A Book of Great Worth (19 page)

My father glanced at what the other man had carefully printed out and shook his head with wonder. “So many words.”

“Yes,” Bromberg agreed, “the French are verbose. Never one word when two will do.”

The following day’s letter contained another drawing by my sister, more outpourings of passion and tenderness in both English and French and, because it was written the day after his departure, was filled with household news: Esther’s skinned knee, Judy’s colic, a letter from the bank. By the end of the week, though most of his time was devoted to the events unfolding around him, with declarations of war on the business world and news of strategies emerging daily from the
summit, through either official pronouncements or un
official leaks, my father’s head was plugged with such family trivia and his ears rang with the musicality of French phrases conveying promises, pledges, entreaties, enticements. And Bromberg, who continued to be amused by his assignment, had been drawn closer and closer into what my father now felt had become a conspiracy of sorts.

Each afternoon at three, the two men would meet in the hotel bar and Bromberg would translate whatever French passages there might be in that day’s letter from my mother, reading them out loud in a cultivated voice that retained, after the four years the enormous man had spent at Harvard, only the faintest traces of his upbringing in the Bronx. Then my father would dictate a few sentences or two of reply and Bromberg, scribbling on a napkin or the back of an envelope, would produce a version in French. There was some trust
involved, as my father had no way of knowing for certain what his colleague wrote, but he was confident that Bromberg’s command of spelling, grammar, diction and syntax in French were impeccable. What was there to be concerned with?

On Friday, with just one or, at the most, two days left to the labour summit, an unexpected note of alarm crept into my mother’s daily letter. “My darling Harry,” she began as always, “I was surprised by the tone you took in your response to my news about Judy’s recurring cough. I assure you I’m not being overly protective.” This puzzled my father since he recalled no accusations, and certainly no tone, in the letter he’d written two days earlier – or was it three? Suddenly he was confused about how long it took letters to go from New York to Chicago and back again. This letter was dated Thursday, so should be responding to what he had written Wednesday, but perhaps it was Tuesday. Had he taken such a tone on Tuesday? It was so far back, and so much had transpired at the meeting since then, he couldn’t be sure. At any rate, the crossness of my mother’s own tone immediately disappeared as she turned to other subjects, so he gave it no further thought. And if her passages in French, when Bromberg translated them for him that afternoon, were briefer and seemed less passionate, that surely was his imagination playing tricks on him.

Nevertheless, in his letter to her that night, he began by writing “Dearest Bertie, I apologize a thousand times if anything I may have said gave you offense or hurt your feelings. It was certainly unintentional and perhaps attributable to the tense atmosphere here at the hotel.” And he’d already made certain that the passages he dictated to Bromberg for translation into French, which he now carefully copied out, were especially affectionate. Bromberg, he recalled, had nodded his head in approval as he scribbled.

The following day, Saturday, there was no letter from my mother. My father, surprised, exclaimed: “Surely there’s mail delivery on Saturday in Chicago,” to which the desk clerk assured him there was, though only one, in the morning. There would be no further delivery until Monday morning. But by that time, my father knew, he would be on his way home, as it now
seemed certain the summit would conclude Sunday af
ternoon, carefully timed to make the headlines of Monday morning’s newspapers. There would be a pickup at noon, however, the desk clerk told him, and though he wasn’t sure if a letter he posted today would get home before him or afterward, he sought out Bromberg after breakfast and dictated one final message in French. “I love you and count the minutes, the seconds, until once again I hold you in my arms,” he dictated, blushing. He realized with sudden horror how deeply he had opened himself to the other man’s scrutiny, but it was too late now for modesty. “Until then,” he went on, his voice trembling with emotion, “I will be only a shadow of myself, a hollow man, waiting to be filled once again by the sweet liquor of your love.”

Bromberg raised his heavy head and gave my father a frank look, and smiled with satisfaction as he returned to his task, his jowls quivering. “You’re a poet, Morgenstern,” he said, “a blessed poet.”

That evening, there was a banquet, thrown by the Illinois branch of the federation, and the Blackstone Hotel’s best hall was filled with the cream of the leadership of the state’s unions. Meany gave one of his trademark thunderous speeches, though he omitted most of the key announcements, which were being held for the following day. Afterwards, there was much drinking and when my father went to bed he barely had time to whisper “Goodnight, darling Bertie” to his pillow before he was asleep. The following day, as he had expected, there was a press conference shortly after noon, but there had been enough leaks that my father already had most of his story written. A few quotes pasted in and he was ready to dictate into the telephone to the rewrite man awaiting his call on the city desk in New York. Afterwards, there was plenty of time to pack, and he and Vogel shared a taxi to Union Station. That night, he slept on the crisp sheets of a Pullman berth dreaming of his own bed.

Once back in the city on Monday morning, the ex
pense account clicked off and my father took the subway from Penn Station to Coney Island, where my parents had a small apartment on West Twenty-First Street near Surf Avenue, within scent if not sight of the ocean. He lugged the big suitcase up the two flights of stairs and paused outside the door to catch his breath before turning the key. “Bertie, children, I’m home,” he called. There was no response. My father put the suitcase down and walked down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. Dishes were in the sink but there was no other sign of life. “Bertie?” he called again.

He found my mother in their bedroom standing by the window. She didn’t turn when he called her name from the doorway and he could see from the movement of her shoulders that she was crying. “Bertie, what on earth?”

He took her by the shoulders and turned her around. Her eyes and nose were red and her cheeks glistened. “You’re a h-h-h-horrible man,” she managed to hiccup out.

My father was dumbstruck. In the five years they’d been married they’d had arguments, even one memorable fight, and there had certainly been tears before, but nothing like this, the cause so completely mysterious. “What are you talking about, Bertie?” he demanded.

“What I’m talking about? The terrible things
you
said. The vile things you wrote about your own children, and about me, all week.” She paused to blow her nose with a handkerchief she had balled in her hand. “And today’s letter...oh, Harry, how could you do such things? How could you tell me about those women?”

My father looked at her with amazement. At first, it seemed to him that she was speaking nonsense but gradually it began to dawn on him what might have happened. “I said things? When? Where?”

“In your l-l-l-letters,” my mother hiccuped. “Your
horrible
letters.”

“In my letters...I said these terrible things in French?”

“Yes,” she spit out. “That made it all the worse.” She gave him then a pointed look, as if she too were perhaps beginning to understand.

“Bertie, Bertie,” my father crooned, stroking my mother’s auburn hair, which, at the time, she wore loose around her shoulders. “I have a confession to make.” Later, he would think about what he would have to say to Bromberg. And whether a punch in the fat, malicious bastard’s nose would be appropriate. As for now, it was enough that she was in his arms.

From that day on, he determined, there would be no more French spoken in his house, no more French in their letters, no more secrets, no more deceptions, harmless or not –
harmless!
– no more lies, white or any other kind.

Outside the bedroom window, on the street below, children were playing. Through the glass, my parents could hear the muffled sound of their shouts, but not the words.

• • •

A Bargain

My father used to say that my mother was the one in the family who wore the pants. As he said it, he would invariably be wearing pants himself, either the pants of his suit or a pair of the Sears catalogue blue jeans my mother ordered for him, and she would be wearing one of her many floral-print skirts, so the remark was surely meant to be ironic, though at the time, and until I went off to college and learned its delicious meaning, irony
was a concept I was unfamiliar with, and what my fa
ther said was merely puzzling. The closest my mother ever came to wearing pants was the voluminous denim culottes she put on to tend her garden in the summer. Beyond those, and the one-piece swimsuit she wore when we went to the beach, I never saw her out of a skirt or dress, though she would occasionally walk around the house in her slip for a while after coming home from work. She was never embarrassed to be dressed that way in front of me, and so I in turn was never embarrassed to see her.

I think what my father meant by the remark was that my mother made all the big decisions in their life together. Another of his favourite remarks – again, ironically – was that he made the
big
decisions, on war and peace, world hunger, the economy and other weighty matters, while my mother contented herself with the
small
decisions, those related to the family and household, things like spending money, feeding and clothing them and the children, what movie to go to and so on. My father also often said that he and my mother did everything around the house together, with
him doing the physical labour and my mother “supervising,” if it was something to do with the outside, and her doing the work and him supervising if it was inside –
chores like the dishes and the laundry. All of these
comments – conveyed in a joking voice but with a se
rious undertone – related to my father’s often-expressed grievance that my mother was “bossy.”

It was true that she almost always got her way. But not always. My father liked a drink now and then, meaning several times a day. I don’t know how many. She would have liked him not to drink at all. His concession to her was rarely to drink his preferred rye whisky in her presence – never at home, but he would let his guard down and have one or two at family gatherings where liquor was flowing. “I’m just doing this to be polite,” he would say, a little too loudly but usually with a wink, and the uncles would smile. But he kept a flask in the inside pocket of his overcoat – and when, a few years later, he became a commuter, another in the glove compartment of his car. There was also a bottle in the bottom drawer of his desk at work, and during the course of his day he made occasional stops at barrooms where he was a familiar customer. At home, at night, usually seated at the kitchen table in his undershirt, he would have a glass or two of sherry or port, usually the cheapest brands. My mother bought it for him, and that’s what he specified, the cheapest, which, I imagine, also appealed to her own sense of frugality. This was her concession to him, these fortified wines, “a gentleman’s drink,” he would say when he unscrewed the bottle, as if to imply it was no drink at all then, and didn’t count.

Although I was a witness to them all through my growing up, this to-ing and fro-ing, these nuances of
their life together, it wasn’t until I was grown and in
volved in a relationship of my own that I came to understand the delicate balance they had constructed and maintained. Well, not understand, but begin to.

Long before that, before my birth even, my father had a bad experience with drink, so bad that, even though he did not give up drinking, he vowed he would never again be drunk, really drunk, in that state where he could not count on his own abilities or judgment, where he was of no use to anyone.

I heard about this experience, as might be expected, after I had my own first bad encounter with drink, when I was seventeen, drank too many illicit beers
while out with my friends, and, on the way home, in
delicately put the family car in the narrow river branch that ran alongside the road that led to our place in the country, where we’d finally moved the year before – a return to rural life my parents had quit when my sisters were approaching college age. This was the finest car we had ever owned, a Lincoln less than ten years old, with leather seats and power windows, which we had purchased cheaply the year before from my mother’s sister Mars, who was married to a lawyer and so the best off of her siblings, and I was terrified that I’d damaged it, more frightened of that than what might happen to me – in the split second that the car was airborne before landing in the shallow water, I issued a silent prayer that
I
pay whatever price might be due, not the car.

But, miraculously, I wasn’t hurt, and even the car received only a minimum of damage, the mud it settled into more an affront to the Lincoln’s dignity than anything else. Really, what happened to me was not exceptional; what was memorable was the story my father told me afterwards.

My parents and my two sisters lived in an apartment on West Twenty-First Street, near the corner of Surf Avenue, in Brooklyn, Coney Island to be more exact, not within sight but, as my father put it, within smelling distance of the ocean. From their living room window, which faced south, they could see the top of the Parachute Jump on the Boardwalk and, in the summer, hear the shrieks of riders on the Cyclone. My mother was left alone every day with the children, both of them still too young even for kindergarten, while my father escaped to his own world of work, first riding the Surf Avenue bus, then descending into the dark cavern of the Stillwell Avenue subway station and emerging within half an hour on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the East Broadway station, a short walk to
The Day
. “If anyone needed a drink,” my father said, “it was her, not me.” My mother, for reasons of her own, rarely drank more than a few sips from a glass of wine at family events. But my father, as I’ve said, kept a bottle in the drawer of his desk, even in those early days, and he had a drink from it as soon as he arrived at work, presumably to brace himself for the rigours that lay ahead. Later he would have a drink or two with lunch, and another drink or two with some cronies before catching the subway for the return trip to Coney Island. Walking home from the bus, he would often stop at a tavern on the corner of Mermaid Avenue and Twenty-First Street for a glass of beer – which he believed would hide the odour of whisky on his breath – before tackling the three flights of stairs that led to wife and children with whom, almost always, he would be loving husband and father, revealing no sign of the alcohol he’d consumed during the day other than a mellow disposition. My father had a temper, but he rarely displayed it.