A Book of Great Worth (8 page)

“No.” After a moment, my father added: “It’s been almost four months now, so it’s doubtful she will. Who knows what may have become of her?”

“Ah,” Professor Bell said. “I would dearly love to in
terview her.” She took off her eyeglasses and gently rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, a gesture my father found endearing. When she removed her hand, her eyes, a lighter shade of brown than he had first thought, were warm and inviting. “I wonder if I could impose upon you for a favour?”

“If I can be of service, of course.”

“Perhaps you could insert a sentence or two in your column inquiring as to this woman’s whereabouts, ‘will the woman who wrote the letter on,’ I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the date, ‘will the woman who wrote about her love affair with the Indian man please be in contact...’ Something along those lines. Would that be possible?”

“Ah,” my father said. Professor Bell had not yet put her glasses back on and he found himself gazing into those warm brown eyes. He felt a moment of panic, as if he were being drawn into those pools of liquid, chocolatey brown, where he would surely drown, but it quickly passed. What harm could such a subterfuge do – other, of course, than to compound the original fabrication? Heshberg, if he even noticed, would find it amusing.

•••

In matters of the heart, my father found, each situation was different. His experience was useless for the situation he soon found himself in.

After some weeks had passed, he was able to imagine writing this letter:

Esteemed Yenta Schmegge,

I find myself unexpectedly in need of your sage advice. I’m enmeshed in an impossible love affair. In fact, I have inextricably entangled myself in a web of deception for which I have less and less stomach every day. The Americans have a phrase for it: ‘painting oneself into a corner.’

I am a young man from a good Jewish home. Our family was not religious – I would characterize myself
as an agnostic – but Jewishness, if not Judaism, is im
portant to me. Yet I am involved with a Gentile woman, a
shiksa
, for whom ethnicity and faith are merely subjects of interest, to be examined and studied rather than adhered to.

She is a professional woman, a woman of learning, for whom education is of the highest importance. I have very little formal education, though I have done much to improve myself. She is part of a profession that follows a strict code of ethical conduct, that draws a sharp distinction between theory and data. I follow a trade that has high ideals but is essentially amoral.

I love this woman and we are involved in a passionate affair that has gone beyond my wildest dreams. But, in order to advance this affair, I resorted to a number of falsehoods; now, to preserve the affair, I must pile falsehood upon falsehood. There is, I fear, a void at the centre. It is only a matter of time, I’m certain, until this woman, who is no fool, will see through the facade I’ve erected.

So, I implore and beseech you, tell me, dear, wise Yenta Schmegge, what am I to do?

My father had not really written the letter, but the situation and the question were real enough.

He considered the question, and the one contained in a letter which had come that day, a real question, in a real letter, from a real reader: “My husband beats me and the children. What should I do?”

He had been sitting at his desk in
The
World
newsroom for an hour or more thinking of how to answer this question. It was late, and the newsroom was deserted. There was a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer of his desk. He opened the drawer, took out the bottle and a small glass and poured himself a drink.

The only answer my father could think of for either dilemma – his own and that of his distressed correspondent – was the one he had written so often in the newspaper: “Follow your heart.” In the dim light of the empty newsroom, the inadequacy of the answer – and its falsity – loomed enormous.

• • •

A False Moustache

In 1924, when my father came back to New York from Cleveland, he moved uptown to Harlem, where he hoped to find independence.

For several years after dropping out of school at thirteen, my father had knocked around, working at a variety of jobs, usually taking a night class of some sort at the same time from the
Arbeiter Ring,
the Workman’s Circle, an organization that sought to bring education and culture to the Jewish immigrants, and travelling some. A problem with his feet allowed him to avoid
service in the Great War that raged all over Europe, in
cluding the area where he’d been born. This had prevented him from having to put his beliefs in pacifism to the test. Instead of taking up arms, he’d served his country by working on a farm, something he already had some experience with.

Afterwards, he went west, and he had just spent almost four years on a small Yiddish newspaper in Cleveland learning the craft he would earn his living by for the next forty. He liked to tell me, years later, that he would often dream, in the cold rooming-house
attic he’d shared with a mouse he called
Maleka,
of re
turning to the city he’d once thought didn’t have room for him, the city of his father’s and brother’s friends and influence, their reputation, like a bright morning star, burning on the horizon, forcing men to lift their heads and see.

In those days, with the Great War still seeming to reverberate in the air above the city like a subway train that has rumbled out of sight but not hearing, Harlem was already beginning to make the change that was to plunge it into the new world. The handsome brownstones that lined 125th Street and its dissecting avenues were starting the painful process of transforming themselves into neat, genteel boarding houses, like capped teeth in a once proud mouth – the smile still warm, but no longer glittering. My father took a room on the second floor of a Lexington Avenue house, just south of 124th Street, that had once belonged to a lawyer with Tammany connections. The lawyer had died in debt and now his solemn parlor was the domain of an aunt who had only her wits and boarders to keep her together. The room was clean, with a scrubbed window behind starched white curtains looking out on the avenue and one slim slice of Mount Morris Park, two blocks west, that wasn’t cut off by the buildings across the way. North of 125th, where the roots were deeper or the money of better quality, my father didn’t know which, there were still families with servants living in the pillared, imposing brownstones, and from his window, on warm afternoons, he could watch the black nursemaids, who lived far south of the pleasant street, strolling with their charges to the park, where they would sit on benches and watch the children play in the sun. He paid twelve dollars a week, and that included coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner sharply at six. When he worked the night shift, as he often did, his landlady packed him a wholesome lunch.

There was no mouse in the room on Lexington Av
enue and, even though the subway ride downtown
to East Broadway took almost an hour, my father en
joyed living there, far from the sights and smells that meant something different entirely. And his enjoyment was enhanced somewhat when, after several weeks, he ran into Louis Shmelke in the hall outside his room.

“Shmelke,” my father said, surprised and pleased, still new enough in his surroundings to be lonely, “what brings you here?”

“I have to go,” Shmelke shrugged, gesturing to
wards the toilet at the end of the hall. At the other end, my father could see, a door hung open, the door to the room where, he believed, a travelling salesman with a lingerie firm resided. Or had.

“So go,” my father said, moving out of the lean man’s way, “but step in on your way back and begin the process again.”

A minute later, they were lifting their water glasses to the memory of Cleveland. “May that infermal lake from which blows that infermal cold wind overspill its shores and swallow the infermal city up,” Shmelke said, licking his lips with a peculiar slapping sound, like small waves on stones. He swallowed the whisky with a single gulp.

He was a tall, fleshless man with ears like mushrooms springing out of moist earth, fond of suits a size too large, as if he expected suddenly to put on weight. His lips were the size and colour of the patches on a worn inner tube. He was altogether the most homely man my father had ever known, quite an accomplishment in a world populated by men who worked too hard or kept their heads on too lofty planes to be physically vain.

“It was my partner, that infermal rascal Goldblatt, who forced me to descend,” Shmelke said in explanation for his presence, both in the city and these modest surroundings. He was a humourless, literal man whose command of his second language was not quite up to his reach.

“The ticket selling?” my father inquired after a mo
ment’s thought. They had not been friends, by any means, but they’d frequented the same café in Cleveland, a gathering spot for poets, newspapermen, actors, artists, musicians and hangers-on, and he’d known of half a dozen different ventures in which Shmelke was involved. “Artists’ representative” was what he liked to call himself; press agent was closer to the truth; ticket agent was, in fact, what he was the last time my father had heard.

“Let me tell you, that was no sofa on roses, that expedition. It was a service, a struggle of love, something to do for the people, you know what I mean, Morgenstern? You think I could make a dollar on a thing like that?”

“Would I argue with you?” my father asked. He poured another two fingers of whisky into the dusty glasses.

“My partner, what a
shlimazel,
a head for business he had on his shoulders as big as this.” Shmelke held up his thumb, examined it critically then replaced it with his pinky. “As big as this, no bigger.” He gulped down the whisky with a rubbery slap. “We had these tickets, this big order, something really expressive, for opera, Caruso, no, not him, but someone just as infamous, and it brought in a lot of money. A lot? It made me enervated having that much money so close. And was I right?”

He slapped his narrow forehead with the palm of his hand. “That infermal
shmegegge
had a chance – a
chance,
he called it, a hole in the ground would be more like it – to buy up a whole theatre for Gilbert and Sullivan, so he used all the money from the opera tickets. The whole cat and caboodle.”

“Sounds like a smart move,” my father said naively.

“A smart move? Sure, like suicide is smart for the widow and the dolphins.” Shmelke glared at my father as if he were in the company of a fool. My father tipped the bottle over the glasses.

“So there comes the man from the opera saying where’s the money from the tickets? So what do we say?”

“Tomorrow?” my father offered.

Shmelke peered at him with skeptical admiration. “Sure, tomorrow, that’s context. But what happens after tomorrow?”

“Gilbert and Sullivan is sold?”

“Morgenstern, no offensive, but you and my infermal partner Goldblatt would be sweethearts, regular darlings, newlyweds you could be.”

“You couldn’t sell Gilbert and Sullivan?”

Shmelke’s watery eyes rolled up and almost disappeared into his eyelids. “Morgenstern, you can
always
sell Gilbert and Sullivan. In Cleveland, Gilbert could be elected mayor, Sullivan the governor of Ohio, maybe.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Problem? Who said anything about a problem? Morgenstern, you surprise me.
Problem?
What a cryptic. No problem, believe me. The Gilbert and Sullivan money goes to the opera and that accounting is closed, the book is finished,
kaput.
A little inconsideration, maybe, when the Gilbert and Sullivan cancels and there’s the refunds to make, but a
problem? Noooo.”

Shmelke glared at my father, challenging him, and, though he was tempted to say he didn’t understand, my father held his tongue. After that, the two men saw each other often, in the hallway outside the toilet, rather than at the dinner table, as my father was then working nights, and often they would share a glass of whisky in my father’s room, occasionally in Shmelke’s. The man did not bathe often and there was an odour in his room that my father found worth the price of his whisky to avoid.

It was spring when my father moved into the room in Harlem, and the city was opening itself up for him the way leaves and blossoms open themselves up to the insects that float on the warm breezes of April and May. The Jewish life of New York was rich and exciting in those days, its theatre vigorous, its literature strong
and searching, its artists bold and sensitive with a free
dom growing out of a new sense of purpose after a hundred years or more of lying low. There were half a dozen Yiddish dailies in the city then – his father was editor of one of them,
The
Morning Journal
, and his older brother
Sam worked for another,
The Day
– and the competi
tion between them was fierce, their pages filled with essays on the arts and philosophy, criticism, Talmudic
debate,
humour, advice on everything from self-improvement to affairs of the heart and body, along with news of the far-flung community and the world at large that owed as much, in its style and presentation, to Hearst and Pulitzer as it did to Spinoza and the learned rabbis of Poland and Russia. My father was a news writer, not an essayist, toiling, like his brother, for
The Day
, but he loved the company of the great men he drank coffee with in the cafeteria at the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street and at the Café Royale on Second Avenue, in the heart of the Yiddish theatre district known as the Jewish Rialto, where the lights burned all through the night like beacons.