A Secret Gift (33 page)

When I was a boy, the names of Sam’s brothers were never spoken in our home. But I did hear a story several times when I was older that one or more of the brothers literally backed a vehicle up to the rear of Sam’s store late one night, loaded up his suits and other clothes, then placed them in their own store around the corner. I knew that families were given to exaggeration, that stories get stretched. I imagined this to be just such a tall tale.

But in 2009, Mack Stone’s grandson David volunteered that the story was true in every particular. His own grandmother Edna had told him how she had backed her car to the rear of Sam’s store, while her husband, Mack, carried out suit after suit, all of it bound for Stone Brothers, a few steps away from Sam’s shop. Mack confirmed the story to his son. When Sam later entered his brothers’ store, he instantly recognized his own merchandise.

“That’s mine!” he fumed.

“Prove it,” challenged Mack.

Perhaps Sam was too crushed to bring himself to prosecute his own brothers. But perhaps it was something else, something more sinister. Sam knew that Mack and the others had something on him—the knowledge that he had fraudulently obtained a passport, birth certificate, and other legal papers, that he had sworn falsely under oath before federal authorities, and that he was not, as he claimed, native-born. Sam was in no position to bring in the law.

Instead, he allowed a curtain of silence to fall between himself and his betrayers. It lasted for years. Half a century later, a residue of alienation still separated Sam’s descendants from those of his brothers.

It is likely that Mack and his brothers were jealous of Sam’s success and position in the community. There is evidence that Mack would have been only too willing to use Sam’s mistakes against him, even if it meant sending his eldest brother to prison. In a sheaf of letters left by my grandmother is a November 30, 1932, affidavit in which a man named Ernest W. Richman, who worked for my grandfather, swore that Sam’s brother Mack had come to him several times in June 1932 with a plan to blackmail Sam, and to allege that Sam had ordered Mack to torch his Buffalo, New York, store to collect the insurance. There was in fact a fire that destroyed the store, but Richman in his affidavit said “the entire story is a fabrication,” that Sam had nothing to do with the fire. Sam never sought retribution against his brother Mack.

But my grandmother Minna never forgave Mack. As principled a person as ever there was, Minna recoiled from any contact with him. “Mother hated Mack like poison,” said Dorothy, my mother’s sister. “I think if she had a gun, she would have shot him.”

Even today I cannot fathom the audacity of brother robbing brother. Perhaps to some degree it reflected the lawlessness of the city in those times. Crimes in Canton often went unreported and unpunished. In the public’s mind, many city officials and police were corrupt. In such a freewheeling environment, criminality was seen as one of the lubricants for self-advancement, particularly in the Hard Times. The crimes of Noble Wright and George Carlin had been carried out in desperation and targeted strangers against whom they meant no harm.

But there was something unmistakably personal behind this crime. It was a fraternal insurrection, a statement that the brothers would never again be content to live in the shadow of their older, more successful sibling, that no longer would they accept a supporting role. Underappreciated and underpaid, they’d had enough. Sam had done much for them, bringing them out of the ghetto, giving them jobs, providing housing, an Americanized last name, a new life. From Sam’s point of view this thievery was an act of supreme ingratitude. The brothers doubtless saw it differently—it was a long-overdue comeuppance and a declaration of independence. For all the good Sam had done them, he had inadvertently taken on the same authoritarian role he so reviled in his father, and now his brothers had broken away from him. They flaunted their newfound pride and in 1931 named their new store Stone Brothers. It was almost as if they no longer considered Sam one of the brothers.

For well over a decade the two stores were bitter rivals. Even as the Depression deepened and business dwindled, they carried on their commercial feud, dueling over competing prices and promotions in the advertising pages of the
Canton Repository
. Finally, Sam bought out his siblings, and eventually, in the midfifties, sold Stone Brothers to my father. But the wound between Sam and Mack never healed. Even decades later, the brothers’ names were not uttered in our house. It was as if they never existed. For much of my life, I believed my grandfather was an only child, oblivious to the fact that he had six siblings, several of whom lived a few minutes’ walk from our front door.

MUCH OF SAM Stone’s life—his ambitions, his appetites, his view of money as a means to help some and control others—was shaped by early hardship: the Romanian exodus, anti-Semitism, relentless poverty, a home devoid of affection. All these took their toll. The house at 51 Rowley Street in Pittsburgh was a place of crushing religious austerity and superstition. Sam and his siblings were raised with a paranoia that at any moment Old World prejudices could seize them in the New World. Even today, some of the grandchildren believe that America could be ravaged by anti-Semitism. As the eldest son, Sam was the first to distance himself from that home and its toxins, and perhaps for that reason the most successful in escaping its influences.

But those same forces defined the lives of his six siblings, who were exposed to them for the entirety of their childhoods and adolescence. Several of those lives were marked by tragedy and eccentricity. Their attitude toward money was pathological, their insecurities in the new land profound, their abilities to connect emotionally, even with their own families, damaged. From Jacob, the patriarch of the family, several inherited a kind of frozen heart unable to show affection.

As a child and a young man, I knew nothing of Sam’s siblings. I knew only that there were people in town who were to be avoided and never acknowledged. I had been led to believe that they were related to us in some distant way, and that it was in our interest to maintain and expand that distance. Three of Sam’s siblings lived within a few blocks of where I grew up, though I never met them, did not know their names, and was expressly told not to try to find out.

The barrier between us was erected partly to protect me from danger, real or imagined. There was also a measure of snobbery on the part of my mother and my grandmother, who viewed much of the rest of the Stone clan (though not all) as belonging to a lower social class. They were nameless specters flitting about my childhood landscape whom I came to look upon with a mix of dread and pity—and the curiosity that comes from years of stifled inquiries.

Sam had a brother David, who at twenty-three was still living at home in Pittsburgh and rolling cigars for his father’s in-home factory. Sometime in the 1920s he came to Canton to work for Sam. He was a misanthrope who, like Mack, was suspected of stealing from his own brothers. It is said he bet what little money he had on the 1948 Truman-Dewey race and lost. He was suspicious of women and uncomfortable in their presence. His sister Gussie once asked him when he might marry. “Never,” he replied. “Why would I want to feed a strange SOB?”

And yet for all the toughness of those words, he was never unkind to others. He was shy and socially awkward, had few friends, and preferred to bury himself in books at the public library. He is said to have been brilliant and quoted Shakespeare at length. He worked at Stone Brothers, selling clothes alongside brothers Mack and Al, but even there he did not fit in. He drank, usually alone. He died in November 1964 at the age of sixty-nine. At first, no one noticed his passing. It was the odor that led authorities to his decomposing body, found in his one-room flat above a Canton tavern. He left no will. His paltry bank account was divided among his siblings. Until a few years ago, I had never even heard his name.

Sam Stone’s elder sister Sarah married an English Jew named Jacob Berman. Her grandson, Arthur, says that one day Jacob failed to return home from work. Nothing was heard of him for years. Then he was discovered living in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Home for the Aged. They speculate that he had been the victim of a mugging that had also robbed him of his memory, leaving him incapable of caring for himself. Sarah and her young daughter, Zelda, had been left nearly destitute.

In 1941, Sarah married Hyman Shapiro, a Russian immigrant who owned a barrel and bag company in Canton. On the marriage application she listed her place of birth not as Romania but “Pittsburgh, Pa.” She had divorced her first husband, Jacob Berman, just one month earlier. She told her sister Gussie that she had found a man with money and that when they counted it she would hide some of it in her skirt. She lived out her final years in Santa Monica, California, overseeing the charwomen at the Shangri-La Hotel. She walked the twenty-two blocks between home and work to save the nickel bus fare. Sarah died just short of seventy on March 27, 1953, and, as evidence of her Orthodox faith, was buried that same day at two in the afternoon at the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

Sarah Berman would pass on the legacy of hardship to her daughter, Zelda, who died at ninety-nine on May 17, 2009. So miserly was Zelda that she would never buy stationery, but instead would gently open the writer’s envelope, press it flat, and write her response on it. She even reused greeting cards from birthdays and holidays, taking scissors to excise the sender’s salutation and signature, and sending them out again. Her sons, knowing this, sent her cards in which the greeting and signature were written on a separate piece of paper and slipped into the blank card, leaving it for Zelda to send out without need of tailoring.

Zelda washed clothes by hand in the washing machine to conserve on electricity, bought her clothes secondhand, reused turkey bones that had been cleaned off the dinner plates to make soup, and collected used Styrofoam cups from trash bins, washed them out, and put them on her shelf, some of them complete with the indentations of others’ teeth.

Her husband, a onetime bookie turned real estate investor, left her millions. But she lived in constant fear of poverty and carried with her the dread that anti-Semitism would grab her and her loved ones, even in Santa Monica. She could never bring herself to trust a Gentile or to believe that she was safe in America. To the end she saw herself as “a poor little waif,” says her son. “She was so afraid. The wolf was always at her door.”

Zelda donated her body to the University of Southern California Medical School—apparently in part to avoid the cost of a funeral.

As for the house in Canton that I had been forbidden from stopping by on my way to and from elementary school each day, there was, I would learn five decades later, ample reason for apprehension. That was the home of Sam’s brother Mack. For whatever reason, he did not apply for U.S. citizenship until 1949, half a century after coming to America. He married a woman named Edna Cook, but the marriage ended in divorce. They had a son, Don, who was in and out of trouble. Don eloped with an underage girl, for which he later went to prison. The story made the papers. “When someone was in trouble,” recalls an aging cousin, “they would say, ‘They had to go away for a while.’ ” That was what they said of Don.

Mack’s ex, Edna, drank gin and became a recluse. She made the front page of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
and other papers around the country on April 22, 1952, when police raided her home at 1406 Pennsylvania and discovered her with her three young grandchildren—Don’s children—living in squalor amid dozens of cats and dogs. The children had not been allowed to go to school, had not bathed, had no working toilet, were malnourished, and were dressed in rags. An eight-year-old granddaughter had rarely been allowed to leave the house and had lived like the dogs, only with less to eat. The children were removed from the home and placed in the custody of the juvenile court.

It was not the last time Edna and her son would make the news in Pittsburgh. On June 21, 1970, Edna Stone, then eighty-three, thought she heard someone breaking into her garage. She and Don, then fifty-eight, went out to investigate. Edna carried a .32 pistol. Exactly what happened next is unclear, but this much is known: a twelve-year-old African American boy, Ernest Keith Caldwell, lay dead of a gunshot wound, Edna and Don faced murder charges, and the north side of Pittsburgh erupted in a race riot. Don admitted to tossing the gun into the Allegheny River, but both mother and son were ultimately acquitted of murder charges, arguing that it had been a warning shot gone awry.

But there were other goings-on in Mack’s Twenty-second Street house that spelled danger and would help explain why as a child I was to treat it as a no-man’s-land. Following his divorce, Mack married his brother Al’s maid, a woman named Eleanor who was thirty years his junior. The marriage scandalized the family. Then, on December 17, 1957, Mack’s stepson, Jack, and a brother-in-law, Richard, both twenty and both with criminal records, were shot to death on the streets of Canton. The double murder made front-page headlines. Jack Stone stumbled into a police station, blood pouring from his wounds. He died hours later. The crime was never solved. The son of one of Sam’s other brothers recalls his mother bringing the newspaper up to his room the day of the murder. “This is what happens to tough guys,” she said.