A Secret Gift (41 page)

The fourteen-year-old author—the last and only living link to the B. Virdot letters—was now ninety, a great-great-grandmother who lived at the Laurels of Masillon, a nursing home just outside Canton. Three hours later I received a call from Helen Palm, now Helen Palm Kintz Grant. Her voice was strong and clear.

Helen had been the second-youngest of all those to have written to B. Virdot. I wondered if she had any recollection of his gift. “I remember the ad,” she said without hesitation. “I wrote to him and told him I didn’t have any money. I think he sent me five bucks.” I read her the letter she wrote in pencil on a five-by-eight-inch slip of paper with a return address of “RFD#4”:

“Oh, my God,” she said when I finished reading her seventy-seven-year-old letter. After a pause, she added, “I wanted to do something for my family.” And what did she do with the money? “Oh, gee whiz,” she said, sounding more like the fourteen-year-old who wrote the letter than the ninety-year-old on the other end of the phone line. Well, I asked, do you remember? “You better believe it,” she replied, “because I went right down and bought a pair of shoes.” That would have been December 21, 1933, when the check was cashed. Until then, having a decent pair of shoes—ones that fit and didn’t have holes—had been a constant problem, as it was for hundreds of thousands of others during the Hard Times. She would cut out the shape of her sole from an empty shredded-wheat box and insert it into her badly worn-out shoes. But true to her word, Helen Palm used the rest of the money to take her family out to eat.

It gave her and the entire family a welcome lift in a holiday season that was marked as much by anxiety as by joy. December, even without the Depression, was a somber time for the Palms. On December 16 more than a decade earlier, a brother, Harold, had been born and died just fifteen days later. His mother would later say that in an effort to keep him warm, she had shared her bed with the infant and inadvertently suffocated him. Helen’s own birthday was December 3, 1919, but the holidays were clouded by uncertainty. Her father had worked at Republic Steel but got laid off repeatedly. Her mother, Carrie, went door-to-door trying to sell Christmas cards. “She walked, God love her—she had such bad legs, I felt so sorry for her.”

Helen also walked for miles delivering the
Canton Repository
. Many of their meals came from the garden, particularly the fried potatoes that appeared often on their plates. The upstairs of their small white frame house on Genoa Street was unfinished, and a curtain divided her parents’ bedroom from the children’s. She and her sister, Bernice, shared the room and brother Richard had a cot in the corner. By 1935, the Palms had lost their home and been forced to move. Three years after writing the letter, at age seventeen, Helen got married.

Her memories of Canton echo those of many others who wrote to B. Virdot. She too went to Myers Lake to see the marathon dancers, drunk with exhaustion, staggering to the music. She recalls the vice and the crime that beset Canton, and how her father would point out the spot where the Mob gunned down Don Mellett, the crusading editor of the
Repository
. In later years her family would convert their front porch to a tiny grocery they called Palm’s Variety Store.

But seven decades later, the B. Virdot gift stands out against the pall of the Depression. “I thought that was so wonderful of that man,” she gushes. “Oh, you’re his grandson! Well, God love him. You should be so proud of him. I was so happy. That anyone could be so kind to help people at that time. I know I made those dollars stretch because I tried to make a lot of people happy with it.”

For years, Helen Palm assumed that B. Virdot worked in a bank, perhaps because he had money enough to share with others. She wouldn’t have guessed that B. Virdot was the short man at Stone’s Clothes where her father bought his clothes and where she would pick out a tie for him in less grim Christmas seasons. “Oh, I’ll be darned!” she exclaimed when I told her that B. Virdot was Sam Stone. From among so many who reached out to him in need, she is the only one to learn the secret of Mr. B. Virdot.

S
am Stone never did know the impact of his gift on the lives of Geraldine Hillman, Elizabeth Bunt, Felice May, Helen Palm, or any of the other recipients of his largesse. He had his own three daughters to dote upon, a business to run, and a crush of other matters to occupy his attention. Besides, he understood from the beginning that he could not inquire into the circumstances of those he had helped without compromising his own anonymity and their privacy. What little he did learn came in the trickle of thank-you notes in the days after his gift arrived.

Nearly fifty years later he was still in robust health, still working, and still thoroughly enjoying life in his oceanfront apartment in Bal Harbour, Florida, where he lived with Minna. At ninety-three, he woke up early each morning, went for a dip in the Atlantic, diving headlong into the oncoming waves, then showered in his cabana, donned a pressed white shirt, tie, and jacket, and drove himself to work. He owned a small shop in North Miami that sold marble pen sets, clocks, trophies, and executive knickknacks. He didn’t really need the income. He had owned a chain of clothing stores, and later, a plastics plant and a real estate company that helped develop Sunset Isles in Hollywood and Miami Shores. But the tiny shop provided a focus to his days, and procuring the marble stands gave him an excuse to travel the world.

On Thursday morning, January 29, 1981, he set off as always, cruising down Collins Avenue, and eventually turning onto the Broad Causeway, which connects the mainland’s North Miami with the Bay Harbor Islands. He paid the quarter toll and proceeded. But on this morning, the drawbridge was already rising and the pike descended toward his windshield. Instead of braking, he panicked, put his foot to the accelerator, and shot forward, slamming into the rising concrete span. He died instantly. The time was 10:15 A.M.

The
Miami Herald
obituary appeared under the headline, ENTREPRENEUR SAMUEL STONE, 93. The city sent my grandmother a bill for the repairs to the bridge, but she would have none of it, and told them as much. Faced with the choice of badgering an aged widow or absorbing the costs, the city relented.

Sam’s body was made presentable and flown to Canton. His casket was the color of pewter, and his head was pillowed on a silver crepe interior. I viewed it in the front parlor of the funeral home. The actual service was at three P.M. in the sanctuary of Temple Israel. Just before the casket was closed, his son-in-law and best friend, Don, folded the light blue windbreaker jacket from La Gorce Country Club and gently tucked it into the corner of Sam’s casket, a contradictory symbol of both the New World’s anti-Semitism and the struggle to rise above it. It was the gift that had sealed their friendship.

Sam was buried in Canton’s West Lawn Cemetery in grave number 5, lot 31, section 6, in the ivied company of deceased friends and family. Not far off in all directions were the graves of those whom, nearly fifty years before, he had helped as B. Virdot. Minna had her own name chiseled on the stone, with her birth date and a dash that would hold its breath another quarter century before exhaling. I pinched a green leaf from the arrangement on the casket and put it in my wallet. I still have the leaf. During the funeral I remembered Sam’s favorite toast.

I’d heard him offer that toast scores of times, and always with the same piratical glint in his eye. For us grandchildren, that toast was a welcome manifesto, a license from the patriarch to raise a little hell.

Two decades later, I came upon Sam’s death certificate. It cited the cause of death as “multiple blunt impact injuries.” His occupation was “Executive.” It said he was born on March 2, 1887, in Pittsburgh. Only my grandmother knew otherwise. And so it would remain for nearly thirty years.

Knowing what I now know of Sam’s life, I see in his death, if not the perfect exit, at least the perfect metaphor for how he lived. He died crossing a bridge, which was only right given that for my family he
was
the bridge between the old and new worlds, between the pogroms of the past and the promise of the present. His haste in escaping that former life and embracing the new misled him into thinking he might secure that future sooner by creating a web of lies, but ultimately, those lies put him at permanent risk and proved to be the final obstacle to his own security. How appropriate, then, that the barrier that descended upon him that day triggered panic and, instead of waiting, he sped forward hoping to clear the rising span. Three decades later his descendants cannot cross that causeway without thinking of him and paying homage to the man whose crossing brought us all to this place.

T
he gifts that Sam Stone gave that Christmas 1933 came from a man who understood what it was to be down-and-out. But there was more to it than that. It was no accident that he chose Christmas, a holiday marked for Christians, not Jews, and that he specifically wished his Gentile neighbors a “merry and joyful Christmas.” For Sam, the gift marked a kind of final arrival for him. No longer the object of persecution, he was a respected citizen and a welcomed member of the community.

That nearly all the recipients of his largesse were Gentiles represented a measure of acceptance long denied him. Canton had embraced him in ways he had never thought possible. To the suffering of his fellow townspeople, the act had brought relief and hope. But to Sam, it signaled a personal triumph in which he could finally believe that he had escaped the persecution, rejection, and poverty that had defined his past. In Canton, a small midwestern industrial town against the ropes during the Great Depression, he found what had eluded him all his life—a sense of belonging, a home.

He had strayed as far as he could from the stifling orthodoxy of his youth, but he never severed his ties with Judaism. He was proud of his faith. He repudiated only the rituals that had weighed upon him and with which he associated so much suffering. At Christmas, in his Market Street home, he always had an enormous tree that he delighted in helping to decorate. On Christmas morning he insisted that he be allowed to open his gifts first. And yet, even as he celebrated his freedom from the past that Christmas of 1933, the manner of B. Virdot’s giving was an homage to that past.