Another person who met Berg at Gruning’s was a Barringer High School English and foreign languages teacher, Julius Kritzer. “He was like my guru,” says Kritzer. “Every day at the counter we’d discuss language and linguistics. Berg would sketch things on napkins.” They also did crossword puzzles together. Once when the New York Times was on strike, Berg arrived at Gruning’s with the puzzle from Corriere d’Italia and polished it off over his cup of coffee.
After two years at Gruning’s, a new counterman, who hadn’t been briefed on the situation, asked Berg to pay for his coffee. He got up, left, and never came back.
It was more difficult to walk away from Dr. Sam’s house, so Berg stayed. With Dr. Sam, it was that ramrod sense of decorum that kept him host to his brother long after he’d tired of his company. So strong was Dr. Sam’s sense of fraternal duty that, on several occasions, he paid his brother’s debts without telling him he was doing so. When he heard that Berg owed people money, Dr. Sam would make inquiries and write a check on the spot. In one case, he sent $1,000 to a widow whose husband had loaned Berg money years earlier. The woman had two children in college, and wrote to tell Dr. Sam, “This is a tremendously fine thing that you want to do.” There may have been more to it. Dr. Sam liked to tell people about Berg’s woes, and didn’t hide the fact that he was paying his debts. The spectacle of Berg, who was good at so many things, now falling apart may not have been entirely disagreeable to Dr. Sam. He’d always felt he was a better man than his brother. The forlorn figure asleep in the living room was the evidence.
By 1964, Dr. Sam had reached his limit, and he asked Berg to leave. Berg would not. Dr. Sam’s lawyer, who had been at Columbia with Berg, sent Berg two letters of eviction, to no effect. Next, Dr. Sam threatened to make his intentions public, and in mid-June, Berg informed his brother that he had been in touch with their sister, Ethel, who was glad to accommodate him. On June 15, Berg handed Dr. Sam a piece of paper listing the whereabouts of his newspapers, books, personal papers, and clothes—as if Dr. Sam didn’t know where it all was already—and he left. Two days later, Dr. Sam called over to Ethel’s to forward a message to Berg from a friend, and Ethel’s sharp voice asked, “What would Moe be doing here?” When Dr. Sam explained that Berg had told him he was moving to Ethel’s, Ethel said she knew nothing about it and hung up. Dr. Sam began sobbing. It was only by chance, a month later, when he encountered someone who had spoken with Berg on the telephone, that Dr. Sam was sure that Berg was alive. Eventually Berg did turn up at Ethel’s, but it took him awhile to get there.
In the meantime, Dr. Sam and Sam Goudsmit did their best to trace the vanished Berg. Of all Berg’s friends, it was Goudsmit, the former detective student and sometime spy, who tried the hardest to keep up with Berg. From the late 1940s, Goudsmit was writing Berg letters at Dr. Sam’s house that began “Where are you hiding?” and concluded with “Please, please, please, respond—react—write—phone—cable or ‘say it with flowers.’ ”
When Berg disappeared from Dr. Sam’s house, Goudsmit began to write letters to people, asking if they’d seen Berg. He wrote to Ted Lyons in early August 1964, and Lyons wrote him back to say that he had received a telephone call from Berg a month earlier, but had no idea where he was. Goudsmit followed up leads in Boston. He placed a cryptogram in the New York Herald Tribune that read “Moe Berg how are you,” and when he spotted Berg being interviewed during a baseball telecast, Goudsmit called the studio. All was fruitless. Goudsmit kept Dr. Sam apprised of his efforts, and Dr. Sam wrote him back with his worries. “Twenty years ago I thought he was eccentric. Now I am frightened.” By July 1965, a year after Berg had left, Dr. Sam had decided that “the fact that he willfully shuts himself off completely from his personal world indicates some measure of non-sanity.”
Berg, meanwhile, may have been enjoying the anxiety he was causing in Brookhaven and on Roseville Avenue. He met a physicist he knew in Boston, and asked the physicist not to tell Goudsmit where he was. In October, he attended the 1965 World Series in Los Angeles, and visited William Fowler at Cal Tech. Goudsmit heard about the visit and dashed off a note to Fowler, and Fowler wrote back to say that he found himself “in a somewhat embarrassing situation. Moe gave us his address but specifically asked that we not tell anyone else.” Fowler said that he had told Berg about Goudsmit’s concern, and was willing to forward mail from Goudsmit to Berg. Goudsmit asked one of his government friends to look into the matter for him, and was assured that Berg was fine. From the Treasury Department, Dr. Sam learned that Berg had done some work for Arthur D. Little in Cambridge. By 1967, Dr. Sam had been out of touch with his brother for three years.
NO LATER THAN 1966, Berg’s security residence was a few blocks from Roseville Avenue, in the large stucco mansion on North Sixth Street where the eccentric spinster Ethel Berg lived. Berg had been installed at Ethel’s for months, perhaps even years, before Dr. Sam could be sure that he was safe. Dr. Sam’s response was to hire a small truck. After four round trips, fifty boxes of Berg’s books were piled on Ethel’s porch. And then, after twenty years of fretting about him almost daily, Dr. Sam washed his hands of his younger brother.
That was fine with Ethel. It’s entirely possible that Berg had been at her house that day in 1964 when Dr. Sam called to pass along a message, and had misled Dr. Sam to make him suffer. Since 1934, Ethel and Dr. Sam had had nothing to say to each other. It’s unclear what induced such a terrible breach between a brother and a sister, but it’s certain that Ethel felt that Sam had done something so monstrous that nothing she did in return could equal it. She hated Sam with such fervor that she could barely utter his name. If she did speak of him, everything she said was pure vitriol. After Bernard’s death, when Rose chose to move into Sam’s house rather than Ethel’s, Ethel was enraged. She would hold it against both of them for the rest of their lives. Dr. Sam was “a social misfit since childhood,” who “practically ruined my mother’s life.” Dr. Sam was not given to ranting in kind about his sister. He praised her teaching skills—she grudgingly admitted that he was “a very good medical man”—was at pains to explain to other people that she had been a paranoid schizophrenic since age twenty, and made it his policy to defer to her rather than provoke her. The Berg family, and its various tendrils and offshoots—the Greenbergs, the Reichs, the Ginsbergs (the poet Allen Ginsberg and Moe Berg were distant relations)—had large family gatherings in Newark hotels or, in summertime, on the New Jersey shore and in Far Rockaway, Queens. When the reunions were organized, Ethel always responded first. If she was going, Dr. Sam did not. If she had other plans, Dr. Sam would attend. As for Berg, he was always aloof. Everyone would whisper hopefully, “Is Moe coming?” But he never did.
After Berg died, Dr. Sam cooperated with three Massachusetts journalists on a book about his brother’s life. When she heard about Dr. Sam’s role in the project, Ethel promised to sue if her name appeared anywhere in the book. The writers obliged her, with the result that Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy betrays no clue that Moe Berg had a sister. Meanwhile, at her own expense, Ethel assembled and published My Brother Morris Berg: The Real Moe, less a biography than an annotated collection of Berg’s letters and memorabilia. Dr. Sam Berg’s name appears on none of its 360 pages.
AS A CHILD, Ethel Berg liked to sing and to dance, had theatrical ambitions, and went to Vienna to study piano. But though she had a pure soprano voice and a pretty face, with attractive waves of dusky blond hair and blue eyes, she made her way through life as neither an actress nor a musician. Instead, as her father preferred, she became a kindergarten teacher, and a superb one. Ethel loved children, and they liked right back this thin, spry young woman who sometimes rollerskated down the hallways in the First Avenue School. In time, Ethel became a master teacher to apprentice kindergarten instructors, and had three assistants working for her.
Teaching was a well-chosen profession for Ethel Berg, both because she was good at it, and because it left her afternoons and summers free for her ot
her interests. She made an annual trip to Vienna for many years, and then later visited her parents’ old villages in Ukraine and toured the western United States. In New York City, she attended operas and frequented expensive restaurants. She collected expensive china, flatwear, dolls, Baccarat crystal and antique furniture—including a baby grand piano—and supported a number of charities, including one that benefited Israel and one that assisted American Indians. For a woman with expensive tastes who was interested in the arts, she was an unaccountably poor dresser. Her clothes might be well tailored, but nothing ever matched, and she looked to many people like a vagrant. On one of her trips to Vienna, she had met a young chemist and fallen in love with him. He gave her a ring with her initials on it and asked her to marry him. She helped him to immigrate to the United States, and for a while they were lovers. Eventually, he married someone else. She never quite got over it. From then on, she spurned all men, turning her attentions outside her work to two passions: her garden and her younger brother.
It was a garden like no other in Newark or, indeed, in all the Garden State. There were peppers of every color, carrots, zucchini, squashes, and strawberries and raspberries so sweet that when she brought a few pints of them to the chef at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, he would send out word that Miss Berg and her dining partner were the guests of the Four Seasons. There were flowers and a yellow dogwood, and fruit trees thriving in Ethel Berg’s garden that botanists swore could not grow in New Jersey soil. Once a Rutgers University professor came to see for himself and left, shaking his head. Ethel was forever rushing out of her kitchen, apron flapping, to rake and prune. Her secret was a stable of police horses, two blocks from her house. Buckets of horse manure produced earth of uncommon richness.
If she was deft and gentle with plants and children, with adults Ethel Berg was strident and domineering. To some of her youngest relatives, she could play the doting cosmopolitan. Her cousin David Niceberg, as a little boy, went all over New York with Ethel, inspecting parks, museums, aquariums, and monuments. He saw more in a day with Ethel than in a week with anybody else. She walked quickly, spoke quickly, and angered quickly too. Her conversation usually fit into the simple rubric of commands: “you ought to; you should; you must; do it.” Many people found her inflexible—a harridan who was impossible to get along with. Anybody who did not agree with her was dismissed fiercely as “a liar.” In Newark, people crossed the street to avoid her. Ethel’s cousin Frances Book had buckteeth as a girl, and Ethel—a grown woman at the time—ridiculed her unmercifully for the imperfection, making faces and taunting her. When Frances was ten, Ethel dropped her at a downtown theater and told her to find her way home. Frances got lost, and was finally brought home by some firemen, whereupon Ethel gave her a tonguelashing. Frances’s sister, Elizabeth, on the other hand, became Ethel’s protégée. Ethel took her to fancy restaurants in Manhattan, and sent her to investigate and report back with all the details when Dr. Sam bought a house on Roseville Avenue.
As she grew older, Ethel became increasingly eccentric. She developed a terrible fear of childbirth and did not hesitate to hurl calumnies at pregnant women. “Isn’t that awful,” she’d say loudly. She endured thunderstorms by hiding under a bed, quivering. At night she suffered from insomnia, and to pass the time, she’d walk through her house blindfolded in the dark, so as to know her way around in case she went blind. When Elizabeth’s daughter Barbara came from Melrose, Massachusetts, to visit Ethel for a week in Newark, Elizabeth called up Ethel after a few days and Ethel announced that Elizabeth needn’t bother picking Barbara up—she was keeping her. Elizabeth’s husband, Joe Shames, took the telephone out of his wife’s hand and told Ethel that he’d be in Newark at 1:00 P.M. the next day to pick up Barbara. Barbara didn’t like to visit Newark after that.
Ethel had much in common with Berg. Both walked quickly, had their own ideas about clothes, and demanded the full attention of the person they were speaking with—hurrying out the door and sometimes even severing the relationship permanently if they didn’t get it. Moe and Ethel Berg also possessed an uncanny ability to get other people to give them things for nothing. Craig Miller and his father cut Ethel’s lawn, fixed and carried things for her whenever she asked, and did the heavy work in her garden, all without remuneration of any sort. “We just did it,” says Craig Miller. “I rebuilt her carriage house for her. You just did things for her.” As she grew old, Ethel became known as a witch to the children in her neighborhood—a reputation she did not discourage by rushing out onto the porch and cackling at them. “Rahhh,” she would scream. “I’m a witch.” The family joke during the Newark riots in the 1960s was that Ethel’s house was the safest place in the city, since everyone was afraid to go near it. For all this, Ethel appears to have shared one more thing with Berg: she was lonely. Once Craig Miller’s mother, Dorothy, invited Ethel over for Christmas dinner. She came, sang carols with the Millers, and then broke down. “This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had,” she said. In the Millers’ guest book she wrote, “If you want to enjoy life, come here.”
The Millers owned a drugstore in Roseville, and one day Ethel came into the store beaming. “Moe’s coming to live with me,” she said. Berg was one of the few people who wasn’t cowed by his sister, but living with her wore on him. She built him shelves for all his books, provided his newspapers, a sun porch to read them on, and a dresser to stuff full of the ones he wanted to save. She cooked him lavish meals, made from the produce in her garden. But Ethel’s prize niece, Elizabeth Shames, says, “If you allowed Ethel to do things for you, you virtually could not move without her permission.” A woman like that sharing a house with a thoroughly independent man like Berg made for plenty of unhappiness.
If there were bucolic trappings now to Berg’s new life in Newark, he brought with him to Ethel’s some of the same eccentricities he’d revealed to his brother. He shunned people. When family members or the Millers came to visit, he left the house through the back door to avoid them or slipped upstairs to his room. To letters and invitations he offered no response. When telephone calls came to the house, Ethel would answer and Berg would hiss with alarm, “Mention the name!” until she did. He read dozens of books simultaneously, switching frantically from one to the next, and lining them all with stroke after stroke of lead pencil.
In 1966, when Elizabeth Shames arrived from Portland, Maine, Berg emerged from behind the Florentine glass front door to swing her around in greeting, just as he always had in the old days. He kissed her cheek, and while he did, Shames noticed a massive lump bulging at his navel. They went into the kitchen, and Ethel prepared a wonderful dinner, with Berg in rare form, telling stories. He talked about the Nuremberg trials, and about Heisenberg, completely relaxed, eyes flashing. “Elizabeth,” he said, “do you like all this crap?” Then he asked her if she’d like to meet Anita Loos. All of a sudden Berg and Shames realized that Ethel was missing. It was spring, but it was cold and wet outside, and Shames found Ethel furiously pulling weeds in her garden. “He doesn’t ask me to meet Anita Loos,” she said. “He doesn’t ask me to go anywhere.” That stopped the storytelling.
After that, the only person anyone in Newark ever saw Berg with was his friend Takizo Matsumoto, the Japanese English professor he’d met in Tokyo. The two were inseparable for the duration of Matsumoto’s visit. Ethel found the friendship disturbing. Why it upset her, she wouldn’t say, but she told the Millers that it did.
Otherwise, when anybody saw him in Newark, Berg was always alone. His fine black hair had gone gray now. He was thick at the middle, and his skin was creased and sagging. He was an old man and vulnerable to criminals, who mugged him during his walks. Newark, too, was decaying. Interstate 280 had cut through Roseville, and helped its decline from a prosperous neighborhood to a dangerous slum where trash filled the streets and some families gave their homes away as they fled to the suburbs. Berg, who never learned to drive, was trapped in a peculiar home in a city that no longer resembled the one wh
ere everyone knew the famous Moe Berg. And so, as he had in the seventeen years he lived with Dr. Sam, Berg did his best to stay away. He went to ball games in New York, and he sat with New Jersey sportswriters through entire programs of horse races, never once placing a bet. He went to Boston, where Dr. Hendron removed his hernia, and on to Washington to see Clare Smith and Joe Crowley and, in 1971, to perform consulting services for a man who was seeking to purchase the Washington Senators from the team’s owner, Bob Short. He gave legal advice to friends. Jerry Holtzman’s room was always available to him, and Berg never missed a World Series. He killed time and kept moving. For a man nearing seventy, he moved pretty well.
The writer and editor Ray Robinson, who had known Berg since 1951, was working for Good Housekeeping magazine in the late 1960s when, on his way out to lunch, he came upon Berg at Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. “Would you like to join me?” asked Berg, and Robinson said he would. Berg had walked up from Twentieth Street and now, with Robinson in tow, he went farther north. Block after block they went at a brisk pace, with Berg telling stories the whole way about Bobo Newsom, once a pitcher for the Red Sox, who, Berg said, phoned in bets from the bull pen after asking Berg’s advice on where to lay his money. Sixty blocks later at Columbia, Berg finally slowed down and ducked into a scruffy luncheonette full of students. Robinson bought lunch for the sixty-seven-year-old five-mile walker, and Berg told war stories.
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