the conventional symbol of the various pieces, used them as chessmen, and taught my sister how to play.
Eventually I persuaded my father to invest in a set of real chessmen, and the game proceeded more smoothly. Marcia and I played quite a bit, and Stanley, who watched us, finally asked for a game, too. He had learned the moves just by watching and I found I had considerable difficulty beating him.
Indeed, he went on to become a much better chess player than I ever was. He was still a mere wood-pusher in comparison to real players, but he was good enough to join chess clubs and have fun.
As for me, I abandoned chess early on. I quickly made the humiliating discovery that just about anyone could beat me—old ladies, little kids, trained chimpanzees, anybody. Why, I don't know. It may be that I lacked patience; that I was too accustomed to seeing things at once. If I looked at a chessboard and didn't see the good move at once, I would make any move and get beaten.
It's really depressing to think of the vast number of things I'm not very good at.
3
By the time I was eighteen, I was old enough to stay up with father till he closed the store, if I wished to.
By midnight the work was done. Few people arrived after that and my father did not welcome them when they did. Generally, he would lock the store and shake his head if anyone arrived, indicating the store to be officially closed. Only if a particularly important customer arrived would he open on an emergency basis.
It took him an hour to get everything set for the next morning. He would sweep the floor, wash all the dishes that needed washing, arrange a tray with cigarettes, matches, and other necessaries to take outside in the morning so that as his regulars passed on their way to the subway station entrance one block to the northwest, he could hand them papers and, if necessary, cigarettes.
He knew everyone's paper and cigarette brand and they always had the money ready. My father was very proud of the efficiency with which he had everything planned out and, ideally, he hoped to get rid of everything on the tray, with nothing left and no additions for which he would have to scramble inside the store. He never allowed me to close the store by myself because he knew that I would not adjust the tray
properly—to say nothing of knowing that I wouldn't sweep and wash with the proper devotion. 2
What he spent most of his time on, though, was the matter of balancing the daily books. It wasn't for the sake of income tax; it was for the love of adding figures in columns and making comparisons of day to day and week to week and month to month. It meant he was forever saying dolefully, "Last week was the worst week in two months" or "This is the worst June 14 we ever had." For some reason he never reported "best" statistics.
Of course, everything had to balance. Income had to equal outgo plus profit, which meant carefully recording how much had been rung up on the register (there were meters inside you could read) and how much had been paid out in bills. Subtracting the second from the first told you exactly how much cash there ought to be in the cash register and in other places in the store. Since no one ever touched the cash register but my father, my mother, and myself, there was no question of theft. Any discrepancy could only be a matter of forgetting to take some bill into account, or of making a mistake in addition.
Time after time, my father would linger over the register and I would say, "What's the matter, Pappa?" and he would mutter, "I'm out a dollar."
It didn't matter whether he was a dollar over or a dollar under (or any other sum), he would stay there till he had straightened it out. My own remarks to the effect that surely it didn't matter were greeted with scorn.
In later years, after money had begun to come more easily, I would visit the old folks and, staying one night with my father, I found him looking for that missing dollar again. I said, "Pappa, forget it. Here's five dollars."
To which his comment was, "Don't be a wise guy. If you gave me
2 Once—in 1937, I believe—there had come one of those rare times when my father was really down with the flu and he simply could not get out of bed for nearly a week. My mother and I struggled with the store alone. But just as my father took to bed, the news of a particularly juicy multiple sex-murder broke and people flocked to the store for the newspapers. Even those customers who couldn't read could look at the pictures of the murdered model, since the Daily News and the Daily Mirror found it necessary to print every undraped photograph of her they could find in order to keep their readers (or lookers) informed. (Those were the days before the modern girlie magazine had sated everyone with intimate* anatomy.) Those people who flocked to the store bought other things as well, and when my father finally staggered to the store, he looked at the income the register told him we had made and his eyes bulged. "What happened?" he said. Whereupon I said, cheerfully, "It's always like this when you're not in the store, Pappa." But my mother told him the truth.
a million dollars, that dollar would still have to be found. The books must balance."
He never told me why, though. It taught me a lesson. In later life, when I had occasion to balance accounts, I never bothered about trifling discrepancies. I just made arbitrary corrections and let it go. My father did enough searching for both of us in his lifetime.
When I stayed with him, he would often regale me with reminiscences of his days in Russia, usually adding improving tales designed to make a better person of me. He filled me with aphorisms such as:
"If, Isaac, you should have a chance to take ten thousand dollars that is not yours, you should not take it. Why? Because someone might find out and you would be punished? No! Even if you should be sure that no one would ever find out, you should still not take it."
I would think it over to try to catch his reasoning and I would say, "Because God would know! Right?"
And my father would brush that aside. "Never mind God. You would know. You would know that you had done wrong, and you mustn't do it."
Then at some later time, he told me of how his father had once purchased bushels of grain from a certain peasant. To keep track of the number of bushels, my grandfather had thrown a shiny new ten-kopeck piece into a dish, one for each bushel.
"Can you imagine," said my father, "a peasant who could resist stealing ten-kopeck pieces? Naturally, he took some and there was a short count so that my father profited greatly since the bushel of grain was worth far more than ten kopecks." And he laughed heartily at the memory.
I frowned and said, "That was dishonest, Pappa."
"Why?" he said. "Who told the peasant to steal?"
"Your father knew he would and he let him do it."
My father fell silent. The peasant was the natural enemy of the Jewish merchant. Once drunk, the peasant would beat up and plunder any Jew he encountered and feel justified and pious for doing so. Yet the force of my remark was plain.
This was one of the few stories my father never repeated to me after a first telling.
4
Each successive store had seen me tied down more than before, and the Windsor Place store saw the last freedoms go. It was my fault, really. It seems that the Daily News put out a very early "pink" edition
(so called because the front page was that color), one that was so early it came out the evening before its actual date. That had always been so, but we ignored it, largely because that edition wasn't delivered directly but had to be collected at some key stopping points.
In Windsor Place, however, the clientele was much more keen on the news of the day than had been true in the earlier stores. Furthermore, these were exciting times. In 1936, civil war had started in Spain; in 1937, Japan had mounted a renewed invasion of China.
I myself was following the news with agonized absorption, becoming ever more fearful of Hitler's might; ever more contemptuous of the Western powers for failing to take a stronger stand against Germany and Japan. The point was that I wanted to be able to read the pink News every night, in order to keep up with events.
I therefore suggested we ge
t it, using as my justification the fact that customers occasionally wanted it. The papers would have to be picked up at "the circle"—that is, the traffic circle at the corner of the park where Prospect Park West and Prospect Park Southwest met.
That was only four blocks away, and three of those were immune to weather vicissitudes because one could walk through the nearby subway station, one end of which was within a block of the store and the other end of which was at the circle itself. I volunteered to go there every evening at 8:00 p.m. and pick up the necessary twenty-five papers and bring them back.
It turned out not to be worth it. In my eagerness to get the news I committed myself to being nailed down each evenings F had to be there, and I had to be there before the truck came. It killed my evenings.
5
On the lighter side, we had a cat in the early years at Windsor Place. We often had cats, both before and after this one, but this one was the best cat we ever had and the one most nearly a member of the family. Like all the cats my family had, its name was 'The Cat."
It was a female cat who was a nymphomanic and who had kittens at every opportunity. She once left us for three days in search of who knows what nameless orgies and came back, very much the worse for wear, after we had given up and decided she had been kidnapped. (I secretly thought she had been taken by some college student for a zoology class, but I didn't tell my parents that. It would have distressed them.)
While she was at the store, however, she was a model of decorum,
at least as far as her attitude toward the rest of us were concerned. She treated us with amused contempt and was willing to accept food from us, but allowed no other familiarities, and treated the newsstand as her own. She would always stretch out on top of the pile of Timeses and blink lazily in the sun. She did not budge at the approach of customers, whom she preferred to ignore in godlike indifference. Nor did my father ever disturb her. He would flick out a Times from underneath the top one and the cat would settle sharply downward by the thickness of one newspaper without any sign of concern. We always kept the kittens until they were in danger of losing their kitten cuteness and then we would labor to place them with various customers.
At night in good weather, my father, if he felt expansive, would decide to walk the two blocks to the park and back and would say, "Come on, Cat."
The cat would follow. There was no leash, of course, and she always followed with circumspection, as though she were interested in her own affairs only and ended up at my father's heels by pure accident.
When they reached the park, the cat would vanish inside and my father would wait for about five minutes and then he would call out, "Come on, Cat," and the cat would reappear and walk him back. The cat stayed out all night, living her life of wickedness and shame, but she would always be waiting at the entrance of the store when my father came down in the morning to open it.
My clearest memory of that cat is of one warm and sunny morning when the cat was sitting on the newsstand and a tomcat walked jauntily down the street across the way. Our cat's yellow eyes saw him and followed him with distinct interest, and I could see the almost sensuous workings of her feline mind. So, with my customary stupidity reaching temporarily monumental heights, I moved in front of her and placed my face so that it was between her and the object of her carefree lust.
The cat looked at me wearily and craned her neck so as to see around me. I moved my head to put it in the way again and the cat, moving far too quickly for me even to begin to duck, unlimbered her right front paw and handed me a slam on the left check that staggered me.
I left in a hurry with the knowledge that the cat was far more intelligent than I was. She might have unsheathed her claws and sliced my cheek into four pieces, but she did not. The blow was hard, but velvet-smooth. She just gave me what I deserved, but no more than that.
The cat's one fault was her undying hatred of dogs and her inability to take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them. Since many of our
customers had dogs and since they brought their dogs with them, we were under the perpetual necessity of snatching up the cat and holding her tightly till the dog was gone, while we felt her muscles writhing angrily in our grasp as she made every effort to get loose and grind the dog into chopped meat. My father clung to the cat longer than he would have clung to me, I think, if I had threatened the welfare of his customers, but in the end she had to go.
On January 13, 1938, she attacked not a dog but the dog's owner, and after that there was no choice. She was handed over to the SPCA while I was at school, and all of us, my father and I most of all, did not recover for a long time.
In my junior year at Columbia, my courses included qualitative analytic chemistry, quantitative analytic chemistry, intermediate physics, calculus, English literature, medieval history, and possibly a few other things. 3
By all odds, English literature was the most unusual of the courses, for we had as our teacher Professor Lyon.
Of all the teachers I've ever had, Lyon seemed at first glance the most mannered and affected. He spoke with extreme preciosity, he dressed like a dandy, he held himself carefully, his gestures looked as though they had been rehearsed before the mirror. He was sixtyish when I first encountered him, but he had clearly been theatrically handsome when young, and he acted as though he still were.
He lectured in the grand manner, walking slowly up and back, striking poses, using no notes but affecting a theatrical delivery that made it seem he was satirizing a Shakespearean actor, but he wasn't. I got to know him fairly well and I never caught him in any other pose. If he were phony on the surface, he was at least phony all the way through—and it wasn't phony, it merely seemed so. In reality, he was a gentle, kind-hearted fellow who always tried to help me.
But never mind that. When he lectured, he allowed no interruptions. In grade school and in high school, of course, there were no lectures as such. Even in most college classes, though the professor lectured, we did not hesitate to interrupt and ask questions, nor did the professor hesitate to turn the lecture into a dialog. There was always the feeling of give and take—but not in Lyon's class.
3 Sidney Cohen refused to take calculus with me, proposing sociology instead, I scorned that emphatically, so for three hours a week we separated, I to differentiate and integrate and he to do whatever is done in sociology.
That was one long monolog and nothing more. Fortunately, it was always an interesting monolog, which he would lace with reminiscences concerning theatrical performances he had seen.
I myself greeted those reminiscences with delight for, except in the Yiddish theater, I had never seen any performances on the stage. I had never seen either Shakespeare nor Gilbert and Sullivan (my two great dramatic enthusiasms) done professionally up to that time.
For that matter, I had never even seen burlesque (it was a secret wish of mine to see that, too), and now it seemed I never would, for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, in a fit of self-righteous Puritanism, had banned burlesque some short while before.
But I could always listen to Lyon, who on one day went into polychromatic raptures over a play he had once seen. With graceful gestures of his hand, he described the scenery, the heroine in her diaphanous costume, the glittering bespangled gorgeousness of the sofa on which she reclined in luxurious abandon, and so on.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I am sorry for you, but never in your life will you see such a vision of beauty, such a glory of grace, such a . . ."
And from my place somewhere in the front row, I said, casually, "Not as long as LaGuardia keeps those places closed."
Well! One didn't interrupt Lyon to begin with, and one certainly didn't interrupt him in order to imply he was describing a sleazy burlesque show to us. So the class went into hysterics.
I wasn't counting on that. I had expected a snicker, and then a ten-minute-long series of cutting comments from Lyon. I was prepared for that. I got such comments from my mother for matters that brought me far less satisfacti
on. Some things are worth a reasonable amount of hot water.
But hysterics? Literally hysterics? Every time Lyon held up his hands to quell the monsters, they broke out again and he had to give up. He was literally unable to finish his lecture and had to dismiss the class.
I sat there stricken for quite a while after Lyon and the rest of the class left (except Cohen, who sat there shaking his head at me). Surely there could be no possible consequence for this but permanent ejection from the class and, possibly, just possibly, expulsion from college. After all, Lyon was a valued professor speaking to a Columbia College class and I was a university undergraduate interloper.
I finally dragged through my remaining courses of the day and carried on, somehow, waiting for the ax to fall and wondering how I would explain to my father. ("Again with the jokes, Isaac?")
Nothing of the sort happened. When the next class opened, he smiled at me and nodded in his lofty way. I can make no pretense at analyzing the psychology of it. I don't know if he admired my courage, or the successful "theater" of my remark, but I was a favorite of his from that moment and got an A in the course.
7
Marcia finished high school on February 4, 1938. Like myself, she got out at the age of fifteen. She did not go to college. It was not as customary then as it is now for girls to go to college, and education for women was not something that fit in with my parents' background.
Marcia went to business school instead and before she was sixteen had her first job. She went on to become a crackerjack secretary.
8
I tend to think of Brooklyn in the 1920s and 1930s as idyllic and crimefree, but that, of course, is only in comparison with the situation now. It was not crime zero.
On February 16, 1938, when my father woke and looked casually out the window to see what the weather was like, he noticed that the night light in the store was out. It might have burned out, of course, but he was dressed and downstairs in a hurry to see. The rest of the family, awakened by my father's unusual excitement, remained at the windows. I saw him get to the door and walk in immediately, instead of fiddling with the lock for a time—and that was the giveaway.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 23