You Are My Heart and Other Stories (21 page)

Then, starting seven months ago, when the last remaining relative of my parents' generation, my Uncle Herschel, died (he was ninety-three, and was hit by a car at the intersection of Broadway and 89
^th
Street in Manhattan, when, crossing the street, he bent down to pick up a dime), the door to that windowless room opened wide, and feelings I thought I'd put away forever, especially after Herschel's son Joey died more than forty years ago, tumbled out, and with a power that, like one of Herschel's famous punches—he'd been a terrific amateur boxer, a Golden Gloves and AAU champion—stunned.

When I was growing up in Brooklyn during the years following World War Two (I was born in 1938), my mother, Herschel's youngest sister, worked as a registered nurse at Kings County Hospital. My father worked at odd jobs, mostly as a floor salesman at shoe stores on Flatbush Avenue, and sometimes, with Herschel, as a runner for the guys who controlled the gambling and numbers rackets in our section of Brooklyn.

When I was five months old, my father contracted mumps. My mother claimed he caught it from hanging out with low-life; my father claimed she passed it on to him after exchanging saliva samples with one of the doctors she worked with. Though I stopped listening to their arguments about
why
I was an only child early on, my mother could still get to me when she told me what, in memory, she seemed to do every day of my life: that she loved me so much that if anything ever happened to me, she didn't know
what
she'd do to herself.

“If you go, Marty, then I follow,” she'd say. “You can count on it.”

I'd say stuff back to her—that there was nothing to worry about, that I was in great shape, that I wished she'd stop talking this way—but nothing helped. When I was fourteen years old, though, I finally said something I'd been fantasizing saying for a long time, and I can date the event from the fact that it was the year my elementary school, Public School Number 246 changed into
Junior
High School Number 246. Because my friends and I were eighth graders who'd gone to P.S. 246 since kindergarten, we were allowed to go straight to high school instead of having to spend ninth grade in junior high the way new kids entering the school that year would have to.

Three weeks after my fourteenth birthday, on graduation night, when my mother found out that my friends and I were planning to go across the river to New Jersey—to Minsky's for a burlesque show—she threw a fit. Over her dead body would she let me go, she said, because she knew the kinds of jokers who hung around places like that and preyed on pretty boys like me, after which she added her usual line about not knowing what she'd do to herself if anything happened to me.

Because I felt humiliated by the
thought
of having to tell my friends my mother wouldn't let me go to a burlesque show with them, I said that if something happened to me, she could always
buy
a new child to replace me.

“Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?” she said.

“You know,” I said.

“I know what?” she said.

“If anything happens to me, you could
buy
a new son the way Uncle Herschel and Aunt Rose bought Joey,” I said, “and the way all the others do—the ones you and Doctor Margolies sell—one of your black market babies.”

She was so astonished, she just stood where she was, her mouth open in amazement, and sensing I'd wounded her the
way I'd often hoped to, I added that because we were family, she could probably get a discount.

That did it. She came at me, slammed me against our breakfront—I heard stuff shatter—raked her fingernails down my face, and then, before I could cover up, she started in slapping at me with both hands, one after the other—left right, left right—while screaming that I had a mind as dirty as my mouth, and if I ever dared talk this way to her again I'd wind up at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal in cement boots, after which she'd put on her best dress and her silk stockings and go out dancing. My father stayed in his easy chair like the lump he usually was, a low moaning sound coming from somewhere inside his chest.

“And let me tell you something else, you ungrateful little stinker,” my mother said when she'd stopped slapping me around. “Nobody knows the risks we take. Nobody knows, do you hear me? We bring happiness into people's lives that they shower blessings on us for, and nobody knows, do you understand? Nobody ever knows.”

“I know,” I said.

“And the
good
we do for people—helping young girls out of the worst kind of trouble, and young wives wanting to be mothers and cursed by some fucking heartless god to be sterile their whole lives—most of them from the best families, for your information, and I mean the
very
best—the daughters of judges and doctors and even rabbis—and nobody ever knows all the good we do.”

“And all the money we make!” my father chimed in, which made my mother look at him as if he were some drunken fool who'd wandered in from the street.

“You go wash up, and don't forget to use hydrogen peroxide,” she said. Then, to my father: “And you—who invited
you
to this party? Because you can drop dead for all I care. In fact, the both of you can, and I mean it this time, to have this little
pisher
talk to me the way he did…”

Which words seemed to give my father the excuse he was waiting for to take a turn whacking me around while proclaiming that
nobody
talked to his wife the way I did without having to deal with him. But I got away easily—I was always too quick for him—and locked myself in the bathroom, where I cleaned out the scratches on my face.

By the time I came out my mother was gone, who knew where, so I headed out to meet my friends, and we went to Minsky's and had a great old time. When I explained the marks on my face by saying I'd picked up this wild chick in Greenwich Village—a real tiger—and had started celebrating early by taming the beast in her, my friends were skeptical, but not totally disbelieving—I had a reputation for taking dares and doing wild things back then—and I doubt that it would have occurred to any of them to think it was my mother who'd done the damage.

My mother and I never mentioned Doctor Margolies or black market babies again, but I think it broke her heart—not that I knew about what she did, because how could I not have known, given all the talk that went on over our phone about babies and money and lawyers and when and where deliveries and exchanges would take place, but because by saying what I'd said I'd broken some unwritten agreement we'd had about never acknowledging out loud that she did what she did.

But there was something else at work too, because if we'd talked about it, I would have agreed that though she and Doctor Margolies may have been breaking laws, they weren't
hurting
anyone: that they were, in fact, doing what my mother said they were doing—helping some people out of jams while helping other people fulfill their dreams. Plus—the main thing, from my point of view—they were giving a child who would have been stigmatized as a bastard, a life that child would never otherwise have had. I'd heard my mother whispering her justifications and rationalizations into the phone to one or another of her sisters (she had three sisters and one other brother besides
Herschel), or to Doctor Margolies, a thousand times, and except for when she'd cover the mouthpiece with her hand and go more hush-hush if I passed through the foyer, where our phone was, I never thought much about the effect on me of what she did, partly because I'd heard her talk about other doctors and nurses who were doing the same thing, so that it just seemed what people did to avoid being at the mercy of adoption agencies and the crap and lousy choices they put you through.

What I began to see, though—what became clear around the time of Herschel's death—was that one reason I got so angry with my mother wasn't because of what she and Doctor Margolies
did
—in a weird way, I was proud of her for being a kind of outlaw who risked her life and career to rescue people from misery—but because I'd always wanted to
be
one of the children she'd bought and sold.

Because if a mother and father paid large amounts of money and risked going to jail to make you their child, they must really have wanted you and loved you.

“Dogs fuck dogs and make more dogs,” I'd hear my mother say to people she was providing babies for. “It's
raising
the child that makes you a parent, and you'll see—the minute you hold that precious package in your arms, you'll fall in love with it and feel it's yours and will be yours forever.”

My cousin Joey had been a black market baby—born, bought, and sold into our family before I was born—and because he was my favorite cousin, it made me wish I could have come into the world the way he did: illicitly, and in a way that, once he discovered his true origins, he could, as I saw it, have had it both ways—he could be grateful to his parents, my Uncle Herschel and Aunt Rose, for wanting him so much that they made him their child even though he wasn't biologically theirs, and he could also have held a trump card against them if he ever needed one by being able to say: You're not my
real
parents.

But I didn't love Joey mainly because he'd been a black market
baby. He'd become my hero years before I knew this about him, when he was fighting in the Pacific as a navigator in a B-24 over Saipan and New Guinea. When I wrote letters to him, he answered them, and at the end of each letter always said that my prayers were keeping him and his buddies alive—that they were fighting to keep us
all
alive and free—and that I should keep my chin up and the home fires burning.

When he came home from the war in 1945, he brought me a box of souvenirs—insignias, medals, a compass in a flip-open metal case, a small gnarled item wrapped in plastic that he said was the ear of a Japanese soldier (while I was sleeping one night, my mother took it from my room and threw it away), three bullets still filled with gunpowder, and his dog tags, which I wore on a chain around my neck.

And he told me again—this was at a welcome home party his parents made, a big red-white-and-blue sign over the entrance to their apartment building—WELCOME HOME OUR HERO JOEY!—that it was thinking about me that had kept him going when he never knew if, in the next minute or hour, he was going to live or die. He just kept telling himself, “If I stay alive, I bet there'll be another letter from Marty waiting for me at the base when I get back, and you know what? I lived for your letters, Marty! I showed them to my buddies and they agreed that you've got one hell of a talent there and are gonna be a great writer some day.”

“
Really?
” I'd say.

“You bet,” he'd say, and chuck me on the shoulder. “When it comes to words, you got the gift. But there was this, too, see—because most of the other guys got their letters from their wives or sweethearts, what they worried about—almost more than getting shot down and captured, which we figured would be worse than dying, the way the Japs did things—was if their women would stay true to them, them being away from home for so long.”

“Did you see any of them die?” I asked.

“I saw some of my buddies die,” he said, and as soon as he did, he walked away to the table where the booze was, poured himself a drink, and began slapping people on the back and telling them how great it was to be home.

Joey went to college on the G.I. Bill—to Brooklyn College, where he was a star on the basketball team (he'd been high scorer for his high school team when he'd played at Erasmus before the war), and I'd go to all his home games. He always left me comp tickets at the door, and I usually sat with Herschel, who'd go wild whenever Joey scored, but even wilder when a referee called a foul on Joey that Hershel disagreed with. He'd scream and curse at the ref, and ask him who his optometrist was, or if the other coach or some bookie was paying him off, and if a ref looked his way, Herschel would stand up and point right at him and tell the guy to meet him outside after the game and he'd show him what playing fair was all about.

I think Joey looked up to his father as much as I looked up to Joey, though when I once said something to my mother about how much Joey admired Herschel, and about what a great man he was, she sneered.

“My brother has his fans, that's for sure, but don't count me as one of them,” she said. “I love him, I suppose, and he probably loves me in his cockeyed way, but mostly Herschel's an operator who's always been hot after the buck.”

“But he was a great boxer,” I protested, and talked about all the trophies in his apartment, and the signed photos on the walls of him with famous fighters—Jack Dempsey, Max Baer, Benny Leonard, Gene Fullmer, Carmen Basilio, Jimmy Braddock, and lots of others.

“He got around, Herschel did,” my mother acknowledged. “And he had some talent and lots of grit, I'll give that to him.”

“Joey says he knew
all
the great fighters, even Joe Louis!”

“He knows Louis,” my mother said, and looked at me in a
funny way that made me think she knew I was thinking about Louis's training camp in Lakewood, New Jersey, where I'd been with Herschel and Joey, and which was near the place where a lot of the young women who got pregnant, and who my mother and Doctor Margolies worked with, stayed before they gave birth.

 

After Joey graduated from college, he got a start in the garment business through a guy who owed Herschel a favor from gambling debts Herschel had helped him with, but a guy who also said that with Joey's record—a war hero, and a star athlete—along with his terrific personality and good looks (he was a dead ringer, the man said, for the actor John Garfield, who'd grown up in the man's neighborhood when his name was Jacob Garfinkle)—he'd be a natural.