A Book of Great Worth (21 page)

• • •

Music by Rodgers, Lyrics by Hart

These days, envelopes come to my house almost weekly offering to make me a millionaire. All I have to do is open them and look inside; I may already be a winner.

I never am, and I’ve largely stopped looking, but these letters remind me of a time when my mother and her friend Moishe Cahan entered magazine and grocery store contests with a vengeance, the same sort of grim determination that drives a gambler to the slot machines and card tables.

My father took a dim view of these pursuits. “This is foolishness, Bertie,” he would complain, a hand-rolled cigarette burning in the ashtray and the first of his several evening glasses of port or sherry in front of him on the chipped Formica kitchen table, as my mother, still in her housedress and apron, sat across from him, the dark curls that adorned her head falling over her brow as she scribbled furiously in a steno pad, making rhymes. “Flour, hour, our, scour, dour, power,” she was writing in the light blue ink she favoured, using the silver-tipped pen she’d won in college for high marks in French. In my father’s moral lexicon,
foolishness
was one of the worst sins a person could fall prey
to, even worse than larceny, which could perhaps be ex
plained by need – hungry children, for example. Foolishness was a moral failure for which its author could have only himself to blame. He would never have thought of my mother as a fool, but he did believe some of her actions were foolish, and was always quick to say so. The contests she pursued, the jingles and slogans she composed, clearly fell into that category in his view.

“But what does it hurt?” my mother asked absently, brushing away a lock of chestnut hair as she looked up. She gave my father a crooked little smile, half innocence, half impudence. “Is my jingle any more foolish than your sherry? Now really.”

My father, who was a newspaper reporter, was em
ployed all through the Depression, actually made a good wage, and had no desperate need for instant riches; neither, of course, did my mother, but, as a young mother with first one, then two small children at home, and my father gone all day and often into the evening, she did have a craving for diversion.

Moishe, on the other hand, was in conspicuously dire straits. The Crash had come during his final year of architecture school, forcing him to drop out. He worked sporadically as a draftsman – an occupation he would sourly continue with when times got better – but mostly he was unemployed, disappointed and at loose ends, in need of something to do with his restless, birdlike hands. His wife, Rachel, who had been my mother’s best friend since high school, also had two young children to look after, but her poetic, abstract mind didn’t lend itself to the riddles, puzzles and other concrete
challenges of the magazine and radio contests that at
tracted her husband and my mother, though she didn’t frown on them the way my father did.

There were certain expenses involved which, be
cause my parents had money and the Cahans didn’t, my mother undertook to cover. These were postage, of
course, but also the purchasing of certain products: la
bels had to be scissored from cereal boxes and flour sacks, protective seals gingerly snipped from beneath the lids of peanut butter, jam and pickle jars. My mother could rationalize these purchases easily enough – she had to shop anyway, and most of the products were ones she might well have bought, contest or no, though not always in such large numbers. But it wasn’t the money my father begrudged, or even, since he
wasn’t the jealous sort, the growing intensity of the re
lationship between my mother and her friend’s husband, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table in the Cahans’ cramped apartment in the Bronx, near the Grand Concourse, or at my parents’ only slightly larger place in Coney Island, their heads close together as they pored over pencil and paper or some reference book, or falling helplessly together on the carpeted living room floor in bursts of giggles as they laboured over a limerick or a jingle while my father and Rachel, who had been attempting to carry on a conversation, looked on with slightly amused expressions; no, it was the wasted time he thought was foolishness, especially since, in his view, the chances of them actually winning anything was highly unlikely, the contests being either rigged or impossible. Testimonials in the magazines from previous winners he always dismissed as “cock-and-bull stories.” Earlier in his career, in Cleveland, he had written the
bintel briefs
, the advice to the lovelorn column, and no one knew better than he how little one could rely on what one read.

“But it’s
my
time,” my mother responded when my father complained of the hours she spent thumbing through dictionaries, encyclopedias and the thesaurus out of which the answers to puzzles and the rhymes for
jingles emerged. Although it seemed frustratingly im
possible that he might actually sell any, Moishe had even taken on a commission job as an encyclopedia salesman to give them access to more reference books, and many of these works were stacked on the coffee table in the living room and on the kitchen counter of my parents’ apartment, just as they must have been in the Cahans’. “And what
else
should I be doing with my time, Harry? I can’t wash and fold diapers
all
day long.”

My mother had spent two years at Hunter College before she married, and her education was one thing my father, who had only gone as far as the fifth grade and was largely self-taught,
was
jealous of; it was a matter of great pride to him that he had come so far, that he made his living writing, with so little schooling, and it irritated him that she didn’t take more advantage of what she had. Never mind that her education, and Moishe’s even greater one, were great assets in their pursuit of the contests, where knowledge of things as trivial as the states’ capitals and as arcane as Greek myth and European history could be invaluable; he would have liked to have seen her writing poetry, which Rachel Cahan did, or reading serious books, like the
Freud and Shakespeare he himself was partial to, to im
prove her mind, not reference works in hopes of winning some money – “filthy lucre,” he sneered – or a new stove or living room ensemble.

In fact, my mother
did
write poems, and after her death my sisters and I found some of them, folded and bound with a blue velvet ribbon along with love letters she and my father had written to each other during their occasional separations in their early years together, when my father, who covered the labour beat, would travel out of town on stories.

As it happened, he was away on just such a trip when my mother and her friend finally won a contest.

•••

As he did every summer, my father went to Atlantic City that year, 1936, to cover the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union convention. He was gone for barely more than a week, but in the six letters my mother wrote to him (four mailed, including two that came back after his return, marked “addressee no longer
here,” and two left unmailed for him to read on his re
turn), she expressed such longing that it might have been a month, or a year. These letters were all written
in English, my parents having forsworn French after the painful misunderstanding of a year earlier. She felt, she wrote on the third day, “like the wife of a seafarer, one of those whaling men or merchant marines who would be at sea for years on end, while their families lived their own closeted lives in Liverpool or New Bedford. It’s only the boardwalk at Coney Island, and I know your feet are walking on a similar boardwalk no more than a hundred miles from here, but I feel like I’m on one of those legendary widow’s walks, my face wet with a mixture of sea spray and tears.” This from a woman whose parents had both been born in central Russia, far from any large body of water, though she herself was born in
Paris and crossed both the English Channel and the At
lantic before she was four years old. How my father could say she was wasting her education when she was capable of hyperbole like that, I don’t know.

It was during my father’s absence that my mother and Moishe got word that their efforts had finally paid off.

The contest in which they had success was sponsored by a flour company and involved the writing of a jingle – the winning entry was to be professionally produced and become part of the company’s radio advertising campaign. More importantly, first prize was five thousand dollars – an enormous sum in those days – and a cruise to the South Seas; though it’s hard to imagine such pleasure cruises continued through those Depression years, apparently they did. The jingle my mother and Moishe wrote is lost, so I can’t record it here; they didn’t win first prize, and their contribution was never used by the flour company. They did win third prize, though, which was one thousand dollars, a set of stainless steel pots and pans and other kitchen paraphernalia and a certificate redeemable at the grocer’s for up to one hundred dollars worth of selected food products.

When my father came home from his trip, on Sunday evening, he was greeted by a nearly hysterical wife, two overexcited small children and a kitchen that looked, he used to say, like it had been hit by a tornado: the sink was filled with dirty dishes, the countertops were crowded with more dishes, open jars and boxes of food, the floor was filthy, particularly in one corner where a suspiciously fragrant stain still glistened. This was so unusual that he immediately assumed some calamity had befallen his family in his absence.

“Where were you?” my mother demanded. “I phoned and couldn’t reach you.”

“Bertie, what’s happened?” my father gasped in reply, genuinely alarmed.

“I tried to ph-ph-ph-phone you,” my mother stammered, tears streaming down her face. “No one knew where you were.” First she hugged my father, then she stepped back and began to beat his chest with her hands. He allowed her to do this for a few seconds, then gathered her into his arms, where she nestled as still as a wounded bird taken into hand. Through the shouting of his young daughters, who were grabbing at his trouser legs, my father could hear the soft shuddering of her sobs.

“I was sharing a room with Vogel, to save a few dollars,” my father said when he understood why my mother had become so anxious, and this explanation stood unchallenged, then and down through the years of family lore.

“They said you checked out,” my mother said weakly. “I was beside myself, I couldn’t...”

“I did check out, of course,” my father said. “I couldn’t very well tell them at the front desk what I was doing. But I told them at the office. If you had phoned there, they could have told you.”

“I didn’t think.”

“
I
didn’t think, Bertie. I didn’t think to let
you
know. It was Thursday, there were just a few days left and it didn’t occur to me that you’d call.” He paused. “Why
did
you call?” He stood back, holding my mother at arm’s length.

“Oh...” A smile broke across my mother’s tear-stained face, the slightly crooked smile that had softened my father’s heart the first time they met and still had as firm a grip on him as it would continue to have for many years to come. “Oh, I completely forgot. We won, one of our jingles, Moishe’s and mine. Third prize. A thousand dollars. I was so excited, I was calling to let you know.”

“A thousand dollars!” Beyond that, my father was speechless, much to my mother’s delight. He was a practical man and whatever doubts or disapprovals he had harboured about her time-consuming hobby seemed to vanish at the mention of that sum – not a
possible or projected or dreamed of amount, but a re
ality, more than ten times the amount of his weekly salary. “You have the money?”

“Not yet. I had to write back and confirm that I was who I am and live at this address. They’ll send a certified cheque by registered letter.”

“That you are who you are...” my father echoed, still trying to absorb the news.

“And half of it is for Moishe, for the Cahans. You know that, Harry.”

“Of course.”

“They can really use it. Moishe was beside himself when he found out, and Rachel was in tears. They were here for dinner Friday night. That was when I phoned you...” Her smile faded but didn’t disappear. “Then we were
both
in tears.”

Of all the arguments, fights and crises my parents had in their long marriage, none was as happily ended as this one, what my mother would, years later, refer to as “the time your father disappeared and I made three hundred dollars.”

“It should have been five hundred,” my father would grumble.

Then they would always laugh, both of them, as if the two events had been causally linked, as if it had taken my father’s disappearance to allow my mother to win the money, although, in fact, she had won the money before she knew of his disappearance, and wouldn’t have known of his disappearance at all – he would not, in fact, have “disappeared” – had she not won the money and, as a result, tried to telephone him. The winning of the money, my father’s safe return to her, to his family, to the tiny apartment in Coney Island, these were all remembered as a happy time, deliciously happy, if all too brief.

•••

Moishe Cahan was a short, heavy-set man whose thick mat of hair on chest and shoulders startled me, a boy of five or six, years later when the Cahans visited us once in the summer and he took off his shirt; so thick was the hair on his chest, he seemed more apelike than human. My mother used to swear that he was a kind, gentle, humorous man when she first knew him, that Rachel had plucked herself a peach, but the man I knew was bitter, irritable, stern. I went from feeling apprehensive about him to strong dislike during that visit, when I saw him slap the face of one of his sons, Manny, a few years older than me, for not immediately coming when he was called. This change in his personality was the result of the bad hand the Depression had dealt him, my father said. It was because of that, I suppose, and my mother’s deep affection for Rachel, that my parents didn’t allow the disagreement over the division of the contest prize to ruin their friendship, although my father only barely concealed his distaste for the man and, after Rachel’s death, communication between them and Moishe – his children long grown – trickled to an annual greeting card, then to nothing.