by Peter Golden
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
* * *
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
For Bruce Davis, who was there at the beginning
* * *
And for my late uncle, Leonard Golden, an American hero
* * *
And for the memory of Martin Lewis and Arthur Weiss
* * *
And for Annis and Ben, who gave me the courage to remember
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
—CICERO
Part I
1
South Orange, New Jersey
I was never too interested in my family’s history. My indifference wasn’t just the apathy of a kid bored by school and obsessed with rock ’n’ roll; it was because my father and his mother, Emma Dainov, preferred not to talk about it.
“Misha, ne sprashivay,” my grandmother would reply in Russian on those rare occasions I prodded her with a question. Don’t ask.
Still, some of the history was unavoidable because we seemed different from the other families in South Orange and Maplewood, a pair of suburban Edens with houses in every style from redbrick Federals to flat-roofed split-levels that resembled spaceships. Our neighbors were hardworking Jews, Italians, and Irish, along with some black families to prove no bigots breathed among us, and at the top of the food chain, a papery-skinned layer of Wasps whose chief purpose, as they perused the financial pages in the gin-soaked ambience of their restricted country club, was to provide some incentive for their social-climbing inferiors.
As a boy, I learned that Daniels wasn’t our original name while I was digging through a trunk in the basement and found my father’s passport from the Soviet Union, with its faded green cover and strange lettering. I was holding the passport when my father, a wan, asthmatic beanpole with a Brylcreem-resistant cowlick, came down with a laundry basket, a chore he had handled ever since my mother refused to separate his lights and darks.
“You the detective now?” he asked in his slightly accented English, peering at me through his pince-nez.
I shook my head, and he smiled a little sadly—the Russian smile, my grandmother called it, like a weak sun in a winter-gray sky. Then he said that in 1934, at the age of eleven, he had landed at Ellis Island with his father, whose imagination was aflame with Yankee-Doodle dreams of striking it rich, which was why he Americanized their surname from Dainov to Daniels, and my father’s first name from Lev to Lawrence. My grandfather died before I was born, leaving Larry Daniels to run his empire—Sweets, a candy store on Irvington Avenue, a five-minute walk from our modest Colonial in South Orange.
The name change was odd enough, but what perplexed me was why he had emigrated to the United States without his mother. My father squeezed the rubber bulb of his nebulizer and cleared his airways by drawing on the mouthpiece before he wheezed, “My parents had a divorce, and my father, he took me away.”
Divorce wasn’t fashionable in those days, so my grandparents splitting up was further evidence of our family’s difference, but it—and the mutation of Dainov into Daniels—might have remained a minor puzzle had I not been the baffled owner of four first names. On my birth certificate, I was Michael, and that was the name my mother and teachers used. My father called me Mikhail, and to my grandmother I was Misha, short for Mikhail, or Mishka, an affectionate form of Misha. This left me with a touch of multiple personality disorder and was a point of contention between my parents.
My father’s English was excellent, though out of some nostalgia for his boyhood, perhaps, and undoubtedly to irritate my mother, he often spoke to me in his native language. I didn’t mind. It was cool using words none of my friends understood, and I needed Russian to understand my grandmother. She insisted that I answer her in English, because my father was completing his degree in accounting at Seton Hall University—a few blocks up Ward Place from Sweets—and he wanted his mother to take over the business after he passed his CPA exam and opened an office.
My mother, a violet-eyed beauty with a pug nose and poodle-cut hair she dyed a shimmery copper, hated that my father spoke to me in Russian. She was born in New Jersey and lorded it over her husband, as though hailing from the Jewish ghetto of Paterson, with parents who worked themselves to death in that city’s silk mills, qualified her to be next in line for the British crown, a view of herself fortified by the fact that after high school she had masqueraded as an Episcopalian to work as a secretary at a law firm in Manhattan that didn’t hire Jews.
My father, needling his wife about her pretensions, frequently referred to her as “Queen Shirley the First.” Nor did he stop conversing with me in Russian even after the blowup at Clinton School with my fourth-grade teacher. Miss Smethers was an elderly taskmaster whose dark dresses gave off a whiff of mothballs and who would order you to stand by her desk and face the class if she caught you smiling. On this morning, she was writing multiplication problems on the blackboard while in my head Big Mama Thornton was singing “Hound Dog,” a bluesy wail that I—and the deejay Jocko Henderson, the self-proclaimed Ace from Outer Space—couldn’t get enough of. I was sketching Big Mama’s face on my math homework—the big grinning face with the devilish eyes I remembered from an album cover in Village Records—when suddenly students were turning to gawk at me, and Miss Smethers said, “Michael, we’re waiting for your answer.”
You couldn’t admit that you weren’t paying attention, not if you wanted to avoid standing in the place of shame. Without thinking, I replied, “Ya ne znayu.”
The class broke up as if I’d cut the world’s loudest fart instead of saying that I didn’t know. Miss Smethers, believing I’d cursed her out, marched me to Principal Furrie’s office and, before returning to the classroom, suggested he wash out my mouth with soap. The principal was a jolly rotund fellow who combed his hair east and west to hide his baldness. I explained that I’d spoken Russian by accident. He nodded sympathetically, then phoned my mother. For the last week she’d been going on about a sale at Bamberger’s—arguing with my father about her spending limit—and I hoped she wasn’t home. No such luck—she stormed into the principal’s office, eyes blazing. Mr. Furrie told her what happened and asked if I’d ever been dropped on my head as a baby, which could account for my confusing two languages.
“My husband’s a schmuck,” my mother said. “That’s why he’s confused.”
Grabbing my shirt collar, she dragged me through the school yard to her Country Squire and drove to Sweets, where my father was arranging packs of cigarettes in the honeycomb behind the cash register.
After telling him why I wasn’t in school, my mother said, “I told you to stop with the Russian. Everyone’ll think Michael’s a commie spy.”
This was the 1950s. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been sentenced to die in the electric chair for selling atomic secrets to the Soviets; Senator Joseph McCarthy had accused everyone except President Eisenhower’s parakeet of spying for Moscow; and Hollywood was blacklisting directors, actors, and screenwriters if they’d ever taken a sip of vodka.
“Calm down, Shirley. You’ll have stroke.”
Her voice rose. “They’ll blacklist our son.”
I piped up
. “Will I get to miss school?”
My mother whipped off her shoe and, with the spiked heel, swatted my backside. A geyser of pain shot up my spine. She wasn’t shy about hitting me, but I refused to cry; she might enjoy it. The enraged stoic—that was me.
Glaring at my father, she said, “This is your fault,” and then she was off to Bamberger’s.
I looked at my father. He shrugged helplessly. “Mikhail, you shouldn’t use Russian with your teacher.”
And you, I recall thinking, shouldn’t let your wife smack your son with a spiked heel.
2
Other than sitting in my room and drawing in my sketchbook, or lying in bed at night listening to the patter of deejays between bursts of Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Fats Domino—both foolproof methods for escaping my parents’ bickering—my childhood refuge was wherever my grandmother happened to be. And before Emma learned English and was still reluctant to leave the house, that was the kitchen with its eggshell-white cabinets, mustard-colored linoleum, and aquamarine, chrome-legged dinette set.
My mother’s pursuit of haute couture and her mah-jongg habit limited her cooking to throwing a steak on the broiler and serving it with Birds Eye french fries and mixed vegetables or heating up Swanson TV dinners. So it was my grandmother, after she arrived at her house from Europe in 1948, who enlisted me as her sous-chef and taught me the glories of sweet-and-sour brisket, potato pancakes, and baked apples stuffed with raisins and brown sugar.
Once my grandmother decided to concentrate on her English, Emma and I spent hours in the den, where we read the dictionary and watched the Philco television in its burled-wood cabinet, and I translated for her and corrected her pronunciation. Learning another language wasn’t too difficult for my grandmother. She also spoke Ukrainian, Yiddish, some German, and French, and by the time I was in fifth grade, she was running the candy store, and my father was a certified public accountant with an office across from the train station in the commercial heart of South Orange Village.
Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for families to reside with a grandparent or two, but Emma wasn’t like my friends’ grandmothers. There was no calling her Nana or Bubbe or Nonnina, the affectionate term my Italian pals used. She insisted that every kid, including me, call her Emma, a revolutionary casualness in that more formal era. Nor was Emma stubby or hunched over from lumbago. She was tall and slender, and instead of shapeless dresses, she wore long colorful blouses cinched at the waist with a leather belt, wide black trousers, and brown boots or, in warmer weather, black Converse high-tops. Her dark gold hair, with its threading of silver, fell past her shoulders, and she had a pale round face with a perpetual expression of amusement and an intriguing slant to her sea-green eyes, which didn’t appear to believe a thing they saw.
My grandmother was happiest when kids filled the candy store on weekday afternoons before catechism or Hebrew school, and on Saturdays after football games or Little League. They gathered at the wall rack, pulling out the latest Archie and Superman and MAD, and bought packs of Topps baseball cards, stuffing bubble gum into their mouths as if the pink wads were plugs of tobacco as they worked out trades for Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, their dickering blending into the whirring Hamilton Beach spindles. Emma made milkshakes in the steel beakers and ordered everyone to wait their turn at the shelves across from the marble-topped soda fountain, where the rows of glass jars were brightened by red and black licorice strings, fireballs, Mary Janes, Tootsie Rolls, jawbreakers, root beer barrels, sugary pills on paper strips, candy necklaces, wax lips, and wax bottles of syrup.
I was so proud that the kids adored her. She let them reach over from the stools to work the handles and spritz soda into their cherry Cokes, placing a carton of Ring Dings on the counter so they could help themselves. And she was nonchalant about money: no child ever walked out empty-handed. “Pay what you got,” Emma told them; and if they had nothing but lint in their pockets, she said, “I’ll put in for you.” I remember her smiling at the joy on the children’s faces as they filed out, saying, “Thanks, Emma,” and my grandmother, demonstrating that learning English from TV had a comic upside, would raise her right hand like the Lone Ranger and reply, “Hi-yo, Silver! Awaaay!”
Her finest moment, the moment that boys will still recall when they have become old men sharing a fifth of Scotch, was the afternoon she took a broom to Miss Doyle.
The schools had been closed by a snowstorm, and after me and my two best friends, Rollie Raduzza and Birdman Cohen, had shoveled sidewalks and driveways and earned a fortune, thirty-eight bucks apiece, we went to Sweets for hot cocoa and discovered, to our delight, that the February Playboy had been delivered. In those days, because Playboy featured photos of naked women, it wasn’t sold on the magazine rack out front where kids could see it, but was displayed in an acrylic holder on the wall behind the register with a brown paper wrapper blocking out everything on the cover except the title. The men who bought Playboy seemed embarrassed asking Emma for a copy, mumbling the request and, after she put the magazine in a bag, taking off as if a vice cop was chasing them.
For all Emma appeared to care, she could’ve been selling them a Dutch Masters cigar, and clearly she thought the fuss about kids looking at the magazine was preposterous because whenever my friends and I were at the store and the new Playboy came in, she deposited one on the soda fountain, and we would stand there gazing at the centerfold like archaeologists who had just unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls.
That was what Rollie, Birdman, and I were doing when Miss Doyle showed up, her white hair twisted in curlers and partially covered by a black kerchief. Rollie, whose mom was Miss Doyle’s second cousin, had told me she’d quit being a nun to marry an ex-monsignor, but he ditched her for a manicurist he met in the pool at Palisades Amusement Park. Typically, Miss Doyle ignored Rollie if he was in the store during her weekly stop for a carton of Pall Malls. However, on that snowy afternoon, Miss Doyle stepped past the counter until she was a foot away from Rollie, who was standing between Birdman and me, and holding open the Playboy.
“Rolando Raduzza,” she said, her eyes pinpoints in her long, witchy face, “put that filth down.”
Rollie was a tough, stubborn kid who would become an all-state fullback in high school, but Miss Doyle was glowering at him as if he were Jack the Ripper, and she had Rollie rattled enough that he froze.
Emma, who was removing a carton of smokes from the cabinet behind the register, called out, “Candy’s worse for their teeth than those pictures are for their eyes.”
“That’s filth, Rolando,” Miss Doyle said. “Put it down.”
Birdman, as gangly as a pelican, which was how he got his nickname, was the voice of reason among our trio. He said to Rollie, “Do like she says.”
Rollie replied, “No way,” and Miss Doyle punched him in the chest so hard that he went back over a cardboard display case of Fritos, dropping the Playboy and winding up spread-eagled on the floor.
Miss Doyle, satisfied that she had done her part for public morality, turned to get her Pall Malls, but my grandmother blocked her path, clutching a broom in her hands as though it were a rifle with a bayonet.
“You don’t hit the children,” Emma said, jabbing the broom handle at Miss Doyle, who backed up against the greeting-card wall pockets opposite the soda fountain.
“And you shouldn’t give them that magazine.”
“Poshol ti nahoo.”
My father often said this to my mother; it meant Go fuck yourself. And though Miss Doyle didn’t speak Russian, her reply indicated that she’d caught the gist of Emma’s suggestion. “I’ll get the police, you greenhorn—”
My grandmother ended Miss Doyle’s half of the conversation by pressing the tip of the broom handle into her throat. I’d never seen Emma angry before. Her face was flushed, and her body seemed to vibrate.
“Don’t hit the children,” she hissed. “And don’t come here no more. You understand?”
Miss Doyle took off. Emma l
owered the broom, and as she returned behind the register, it dawned on me that my mother had never hit me when Emma was around, and that maybe she knew something about my grandmother I didn’t know. But being more interested in today than yesterday, I never bothered to ask her.
3
Despite the goodies that Emma gave away, she was making more money than my father ever had. Her success was due to the two additional telephones in the back storage room, which she had installed at the urging of Eddie O’Rourke, a graying dapper leprechaun with eyes the color of an iced-up lake, a fedora tilted at a rakish angle, and a paisley flame of silk in the breast pocket of his sport coat. Eddie and his wife, Fiona, lived halfway up the slope of Radel Terrace, fifty yards from our house. It was an open secret that Eddie O had once worked for the mobster Longy Zwillman, who hung himself my last year at South Orange Junior High, and then for Siano Abruzzi, the silver-haired patriarch of a large happy clan involved in numerous ventures throughout New Jersey, at least 50 percent of them legitimate.
The O’Rourkes had no children, and they were revered among the local kids for giving out candy apples on Halloween. Every morning Fiona and Eddie came down to Montague Place, the corner where we lived, and Fiona turned left to go to Our Lady of Sorrows for mass, and Eddie went straight toward Sweets. The first time I became aware of the extra phones was during my spring vacation when I was helping my grandmother by putting out chocolate Easter bunnies. Emma was behind the soda fountain with a glass of tea, while Eddie O sat on a stool paging through Emma’s dog-eared copy of Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Dictionary and saying to her: “You’re lookin’ lugubrious today.”
“I know this word.”