“You can fall in love with a rich girl as well as a poor one,” he said, “so why not one with money? But never bring home a girl of whatever financial means who’s not Jewish.”
“I get along with everybody,” he said, “which is why I’ve done well as a dentist, and when I lost my license, selling textiles. Be like me, smart and not a wiseguy, and you’ll get somewhere. Go on like you’re doing—a cynical sour-puss—and you’ll end up a flop no matter what field you go in.”
The whole world’s trying to steal from you—remember that,” he said. “But what most of them don’t have is our Yiddische kop, so take advantage of what God and we gave you. You don’t, that just shows what a schmo and easy mark you are.”
Some nights after dinner he’d say “Get me one of my cigars out of the humidor.” He’d give me the cigar band, sometimes slip it on my finger, and a matchbook for me to light the cigar. Then he’d sit back in his easy chair, content in smoke. “Boy, does that feel good after a long day. And better when you have such a terrific kid lighting it. Thanks.”
“Where’ll all your writing get you?” he’d say. “To the nearest soup kitchen if you’re lucky. Give it up before you really start suffering because of all the disappointments you’re bound to face.”
“You drink too much and you got a filthy mouth,” he’d tell me when I was in my twenties. “You’ll just make enemies and never get a good-looking levelheaded wife. She’ll think: ‘That’s gonna be the father of my children when there are so many more refined sober guys out there who have a steady income? Not on your life.’“
Most of my teeth he worked on he ruined for me. He didn’t take x-rays when I had a cavity, saying he didn’t need to: when he was drilling he could see with his own eyes where the decay ended, which meant that a year or so later the tooth usually started aching again. He did give me Novocain, but the minimal amount, so it always hurt when he used the drill on me. When I was sixteen I paid for two root canals with another dentist with money I was making as a delivery boy after school and Saturdays. My father never asked me about my teeth after that and I never told him about the other dentist, but he knew. Otherwise he would have said, as he used to, “You haven’t had a checkup in a while. Let’s set up a time next week.” Before he got his license back he worked on our teeth and several of his old patients’ in a friend’s office, always at night after the other dentist had left.
Walked out on some of his dinner checks, half to save money and half as a game. “I love putting something innocent over on people,” he said. “What about the waiter or waitress?” I said, and he said “Oh, don’t worry your head; I always leave a tip.”
When I got in front of the TV set, he’d say “What’s your father, a glazier? Get out of the way.”
His family was very poor and he worked every day after school and all day Sunday starting when he was eight. “Saturdays, because we were Orthodox, I rested like the rest of the neighborhood, though if my folks had let me I would’ve worked that day too after attending shul.
“Went straight from high school to dental school—that’s the way it was then; it wasn’t that I was especially good in the sciences. But I applied myself, burned those candles—and lots of those nights they were candles, which were cheaper than gas, or electricity, when our building finally got it. If I could do it, you can too, if you changed your major again and went back to being pre-dental. Of course, I could’ve spent four years in college and then gone to dental school, but who had that kind of time to waste? I wanted to start making some real money and move my folks to a better apartment and buy my mother a fur stole, and things like that.”
Had the largest dental practice and the first purple opentop car on the Lower Eastside. “I saw that car as an advertisement for my practice,” he said. “All the girls were after your father,” my mother said. “Not only did he have a good income but he also had hair then, so was quite the catch.”
Also said about his time in prison “I did it dancing, something I always felt good about, that I didn’t whine or act like a fruitcake while I was there.”
My younger sister and I were told he was a major in the army dental corps in San Diego—my mother even got out the atlas to show us where San Diego was—taking care of the teeth of soldiers who were about to be shipped across the Pacific to fight the Japanese.
“After his release,” my mother said, “with his license taken away and all our savings gone and the war still on, so no opportunity for him to make a pile of money—that time was the hardest for your father, I think worse than being in prison. It was also the bitterest period of our marriage, and we’ve had some beauties.”
Worked in a war factory in Brooklyn when he got out. After the war, he sold shoes and then paints and then textiles and quickly did so well at it that in a few years we were able to keep a maid.
Forced to give up dentistry for good because of his worsening Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. For a couple of years he was falling down on subway platforms and streets after work, and strangers had to help him home. Thank you,” I’d say at our front door or in the building’s vestibule when I’d see them through the peephole, “I’ll take him from here.”
The last few years of his life I’d shave him and clean his dentures and give him his shots and exercise him and clean him up after he went to the toilet and come in every night around twelve—I’d rented an apartment on their block to help out my mother with him—to give him his pills and turn him over so he wouldn’t get bedsores and to make him comfortable for the rest of the night. Sometimes I got mad at him while he was lying in bed—that he’d just pissed or shit right after I’d changed his diapers—and would turn him over too hard or curse him under my breath or curse my own fate out loud that I had to be coming here every night to take care of him. “You want to do the right thing,” he said a few of those times, “but it’s just not in you, so you shouldn’t even try. Don’t help me from now on. I’ll live longer without it. Anything’s better than you acting like an animal to me.”
When my parents were first introduced, he was a handsome dentist with a thriving practice and she worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office during the day and at night and Saturday matinees danced in a West 42nd Street musical review. He used to meet her at the stage door two to three nights a week and give her flowers and boxes of candy. “You laugh,” he said to me, “because you can’t see anyone your age doing that today. But then, if you wanted to win a beautiful girl nine years younger than yourself, that’s what you were expected to do.”
“I couldn’t get her to bed so I had to marry her,” he said. “But I already knew that bad girls you sleep with and nice ones you marry. Look at your mother. It’s obvious she doesn’t like me talking about it, but I think it’s an important lesson all my sons have to learn.”
“Hook up with a shiksa,” he used to say, “and she’ll wake you up in the middle of one night and start shouting into your ear how much she hates Jews. It’s bound to happen eventually, so stick with Jewish girls. Much less confusion with your kids later on, and they’re prettier than shiksas and make the best wives.”
“When we were kids we went barefoot in the summer to save on the shoe leather,” he’d say.
“We had so many relatives and landsleit living with us in our small apartment on Ludlow Street that we had to sleep in shifts, sometimes two to three to a single bed.”
“It was two for five to go to the movies then—two people for five cents. So I’d stand out front of a movie theater and say ‘I got two, who’s got three?’ and always got someone to go in with.”
“No matter what a cop or teacher smacks you for, you deserve it. Always respect authority.”
This is my youngest boy,” he said to a couple of his cronies in his waiting room. “Maybe not the sharpest of the bunch, but so far the hardest worker and the one most interested in making money, so the son I have the highest hopes of following me into dentistry. If he doesn’t become one, like the other three, I�
��ll really consider my life a flop.”
“Dad emotionally cool?” my mother said. “It’s just a front. He doesn’t like showing his deeper emotions around you kids. Afraid it’ll give you the wrong way to act and later make you vulnerable to people who take advantage of sensitive men. So he wants to always look chipper and strong, even tough, able to endure and stand up to anything. But weeks after your brother died he was still crying to himself to sleep every night. With his mother, he was even more inconsolable. At least with your brother he let me hold him in my arms sometimes, though don’t let on to him that I told you.”
“Why would you want to move out when you’ve got free room and board here?” he said to me when I started looking for an apartment after I graduated college. “Stay with us till you have a pile of dough in the bank and can afford a long layoff from work. The food’s good, bed’s comfortable, you have your own room now, so if you want to be left alone to type your head off in it, the room’s quiet enough with the door shut where nobody’s going to complain.”
“Don’t be a dope,” he said when I told him I’d stopped signing up for my weekly unemployment insurance check because I was no longer looking for work. “You and your last employer put good money into that plan, so take it while you can. If you were doing something really illegal, that’d make it a different matter. But you want to write and just live off your savings, do it when the government checks run out.”
“I don’t care what you say,” he said, “that girl’s ugly as sin and dull as dishwater and is making a fool of you if you think she’s good-looking and has a nice personality.”
Went through the apartment a few times a night turning off all the lights in rooms nobody was in. “You people,” he’d say, “must think I’ve got stock in Con Edison.”
“Get off the phone,” he’d say on the extension when I was trying to make a date with a girl or talking to a friend. “I’ve only been on two minutes,” I’d say, which was usually how long it was before he picked up the extension, and he’d say “It’s been ten minutes, don’t tell me. The phone company charges by the minute, you know, and not a single flat fee for the call. Besides, I’m expecting some very important calls from my patients, so say goodbye.”
“Close the icebox door,” he’d say when he saw me looking inside the refrigerator for something to eat, “or get what you want fast. You’re spoiling all the food.”
“You already eat like three Greeks,” he’d say sometimes when I’d open the refrigerator or breadbox shortly after dinner, “you want to make it four?” “I’m a growing boy,” I said once, “you’ve said so yourself,” and he said “Yeah, don’t I know, but give it a little rest, will ya? You’re eating us out of house and home.”
That woman’s got a beak and bad breath on her that’s driving away fine prospects,” yet he made a match for her as he did for lots of his patients. “I hate to see two people lonely,” he said, “so when they sit in my chair and tell me they’re looking for somebody, I almost immediately know which of my other patients is the right one.” If the couple got married—several couples did—he hinted to them that he expected as a thank-you for bringing them together a new suit from Harry Rothman’s or four custom-made shirts from the Custom Shirt Shop.
“When I was a boy I walked to work even on the worst days to save on trolley fare. Thunderstorms I’d go through—blizzards like we don’t get anymore—and I never got even a cold or where the weather stopped me from a single day’s work.”
I kissed his lips on his hospital deathbed, something I’d never done with him—it had always been the cheek—and didn’t want to do it then but for some reason thought I should. I was alone in the room with him when he died.
I knew he was dead; everything about his body said so and I’d heard a death rattle and put my ear over his mouth and heart. I didn’t check his pulse because I was never good at finding it on anyone but myself. I wanted to kiss him with nobody around before I summoned the hospital staff and they examined him and declared him dead and shooed me out of the room so they could clean up him and his bed. From a pay phone down the hall I called my mother to say Dad had died peacefully and then my brothers and sisters. I had lots of change on me because he’d come into the hospital in a coma and we didn’t think his room needed a phone. Kissing him was something I think he never would have done with me if I were the one who died, and why should he? He had more sense than me in many ways—he never did anything unless he was sure he wanted to—and no fake sentimentality. I’d come every day to the hospital—it was an easy cross-town bus ride from my apartment—and stayed the last two nights there sleeping on a couch in the visitor’s lounge and every hour or so looking in on him and sitting by his bed and dabbing his forehead and cheeks with a towel if they were wet and swabbing his lips with glycerin swabs if they were dry. He probably would have done what he did with my youngest sister, who died in the same hospital of cancer when she was twenty-three, though like him the cause of death was listed as pneumonia: visited me after work the first two days, stayed half an hour and then gone home to have dinner. And after those two visits—maybe even after the first—said to my mother “I can’t go anymore”—this is what she told me at the time—“It’s too tough to. I can’t take seeing one of my kids in this condition.” So he wouldn’t have seen me alive after the first or second visit and would have left it to my mother to tell him how I was doing, I’m almost sure of it. With my brother he never had to go through any of that because Gene drowned and was never found.
“Kiss me, I’m your father, and I don’t deserve it after the nickel I just gave.”
“Listen to me, I’m your father, and you know anyone else better to advise you with your welfare in mind? I’ve been around; I know the ropes. Believe me, I won’t steer you wrong.”
“Leave the house for good, why don’t you,” he said a couple of times. “All I ever wanted was for my kids to be civil to me and for there to be a bit of peace in my life. But I can’t have any of it when you’re always kvetching and squabbling with me and making speeches and getting angry at every third thing in the world.”
I think what hurt him most, other than the deaths of my sister and brother and of course his mother, and more my brother than my sister since she’d been sick since she was five, he said, “and we never thought she’d live as long as she did,” was that while he was in prison my mother got him to go along with a name change for all the kids. “She forced it on me. Shoved the powers of attorney at me and said ‘Sign them or I won’t be there when you’re released.’ I should’ve told her to stow it, but for the sake of keeping the family together, I didn’t. She was ashamed of my last name because I was all over the newspapers in this big graft scandal and was doing time and she said all your lives would be ruined by having my last name. That people remember, but she knew damn well they forget or don’t care. As for me, I never regretted going through any of it except for losing my dental license all those years. So I had to find another profession when I got out, and it worked. I was a terrific salesman; made a bundle and would’ve stuck with it but I loved dentistry more. But I’ll never forgive her. She did the worst possible thing she could do to me, and all out of spite. That’s why I get so mad at the dinner table sometimes. I see you kids and I think of it, and it makes my blood boil.”
“Change your last name back to mine,” he said a few days after my eighteenth birthday. “You’re of legal age now where you don’t need both parents’ consent,” and I said “I can’t.” “Why not? Come on, please, change your name back and I’ll give you anything you want within reason.” I said “I wish I could, just because I know how happy it’d make you, but with the other kids keeping the name we have now, it wouldn’t be a good idea. I want to have the same last name as them, and they all want to keep the name they’ve had for almost fifteen years.” He said “Look, what am I asking for? Just for one of my sons to carry my name—the two older girls will marry and get new ones—and I’d pay for all the legal costs
involved,” and I said “Honestly, it’s just been too long.” “Ah,” he said, “you were always such a weak jerk. Get out of my sight.”
FOR A QUIET ENGLISH SUNDAY.
“You know, it sort of looks like spit in a way.”
“My God,” she said, “what does?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“No, really, what? I wasn’t being cynical. I’m interested.”
The rain driveling off the arch there. Also the way it smacks against the sidewalk.”
She looked at both places. The rain didn’t look like spit or anything close to it. But if he insisted…
“You’re right. It does resemble it.”
“Resemble what?”
“Oh, come off it, Peter—like what you said. Like spit, then, I suppose.”
“You couldn’t quite get the word out for a moment, could you.” He laughed in that ridiculing way he knew she disliked, half to himself and half aloud. But she wouldn’t let it upset her, since that was what he wanted. Then he’d have excuses.
“Well,” she said, “it’s never been one of my pet words. But I will go along with your description.”
He turned away and looked at the doorway’s granite arch, which had been shielding them from the rain the last five minutes.
Then, without meeting her eyes, he shifted his blank stare past her to a row of Georgian townhouses across the street, the slicing rain looking more now like snow or sleet than anything else. She wondered what he was thinking.
“What are you thinking, dear?” she said.
“Nothing much.”
What Is All This? Page 47