The Journey Prize Stories 21 (10 page)

Native-born readers and well-established immigrants, though, were less likely to pose the utilitarian questions of the recent arrivals, so the columns established by the English papers quickly narrowed their focus to the lovelorn. Heshberg made it clear to my father that his column would involve much more than just letters from unhappy lovers. This was just as well, since my father, who was still a bachelor then, was one of the least likely men on earth to give advice on affairs of the heart, as would soon be evident.

“There should be nothing to it for a smart fellow like you, Morgenstern,” Heshberg said. My father recognized the flattery as a ploy, but he was flattered just the same. “You have the intelligence and sensitivity for the job,” the editor continued. “Just as in the obituaries, every life is a story. Every letter is an opportunity for you to influence those lives. Think of yourself as having a conversation with the readers, a conversation about their deepest concerns, worries, fears. Think of yourself as a rabbi.”

That was exactly what was frightening my father. The last thing he wanted to be was a rabbi, a calling that his eldest brother, Sam, had followed, but the notion of a conversation with the readers was appealing to him.

Heshberg had already determined that my father's own identity, and that of any subsequent writers assigned this task, would be concealed. To this end, he had concocted a fictitious advisor called Yentel Schmegge, a name which, he hoped,
would convey a combination of humour and seriousness readers would find appealing. My father would assume the persona of Yentel as he composed replies to the letter-writers. When he tired of the assignment, “after six months or a year,” Heshberg said, another writer would take his place and consistency would be maintained.

My father agreed to all this – he was relieved that he would not have to put his own name on his replies – and even agreed to Heshberg's plan to prime the pump during the first days that the column would run, although he objected at first.

“Make up letters?” He realized immediately that his aghast tone might be offensive to the editor. “What I mean is …”

“You're concerned about the ethics of the situation, Morgenstern?” Heshberg looked at him with a frank expression, but he didn't appear hostile.

“Well, yes.”

“Ethics don't really enter into it, don't you see? This isn't news, it's what in the English papers they call ‘features.' What if it were a short story or a novel you were writing?”

“That would be fiction,” my father said.

“Lies, you mean?”

“No.” My father hesitated. He recalled a definition of fiction he had heard from a well-known novelist during a heated discussion over coffee at a crowded table at the Café Royale in New York. “Made up, yes, but in the service of truth.”

“Exactly,” Heshberg said. “You see my point exactly.”

“I see.”

“Just make them believable,” Heshberg said. “Don't worry, in a week's time your desk will be covered with letters. Real ones.”

My father thought long and hard, taking long late-night walks on deserted streets near his rooming house, staring thoughtfully into his glass of beer at the nearby tavern. As it turned out, the first few questions and answers he wrote proved to be so sensational they immediately helped make the column a success, but one of them – the very first – also returned to cause my father some discomfort later on.

For his first column, he wrote this letter:

This was followed by a painstakingly careful reply, written with Heshberg's admonition in mind: “Avoid extremes. Take the middle ground whenever possible. Provoke but do not enrage”:

My father stood nervously beside Heshberg's desk as the editor read his typewritten copy, filled with the inevitable xxxd-over typing mistakes. He raised his head, a broad smile on his usually placid face. He had a thin moustache that was several shades darker than his unruly salt and pepper hair, as if he had run the tip of a pencil back and forth against it a number of times.

“Brilliant, Morgenstern. Or should I call you Solomon?

This is the stuff.”

On the spot, Heshberg decided to change the title of the advice column from “With Love from Yentel” to “The Wisdom of Solomon,” though the former would remain as the signature. My father went back to his typewriter with his heart soaring.

“The Wisdom of Solomon” was indeed what the column was titled when it appeared the following Monday and in days to come, always prominently displayed on the second page, above the obituaries, although within the offices of
The World
it continued to be referred to as “the Schmegge.”

The letter from the woman in love with the Indian ran that Monday and others that my father had concocted in the days that followed, but the week was not even out before the first real letters began to arrive, by hand and then through the post, and, as Heshberg had predicted, by the following week a steady stream of letters was arriving and my father no longer had to concoct lives wracked with heartbreaking dilemmas. Instead, the time allotted to this task was more than taken up by reading through the letters, selecting a couple of good ones for each day, and writing the replies.

The replies, he found, were considerably easier to write than the concocted letters, but, though he had felt ambivalent about writing those letters, when they were no longer necessary, he missed them.

Many of the real letters were considerably more mundane, dealing with disputes with landlords, employers, and bureaucrats, like the man who wrote to complain about the barking of a dog in the night. My father's replies were instructive (“What is more important, the good will of a neighbour or a few extra minutes of sleep?” he inquired rhetorically), and thus
played an important role, as Heshberg frequently reminded him, but they took no imagination or creative powers. To the question from a woman about the proper handling of garbage being put out for collection, for example, he merely telephoned the appropriate clerk at City Hall and quickly had the answer, just as the letter writer herself could have done, except that, perhaps, her command of English was not up to it.

“You are the reader's agent.” Heshberg had instructed.

There were also questions relating to child-rearing, education, career choices; immigration, housing, and a variety of other issues as well as, always, those of a romantic nature. There was never any telling what the day's mail would bring, and my father was often hard pressed in producing answers that were both informative and entertaining, which was what his editor expected of him.

Despite the ordinariness of the majority of the letters the column received, there were always some letters, “gems,” my father called them, that echoed those of his own creation during the first week.

“Most worthy editor,” one man, who signed himself “Tormented and Torn,” wrote, “I have been unfaithful to my beloved wife. Should I kill myself? Confess all and suffer the consequences? Or keep my own counsel and let God deal with me as He will?”

My father was delighted. “My dear Tormented, by all means, put thoughts of suicide far from your mind. But at the same time, mend your ways. Being unfaithful once does not give you licence to be unfaithful again,” he replied in a column that quickly became known and was often quoted. “Bad enough
the unfaithfulness to your wife. Do not compound the sin by being unfaithful to God.”

He wrote more, jabbing furiously at the typewriter keys with the index fingers of both hands, but, on consideration, crossed the rest out. He was learning that the best answers should be brief. To matter-of-fact questions, factual answers were required, of course. But to questions of the heart, my father was realizing, it was best to be a bit enigmatic.

In matters of the heart, my father already had some experience of his own. He had been involved in a love affair or two, and his heart had been broken. He had observed envy and jealousies cause rifts within his own family. He himself had been the victim of betrayal by a friend. He was no Solomon, he knew, but he felt confident and stimulated. And he felt the first stirrings of what soon would become a new novel moving within him.

The envelope immediately announced itself as different from most of the others that crossed my father's desk. For one thing, it was neatly typed – whereas most he received were handwritten, often crudely so, and in a mixture of English and Yiddish – and addressed fully to Yentel Schmegge/The Wisdom of Solomon,
The Jewish World
, and the complete address. Of even more interest was the return address: Prof. M.E. Bell, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ohio, Columbus, Ohio. Columbus, my father knew, was some 150 miles away. He examined the envelope front and back and slit it open with interest.

The letter was addressed not to “esteemed editor” or “worthy Yentel Schmegge,” but to “My dear Mrs. Schmegge (or is it Miss?).” Now my father really was interested.

My father, flabbergasted, paused in his reading to rub his eyes. Then he continued:

The signature intrigued my father. It was just the name, “Madelaine Bell,” with no title, neither “Professor” nor “Miss” nor “Mrs.” Bell, he knew, could be an English name, or it could be a shortened, Anglicized version of a Jewish name like
Belzburg or Belowitz. In New York, he knew a number of Jewish men who called themselves Bell. He looked closer at the signature. The hand was feminine, yet clear and somehow bold, he thought. He imagined it was the signature of a woman who was independent – a professor! – who would yield to no man on matters of principle yet might happily yield to the pressure of arms and lips. This was exactly the sort of woman he himself was seeking. He read the letter again and a third time, and studied the signature further. He imagined the author of this letter was an attractive woman – but not wildly attractive – with long brown hair and intelligent eyes that could hold and return a gaze. Assistant professor meant that she could not be too old, and he imagined she would be no more than thirty, perhaps younger.