What Is All This? (48 page)

Always home for dinner on time, shirt smelling of work: sweat, from all the teeth he pulled out, and the chemicals he used there for plates and fillings.

Scrubbed his hands with a nail brush before sitting at the table—“My fingers have been in all sorts of mouths, so need two to three washes”—my mother at one end, he at the other, various numbers of kids on either side.

“Eat all your plate,” he'd say to me. “When I was your age we felt lucky to get one square a day.”

Not “What happened at school today?” but the job I had after.

“Everything still good there? Getting to work on time and not giving them any trouble? You never want to lose or quit a job before you have another one. How much you making now? They don't hint you're due for a raise soon? If you do have a few extra bucks a week hanging around in your pocket, you don't think it's time you started contributing to the house? I did at ten and never stopped. It costs us a small fortune to bring up seven kids.”

When they didn't want us to know what they were saying at the table, they spoke Yiddish. He'd taught it to her so she could speak to his mother. His father, a weaver and darner, had spoken a broken English, but only Yiddish at home.

“Go lie on your stomach in a bathtub,” was one of the curses he translated for us. Others: “May his head get so small to fit through the eye of a needle. May the rest of his life be like a hand caught in a jackal's jaw. May he have no sons to say kaddish for him, and if his wife does give him one, then a son who turns into a goy.” I didn't understand why he found them so funny.

“Mockey Jew bastard” was the worst thing he could call a person.

“Not at the table, Labe—please,” my mother would say.

“Who he?” he often said when we were speaking about someone he didn't know. “Who is he?” I once said, and he said “You too? God, won't any of my kids ever know when I'm joking?”

Home with newspapers he found on subway seats and in public trash cans, yellow with piss a couple of times and once with spit on it, but he said “So what's the big deal? You just tear that part of the paper off and read the rest. And look what I've saved over the years by not buying the afternoon dailies: several trees.”

When one of us said “Why do you have to be so cheap?,” he raised his hand and said “Shut your trap, you nobody,” but never once hit any of us except a few times with a newspaper.

He gave my mother spending money every Friday at the dinner table. He'd come home, scrub his hands, sit down, take out his wallet and say “Here, for the week.” Sometimes she'd say she didn't know how she could keep the house running on so little, and he'd say something like “What, what I gave isn't enough? Okay, then—take everything I got,” and throw some more bills across the table at her or slap the money down in front of him and tell one of the kids “Pass it to your mother.”

In a good mood, he'd take a wad of bills out of his pants pocket, unwrap the rubber band around it and say They aren't all ones either. Who's gonna count what I took in just for today?” When one of my brothers or sisters would give the figure, he'd say to us “See why I want all my sons to be dentists?”

They argued at least twice a week at the dinner table. When it got really bad I'd get up and start to bring my dishes into the kitchen, and he'd say “Where you going? You didn't excuse yourself.” I'd say “May I please be excused?” and he'd say “Get the hell out of here if you can't take it.”

He'd eat the half a grapefruit right down to the white rind, then hold it up, squeeze it in half and drink the juice left in it straight into his mouth.

Got arrested for steering, for a cut of the fee, his patients or women they knew to doctor friends for illegal abortions. He spent two years in prison, lost his dental license and had to give up his practice, and went broke paying for his lawyers.

“Did it standing on one foot,” he liked to say about his prison term, but that was all he spoke about it except that he met lots of very respectable and educated people there—“Judges, important businessmen and politicians”—many of whom will be future patients of his, he said, once he gets back his license.

“If I had a nickel I'd build a fence around it,” he said whenever we asked him for one, and then he usually gave.

Insisted we kiss him till his dying day, he used to say, “just as I did with my father.”

“Pick me a winner,” he'd say when I put my finger in my nose. “Get me a green one this time,” he also used to say, if he didn't say the “pick me a winner” line.

I was ashamed of his frayed pants cuffs and shirt collars, stained ties and pants, broken shoelaces and other men's shoes he wore. Dead men's shoes, given to him by their widows, of several sizes from a too tight to a floppy 11.

“He's a diamond in the rough,” his best friend told my mother before they got married, “who'll continue to adore his mother much more than he ever will you.”

He said he was happiest when he was at his office, seeing a stream of cronies there, and working on people's teeth, especially extracting a deep-rooted tooth out of a big man's jaw. “If I can pull it out with no Novocain, even better. I've been blessed with two strong quick wrists to do it, if the guy sits tight, with little bleeding or pain and no swelling after.”

Pulled one of my mother's molars out two nights before their wedding. “In her parents' kitchen,” he said, “and without anesthetic. She was an ideal patient; not a tear or peep.”

He supposedly had a woman or two on the side now and then, my mother said, but she never believed it: “He was too stingy to.”

To keep what little hair was left on top of his head, she massaged his scalp several nights a week for years.

“I'll admit,” she said, “your father and I never had a problem in bed, except when he'd been terrible to me that day. But he always said ‘Let's work things out before we go to sleep so we can have nice dreams and wake up okay,' and for the most part we did.”

Rare times we saw him loaded, and it always seemed to be after they came home from the annual Grand Street Boys gala, he'd throw all his change on the kitchen floor for us to pick up and keep. Then my mother would usually say That proves your father's had too much to drink. Always when there's an open bar. One of you want to help me get him into bed?”

I can't remember him ever holding my hand when I was young, teaching me a sport, helping me with my homework, seeing one of my teachers, taking me to a ballgame or park, stopping to talk to me on the street, going anywhere alone with me but once a year to buy me clothes wholesale at a patient's factory downtown. He did used to take a couple of us to Broadway shows once or twice a year because the theater manager, for free dental work, would give us seats that hadn't been sold. We'd show up in the lobby about twenty minutes before the play began, the manager would be called out, he'd say “Let's see if anything's available,” and we'd wait while he checked. There were always seats for us, though we'd have to be split up, my brother or sister and I in the balcony, my father in the orchestra.

“It's not what you know but who you know”—quote he used most. Or “Remember this: it'll help you out in life. It's not what you know but who.”

“I failed with my sons when none of them went into dentistry,” he used to say. “Artists you had to be. Writers, reporters, part of the intellectual elite. You'll all learn soon enough that you went wrong, but by then you'll be stuck for the rest of your lives at what you're doing.”

He'd stand me up on the kitchen counter in front of his friends and say “Sing ‘God Bless America' for us.” His friends would applaud when I was done and give me a nickel or dime each. One man gave me a new dollar bill once. My father took it from me and said “Better I keep it for you for the time being. Otherwise, you'll lose it.” When I asked him for it a while later, he said “What dollar you talking about? I've given you way more in change over the last few weeks. All you kids ever ask me for is money.”

He used the word “schwartzer,” and I said “You shouldn't say that word.” He said “What're telling me, that I'm prejudiced, against them? I'm not. They're in fact great patients, paying up much faster than the Hebes and never once bouncing a check.”

Three of his five siblings died of diphtheria and influenza when they were very young. His surviving brother looked like a wolf and was a bookie most of his life and died of a blood clot in his brain when he walked into a streetlight pole. His sister came to the apartment one Sunday a month with a jar of glutinous soup she made and greasy cookies and onion rolls she baked that were still warm. They always spent at least an hour alone together, talking very low so no one would hear them. After she left, my mother said things like “I wonder how much cash she got out of your dad this time after one of her sob stories. He's a sucker for everything she says, just as he was for his mother.” Or “I can imagine the loathsome things she said about me and which your dad, of course, let her get away with. I never liked his family. Only his father. A sweeter, sadder shlep never lived.”

He liked to call me “junior boy” because I was small for my age and the fourth and last son. At first I liked it—he said it affectionately and sometimes rubbed my hair. But when I got into my mid-teens I asked him to stop calling me it—it made me seem too boyish. He said “I can't; it's gotten into my blood.” “Junior boy, junior boy,” he'd say mockingly when I was in my twenties and angry for one reason or another or indignant over something, usually politics or the state of culture.

“You can fall in love with a rich girl as well as a poor one,” he said, “so why not one with money? But never bring home a girl of whatever financial means who's not Jewish.”

“I get along with everybody,” he said, “which is why I've done well as a dentist, and when I lost my license, selling textiles. Be like me, smart and not a wiseguy, and you'll get somewhere. Go on like you're doing—a cynical sour-puss—and you'll end up a flop no matter what field you go in.”

The whole world's trying to steal from you—remember that,” he said. “But what most of them don't have is our
Yiddische kop
, so take advantage of what God and we gave you. You don't, that just shows what a schmo and easy mark you are.”

Some nights after dinner he'd say “Get me one of my cigars out of the humidor.” He'd give me the cigar band, sometimes slip it on my finger, and a matchbook for me to light the cigar. Then he'd sit back in his easy chair, content in smoke. “Boy, does that feel good after a long day. And better when you have such a terrific kid lighting it. Thanks.”

“Where'll all your writing get you?” he'd say. “To the nearest soup kitchen if you're lucky. Give it up before you really start suffering because of all the disappointments you're bound to face.”

“You drink too much and you got a filthy mouth,” he'd tell me when I was in my twenties. “You'll just make enemies and never get a good-looking levelheaded wife. She'll think: ‘That's gonna be the father of my children when there are so many more refined sober guys out there who have a steady income? Not on your life.'“

Most of my teeth he worked on he ruined for me. He didn't take x-rays when I had a cavity, saying he didn't need to: when he was drilling he could see with his own eyes where the decay ended, which meant that a year or so later the tooth usually started aching again. He did give me Novocain, but the minimal amount, so it always hurt when he used the drill on me. When I was sixteen I paid for two root canals with another dentist with money I was making as a delivery boy after school and Saturdays. My father never asked me about my teeth after that and I never told him about the other dentist, but he knew. Otherwise he would have said, as he used to, “You haven't had a checkup in a while. Let's set up a time next week.” Before he got his license back he worked on our teeth and several of his old patients' in a friend's office, always at night after the other dentist had left.

Walked out on some of his dinner checks, half to save money and half as a game. “I love putting something innocent over on people,” he said. “What about the waiter or waitress?” I said, and he said “Oh, don't worry your head; I always leave a tip.”

When I got in front of the TV set, he'd say “What's your father, a glazier? Get out of the way.”

His family was very poor and he worked every day after school and all day Sunday starting when he was eight. “Saturdays, because we were Orthodox, I rested like the rest of the neighborhood, though if my folks had let me I would've worked that day too after attending
shul
.

“Went straight from high school to dental school—that's the way it was then; it wasn't that I was especially good in the sciences. But I applied myself, burned those candles—and lots of those nights they were candles, which were cheaper than gas, or electricity, when our building finally got it. If I could do it, you can too, if you changed your major again and went back to being pre-dental. Of course, I could've spent four years in college and then gone to dental school, but who had that kind of time to waste? I wanted to start making some real money and move my folks to a better apartment and buy my mother a fur stole, and things like that.”

Had the largest dental practice and the first purple opentop car on the Lower Eastside. “I saw that car as an advertisement for my practice,” he said. “All the girls were after your father,” my mother said. “Not only did he have a good income but he also had hair then, so was quite the catch.”

Also said about his time in prison “I did it dancing, something I always felt good about, that I didn't whine or act like a fruitcake while I was there.”