A Book of Great Worth (3 page)

My father strolled leisurely along Allen Street, which lay under the heavy shadow of the elevated train
tracks, to the corner of Grand, took a right, then another
right at Orchard, crowded with pushcarts and hawkers, then another on Hester back to Allen Street. In the course of a walk around the block that should have taken five minutes but instead took twenty, he was propositioned, by his count, thirty-seven times. Their conversations were almost always short – “Hello good-looking,” or “Say, there, handsome,” in Yiddish inflected with a range of Eastern European accents, Galician,
Polish, Hungarian, countered by my father’s good-natured
reply, “Good afternoon, young lady, no thank you.” On Allen Street itself, these conversations were often all but drowned out by the rattle of the elevated train rushing by above them.

One of his two shadows, Chisel Face, was loitering across the street, making a show of studying the contents of a shop window. My father walked quickly across the street and, before he could bolt, had the man by the arm.

“What the hell…” he shouted, wheeling away.

“Take it easy,” my father said. “I’m not looking for a fight. I want to talk to Monk Eastman.”

“You crazy?” the skinny fellow asked.

“Not at all. Get your friend to go to Eastman, or you do it and your friend can watch me, the heavy-set fellow. I’ll stay right here till you return. Don’t worry. I don’t mean him any harm, or you either. I just want to talk.”

“You are crazy,” the man said, but a sly grin was spreading across his narrow face. He gestured, and in a few seconds the other fellow came up beside them. The two stepped aside and conferred. After a minute, Chisel Face took off on a trot and Dumpling Face took up a position on the corner, brushing aside a young woman who’d been stationed by the street light. My father, for his part, sat down on the stoop closest to the corner, unfolded his newspaper and began to read.

Half an hour later, my father was ushered by both
of his companions through the door of a saloon on Rivington
Street, through the crowded saloon itself and into a back room, all but deserted. There, at a large table sat a well-built, dapper man in an expensive silk suit and a meticulous haircut. The man’s pleasant face was vaguely familiar.

“Good afternoon, Morgenstern,” he said.

“I know you, I think.”

“We’ve met, once or twice, here and there,” the other man said. “We have mutual acquaintances.” He stood up and extended his hand. “Monk Eastman. I don’t know who or what you expected.”

My father wasn’t altogether surprised that he’d recognized Eastman, or by his manner. As a reporter, he met all sorts of people, didn’t always remember them and was no longer surprised by anything he heard or saw. The two men shook hands, and my father took a chair across from Eastman. A bottle was produced, good Scotch, and drinks were poured.

Eastman drank and placed his shot glass down gently. “You wanted to see me?”

“I have a proposition,” my father said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m concerned about a friend. He’s been a nuisance to you, I gather. But my guess is, not much more than a nuisance, no real harm.”

Eastman’s expression was politely curious but noncommittal.

“Perhaps I’ve been a nuisance too. I apologize if so. But, you know, if not me, someone else.” My father made a hand gesture indicating the power of fate.

“I appreciate that,” Eastman said.

My father took a deep breath and drank off his shot of whisky. He preferred rye, but the Scotch was good.

“I don’t want to get hurt, but I could be more of a nuisance.”

“I imagine.”

“So could my friend.”

Eastman poured two more drinks. “And your proposition?”

“I think my friend could be persuaded he’d done enough.”

The two men observed each other in tense silence. After a minute or two, Eastman drank down his whisky. “No more nuisance, then?”

“And no one gets hurt,” my father said. He drank his.

“One more to cement the bargain, Morgenstern?” Eastman asked.

•••

That evening, my father left the
Day
office and headed towards the subway and the train north. He still felt a little light-headed, and elated. He’d called Bronstyn, met him for a coffee at the Café Royale and was satisfied the danger was over. It hadn’t been hard to convince his friend that he’d had an effect on the white-slavery problem and to turn his attention to other issues. The problems of unwed mothers and
abused women were especially pressing, my father argued
. Bronstyn agreed.

“And the photos, they just disappear?” he asked.

“As if they never happened,” my father said. He didn’t think the photos would actually disappear – Eastman, he thought, was a bit of a gentleman, but certainly no fool – but the threat of their being sent to other newspapers had pretty much evaporated.

At the entrance to the subway, he hesitated, then, changing his direction, headed towards Allen Street. The two men who had been his shadows the past couple of days were no longer to be seen, and he walked slowly, breathing in the bittersweet aroma of what he thought of as the perfume of the Lower East Side, a heady mixture of cooked cabbage, baking bread, sweat, sour meat and horse manure, spiced by the sharp salt aroma of the bay wafting inland on a cool breeze, and enjoying the pastel light of the setting sun that softened
the hard edges of the tenement-lined streetscape, imbuing
it with a dignity it lacked during the bright glare of day. At Allen, he stopped to admire a trio of young women in bright clothing, engaged in conversation, across the street. He could hear laughter drifting in the light breeze. It was a pleasure, after the long winter, to see women without their coats and boots, mufflers and hats. These three were even showing off a bit of leg. They glanced at him, but didn’t stop their conversation.

My father was not intending to purchase their wares – when he was a younger man, in Cleveland, he had indulged once or twice, but now he was content, on a fine evening like this, merely to do a bit of window-shopping.

• • •

The Farmhand

When my father was a very young man, not quite twenty-one, he spent one summer in the Catskill Mountains working for a rich family. He liked to say he was a farmhand, and there are a few grainy old photos of him, skinny and shirtless in baggy overalls, pitching a bale of hay, bareback on a horse, and milking a cow – this latter the only photo I’ve ever seen of my usually reserved father grinning. But the truth is that, while he did do some farm work, his primary responsibility that summer was to tutor the children of the family. This was a delicious irony, as my father had dropped out of school himself in the fifth grade, when he was thirteen. Any knowledge and skills he may have possessed that would make him qualified to be a tutor he had acquired on his own and were hard-earned.

He didn’t know, when he accepted the job, that he would be drawn into an early skirmish of the Great War; would come close to becoming one of its first casualties.

My father’s father was an eminent journalist on the Lower East Side, editor of the conservative daily
The Morning Journal,
and my uncle Sam, my father’s eldest brother, was also working on a newspaper,
The Day
, and beginning to establish a reputation as a columnist. My father too had dreams of being a writer, though he thought he’d rather write novels and poems than fodder for newspapers. “What would you write
about?”
my grandfather asked him when my father told him of his ambitions, and this was very much on his mind for many years afterwards. Certainly it was on this day, as he contemplated the possibility of an adventure outside the city.

It was through Sam that my father made the ac
quaintance of the Pearlman family. They were German Jews who had already been in New York for three generations, having arrived before the Civil War, and were well established in social as well as business circles, completely Americanized. Hershell Pearlman, one of three brothers with diverse interests, was a lawyer; it was he whom my uncle was friendly with. A younger brother, Robert, had taken over his grandfather’s jewelry shop on Park Avenue, and it was he who was seeking a tutor.

The only real requirements for the job were fluencies in both English and Yiddish and a willingness to spend time with children, my father was told. These were qualifications he had. Familiarity with farm chores would be a plus, and he had some of that as well. For my father, the thought of spending the summer in the country, far from the stink and steamy heat of the city, was a delight. He had spent his early childhood on a farm, and, though it had been a mean life, one his family was anxious to escape, he harboured some nostalgic memories that made the prospects of spending the summer of his twenty-first year on a farm especially appealing.

It was the last week in June of 1914 and the sun was shining brightly, the air fragrant with the scents of early summer mixed with exhaust fumes from the end
less procession of taxicabs and streetcars on Park Avenue
and manure announcing the presence of horse-drawn wagons on the side streets. My father, who had walked north from Mott Street, where he was still living with
his parents, younger brothers and unmarried sister,
arrived at the jewelry shop at the appointed time, wearing an ill-fitting woolen suit he’d borrowed from his father. My father was two inches taller than my grandfather and his ankles and wrists protruded from the sleeves and cuffs, making him look somewhat like a stick figure drawn by a child. His curly black hair crackled with electricity from the unused-to brushing it had just received at the hands of his sister Ida.

He stopped on the corner of Forty-seventh Street, a half block south of the shop, where a noisy crowd was milling around a newsboy. The banner headline on the
New York Herald
proclaimed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. My father gave the boy a penny and put the folded paper under his arm, thinking it would add to the overall impression he hoped to make. Beyond that, though, he gave little thought to the day’s news.

A clerk ushered my father to the rear of the shop, where he found Pearlman, a tidy man in his late thirties with a well-trimmed moustache, impeccably dressed in a fawn-coloured suit, examining a glittering stone of some sort through a jeweller’s monocle. “Ah, young Harry,” he said, removing the monocle from his eye and rising to shake hands, but through the interview that followed my father persisted in the feeling that he was being examined in just such a thorough, microscopic manner as the stone had been.

The interview was short and seemingly undemanding. “Tell me something about yourself,” Pearlman
asked after they’d been seated on either side of an im
pressive oak desk.

There was little to tell but my father tried. He’d come to America with his family when he was ten, from Galicia, a troubled corner of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, over which the Archduke Ferdinand – just murdered – had ruled. As a boy on the farm his family rented, he had often helped the hired
workmen with milking cows, collecting eggs and shooing
the geese, and at this news Pearlman smiled approvingly. He had learned reading and writing and other subjects from a succession of young rabbinical students who came to the farm three afternoons a week – it pleased him no end that, should he win this position, he’d be doing much the same as his own tutors. In New York, he’d attended three grades at the public school on Henry Street, just a few blocks from where
his family lived, leaving at thirteen, when his English was good enough, to work. Since then, he’d had a succession of minor jobs, delivering newspapers, selling papers on street corners, running errands at his father’s office, helping a milkman on his early morning delivery rounds, wielding a shovel on a crew repairing city streets, planting and tending trees in Central Park as part of an
other city crew. For the last year or more he’d been em
ployed as an apprentice silversmith for the famous Tiffany company but was feeling restless, wanting to better himself. As he told this, his cheeks suddenly reddened, for it occurred to him that Pearlman, a jeweller, might take offence, but if he had he didn’t betray it.

My father didn’t say why he worked: so that Sam and his brother Henry, one year younger than him, could attend university, so that Ida could study to be a midwife, so that his brother Izzy, who was still in high school, could also go to college when his time came. Somehow, it had fallen to my father and his brother Nathan, one year older, to help provide for their siblings. Over this apparent injustice, he felt no bitterness. His own time, he was certain, would come.

“And when you are not working?” Pearlman inquired.
“In the evenings? You have friends, I suppose?”

Friends, yes, my father said, and he also took night classes at the
Arbiter Ring
– the Workman’s Circle – and read everything he could get his hands on. And, he admitted, his cheeks suddenly reddening again, he often, on his own time, wrote stories and poems.

Pearlman listened intently, and when my father came to an embarrassed halt, the jeweller made only this comment: “Your English is excellent.” Then he asked him to repeat what he’d said, as best he could, in Yiddish.