he began to bite his nails, a nervous habit, which he implied was associated with the effect his father's absence, or his silence about it, had on him.

During summers, Lena, busy with her sewing, lost track of Joey as he ran to play on the beach with neighborhood friends: his old pal Marvin Winkler, whom everyone called “Beansy,” for reasons no one could later remember; a boy named Murray Rabinowitz, known as “Rup”; Tony Provenzano, son of the Hellers' landlord; Lou Berkman; and Danny Rosoff, called the “Count,” perhaps because of his fondness for swashbuckling tales in adventure books. The kids would fly past Moses' Candy Store (Mr. Moses, always scowling and hitching up his trousers), skitter by a Catholic orphanage located between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk, and stare at the pale, freckled boys behind the gate. Joey and his gang spent afternoons playing punchball or throwing confetti in the faces of girls, hearing them scream in delight and irritation (the boys especially liked to torment two neighborhood gals known to some of the older guys as “Squeezy” and “Frenchy”), or pooling the nickels their parents gave them for chocolates, jelly doughnuts, potato chips, or pretzels. Then they'd sprint, shouting and laughing, toward crowds sunbathing on the sand or lining up like obedient soldiers, wearing backpacks and carrying provisions, waiting to ride the Wonder Wheel, Shoot-the-Chutes, the Mile Sky Chaser, the Tornado, the Thunderbolt, or the brand-new Cyclone. Ride by ride, Joey built his courage for the next teeth-rattling challenge. He once said, “I approached [the Chaser] … in the same frame of mind with which I suppose I will eventually face death itself—with the conviction that if other people could go through it … I could too.” (The Mile Sky Chaser featured a sudden eighty-foot drop.)

The boys discovered that elderly visitors to Luna Park or Steeplechase, becoming fatigued, did not use all their ride tickets. Joey and his friends would sneak inside the parks and ask the oldsters if they could take the unused tickets. Joey gathered enough passes to go many times on any ride he wanted—to the point that soon he was so blasé, he never wanted to ride anything again. Thrills! Spills! Excitement! Nothing lived up to its billing for long. “[Eventually,] I could anticipate accurately every dive and turn of the Mile Sky Chaser with my eyes closed better than, years later, I was ever able to read an aerial map in the air corps,” he wrote in his memoir.

Walking home each dusk, passing fashionably dressed couples being pushed along the boardwalk in rolling wicker chairs, Joey loved the raucous patter of Yiddish rising from porch stoops as women, fresh from doing the day's laundry or washing dishes, sought company and cool air. His mother was not so enamored of the neighborhood. The crowds were growing bigger on the boardwalk—louder, more vulgar, she thought. This was no place for a kid. Coney was a “
chozzer
mart,” she hissed: a pig market.

Since the completion of the subway line from Manhattan, the number of daily visitors to Coney Island at summer's peak had almost doubled from half a million just a few years before. There
was
more noise and trash. Known as “the Nickel Empire” now, because of the five-cent train fares and the cheaper entertainments on display to draw bigger and bigger throngs, the place was pure frenzy. Sometimes there wasn't enough space on the beach for a person to drop a towel. At the Municipal Bath House, where families changed from street clothes into beach wear or bathing suits, only twelve thousand lockers were available. Some Coney Island residents, seizing a chance to make a dime, erected changing tents out of bedsheets and lured people to the sidewalks in front of their apartment buildings or bungalows. Families took to undressing in the open or under the boardwalk. It disgusted Lena to catch from her window flashes of naked bodies, skinny, fat, disintegrating. On side streets, people ate pungent fried foods from sloppy tubs brought from home. Lena hated the way Joey and his pals hung around beach gymnasts, loudmouthed oafs, barely dressed, flexing their muscles, standing on their heads or balancing awkwardly on the exposed torsos of their girlfriends. Food wrappers and paper cups amassed like sediment in the Railroad Avenue trench, and on windy afternoons they blew up into the street against your legs.