Safekeeping (56 page)

New York City, 2014

M
etal scaffolding shaded the engagement rings in the window of Weisberg's Gold and Diamonds. Inside the store, Isaac scrolled through Facebook on his iPad, though he knew he should be avoiding his newsfeed now more than ever with the war in Gaza. And yet, whenever he was about to polish the watches or revisit the Q2 spreadsheet, there he'd be again, scouring his newsfeed the way the OTB shickers would scan their inky booklets for that lucky horse. Only what did he have to win?

He paused on an Instagram of blueberry pancakes dusted with confectioner's sugar, a yellowing filter meant to give the still unconsumed pancakes the magic of nostalgia. The photo was posted by a woman he went on one date with three years ago when he was still dating, a recent divorcée, a failed actress of about forty, who cracked him up with her impersonation of her squeaky-voiced therapist. When he sent her an e-mail the following day, inviting her to see an off-Broadway play, she had said no, thank you, she didn't think they had that je ne sais quoi, and then immediately sent him a Facebook friend request. Why he had paid witness to everything this woman had eaten for the last three years was a mystery. She had stopped posting pictures of herself, and he wondered if she no longer believed she was much to look at. Above the pancakes was written:
Best. Dinner. Ever. Life is good!

The door chimed, and Isaac shut off his iPad and jumped to his feet, but it was only the owner of the store next door.

“Oh, hi, Patni.”

“You look sad to see me, Weisberg.” Patni smiled, well aware no one was ever sad to see him. He had that bonhomie that made people want to be around him, even when he was driving a hard bargain, which he always did.

“I thought you were my first customer of the day.”

Patni, the first Indian to open a store on the block, was now one of a handful. No doubt they were going the way of Antwerp. When Isaac took over the store after his father's “accident,” as his mother and sisters called it (though what was accidental about getting pistol-whipped in the head, he didn't know), the gemstone industry was run by Jews, as it had been for a millennium. But in the twenty years since, that reign had come to an end. Seventy-five percent of the diamond traders in Antwerp's Square Mile, the diamond capital of the world, were now Indian. Cafeterias served kosher curries, and Indians sealed deals with the traditional handshake and Yiddish benediction
mazel und broche—
luck and blessing. His father wouldn't have believed it.

Patni rested his hand on the glass counter, a thick gold ring on his pinky finger.

“Our Internet is down. I was hoping we could jump on your Wi-Fi. Only for an hour or so. Just until those Verizon bastards get here.”

“Of course. No problem.”

Isaac jotted the password—
iwouldprefernotto
—onto a scrap of paper, one of the scraps kept on the counter for writing out calculations for the customer: the price if he knocked off fifteen percent, what would happen if they bought two, this was his final offer. He handed it to Patni.

“This is a strange password, Weisberg. But very good. Thank you.”

Patni headed out, a bloom of sweat on the back of his white shirt. He paused at the door. “You are coming to my daughter's wedding?”

“Of course.”

“You need to remarry, Weisberg. You are not too old. Find a young pretty thing; that will wake you up.”

Thing
, Isaac thought as Patni walked into the sunshine. Calling a woman a “thing” was so far from what he would have heard from his colleagues at the community college. How he missed that tatty office and the conversations they would have in it, the heated debates about Tolstoy's moralism while eating Thai delivery, though in the end he had found intellectual coercion there too. Sure, it was nowhere near as restrictive as what he'd grown up with, but there were still party lines to walk or risk being
ostracized, a conformity that was surprisingly scary to buck. At least his yeshiva had never claimed to be a bastion of free thought.

He returned to Facebook. Someone he hadn't seen in thirty years wanted to play FarmVille.
ISIS takes over Christian village in Iraq. This cute dog has a chicken for a best friend.
His father never sat around reading a newspaper. He couldn't; someone was constantly coming through the door. Who would have thought people would ever buy engagement rings on the Internet? Everything happened out of sight now, the trading, the cutting. Instead of old Jews he'd known his whole life cutting the gems right here on the block, demanding up to $300 a carat for their artistry, now most stones were cut for five bucks a carat in Gujarat. Patni had offered to find him a good factory there, but Isaac couldn't do it. How could he trust rubies and diamonds to people he'd never met on the other side of the world?
In this business, it's trust, trust, trust
: that was his father's mantra.
No deals with anyone you don't know and can't trust.
Ironic, considering how well he knew that junkie. “A drug addict you could smell a mile away,” was how his mother described him.

His pocket buzzed. He pulled out the phone and saw a blue text bubble from his daughter Sam:
R u coming this wknd
.

Yes
, he typed, worried that she secretly hoped he wasn't coming. She was twelve, budding breasts, teeth no longer too big for her face, maybe she didn't want her old man taking up her free time. What could he add that was playful?
Prepare for some fun.

Wow, that was lame. He watched the ellipsis, the promise that she was writing back.

Ok but I'm going to the mall and a bday party on Sat.

So he'd been right. She wasn't looking forward to seeing him. Now what? Should he take a three-hour train out to western New Jersey and sleep in a hotel all for a breakfast on Sunday at the Country Griddle? His older daughter, Clara, now in college, must have withdrawn at this age, but he never noticed, probably because he still lived with them and was too busy fighting with their mother. And because he still had baby Sam, who seemed so far away from growing up.

All right, but Dave Sunday
. . . Oh,
farkakte
spell-check! He hurried to erase
Dave
. Now his response was taking too long, making his words seem less casual and cool with it all.
All right, but save Sunday for me, ok?
Seeing how that could sound a little angry, he tacked on a smiley face.

When no ellipsis appeared, he looked from the iPhone to the shop, where he had been forced at Sam's age to spend the little free time he had between studying and more studying helping his father. The shop looked much the same then, only instead of a mirror covering the opposite wall, there had been fake wood paneling. His sisters never had to help out, never had to learn the ropes; the store obviously wasn't going to them one day. While he would arrange the rings in the window display, on the other side of the glass, boys no older than him would walk by in bell-bottoms and trucker hats, chewing gum and laughing, heading off to who knew what adventure. Maybe the Ziegfeld. That became his dream, to visit the palatial cinema only a few blocks away. He could still picture all the movie posters from those days pasted on the subway station walls:
Mean Streets
,
The Exorcist
,
American Graffiti
. It would be years before he dared to sneak into a movie, but he soon started checking out books from the library and hiding them behind his bedroom dresser. After that first book—
Lord of the Flies
, recommended by an amused librarian—he knew he could never live without
trayf
books again.

“Binghamton? What is this Binghamton?” his father said when he finally told him he was leaving it all. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his evening snack, always one poppy-seed rugelach and a cup of decaf. He had to have been fifty-three years old at the time, exactly the age Isaac was today, the short
payess
tucked behind his ears more salt than pepper.

“It's a college upstate, Papa. Not far from the city.”

“What do you want to go upstate for?”

“To study . . . literature.”

“Literature? What are you talking about? If you want to go to college, all right, go. Take some business classes at Yeshiva, like the Habermans' boy, so when you take over the business you can run it even better than me.”

“I'm not going to take over the business, Papa.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I'm not taking over the business.”

His father fell silent, stared at him in shock. Perhaps he had done too good a job hiding the books and movie tickets. How had his father not seen this coming? When he did speak again, his father wasn't angry, not yet—the shouting until his voice was hoarse would come over the following days. For now there was only confusion.

“Our family, Yitzchak, we've had this business since 1656. In five different countries, we've had this business. It has seen us through . . . everything. Without it, I wouldn't exist. You wouldn't exist. If you don't take over the business, a family tradition hundreds of years old comes to an end.”

And he said: “I don't care.”

Isaac had no regrets about leaving, but was the “I don't care” necessary? Though if he really put himself back in that kitchen, really remembered being eighteen years old, his anger was understandable, given that's precisely what his father had to say about his dreams: “I don't care.” Though now he understood it wasn't that his father didn't care, exactly; he just believed he knew better what would make his son happy, keep him safe. Isaac checked to see if Sam had written back. She hadn't. He returned to Facebook.

Hubbie just brought me coffee in bed. Feeling blessed.

When his father called to tell him about the brooch, he had been a free man for fourteen years. He was alone in that office at LaGuardia Community College, working late on a paper about social class in Fielding's early poems and plays. He answered the phone hoping it was his wife. They were happy then, married only two years. If he'd known it was his father, he probably wouldn't have picked up.

“Yitzi, it's the most incredible thing I've ever held in my hand. Like holding history. Our history.”

As his father waxed on about this brooch, Isaac stared out the window at western Queens, a bleak, wintery scene as different from a leafy green college campus as possible. Students walked along a cement overpass, traversing a vast rail yard. Above the sea of tracks was a tangle of black telephone and electrical wires. In the distance the gray buildings of Manhattan looked like a jumble of giant gravestones. After his father described every detail of the brooch three times, he said, “Will you come and see it, Yitzi?”

“Uh, sure. When?”

“Why not this Thursday? You can come for dinner, and I'll bring it home from the shop.”

“Hmm. This Thursday? . . . I don't think so, Papa.”

He had to get this paper written and accepted before the end of the school year. The clock was ticking. His wife, herself a lowly adjunct in
art history, was pregnant, putting the pressure on him to find a better teaching gig, one with a livable wage, health insurance, some security. That was the excuse; truthfully he had little hope of securing a tenure-track position, even if he got this paper out. The fact was he had been avoiding his family for years: at first, when he was in his early twenties, he was unable to pull himself away from his newfound freedoms for even an evening; later, when he was older, he just didn't like being around them, their boring conversations, their ignorance. Their world was too small. Too depressing.

“I can't even entice you to visit me with a seven-hundred-year-old treasure?”

Give me a break, thought Isaac, it's just a fucking brooch. Once again, his father couldn't step out of his own interests.

“Sorry, Papa. I'll come as soon as I send out this paper I'm working on, okay? It's really important.”

“Really important,” his father muttered.

And that was the last time he heard his voice. Two weeks later, while Isaac was working on the Fielding paper that would only be rejected by every journal anyway, that drug addict came into the store to get his grandmother's brooch back. At first it looked like Papa was going to pull through. Though the skull had a dent, the doctor explained, pointing at a CT scan, the pressure on his brain was minimal. “We'll get a titanium plate in there, and chances are he'll make a full recovery.” But late that night, before the old man ever woke up, he had a brain hemorrhage and died.