I was up all night sweating in bed. I was dying alone. If the disease didn’t finish me, panic would. Finally I begged my father to take me to the Clinic. This was a grim but necessary step. I knew they would take my stomach or some of my intestines. Typically, top guys in the lighting business had left the Clinic with less than they brought. The doctors had recently taken my uncle Chet’s stomach and he was bitter about it.
We flew to Boston on the Eastern shuttle. I recall my aunt Celia the night before my tests grilling well-done steak on the rotisserie. I couldn’t eat a bite. She nodded gravely as though she had seen this before. She knew all Dad’s big-shot friends who had gone in for surgery. Whenever she mentioned the Clinic, Celia tittered. To her the Clinic was status. On my father’s side of the family, because of Abe’s connections, illness was an opportunity for going first class.
Once again I watched how the doctors were drawn to my father. While I dressed in a chilly white gown, Dad was smiling like a winner surrounded by a half-dozen doctors. He described his deals and promised them marlin fishing on the Ebb Tide. They wanted to make deals like Abe. Before I went in for my tests Dad mentioned that one of the doctors he’d been chatting with was a top brain surgeon. I smiled weakly. We were covered top to bottom.
Soon after swallowing the white liquid I heard one doctor say to another, his esophagus is clear. Thank God for that, I thought, never before having realized that the esophagus was a source of danger. The body is so complicated—death can be sitting in any pocket, curve or straightaway. A couple of hours later I learned that my stomach and intestines were also clear. A nervous stomach, one of them told me, relax.
On the shuttle back to New York, my father was disgusted with me. What a head case. You know what that examination cost! But this did not deter my good spirits. I had a clean bill of health, as Dad would put it. What a feeling. I resolved to be more bold with girls. I was free to pursue love and baseball with my full energy. The Clinic had given me back my future.
I had been cut from every team I ever tried out for. Basketball, track, baseball the year before in Great Neck. I was determined to make the varsity baseball team at Barnard, to get a letter. It was my last chance to make a team, but I knew that Coach Kelly would cut me. He was the one who dropped me from the JV basketball team after Bloomberg fell onto the court holding his arm. My friend Ronnie Penn and I made a plan. He was all-city in baseball as well as basketball. He was a lefty with a wicked curve ball, the best in our conference. An unhittable pitch. Ronnie always threw for the tryouts, and hitters were pleased if they managed to foul off one or two of his pitches. Our plan was simple. Before each curve ball Ronnie would touch the tip of his cap. He would take a little off his fast balls. I would write his next two English papers. It was an insider Abe Waitzkin deal, and it worked to perfection. I stepped up on every curve and punched it into right field. I had no power but made contact with everything Ronnie threw. The coach and starters on the team looked on with amazement as I slapped back grounders and little line drives. I made the varsity. I couldn’t wait to call Dad with the news.
From the ship’s log: “Alan F. [Fischbach] arrived Lauderdale Friday night. Sat morning we took both boats across the Stream. The Friendly Fisch rode beautiful. What a boat! We had lunch at the Game Club. Fished the afternoon. Alan in the chair. We had two strikes by marlin. Switched over to center [fuel] tanks 2PM. Tomorrow morning we plan to leave for Chub at 7AM with both boats....”
Now Dad was alone in the house. Sometimes I thought of him by the stove stirring salami and eggs for himself. He had no buddies in Great Neck. Without the kids at home, selling trips had become more of a push, but his fury toward Grandpa was unabated. It got him through.
Dad was slowly tightening the screws, as he put it. I wonder if he ever discussed his master plan with Alan fishing off Chub Cay or dining after drinks at the Colony Club. Most likely not. I always thought that Alan was simpleminded. Abe led him from one deal to the next. Promised great times. More rendezvous in the Bahamas. Rich people are often unhappy, lost at sea on their sumptuous yachts. My dad brought along a vision of special times, an endless horizon of great fishing trips and good talk. Alan gave Abe all the work Ruby could handle and then Dad suggested which other companies deserved orders. Jobs for SmithCraft, Daybrite, Neo-Ray—that was his friend Leon’s company—and sometimes they made side deals. Globe was never on the list. Dad made calls to other contractor buddies, eased them away from Globe. It was easy. Whenever he called the Commissioner Dad pushed his voice and projected a sensibility of terrific times, of glee. Lying in the bedroom of our empty, darkened home, Dad asked about the Commissioner’s kids and the wife, about barbecues on the back lawn. Eventually they got to trading favors and Abe said a few words about Globe. The Commissioner took Abe’s cues quickly and changed the subject. He liked to keep conversation pleasant. After these important talks Dad couldn’t speak for hours. He smoked Luckies to soothe his throat, blew rings into the air.
I’m busting the old man’s balls, he told me with his chin quivering a little. His voice was hardly more than a whisper and even at that it hurt him to speak. He knew what was coming and was training me to read his lips. Harassing him a little, he said, forming his words carefully. Nothing terrible, he continued, Maybe a wrench falls into the gears of a costly machine. A Globe truck arrives at a building and the union guys refuse to unload the fixtures. Fuck the old bastard. He can throw his fixtures into the river. Dad’s impish smile always made me grin back.
During Abe’s years landing office buildings for Globe, Grandpa had allowed the residential side of the business to slip while Globe gradually developed the best plant in the industry for manufacturing ceiling-mounted fluorescents. All of a sudden New York distributors weren’t giving Globe salesmen the big jobs. Making the payroll for five hundred workers had become a problem. About the same time that Stella left Abe, Chet and Thelma were divorced and now my uncle was also out of the company. With Abe and Chet gone, I.R. needed his son to take up the slack, but Alfred was a gentle man who had never had a great mind for business. And he wasn’t well. Alfred responded to his father’s pressure by becoming irritable and distracted.
My father’s machinations against Globe proceeded like a game to me, not unlike the ruse Ronnie and I had concocted to make the Barnard baseball team. While I rooted for Dad and found his wheeling and dealing with Fischbach and the Commissioner heady, at heart I believed that Globe was fundamentally impervious. The huge company was like the ocean itself. It would always be there providing lighting for America while enriching our families.
On Sunday evenings Grandpa took us to dinner at a steak restaurant on 72nd Street where the waitresses wore tiny black outfits and were chosen for their plump rear ends and large bosoms. During these meals Grandpa was cheerful and confident, smiled when the girls leaned over to take his order. One Sunday he showed up triumphantly in a brand-new green Caddy with enormous fins, talked buoyantly about his color catalog. It was clear that Grandpa would soon rebuild his sales force and come out with a smashing new residential line.
Abe Waitzkin’s Ebb Tide log: “No fishing today off Cape Cod. 25 mile winds. Generator removed and disassembled by Falmouth Marine. Bill arrived aboard Ebb Tide with wild stories. We had a ball. Had dinner at Flight Deck.” Following this entry my brother sketched a blue marlin in the log, signed his name and added, “Everything shipshape!”
Alfred’s decline was precipitous. He began espousing bizarre ideas and quickly lost physical coordination. One day Laurie found her husband talking to himself as he watched a record go round and round on the turntable. Soon she had to put him into a mental hospital. When I.R. visited the institution he found his thirty-six-year-old son crawling on the floor. I.R. pleaded with Laurie, Let me take care of Alfred. I’ll build bars on my windows, I want to take him home, I’ll watch him every minute. Of course Laurie had to refuse this request. Grandpa demanded of her, Let me have three days alone with my son. She reluctantly agreed. For
three days he slept in Alfred’s room. I.R. never discussed the visit with Laurie. To the end Grandpa’s relationship with his son was private and eclipsed all else. After Grandpa left the hospital, Alfred telephoned to ask his wife to come. Will you bring my shoes? he asked.
A few hours later Alfred died of a heart attack.
I.R. was a blind man without his son. He decided that Alfred’s wife was a gold digger and tried to dismiss Laurie with a ten-thousand-dollar check. Don’t you ever ask me for another penny, he demanded bitterly of his son’s flabbergasted widow. Then he was filled with remorse and fear. What if Laurie kept the grandchildren from him, his connection to Alfred.
Grandpa had pains in his heart for Alfred. He worried, maybe he had given his son too much responsibility. Everything came at once. Business was bad and he had to lay off workers. He had known some of these men thirty years. He told Stella he had to take back the blue Chevy, which was a company car. To save. Stella was angry at him. Why does Thelma keep her Thunderbird?
Because she works for the company. Thelma’s gonna take over for Alfred. Someday she’ll be president of Globe.
Bullshit, said Mother.
Stella, why do you speak to me this way? I’m an old man. I’m sick. And look how you dress, in torn black stockings? Why do you dress like this?
Grandpa’s old law firm, Rubin, Baum and Levin, was a harbor of refuge and stability. Sometimes Grandpa visited his prominent lawyers in their rich, wood-paneled offices. More often the lawyers, including Abe Levin himself, arrived at the 73rd Street apartment fresh from multimillion-dollar negotiations Midtown. They brought thick new drafts of his various wills and trusts along with a stack of new yellow legal pads. They were ready for any and all revisions. They brought hope. The high-priced attorneys wore impeccable pinstriped suits and listened carefully to Grandpa, who sat in his recliner wearing pajamas and slippers. He offered them wisdom about Kennedy and Jacob Javits. He stressed that everything he had ever done was for the family. The attorneys called him I.R. Grandpa felt refreshed and vindicated after these visits.
A few weeks after Alfred’s death, my father visited Laurie in her home, which was only a few blocks from our house in Great Neck. He assured her that whatever bad blood existed between him and I.R. had nothing to do with their friendship. He said to Laurie, whenever you need me or want me, pick up the phone and I’ll be right over. Count on it. At the time Laurie was beleaguered by her loss and the rejection she felt from I.R. Her meeting with my father was emotional and today my aunt is still moved when she recalls my father’s generous words, his ability to brighten a dark time with his irresistible promise of friendship.
But Dad never saw Laurie again. Even while they spoke, the Great Neck house was on the market, and soon after it was sold, Dad moved into a two-room suite at a residential hotel on 44th Street. Although the Concord Hotel was beyond the beginnings of its decline, the move seemed to energize Dad. He woke up to the sound of jack-hammers and rivet guns, buildings going up. He entertained customers in the shadow of the Seagram and Socony buildings, his greatest triumphs. With so much action all around it was easy enough to ignore the worn rugs and weary wallpaper in his bedroom. So what? In 1961 the city was pockmarked by massive excavations with derricks lifting, steel girders rising. The need for lighting was all around, and Dad was itching to sell again.
Giving up the house had unburdened me. Manhattan and Riverdale were cheek by jowl. After school Dad and I could meet for Knick games at the Garden. Sometimes I would arrive at the Concord and there would be a message for me at the desk: “Tied up for a half hour. See you at 6:30.” He was doing business. I was still intoxicated by his deals. I paced in the lobby craving details. At six-thirty I would be waiting outside his door. Finally it swung open. The customer was shaking Dad’s hand, then mine. My father’s face was flushed with business, a big deal was in the works. The room smelled of his newly starched shirts, aftershave, sweat, the sweet drift of his bowels, smells I had known my entire life.
After Dad had had a beer or two, we walked outside. The Manhattan night sky was sparkling with fluorescents. Dad wore his trench coat and pointed up to his deals all around. It was so great. The restaurant was my choice and I often picked Sauli Schniderman’s place. He was a contractor who had gone broke and then found a backer to open this terrific restaurant with a real French chef who prepared “Chicken Divine” specially for me and Dad. The bar was always crowded with lighting salesmen jostling against beautiful women and there were deals in the air. All the manufacturers and reps came over to our table to say a few words and Sauli would stop by to ask about the chicken. You could tell he admired my father. He knew selling. Then Dad would say to Sauli or one of the salesmen he was going to take his boy to hear some music. Always a big tip to the cigarette girl, who also ran the coatroom, and we were back on the street hailing a cab for Basin Street East or the Embers, which was my favorite because George Shearing often played piano there accompanied by the incomparable Armando Peraza on congas.
For my brother life was anything but shipshape. The sale of the house had thrown him into turmoil and dejection. In his rage at Abe, Bill threw rocks at passing cars on the West Side Highway. He wrote my father off, vowed never again to fish on the Ebb Tide. He continued to take the train out to Great Neck. In the darkening afternoon he would stand in front of his house, watch lights come on in the windows and imagine Winnie folding clothes in the little room on the second floor. No one knew where Winnie was. There was no phone number for Bill to call. She had disappeared as though covered over by the earth. The new owner of the house had taken Mother’s car out of the rock garden. Bill stood beneath the trees on the front lawn and cried.
My thirteen-year-old brother began to drink bourbon. When he was smashed he would call the new owner of the Great Neck house on the phone to negotiate to buy it back. What will it take? he asked the astonished new home owner. Bill told Mother he was planning to move into an apartment in Great Neck and remain there until he could get the house back. My mother did not know what to do for Bill. She bought him a dog, a German shepherd Bill named BlackJack. But Mother was living in her own reality and found Bill’s attachment to Great Neck bizarre. She was free from Abe and beginning to find her own way. Her friends were intensely committed to painting. They lived in cold-water flats and were arrogant about their impoverished lives. Besides Bill, no one she valued had yearnings for the bourgeois life, although when de Kooning came to our Riverdale apartment he commented that he would like to have a lazy Susan like the one we had taken from the Great Neck house. He even took measurements.
From the first days Bill turned the German shepherd against me. By the time Black Jack was a year old, he bared his fangs and growled viciously every time I walked past him. He would attack me on the way to the bathroom. He ripped at my pants and grabbed the sleeves of my shirts. I never had a peaceful day in the apartment with that dog. Some afternoons when Bill was out Black Jack held me hostage in my room. Other times when he had me cornered Bill would make a big show of pulling Black Jack away, chiding him, Now you be good to my brother Fred. He always did this when Mother was around. Then he kissed Black Jack on the lips, on the tongue. Such a sweet dog, he’d say. He knew that this kissing disgusted me. I hated that dog. I couldn’t wait to get away from him, to leave for college.
From his balcony on the seventeenth floor Grandpa watched the profusion of rising girders and spires of a veritable new city of glimmering office buildings. But there were no more high-profile jobs for Globe. My father had created Izzy’s living hell. Old contractor friends were brusque on the phone and I.R. had no stomach for groveling. There were no more weekend visits from Harry Fischbach for bagels. Only a couple of years earlier, before the divorce was final, Harry had actually asked Grandpa for permission to court Stella. And though such a marriage would have been excellent for Globe, Grandpa had felt proud to turn down the great Harry Fischbach. It was the right thing to do, he decided, because Harry was too old for his da
ughter.
The unions had always given Izzy an edge, but now they had also turned against him. In the New York area the electrical union mandated a balance manufacturers had to maintain between high-income workers with seniority and inexperienced bottom-of-the-scale laborers. During the Abe years Globe had been given license to employ more low-end workers, but now this policy had been remanded. I.R. was squeezed for high wages when he had no business.
Revenge makes powerful drama, and I must admit that Dad’s ingenious work was thrilling to me. I could barely believe it, but the great company was foundering. No one had ever put on such a show of power and finesse in the lighting industry. Of course it was mostly a show for us alone, not something you would take credit for at a Bar Mitzvah or dinner party. Dad would say, “I only want to live long enough to piss on his grave.” Then I’d smack him in the shoulder, try to coax a smile.
When my grandfather could no longer afford to operate out of New York he assembled a few key guys from the Maspeth plant and moved Globe into a smaller building in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Hazleton was near Scranton, which was Laurie’s hometown. I.R. hoped that Laurie’s ties to the community would be helpful, Globe would be welcomed with open arms and maybe the unions would give him a break. He took a small room in a local hotel with an Italian restaurant downstairs and worked late into the night creating designs for his new catalog.
A couple of times when I visited Hazleton, he and I ate in the gloomy restaurant. Once over soggy lasagna Grandpa referred obliquely to “Abe’s dark work.” His face was turned away from mine and he didn’t say any more about it.
Abe Waitzkin’s Ebb Tide log: “Went fishing from 9AM. Hooked a tuna off the Hens and Chickens. It came in tail wrapped and was eaten at transom by sharks. Changed over to wing fuel tanks at 2 PM. Then the great Les Sagan hooked and landed blue marlin, 123 pounds, a beauty. Back to dock 6 PM. Top boat for the day! Dinner Big Game Club. Great food and of course plenty of booze. Alan will arrive tomorrow.” Below this entry another note in a different handwriting: “Today was a day to remember. We’re all so lucky to have a friend like Abe. He’s an angel.” Signed, “Susie.”
The Last Marlin Page 12