David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  Copyright © Robert Alan Kalich, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photographing, recording, or

  by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in North America in 2019 by

  Bunim & Bannigan Ltd.

  P.O. Box 72131 BP Atwater

  Montreal, QC

  H3J2Z6

  Canada

  www.bunimandbannigan.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: David Lazar : A Novel / Robert Kalich.

  Names: Kalich, Robert Allen, 1937– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana 20190143606 | ISBN 9781933480497 (hardcover)

  Classification: LCC PS3561.A425 D38 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  Design by Rita Lascaro

  Printed in Canada

  For my wife Brunde and Knute, my son.

  With appreciation to those who assisted, motivated, and helped: people like Merle Drown, my Maxwell Perkins; Angelo Pastoramerlo, my left arm; Meryl Zegarek, my confidant; and to my twin brother Richard Barry Kalich, who is everything.

  A true story with blurred lines between fiction and memoir to protect the confidentiality of each person fleshed out and characterized...

  In the real world, motives are mixed. People are unreliable. There are contradictions. People forget. There are omissions. You certainly don’t know everything. There aren’t good people and bad people. There are shades of this and that.

  —William H. Gass

  Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

  —Albert Einstein

  We’re all mixed bags.

  —Gordon Gekko

  Contents

  An omen from the author

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  12 months later

  About The Author

  An omen from the author

  The protagonist is not likeable. He is unlikeable. He has inimical traits stretching the worldly gamut from Here to There. Those traits take center stage when he whines and feels sorry for himself rather than man up and offer remorse to those individuals he manipulated, maimed, and destroyed. To add pepper to his cruelties, David Lazar’s lifestyle should be labeled obscene, an eighty-year stench. Let’s face it, David Lazar is not to be envied. He’s as universally flawed as most of us. Read on; decide for yourself if I am mistaken.

  Prologue

  On two of the high walls of my wood-paneled study are giant collages with extremely small photographs of faces pasted onto cardboards. When I look at this collage of people, I see my own life in front of me as if it were beginning and ending, living with deep gulps of nostalgia, heartache, and self-condemnation in between. Think of it as taking a swim in dangerous currents, going under, coming back to the surface to gasp one more time. It all began so long ago.

  But this is not a story going from point to point; instead, it’s a shuffling of my entire existence, like a deck of cards. So, if I confuse you, it just happens to be the way I see my life, not as anything coherent or straightforward but as cards being manipulated by a dealer’s deft hands, falling into place as if they were casino chips and when stacked—Bingo! You have an octogenarian who’s still surviving, some would say, on God’s inexplicable blessed air.

  The question now is, can you place these cards of my life where they belong?

  Chapter 1

  It’s a glorious day. From the bedroom window, I can see leaves falling to the ground. Scattering, predictably gathering in bunches, as children do in a school playground. I head for the breakfast nook I am so fond of. Scoop the New York Times off the kitchen table and take stock of the kitchen. After all these Westchester County years, I still can’t believe its size. Amazingly, such considerations as comfort, coziness, convenience, accoutrements—I’ve evolved into a serious collector of first editions and outsider art—have become more than mere indulgences. The imported marble kitchen tabletops, the gleaming white-tiled walls, the magnificent antiques, the furniture and furnishings, the George P.A. Healy 1869 painting of Lincoln, the verdant views...these trappings force me to think of antithetical Harlem, its penniless unending powerlessness. Never did I find a breath of fresh air in the Apollo Theatre, Rucker Park, the reconditioned brownstones, cleaner streets, more attractive storefronts. Still in my head are welfare clients that I served there, nearly sixty years ago. The Rivera family, Mike Tafuri, Mr. and Mrs. Hodapp. Eloise Goyens. Fourteen-year-old Gabriella Blanco. Fifty-two East 118th Street. Swaying not-so-young women play-acting whores: “Hey mister! Want a blow job? $3!”

  And there, but for the grace of my skin color and the serendipity of birth, go I.

  Color and situation still matter in this absurd world of ours. Money, even more. I made dollars because of my good fortune or luck or aberrational skills or whatever you want to label it. I did make money. I did Make It.

  I start the day by brewing myself a fresh pot of coffee, adding cream, drinking fresh orange juice, scrambling a few eggs, going through the Times Book Review section. I’m ready for the “I love you” between Elizabeth and I, which, still, after two decades of marriage, doesn’t feel obligatory. I assumed we would speak about what to tell our son Liam, if anything, about things that I had never mentioned. Without any prompting from Elizabeth, I have dwelled for months on how much to tell my son. For sure, we’ll also speak about his robotics projects and about some of the colleges that he is applying to. Liam is partial to Stanford in the West, Princeton in the East. And I wouldn’t forget to mention to Elizabeth that Liam had texted me searching for his sandals.

  Elizabeth enters the kitchen holding a porcelain cup of steaming black coffee. Her hands are shaking. The cup is rattling on the saucer. Liz is wearing my navy blue, cashmere bathrobe and my son’s sandals. Before I can utter a word, she is sobbing. Slowly at first. Then faster.

  “I was up most of the night,” she says. “I read your memoir, from cover to cover.” She stops and wipes a tear from her cheek. “Before you say a word, I realize what you sacrificed for me during these last twenty years. How difficult it was for you to become domesticated.” She stops again. “We must talk, David.”

  I see the same sorrowful eyes that had gazed at me when I brought her home after our first date, and she said, “I’ve never been happy a single day in my entire life.”

  At that moment, something inside me opened. I wanted to convert Elizabeth’s pain into something joyous. I wanted her to experience delight, fun, as I had growing up, my PM Two baseball glove, kosher food, books.

  “Maybe it’s me.” Elizabeth sobs. “I think I have always denied who you really are. I psyched myself into believing that you were someone I had always wa
nted you to be. A magical elixir or healer, and so delicious that one’s always craving for more. You’re exciting. You’re smart. You’re different. You’re like that pitcher, Bob Gibson, who couldn’t throw a straight pitch. You’re always throwing a pitch that’s darting around and diving. You must have struck me out every day for all these years.”

  Elizabeth bites her lip, stammers, “Evan Strome!”

  “That’s one of the things in the manuscript that isn’t true. One day Evan just disappeared. I didn’t threaten him or give him any ultimatums. I certainly didn’t place a contract out on him.”

  “And you didn’t hunt him down?”

  “I have no hard feelings for Evan Strome. He was a hell of a lot

  like me.”

  What amazes me is how I have learned to lie so adroitly to Elizabeth. So, when she asked questions, I circumvented truthful answers and found it very easy to tell her bold-faced lies and play the role of the thunder headed Dad.

  I remain mute while I try to figure out what I can say to salvage my marriage. Keep my son.

  “You’re right, Elizabeth!” I said. “I just didn’t want to help Evan Strome. Something inside of me stopped me.” I begin to throw out hollow justifications for my actions. “You know how I am, Elizabeth, when I think I’m right, I just don’t change my mind. With Evan Strome, I simply didn’t want to help him. He—”

  I stop. I can see that Elizabeth isn’t buying any of this. Then I make a terrible mistake. Rather than tell the truth or explain the deep sorrow I feel, I begin to articulate the reasons I thought Evan Strome was rotten. I don’t include myself in this judgment. It’s only Strome

  I condemn.

  “David, I think you’re very sick,” Elizabeth says in an almost pitying voice.

  I don’t utter a sound.

  “You’re sick, David.”

  “You’re right,” I mutter.

  I gaze at Elizabeth’s well-meaning face. Her furrowed brow. She’s chewing on the lapel of my bathrobe.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she says.

  I make every effort to remember that Liz is my wife! My companion! My best friend! The woman I love! I try extra hard to think

  of Liam.

  Elizabeth starts to chastise me again, and the more she does, the more I keep insisting that I would do it all over again. The same way.

  Chapter 2

  I’m looking at my collages. On one board are people alive with memories of yesterday; on the other wall are hindsights—let’s call them bottom-line realities—of what went right or wrong or maybe nowhere in particular. Each day, the collages are colliding. After Elizabeth’s question about Evan Strome, the dynamics are changing. Each day I think about what, if anything, to tell her, to tell Liam.

  The arrangement of the collages should reveal beginnings, endings. Vague memories. Obscene realities. Flashes of what is or was or still can be. A black comedy of regurgitations on yesterday’s experiences, today’s brief tweets. Will I learn enough to decide what to reveal, what to hide?

  The only thing I’m sure of is that when I look at this collage of people, I see my own life in front of me, beginning to end. My grandfather pushing my baby carriage on Eastern Parkway. Being four years old and riding in my dad’s Dodge into congested Manhattan, where we took up residence on 106th Street and West End Avenue. We lived in one of those winding three-bedroom apartments with a massive foyer and huge bay windows overlooking Riverside Drive, the Hudson River. My loving parents would say, “There’s the Queen Mary...That’s the Queen Elizabeth...Here comes the triple-stacked SS Normandie. It was built in Saint-Nazaire, France, David. Its length is 1,029 feet. It was launched October 29, 1932.” These giant-sized ocean liners passed by our dining room and living room windows before moving south toward the larger sea. After a while, I identified these ships by their smokestacks and by my parents’ unbridled excitement as they repeated their historical biographies. The Normandie caught fire and capsized in 1942. I was five years old and wept for two whole days.

  I could even see Palisades Amusement Park from our windows. We were on the top floor on a quiet block far from the “toughie” side of our neighborhood, which was only blocks east of where the growing Hispanic population was quickly becoming part of the melting pot. One week after we moved to the Upper West Side, my mother took me to Radio City Music Hall to see the Disney film Bambi, and I was crying, giggling, and glowing.

  I delve into my life with a rusty nail. I have flashes of working for the Department of Welfare as a caseworker. We were called Social Investigators back in September of 1958 when I started to work in a white-bricked building on 131st Street and Park Avenue. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I had turned down my father’s offer.

  “David—I have an opportunity to buy into a very successful catering business. You’ll have something solid!”

  “Are you crazy, Dad? The last thing I want to do is be a businessman.”

  We went to housing projects like 350 East 124th Street whose residents needed more than we could ever provide. I was pure of heart, a well-intentioned boy with an honorable dad and a mother even more decent than my father the cantor.

  At twenty-one, I walked to the front of the building, stepped over a strung-out woman, and entered the lobby. Two drug guys were dealing. They reached for weapons. I flashed them my black field book and hoped that they would know I was working for Welfare. (A co-worker, Norma Meyers, had advised me to do that.) They returned to selling drugs, and I kept moving. I knocked on a door to visit the first client of a thousand I would see over the next three years.

  Here in my office, I begin to cry.

  Not over a photograph on a wall. Not part of my two collages. Flashes of people that I had helped in 1958. Why them and not the extraordinary people, good friends or close relatives or the many I bounced with or had intimate relationships with or the many I bumped into on an almost daily basis, like, say, Albert Rolon, a handyman in my building, or Tim Brown, the silver-haired maître de at Porterhouse? People I can fill a book with? People I will fill a book with?

  Because these people from 1958 make me feel good about myself.

  The Welfare Department assigned me about ninety cases. That winter I had clients at the Wagner Projects and all over East Harlem. I met people. Henry and Edith Hodapp. Edith was born in 1888; Henry in 1877.

  Those birth dates seemed ancient to me in 1958. Now I’m Henry’s age. The Hodapps were humble, polite, gentle people. A lifetime couple without children. They resided at 2405 2nd Avenue. (I’m still good with numbers. Helped me with handicapping. Not sure it will do me any good handicapping what to tell Elizabeth.) I visited the Hodapps regularly that winter and usually stayed a long while. It was always just the two of them, inseparable in that way people connected with each other in those days were. Neither one ever complained about their circumstances. They didn’t have a TV though their Emerson radio was always playing. They never mentioned the old country or anyone from their past. Henry was bald and toothless with a craggy face. I never saw him smile. I neglected to ask him what he did in his prime. I imagine it had been something physical like carpentry or plowing furrows in arid land. Maybe he had driven a horse and wagon. Edith was tiny, snow-haired, and quiet. She looked like a winter sparrow all balled up and ready to perish, but Edith didn’t perish that winter. She was feisty and in charge of her husband’s welfare. She even questioned me about my future.

  “Mrs. Hodapp, I had a long talk with my mother. She feels that I should continue for a master’s in journalism at Columbia. I’m not sure I can do that and still hold this job here.”

  “You should try to do both, Mr. Lazar. You know how it is. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  I liked Edith Hodapp a lot.

  Winter came in June as Edith quickly and quietly passed away. I visited Henry Hodapp on late afternoons, mostly on F
ridays after I had finished with my other clients. His face held even deeper crevices, more wrinkles. His azure blue eyes were always watery, sometimes streaming. Without his wife, he ate oatmeal, string beans, a slice of Velveeta; his dinners simply warmed white bread covered with mayonnaise. The last time I visited Mr. Hodapp, he said, “I’ve accepted that Edith’s gone. I’m ready to join her.”

  Mike Tafuri was one of my all-time favorite people during my Welfare years. I’d make a special effort to end my day by checking in on him. I’d stay with him an extra half hour or so, which was a big deal as most of the Social Investigators left the field as early as they could.

  Mike was born in 1869. He lived at the Gaylord White Houses at 2029 2nd Avenue. A tough little guy with a history. He’d worked for the mob when he was younger.

  “Mr. Lazar, I remember things.” And then he would tell me stories, squinting out each word from his grey-blue eyes. “Mr. Lazar,” he’d say, “Don’t ever end up like me.”

  Some of those people looked after me as much as I looked after them.

  Some of my clients had tragic lives. Eloise Goyens, a twenty-two-year-old woman from Tampa, relocated with her twin daughters to 112th Street and Park Avenue in East Harlem. A comely woman, she amazed me by how forthcoming she was in telling me her horrific story.

  “I left Tampa, Mr. Lazar, because the man I was living with was always shootin’ up and in bad temper. More than that, Mr. Lazar, he was always puttin’ his hands on my girls.”

  The last day I saw her, I felt I had helped her move to a hopeful and better life.

  “Mr. Lazar,” she said, “I went to church last Sunday and let me tell you, I prayed real hard. Now I’m ready to sign up for that program we discussed. Mr. Lazar, I want to do right for people like me. I want to be a childcare worker.”

  Eloise Goyens could have been the daughter my mother had always prayed for. She could have been family. Then one morning just before Christmas, I was riding the subway uptown to the Welfare office and reading The Herald Tribune and I saw, “Woman and six-year-old twin daughters found dead.”