Stuffed (12 page)

CHOPPED LIVER

Grapefruit was the medicine of food. “Please, darling, please,” my grandfather begged. “Just one bite. For me? ” I didn’t get it. Why would anybody voluntarily eat pulp? Orange juice was strained to get the pulp out. The sensation of sour bursting beads in the mouth was more repulsive than sand in a sandwich at the beach.

“Darling, one bite. That’s all I ask. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to finish it.”

Why was grapefruit worth so much discussion? Why all this pleading over a fruit? Then I figured it out: Our blood was stored in tiny thin-skinned pointy sacs too. When you scraped your knee, it eventually stopped bleeding because the damaged sacs had a limit. Once the wound reached intact sacs, the bleeding stopped. Inside, humans were like grapefruits, and you needed grapefruit to keep you that way.

Herman Morgen started every Thursday night dinner at his table with half a grapefruit. There were always six courses: grapefruit, chopped liver, soup or tomato juice, salad, an entrée with a starch and at least two vegetables, one of which was string beans
almondine au beurre noisette,
and three or four desserts, two of which were my grandmother’s apple pie and lemon meringue pie and in season, strawberry shortcake.

Sometimes my grandfather ate his grapefruit broiled with caramelized sugar on top. Sometimes he ate it cold with a maraschino cherry. First he’d dig out the precut segments with a serrated grapefruit spoon. Then he’d take the grapefruit in his left hand and squeeze whatever droplets were left into his grapefruit spoon. When that was done, he’d excavate the rind. The only other person I knew who ate a grapefruit as thoroughly was my upstairs friend Alice Shapera’s older brother, Bob. On Friday nights in apartment 13F Bob went one step further. After decimating the grapefruit, he wore the hollowed rind on his head like a yarmulke. Eventually Bob changed his last name to Evans, became a producer in Hollywood, and married Ali McGraw.

Hello, Poppy?”

“Yes, darling.”

“If I come down to the store around two thirty, could you have lunch with me?”

SLAM.

My grandfather didn’t say good-bye when he hung up the phone.
SLAM
meant yes, it was fine for me to stop by for lunch. And yes, he’d be able to sit down with me after the last (which on a good day meant third) turnover. Who needs good-bye? Why waste time? If you slam down the phone, the conversation is over.

When he wasn’t in the store, my grandfather took things slower. Sniffing his cigar. Rolling it between his fingers. Clipping, licking, lighting it. Pondering its ash. Eating. Herman Morgen was a trencherman, a volume eater. He leaned into his plate. He liked to eat, but he wasn’t fat. He was five feet nine but he looked taller. His eyes were pewter. His upper lids had a fold that made him look as if he could see through you, see things you didn’t know about yourself. He had heavy brows, full lips, and smooth rosy cheeks. Herman Morgen was neat. He smelled good. He radiated a manly cleanliness and walked with his chest out. Overall he gave the impression of being robust, a man with a limitless peak and low tolerance for fools. He refused Novocain at the dentist’s. He kept a pebble in his shoe to remind himself to stand straight and suggested I do the same. He wore immaculately tailored suits. When he came home in a new gray silk from Saks, my grandmother, whose syntax was based on the hyperbolic compliment, said, “Herman! You look so handsome! You should have bought
three
of those!”

He went back to Saks and ordered two more.

He loved work. He loved to walk fast, then recuperate on a bench and turn his face to the sun. Above all, he loved to play bridge.

“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” he’d whisper to me, fanning out a hand.

It’s stunning to me now that I loved him unequivocally. He could have a flinty heart. He failed to appreciate my father and was less than loving. With the exception of my mother and grandmother, people seemed afraid of him. Once, I was sitting on the Madison Avenue bus, and he boarded at Fifty-second Street. He didn’t see me right away. I never imagined he used public transportation. In the moment before I knew it was my grandfather, I thought, There’s a powerful man.

He was proud of his restaurants and part of that pride depended on the concept of the satisfied customer. “A fellow came in. Ordered Prime Rib. Ate it all except for one bite. Then he sent the bite back. ‘Too well done,’ he said.”

“Poppy! What did you do?”

“I asked him if I could get him something else, darling. Told him I was sorry. Took it off the check.”

This is not to say the customer was always right. He would look a rude one in the eye and say, “You know that revolving door that brought you in? It’ll take you back out. And when you see black crepe hanging in the window, you’ll know I miss you.”

When my grandfather first started working in restaurants, his boss told him something that became a Herman Morgen business tenet. “Sheeny,” the man said, “here’s some advice: When you give people something for free, make it good or don’t bother.” In the spirit of making what’s free good, the bar at cocktail hour offered free coconut shrimp, miniature potato pancakes, skewered scallops grilled with pineapple, marinated chicken wings, sweet and pungent meatballs. Tables in the dining room were set with silver salvers of celery hearts, pickled peppers, radishes carved into roses, full sours, and mammoth green salty olives on a blizzard of crushed ice, alps of ice, fabulous ice that sent a cool breeze over the table when the waiter swooped it down. The breadbasket teetered with Parker House rolls, caraway salt crescents, raisin bread, sesame sticks, Ry-Krisp, and onion bread baked in the store with the onions blackened first in chicken fat.
Garni
on an entrée meant more than a parsley sprig: scarlet cinnamon-soaked crab apples; a nest of watercress; chiffonades, kumquats, riced egg, diced peppers, a perfect pickled green tomato.

You could make a meal out of what the store gave away and some people did. As a business strategy, this was confusing. Why serve free food if you make your living selling it?

“Darling,” my grandfather said, “the big profit in the restaurant business doesn’t come from food. It comes from the bar.” Years later, when the ad agency I worked for pitched the Ponderosa Steak-House account, I did steak-house research. I learned that the steak at fast-food steak houses was a freebie. They bought low-grade meat by the ton and used time and chemicals to tenderize it in stainless-steel vats. You could give the steak away as long as the customer bought a Coke. The Coke cost Ponderosa less than a penny.

Herman Morgen was twelve when he immigrated to America. His parents had sent him to boarding school, and he was miserable. It was the kind of boarding school where your family supplied the board. Since his parents owned an inn, sending food to their son was no problem. But what they sent was intercepted and little of it reached him.

“They never gave me enough to eat,” my grandfather said. “Sweetheart, I was starving.”

His older brother, Leopold, was already in America. My grandfather boarded a ship and came alone to New York. Leaning over the railing, watching the Statue of Liberty fade in and out of the mist, he swore he would never speak German or Polish again, that the little town he came from in the Tatra Mountains would no longer be part of his life. He would never go back, never see his parents. Herman Morgen would be an American now. He would bathe every day. He would chew gum. He moved in with Leopold until their father sent a letter: “I can’t have two boys in America,” it said. “I need one home.”

My grandfather didn’t want to go back. Back to what? A school that was unbearable and a father fond of the strap? Leopold was the older brother. “You would be more useful,” Herman said. Leopold went back.

Herman Morgen’s first job was sweeping up in a restaurant. When he mastered that, he got promoted to stuffing coleslaw into pleated paper cups. By the time he was fourteen, he was a prep man. The next year, line cook. At sixteen he moved onto the floor, rising from busboy to waiter in less than a year. That’s when he got a brainstorm: Since people eat with their eyes, why not show them something? He was working at a café on Times Square. The window was filled with snake plants. He moved the plants and replaced them with a roasted steamship round (the full thigh, top and bottom of a steer). He tied on an apron and borrowed a
toque blanche.
Then he sharpened his knives and began carving for the crowds on Broadway. People stopped. They stared. They watched piece after piece of perfectly sliced steaming pink meat fall. They stood on their toes to see. My grandfather said they watched that meat the way, sixty years later, people watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. He was the first man to carve meat in a window. It brought the customers in.

Herman Morgen was elevated to assistant manager. Then manager. By twenty-four he was making enough money to get married. When he was ready to open his own store, Polly, who all her life used a tea bag twice, handed him a stack of bank-books held together with a rubber band. She was a genius at saving money. He opened Morgen’s Sandwich Shop at 1214 Broadway.

Over the years Herman Morgen owned fourteen stores in New York: Robert’s Tavern (where Uncle Bob was a busboy), Robert’s Bake Shop, Robert’s Seafood, Morgen’s, Morgen’s East, Morgen’s Sandwich Shop, Morgen’s Café (managed by my grandmother), Herman’s Cafeteria (bought for his sister Broncha to run), Herman’s Coffee Shoppe, Herman’s Café (managed by his sister’s husband), Herman’s Tavern (managed by my great-grandfather), Herman’s Luncheonette (opened for Aunt Gertie’s husband), Herman’s Grill, and Hergen’s. Anyone who needed a job got a restaurant.

“Everyone in the family took from him,” Dad says. “He was there. He was generous.”

Only once did he get duped. A restaurant at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was for sale. He went to see what kind of lunch it did. The place was packed. The line was out the door. He bought the restaurant. When he reopened it, no one came. The previous owner had “loaded” the house. He’d filled it with friends to make the restaurant look busy. “Your grandfather worked like a slave to build that place up so he could sell it,” my father says. “He lived there. He
slept
there. He did everything.”

When my grandfather hit me, he was baby-sitting for ten days while my parents were on a cruise to Curaçao. It was Sunday night. We were going to Ruby Foo’s on West Fifty-second Street, the only Chinese restaurant we ate at because of the rumor they used cats in China-town.

I began to get ready.

“Brush your teeth,” my grandfather said.

“I never brush my teeth before dinner, Poppy.”

“I said, Brush your teeth.”

“I only brush my teeth in the morning and before bed.”

“I said, Brush them!”

I explained that according to my mother, I only had to brush my teeth twice a day.

“No,” my grandfather said. “You have to brush them now, before we go to Ruby Foo’s.”

“No. I don’t. I only have to brush my teeth once before breakfast and once before bed.” I told him I’d be happy to comb my hair though. “Want me to comb my hair, Poppy? I’ll comb my hair.”

He followed me into the bathroom. My sister watched from her bed, where she sat eating a raw onion sandwich to clear her nasal passages. I stood on my toes and reached for the comb on the black glass shelf below the medicine chest.

“See?” I said. “I’m combing my hair.”

“Brush your teeth.”

“But I don’t have to.”

“I said, Brush your teeth.”

“Want me to wash my hands, Poppy? I’ll wash my hands.”

That’s when he hit me. He hit the side of my face. The hit lifted me. Landing on the tiled bathroom floor, I was aware of coolness places my undershirt wasn’t. My arms, my neck, the back of my legs. Then I opened my eyes and saw the underside of our pedestal sink. It was gray like pavement, only rough like my mother’s broadtail coat. So this is what the underside of a sink looks like, I thought. I never would have seen the underside of a sink if my grandfather hadn’t hit me.

My sister ran to get my grandmother. Something was going to be different. Something would never be the same. Someone could almost bruise you with hard kisses. Someone could smile and say “Jewish fella” when Eddie Fisher came on
The Ed Sullivan
Show,
and it would make your day. You’d watch for that smile. If you were sitting behind him, you’d watch to see if the crest of his cheekbone rose. Someone could hug you till you begged for air, then send you flying.

“You weren’t hit,” my sister says now. “You were walloped.”

“I was?”

“He hit you over and over again.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“After that, I knew I’d always have to be good around him. After that, I was scared of him. I thought, You have to do everything a grown-up says. You have to do it, or you get hurt.”

When my mother came home, I told her what happened. I wanted to plead my case, to let her know it wasn’t my fault I’d gotten hit because she’d told me I only had to brush my teeth twice a day. I was being good, not brushing my teeth a third time. I was following orders.

My grandfather stared at the floor. “You did what?” Mom detonated. “Don’t you ever . . . !” “If you so much as ever . . . !” It was the only time I heard someone speak harshly to him. He was unthreatenable, a man free of self-doubt. But he cared what my mother thought about him, so he hung his head. I felt sorry for him and wanted to make it up to him. I would sit on his lap and ride his knee. I would ask about the Yankees. When we walked up and down Riverside Drive at night with nothing to say to each other, when I gave up trying to think of something, anything to interest him, to make him talk to me, when all that was left to do was count the red neon Spry signs blinking on and off across the Hudson in New Jersey, I would squeeze his hand every now and then to remind him I was there and still loved him. I would never complain about the river-blasted wind. And from the night he hit me, from that night on, he would call me by name.

“Patty, darling, could you get me a beer?” and I’d run to his round-shouldered refrigerator and pull out a Miller High Life. “Patty, sweetheart, I could use something cold,” and I’d drop my SlapJack cards and pour him a White Rock ginger ale with ice. My sister couldn’t race me anymore, because he used my name. He didn’t say, “Darling, could you get me a beer?” He said, “Patty.”