A Book of Great Worth (9 page)

Sometimes, he would encounter Shmelke there. The tall, skinny man with the pennant ears had secured a position as press agent to a rabbinical council and was also doing publicity work for a hospital in the Bronx. But his heart and soul belonged to the arts and he often could be found in the evenings at the Café Royale and other warm, bright rooms that sparkled through the grey streets of the Lower East Side like fireflies. There were often actors still in makeup and costume, sometimes outlandish costume, at the café, and Shmelke, with his ill-fitting suits and clownish face, could easily have been one of them, my father thought.

“Morgenstern, Morgenstern, join us. Sit down, my friend. Combine with me a drink. You know Rubenstein and Pashka?”

“Of course.” My father sat, smiling. Despite the invitation, he knew he would pay for the whisky he ordered.

“Rubenstein, the steamed violinist, and Pashka, the clammed dramatist. Morgenstern, the novelist and poet.”

My father knew both men – one a teacher of music at a Hebrew school, the other a stagehand at the Yiddish Art Theatre across the street –
and the conversation was good, the evening warm. He lingered, although it was late. Shmelke and he rode home together on the subway.

“Come in, have a drink,” Shmelke begged. “I’ve got something to show you.”

My father’s curiosity was stronger than his tiredness and he followed the bobbing head with its ballast ears into the cluttered room, rich with the smell of socks. On the rumpled bed, there was a peaked white cap like those he had seen the black nursemaids in the park wearing. Shmelke snatched it up and twirled it on a finger, grinning darkly.

There was a bottle of cheap rye on the dresser and my father poured two glasses.

“You should see her, Morgenstern,” Shmelke said. “An angel, a dark angel, like devil’s food cake, like an animal of the night.”

My father was moved by the intensity and clarity of Shmelke’s description. He swallowed his drink and took out a cigarette.

“You’ve had this woman here? In your room?”

“Right here,” Shmelke grinned, patting the twisted bedclothes. “Why not?” He tossed the cap carelessly onto the bed, shrugging his shoulders. “What do I care what people think?”

“Very commendable, my friend, but does that include our landlady?”

The rubbery lips smacked at the rim of his glass. “Depression, depression, Morgenstern, is the soul of valour.” He winked.

“And the girl? She’s nice?”

Shmelke laughed, a cackling that reminded my fa
ther of the chickens that used to share the kitchen of his mother’s farmhouse in the winter, years before, when he’d been a boy in Galicia. “Nice, what’s nice? To the Café Royale, I don’t intend to bring her.
Here
, she’s nice.” He pointed to the bed.

“Is it wise, though, one of those girls?” my father asked cautiously.

“Morgenstern, of you I’m shameless.” Shmelke fixed him with a stern gaze, the rims of his elephant ears reddening slightly. “A man like you, a spigot.”

•••

During that first year of his return to the city, when my father was firmly establishing himself as a newspaperman, and some time before he would meet my mother, he had love affairs of his own, great friendships, nights of talk and whisky and coffee that lasted till dawn, though his lack of formal schooling always made him
feel a little inadequate in intellectual circles. He be
lieved in free love, or thought he did, until my mother came into his life and he changed his mind on that subject
quickly and entirely. He was active in the Jewish Writ
ers Guild, which got its start at the same time as the Newspaper Guild but soon outstripped its English language rival. He got a raise. And one night, in late summer, he was witness to a murder and wrote a story that made an impression on his editors.

My father had an interest in labour, but there al
ready
was a labour editor on the paper, a stern old man who had been a scholar and teacher in the old country and who wrote with the grace of an albatross. When this man, Jaffe, was busy, my father was often pressed into service to help him if there was a conflict, and on an evening in September he went to cover a meeting of a group of garment cutters who were organizing themselves.

The meeting was in a small kosher restaurant on
Seventeenth Street, between Third and Fourth Av
enues.
It had been warm when my father left Harlem that af
ternoon and he had not worn a coat, but as darkness fell it turned cold and a stiff wind was sending newspapers skittering along the empty street as he walked towards the restaurant, the collar of his suit jacket turned up against his neck. A man in a lumberjack’s plaid shirt stood lounging against the plate glass of the restaurant, a toothpick in his mouth.

“Morgenstern,” the man said.

“Schechter, hello, you look like you’re ready for heavy labour.”

“I’m glad you could come,” Schechter said. “Those shits at the English papers, they don’t pay any attention.” He was a big man with a sensitive face who drank coffee occasionally in the Café Royale with a thin actress he was in love with. In Lithuania, my father knew, he had studied to be a doctor, but now he worked in the garment district, his quick fingers racing over patterns with a pair of scissors. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Heavy labour, sure. This is no kids’ stuff, you know.”

There had been a strike in one of the sweatshops that abounded like blossoms off the stem of lower Seventh Avenue, and then, mysteriously, there was a fire in the building and two of the organizers of the strike were arrested, charged with arson. Schechter himself had avoided the police only by accident. The fire was the work of gangsters, everyone knew, but fighting back was no easy matter.

My father lit a cigarette and glanced up the street. On the corner, a light burned in a newsstand but the other shops were dark. He would have liked to stand outside and chat with Schechter but it was cold and he opened the door of the restaurant. “See you inside.” As he moved into the warmth and the clatter of voices from the already crowded tables, he heard the sound of a car on the street but thought nothing of it. The shot rang out just as the door was clicking shut behind him and it didn’t register immediately; even when the glass shattered and Schechter’s shoulders crashed through towards him, he didn’t fully understand what had happened. Then there was confusion, shouting, a man rushing past him, jostling him, knocking him sideways, and he cut his hand on a piece of glass and found himself on his knees, staring into Schechter’s wide open eyes. What he remembered most of that moment, even many years later, was the lack of surprise in them.

His hand was still bleeding when he got home, hours later, although he had tied a handkerchief around it. Taking notes, telephoning, typing his story, there had been no chance for the wound even to begin to glaze over. The handkerchief was stiff with congealing blood and my father was attempting to take it off, his head lowered, as he climbed the stairs, and he bumped into Shmelke, who was standing at the top of the steps.

“That woman, she’s here, what should I do?” Shmelke said breathlessly. His massive ears were tinged with red along the rims like warning signs, and his lips seemed bluer than usual.

“So?” my father said, elbowing past him. “Excuse me. What woman is that?”

He went to the bathroom and snapped on the light, discarding the bloody handkerchief in the toilet.

“You don’t understand,” Shmelke whined. He was standing right behind him, his face pressed close to my father’s shoulder. “She’s right here, in my infermal room.”

“What’s to understand?” my father said. He turned on the cold water tap and plunged his hand into the lukewarm stream. “You should be congratulated, Shmelke. A charming young lady, visiting you here in your own room, and at this hour, no less. Wonderful. You
are to be congratulated and I do congratulate you. And
wish you good luck.” He was filled with the events of the evening and would have liked nothing better than to share them, again, with anyone interested, even Shmelke, but the man’s single-mindedness irritated him.

“Morgenstern
, sometimes I wonder how such a dope can manage to climb the stairs, let alone turn the knob on the door.” He pulled his head back when he saw the expression that flashed across my father’s face. “You’ll excuse me, I didn’t mean to defend. But this woman, she’s got me in such a tizzle. This
svartze
.”

“Oh, that woman,” my father said, his eyes widening. “She’s here?”

“Here? That’s nothing. Here I could live with. It’s who she’s got with her that sends shavings up my spine.”

“Her boyfriend?” My father turned off the water and held his hand up to the light to examine the cut. It wasn’t very deep but the glass had severed a big vein, an artery perhaps, and the blood wouldn’t stop seeping out. “Her husband? Her mother?”

“Worse,” Shmelke said gloomily. His belligerence had suddenly faded and he stared at the raw wound on my father’s hand as if he were considering how a similar gash would look on his throat. “What happened to your hand?”

“It’s nothing,” my father said. All of a sudden, he wanted to speak no more of it. All he wanted was to go to his room, drink a whisky and lie on his bed in the dark, where he knew the sound of shattering glass would reverberate in his ears all morning long. “What is it, Shmelke?”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Ah, so that’s it.” My father turned back to his hand, wrapping toilet paper around it till it was bulky as a crumpled package.

Shmelke observed this in silence, pursing his lips like water wings bobbing in a rough sea. “You know, maybe, a doctor?” he blurted out finally.

My father looked up from his hand into Shmelke’s
face and was washed with a wave of disgust. He re
membered the blank, stoical eyes of Schecter staring up at him and he felt, suddenly, very tired.

“Sure, sure,” he said. He brushed past Shmelke. “I’ll see in the morning.” He walked down the hall.

“And Morgenstern?” There was a plaintiveness in Shmelke’s voice my father had never heard before and it made him stop, his hand on the knob of his own door.

“Yes?”

“You could talk to her, maybe?”

My father turned around. “Now?”

“Sure, now. She’s in my room, waiting. She won’t go. All night, practically, she’s here. She won’t give me any peace. And Mrs. Lowe...” He nodded towards the stairs.

“Waiting for what?” my father asked. “Talk to her about what?”

“Tell her about the doctor you know. Tell her about how safe and sure this doctor is, how they take preclusions and it’s no more than getting your tinsels out, just a little cut and...”

My father didn’t wait for him to finish. He went
down the hall and into Shmelke’s room without knocking. The woman was sitting on the bed, her knees together and her hands clasped on them like a schoolchild
waiting to receive her lesson. “Hello,” my father said. “My name is Harry Morgenstern. I live here, down the hall.”

The woman looked up at him and blinked. She was a small, very dark girl, hardly out of her teens, with a pointy chin and shoulders that didn’t seem to matter. Her face was so dark, my father couldn’t clearly make out her features, but she seemed pleasant enough, though hardly pretty. There was a blue kerchief with lit
tle white flowers on her head. “Where’s Louis?” she de
manded. Her voice was small but strong, like a rain that seems innocent enough but wets you through.

“I’m right here, my little flower,” Shmelke said from the doorway. “My friend Morgenstern, the novelist, he’s a man of the world. Believe me, to him this is nothing. He’s seen this sort of thing dozens of times.” He made a snapping motion with his fingers but they wouldn’t connect and there was only a rasping sound. “It’s only a triffle.”

My father sat on the bed beside the woman. She glared at him but, after a moment, her gaze softened.

“Why don’t you leave us for a moment, Shmelke? There’s a bottle in my room. Help yourself.” He had to fumble in his pocket with his left hand for the key. They waited until the door had closed, Shmelke’s footsteps sounded in the hall, and another door could be heard opening, then closing. Then my father and the black woman looked at each other again.

“He’s very stupid, our friend,” my father said simply.

“Ain’t no friend of mine, not any more,” the woman said. “But stupid, that’s for sure.”

“I’m not the man of the world Shmelke says I am,” my father said, smiling, “but I can see trouble.”

“I’ve got plenty to see.” The skin on the woman’s cheekbones was so tight it glistened.

“What’s your name?”

“Adrianne.”

“That’s nice,” my father said. “That’s a nice name.”

The woman began to cry, lifting her hands to cover her face, the sobs coming soft but steady for over a minute while my father looked away and said nothing. When the sobbing became inaudible, he said: “You don’t want him.”

“I know that, mister. I
acted
the fool, but I ain’t no fool.”

“What
do
you want?”

“I don’t know. I came here thinking I wanted one thing, but now I don’t know.”