World's Fair (25 page)

But I disliked the charitableness of it, it was a life of dangerous propaganda, the more so because it was so quiet. I felt guilty for enjoying myself and the peace of this privileged household. I had to be someone else here, I couldn’t whine or complain or make demands, but only show my gratitude. I felt coerced here in Heaven, and I was happy when at last it was time to leave.

N
ow I recall the present Donald brought me when I was still very ill and lying in the children’s ward. It was actually a gift from one of his friends, Seymour or Irwin, or Bernie, I don’t remember which. It was a lapel pin shaped like a pickle. It was funny. It was a Heinz 57 pickle, which people got for visiting the Heinz Dome at the New York World’s Fair.

“When you’re all better,” Donald said to me as I turned the pin over in my fingers, “we’ll go to the World’s Fair.”

“Have you been yet?” I said.

“No,” my brother said. “We wouldn’t go without you, you know that. We’ll all go together. Mom and Dad and you and I. The whole family.”

AUNT FRANCES

I
don’t know what to tell you about your father. He was a free spirit. As children we were not that close. I was older, I had different friends, different ideas. I spent my time at the downtown Ethical. The downtown branch of the Ethical Culture Society was for Jews. The Upper West Side Ethical was for the Irish. I learned table manners, music, how to behave, all the better things. The Ethical made my life.

But Dave was not interested in that. He was wild. He was handsome and bright but very trying. He teased my friends. He chased them when they came to visit us. Or he held the door closed against them. One day one of my friends was wearing her first pair of heels and he was chasing her down the stairs of our building and her heel caught on a step and snapped right off. How she cried. He was sorry then, although he pretended not to be.

One of my friends was Felix Frankfurter’s sister. The Frankfurters were poor too, as poor as we were.

We lived on Gouverneur Street. Every week, with my group of girls, I walked from the Lower East Side to the Academy of Music opera house on Twenty-third Street. We each had fifty cents for the occasion. Seats were twenty-five cents. The other twenty-five cents were for carfare, but instead we bought bunches of violets, so we walked both ways and sang the songs
we’d heard on our way home, with our pretty violets. I remember seeing
Babes in Toyland
at the Academy, but that must have been later, when I was in high school.

Dave was a dreamer, he was always late to school. When he was getting dressed in the morning he’d be putting on his shoes and socks and he’d forget what he was doing and sit there, he’d forget he was supposed to be pulling on his sock.

As a teenager he spent most of his time at the Socialist headquarters. That was our father’s influence. Your grandpa was a wonderful man. He read three papers a day. He was a great reader, he loved books, the Russian authors were his favorites. He had a remarkable memory, he remembered books he’d read thirty-five years before, he could quote from a book and talk about it as if he had it in front of him. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist. But he never pressed his ideas on us. He would explain things and let us make up our own minds. Dave loved him, he adored him:

When my father first came to America, this would have been 1886 or 1887, he was a young man not yet married. In fact he and Mama had not even met. He worked at whatever they gave him, they made him a cutter, but he was terrible at it, he was terrible all his life at business, he had no head for it. Years later he became a printer. He had a little shop on Eightieth Street east of Third Avenue. Before that he worked for your father in the sound-box business. But as a young man he immediately enrolled in school and learned everything he could. He went to the Eastside Alliance every night after work to learn English. And he studied socialism. Morris Hillquit was his teacher, the famous lawyer. And at the end of the year Morris Hillquit gave my father a dictionary because he was the best in the class.

My mother was better at earning a living than my father. She did piecework. For a while she had a tea shop. Later she ran a resort, a kind of boardinghouse, in the country. I was fifteen or so. The resort failed. She was strict with us girls, with me and Molly, the baby. But Dave could do no wrong. Dave she adored. Dave was the apple of her eye. And he loved her.

From Gouverneur Street we moved all the way up to 100th
Street, where the hospital is now. Then there were tenements. There was a farm on Park Avenue at Ninety-eighth Street. My mother would hand me ten cents and I’d go to the farm and pick the things we needed. Everything was a penny. A bunch of radishes, a penny, a cucumber, a head of lettuce. One penny.

Dave and I were not close until many years later when we were each married, with children. I married much earlier. When he married Rose they made the handsomest couple I had ever seen. Rose was a beautiful girl.

Ephraim and I began to court when I was sixteen. Dave was thirteen or fourteen. There is a family story that Dave threw Ephraim down the stairs, but that is not true. What he did was lock him out, hold the door to keep him from visiting me. Dave made Ephraim’s life miserable. There was friction between them. They never liked each other.

Ephraim and I had a wonderful marriage. We never argued. He was a conservative Republican, a member of the Liberty League. He knew I felt differently. I voted for Norman Thomas one year and simply didn’t tell him and he didn’t ask. He trusted me to handle all the household accounts and make the domestic decisions while he attended to his law practice. He never questioned my judgment. The system worked beautifully. Ephraim was a remarkable man. You know, by the twenties we had a household staff of five—housekeeper, cook, maid, a nurse for the children, and a chauffeur. But when the stock market was booming, Ephraim advised many of his clients to take out second mortgages on their homes and invest in the market and so after the crash in ’29 he felt responsible to those people and made good on every one of those mortgages. He didn’t have to, but that’s the way he was. He wiped out his fortune. We had to let the staff go, except for Clara. We had to struggle to put our boys through college.

Dave should have done better than he did. But he was a dreamer. When we lived on the Lower East Side, he liked to go down by the docks and look at the sailing ships. In those days the ships came right up to the street. The prows extended over the sidewalks. You could hear the ropes flapping in the wind,
you could hear their masts creaking. He loved that he stared at the sailors. My mother told him not to go there. She thought he would run away to sea. He was unpredictable. He was a trial to us all. Papa had a wonderful sense of humor! When they were retired and living up on the Concourse, Dave would call on the phone and say he was coming to visit on Tuesday, for example. Tuesday would come and he wouldn’t appear, and wouldn’t appear, and my mother would fret and Papa would say, well, he didn’t say
which
Tuesday.

I loved Dave, we all did. When he was so sick, the last year of his life, I drove him around Manhattan to his accounts, to the stores he sold to. He could hardly walk, he was on crutches, but he couldn’t afford to stop working.

I do remember one story about your father when he was a little boy. There was a wonderful family, the Romanoffs, who had taken my mother and father under their wing when they were first married. They were an older couple with no children. Mr. Romanoff enrolled me in school because at that point my parents’ English was not that good; he knew English and could speak to the authorities. Anyway, they were delighted with us. Mr. Romanoff had a successful business, a drugstore up in the hundreds somewhere. That was the country. And he especially loved Dave. So the Romanoffs invited Dave to stay the weekend with them, they had no children of their own, you see, and so my mother, wanting to show her little boy at his best, bought a beautiful new suit for him with a hat. Dave turned red when they dressed him up for the visit. He hated the new suit. The hat was a little top hat, I think. When Mama brought him to the Romanoffs, Dave went upstairs and while the adults were downstairs on the street in front of the house, the suit came sailing out the window and landed at their feet. He would not wear it. And to emphasize the point he came outside in his underwear, this four-year-old, and came down the steps and in front of everyone threw the hat down in the dirt and stomped on it. He jumped up and landed with both feet on the hat again and again. Stomped it into the dirt. So they would know what he thought of it.

TWENTY-ONE

F
or several months I would sleep badly. I was afraid to go to sleep: in my dreams I smelled ether and felt a knife cutting into my belly.

When I went back to school, I was for a day or so treated as a returning hero. We all smiled shyly at each other. My classmates had sent me a big homemade get-well card with everyone’s name painstakingly autographed. My friend Meg’s hand was very clear and round and firm, which had not surprised me—as a girl she would be good at penmanship. My friend Arnold wrote like a spider.

All along my teacher had been sending me the lessons and I was almost caught up.

At home I learned that my father was moving his store to another location. The Hippodrome theater was being torn down and all the businesses there had to leave. He had found another site a few blocks north on Sixth Avenue, up near the new Radio City Music Hall between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets and was hopeful about it. It was a large space, which meant he could display more stock; on the other hand, the rent was more and there would be inevitable losses of sales from the move. So everything was at a risk, including the money he and his partner had borrowed to build the shelves and the cabinets
for the display of merchandise. There would also be a loss of selling time while this work went on.

One day my mother took me downtown to see the new store as it was being renovated. We found my father in his shirt sleeves, which was unusual, he always wore his coat and vest and tie, even at home on weekends. He was running around with a cigar in his mouth and stacks of records in his arms; he and Donald were stocking the shelves with albums. Lester, his partner, was unpacking radio consoles, and in the back a man on a ladder was still painting the wall and two carpenters were building the listening booths, of which there were to be three. I was tremendously excited by what was going on. The store was much bigger than the old one, half again as wide. The floor was carpeted. A wide staircase halfway back and in the middle of the floor led to a basement level that was to be devoted entirely to musical instruments. Uncle Willy was to be in charge of this section. My father’s face was flushed with excitement. He put his cigar down on a counter for a moment and his partner, Lester, said, “Dave, don’t you know better than to put a lighted cigar on a new piece of furniture? We haven’t even opened the store yet!” We all stopped what we were doing. My father said very firmly, “Lester, this cigar won’t burn the counter. Don’t you know anything about tobacco? A cigar is a rolled leaf, it is not shredded like cigarette tobacco. A cigarette will continue to burn, a cigar goes out when you put it down.” He was very scientific in his explanation, and I was relieved. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” he said to Lester, and everyone laughed.

Outside, crowds of people moved along the sidewalks. I was excited that my father’s new store was so close to the Radio City Music Hall. Only a block away was the Roxy. We were at the heart of things. Occasionally people stopped to peer through the locked doors. They pressed their noses up against the windows. They were very curious.

Some days later the store opened, and the following Saturday we again went down to see it. Everything was finished now and shining. Red, white and blue bunting was draped across the top
of the windows and the front door. In the windows were displays of radios and electrolas, and photographs of Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin, Benny Goodman and Fats Waller, and Arturo Toscanini and Josef Hoffmann, as if somehow they all knew my father and had gathered to celebrate the new store. The inside was hushed and remarkable. Standing on slightly raised platforms were the latest models of console radios, all the famous makes, like Stewart-Warner, Grunow, Maytone, Philco, and Stromberg-Carlson. Attached to each was a small tag with the price and description of the radio’s feature. I liked particularly the RCA Victor model in heart walnut that went for $89.95. It had eight tubes, two of glass, a magic eye, an edge-lighted dial and a phono connection. Also there was a Crosley with fifteen tubes, five of them glass, an autoexpressionator, a mystic hand, and a cardiamatic unit for $174.50. Smaller table radios were grouped on counters and shelves behind the counters in the radio section. I liked very much a new-model Radette that featured telematic dial tuning. It was a telephone dial set right over the circular station indicator so that you could dial your station as you dialed a telephone. I thought that was really fine for only $24.95.