by Peter Golden
“You didn’t figure I knew it?”
Emma laughed. “Not till you read my dictionary, you didn’t.”
“Fiona makes me play Scrabble with her, and she’s kickin’ the tar outta me. I gotta learn words with q and z. Them’s the ten-point letters.”
Emma and Eddie were Sinatra fans, and my grandmother had a radio tuned to WNEW next to the Hamilton Beach blender. Above Frank singing “Fools Rush In,” I could hear the phones ringing in the storage room until a beer barrel of a guy in an electric-blue shirt and an orange necktie shiny enough that he likely needed sunglasses to knot it gave Eddie a slip of paper and went outside. I must’ve looked surprised because Eddie said to me, “That’s Gerald. He’s my financial adviser.”
I doubted that was true, but Eddie O wasn’t a guy you’d question. “Quiz,” I said.
“Quiz?” Eddie asked.
“It’s got a q and a z.”
“I owe ya one, boyo,” he said, getting up off the stool. “See ya tomorrow, Emma.”
When he was gone, I looked at my grandmother.
“Don’t ask, Misha.”
Two days later, my father stopped in and heard the new phones and saw Eddie O perched on a stool, and that evening he came into the den while Emma and I were watching Dragnet.
“What’re you doing, Ma? Eddie O’Rourke collects money for Abruzzi loan sharks. And he’s using those phone to do what? Talk to gangsters? Threaten the schnooks behind on their payments?”
“I don’t know his business. Why you making such a big deal?”
“Because it’s against law.”
“In the war, my life was against the law, but I’m still alive.”
“Ma!” my father said, glancing at me.
They switched to Yiddish, their customary tactic when they didn’t want me to understand, but I was decent at languages. French had been my one good subject in school, and I’d picked up enough Yiddish to follow their exchange. My father kept referring to Eddie and the Abruzzis as nishtgutnicks—no-good people—and Emma countered with “deigeh nisht”—don’t worry—and when my father observed that Emma would have plenty to worry about if the police raided the store, she said, “Az me schmiert, fort men,” which roughly translates to “Grease your wheels, you’ll ride,” and meant that some under-the-table cash would help the cops lose interest.
They carried on for weeks, and it was Eddie O, probably at Emma’s urging, who settled their dispute by taking my father to lunch at the Famous in South Orange Village with Julian Rose, Eddie’s closest friend. Mr. Rose had been Longy Zwillman’s protégé, but got out of the rackets young and became one of the richest real estate developers in the state. His picture was frequently in the papers: posing with the archbishop of Newark outside a new surgical wing he helped to pay for at St. Michael’s or attending a fund raiser to renovate the sanctuary at Congregation Beth El, where I was bar-mitzvahed. Over pastrami on seeded rye, Mr. Rose, whose company headquarters was across from the village library and a short walk from my father’s office, retained Lawrence Daniels & Associates to do his accounting.
As the news spread that my father was working for Julian Rose, he was besieged by clients, and after expanding his office by renting the floor above him and hiring a gaggle of CPAs, bookkeepers, and secretaries, he was too busy to bug Emma about Eddie O. My mother was tickled pink by my father’s exploding income, and she was an admirer of Julian Rose, commenting whenever she spotted his photo in the newspapers that he could be a double for Cary Grant, to which my father inevitably replied: “You’d think I’d look like Cary Grant if I was worth the hundred million bucks.”
“Tell me when you get there,” my mother said, “and I’ll let you know.”
On a Sunday during my sophomore year at Columbia High School, my parents and I were in the village eating eggplant Parmesan at Victor’s when my father announced: “Shirley, if the stock market doesn’t collapse, I only got ninety-nine million more to go.”
That milestone pleased my mother until the waiter cleared our plates. “We need a bigger house,” she said.
I assumed my mother wanted one of the humongous Moderns in Newstead, a ritzy enclave at the northernmost top of South Orange that was home to people like Julian Rose. I didn’t want to leave our neighborhood, but as long as I didn’t have to switch high schools, I didn’t care. Yet Newstead wasn’t tony enough for my mother. She wanted to move farther up South Orange Avenue to the gold-plated countryside of Short Hills. Founded a century earlier by a nature lover who got rich inventing the window-shade roller, the town was beginning to welcome Jews along Old Short Hills Road, a spot the Protestant natives now referred to as “Bagel Hill.”
Moving to Short Hills meant that I’d have to change schools and leave my friends, plus Beryl Wilner, whom I’d had my eye on since seventh grade. I stewed about it for a week until the night Birdman’s dad picked us up from the Isley Brothers concert at the Mosque in Newark and dropped me off at home. My parents were sitting at the kitchen table, my father sipping a cup of Sanka with the steam of the instant coffee fogging his pince-nez; and my mother adding to the chain of cigarette butts in the black plastic ashtray she’d swiped after seeing Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana.
“I don’t want to move,” I said.
My mother puffed on her Kent. “We’re not taking a vote.”
My father said, “Those Jew-hating snobs in Short Hills won’t want us there.”
I suspected that all his talk about prejudice and snobbery wasn’t the real reason for his reluctance. He had grown up poor, putting in forty hours a week at the candy store with his father while he was in school, which he’d been pointing out to me ever since I begged him to buy me a Schwinn three-speed for my tenth birthday. The bike wasn’t that expensive, but he refused to buy it until Emma gave him a tongue-lashing in Yiddish.
“What’s the goddamn money for?” my mother asked him.
“You mean, if not to make you happy?” he replied.
“Something wrong with making me happy?”
“And me and Mikhail,” he asked. “We do not count?”
My mother didn’t respond, perhaps thinking the answer should have been apparent to him. In the den, which was out through the kitchen and the dining room, I could hear my grandmother watching Lawrence Welk and his orchestra play a polka.
I said, “If you move, I can stay here with Emma.”
“What will people think, us leaving our son? And your father’s selling this house. If your grandmother chooses not to join us, she can buy her own.”
I should’ve kept my mouth shut, but her willingness to abandon Emma infuriated me, and my father wasn’t talking. “That’s stupid. Emma doesn’t drive and likes walking to the store.”
My mother, jabbing another Kent into her Copa souvenir, stood and stepped toward me, glaring. Her dye job had darkened at the roots, and sometimes I wondered if she hated me because due to some genetic quirk, I looked more like Emma than her—tall, with sandy hair, a fair complexion, and the same green eyes.
“Nobody asked your opinion,” she said.
“That’s why I’m offering it.”
Two years had gone by since my mother had smacked me, but when she drew back her arm, I was a boy again, a frightened little boy routinely hit for leaving his socks on the floor or failing to put his plate in the sink, a list of transgressions so long I couldn’t remember them. I could see the anger in her eyes, but she also looked puzzled, unable to comprehend why her husband and son were conspiring to deny her the palace where she belonged. My fear turned into something else, and the boy was replaced by a teenager with eight inches and forty pounds on his mother. As her arm began to swing forward, I balled up my right fist, horrified because I knew that if she touched me, I was going to hit her back.
“Don’t,” I said, and saw a sobering flicker of recognition in her eyes.
Her arm froze. My father was staring into his coffee cup. Behind me, I heard Emma say, “Mishka, come watch Gun
smoke.”
“Go,” my mother said, reaching for her pack of Kents on the table.
And so I went.
* * *
My father promised that the only way my mother would get him to Short Hills was if he dropped dead and they started burying Jews on Bagel Hill. In response, she listed our house with a Realtor, and he unlisted it. To placate her, my father bought her a canary-yellow Fleetwood Cadillac, but she threw the keys at him and stuck to her station wagon. Their conflict escalated into a competition to see who would get the last word, a question that was answered on a Sunday afternoon on the Garden State Parkway. According to an eyewitness, a toll collector who spoke to the troopers, my father was driving the Caddie with my mother screaming at him when he apparently suffered an asthma attack and slammed into a bridge abutment.
I’d been playing basketball at the Community House, and on the way home I went to Sweets, where Emma, her eyes glistening, hugged me and said that my parents were dead.
For years, the news left me in a slight state of shock, and the worst of it was that I couldn’t cry—not as I helped Emma make the arrangements; stood in the receiving line at Apter’s thanking our neighbors, the candy-store regulars, my father’s clients, and my mother’s mah-jongg partners for coming to the funeral. Not as I listened to Rabbi Adelberg’s eulogy about a husband and wife now joined forever in love; rode in the limousine with Emma behind two hearses on the Parkway to the Mount Lebanon Cemetery; and stood over my parents’ graves reading the Mourner’s Kaddish and summoning my best memories of them.
I recalled the Saturday morning I sat in the den watching Crusader Rabbit on TV and my father knelt beside me mimicking the voices of the cartoon characters and translating their dialogue into Russian, and how I laughed until he got up to go to work. And the day, in grammar school, when I was home with a fever, and my mother bought me a Strathmore sketch pad and a box of Venus drawing pencils. Mom, I can’t draw, I told her. Here, Michael, it’s not hard. And she drew a portrait of our faces side by side. It looks just like us, Mom, and she said, When I was your age, I wanted to be an artist. It was silly. My mother took in sewing to make ends meet, and I had to help her at night.
Now their caskets were being lowered into the ground, and I was ashamed of my inability to grieve. Emma noticed my discomfort as visitors paraded through our house during the week of shiva, the majority of them stopping in the den where the trial of Adolf Eichmann was on TV. Videotapes of the proceedings were airmailed around the world from Jerusalem, and now, on-screen, Eichmann, the balding, turkey-necked former SS officer in charge of deporting Jews to death camps, was seated in a bulletproof glass cube peering at the witness stand through black-frame glasses and wearing headphones to hear the translation of the testimony.
The witness, a woman dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and speaking in heavily accented English, was recalling the sight of her daughter being herded with other children into a gas chamber at Treblinka. Eichmann was gazing at the ceiling. Nor was anyone in the den paying attention to the witness. They were debating whether Israel had the right to kidnap Eichmann from Buenos Aires and put him on trial until Eddie brought the argument to a close by saying, “And everybody says Jews are shrewd. Why they pissin’ away dough on this bullshit? They should shoot the fucker.”
I chuckled, earning a scowl from Rabbi Adelberg, who readjusted the tartan plaid yarmulke on his head, a gesture that signaled he was on the verge of launching into one of his moralistic snoozeathons, delivered with the lockjaw phrasing that he’d imported from Oxford, which he’d attended, as he often reminded his congregants, on a Rhodes scholarship. I was curious about how Eddie O would react, but Emma prevented the showdown by shooing Eddie toward the liquor bottles in the kitchen and giving the rabbi a plate with smoked sturgeon on a salt bagel.
“You eat, Mishka?” she asked me.
“I’m not hungry.”
She glanced at the television screen, where Eichmann was testifying, and her face tightened in concentration. Then she looked at me and said in Russian that grief is never what you imagine it will be.
“Otkuda ty znaesh?” I asked—How do you know?
She stroked my cheek. “Trust your grandmother.”
I did, which also partially explained my lack of grief. My parents might be gone, but I still had the most important person in my life. I still had Emma.
4
By March of my senior year in high school, I had no plans for the future, telling myself that the car wreck had destroyed my faith in tomorrow, a perception heightened by reading Camus’s The Stranger in French class. My existential self-dramatization, I suppose, had less to do with the accident than teenage angst and the resulting wish that nothing would ever change. Nonetheless, change was coming. Rollie had a football scholarship to Miami; Birdman had been accepted at Yale; and Beryl Wilner, who had visited me every evening during the shiva and shortly thereafter had become my girlfriend, would be off to the University of Chicago.
Emma had asked me if I was going to apply to college, offering to handle the cost, and when I responded with a shrug, she said nothing. That didn’t mean she wasn’t cooking up something for me to do. Between my father’s life insurance and his savings, my grandmother could’ve sold the store and retired, but Emma had no patience for laziness. She was at Sweets before six in the morning and didn’t get home before seven at night, except on Sundays, when she closed up at three. Other than working, all Emma did was watch TV, go to sisterhood meetings at the synagogue, look through the art books that she borrowed from the library—Picasso, Chagall, and Matisse appeared to be her favorites—and take summer trips to Europe by herself.
Neither I nor my parents knew exactly what Emma did on her travels, but she always brought us gifts—Gucci wallets, bottles of 4711 cologne, Lacoste polo shirts, and the summer before my parents died, Rolex watches. I’d never heard of them—this was before Sean Connery made the brand famous in the James Bond movies. The Rolexes were beautiful, and obviously pricey. My father, opening his box and seeing a yellow-gold watch on a matching small-link bracelet and a cyclops crystal magnifying the date, said Emma shouldn’t be spending this kind of money. My mother, who received the same watch in a smaller size, retorted, “Why shouldn’t she? No one’s starving here,” and Emma, surprisingly, backed up my mother, saying, “It don’t hurt listening to your wife once in a while.”
My Rolex was a stainless steel Explorer with a black dial. Emma said the salesman had informed her that Sir Edmund Hillary had worn the same kind when he became the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Smiling, I kissed her cheek. “I don’t like heights.”
“You could learn,” she said.
Emma rarely splurged on herself, but she’d bought her own steel Rolex, and it was the oddest watch I’d ever seen. The black face had a magnified date and was circled by a red and blue bezel with a dot at the top and the numbers 2 through 22 around it. The watch, she explained, made it easy for the wearer to tell time in twenty-four-hour segments, and an extra red arrow on the face kept track of another time zone.
I calculated that if I kept helping Emma out at Sweets, I could avoid a discussion with her about my plans, and it seemed to work. One thing she did say: “Mishka, whatever you do, remember this your whole life. You fix the past in the present, not in the past.”
I was too young to understand it then, and too distracted by Beryl, with her blond ponytail and dimples. Emma, thrilled that I had a steady, pronounced us as beautiful as the Barbie and Ken dolls advertised on TV, but Beryl, who had volunteered with the Essex County chapter of JFK for President, was no hollow-headed Barbie. She constantly spoke about politics and the Peace Corps, which she wanted to join after college. We knew that by Labor Day we’d be on separate paths, a reality that paled beside going to the movies and parties and Don’s Drive-In for pizza burgers, milkshakes, and fries. One of our favorite weekend stops was in South Mountain Reservation, where we steamed up the Country Squ
ire with our kissing and touching, and once, during a pause, discussed whether Beryl would prefer to lose her virginity in South Orange or Chicago.
“Let’s see,” she said, and smiled so that her dimples seemed an inch deep. “Where’d you lose yours?”
Feeling myself blush, I admitted that I’d be losing mine, too. Naturally, I voted for South Orange and proposed that she practice losing her virginity with me so that after she got to Chicago and lost it again, she’d know what to do.
Beryl laughed. “You’re funny.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think I’ll think about it,” she said, and kissed me on the nose.
* * *
On Saturday, as I walked to work at the store, the sun was melting the crust of dirty snow on the lawns. Eddie O was at the soda fountain, improving a vanilla milkshake with a pour from his silver whiskey flask.
“Hey,” he said. “I been meaning to ask: you play an instrument?”
“Just the radio.”
“He listens to that cockamamie music half the night,” Emma said, and went to wait on the customers at the register.
Eddie O sampled his shake. “You ever hear of payola?”
“Sure. WABC fired their biggest deejay, Alan Freed, for it. It was in all the papers. Freed and hundreds of other radio jocks admitted to taking bribes from record companies to play certain songs.”
“There ya go. And even if paying the disc jockeys wasn’t illegal now, the deejays couldn’t play the songs they took money for. The music’s old, and the station managers won’t let them.”
“Radio’s about today, not five years ago.”
“That might be true, but listen. Some of the record companies had partners, and these guys paid the deejays, and they care about money, not music.”
That was an understatement. I’d read in the Star-Ledger that the Abruzzis, along with some New York mobsters, were involved in payola.
Eddie said, “And these guys, they’re insisting on hearing the songs they paid for. Siano himself had an idea. He’s got teenagers, and they’re crazy about the old songs, so Siano says we should do an experiment. Set up a little station to see if the kids listening will go for it, and then we talk the big stations into doing it. Personally, I think he’s doing it for his own kids, but Siano had a studio set up, and you could be the disc jockey.”