For a time I took a job working for the New York Post as a copyboy–editorial assistant. The job made me feel frustrated and thwarted. All I did was sharpen pencils, buy coffee for the rewrite men and deliver copy downstairs to the printer. No one here thought I might have potential. In nearly a year I never had the opportunity to write a sentence for the Post. Some days I broke handfuls of pencils and threw them into the garbage. Once on the way to the printer from the rewrite desk, I threw away the copy, just to see what would happen. A few hours later, when the Post rolled off the presses, the story wasn’t there, another had taken its place. I was excited by this little experiment, which seemed to prove the gratuitous nature of the news.
At the Post I became friends with Brian Hamill, another copyboy, a tough good kid, who was the younger brother of my favorite columnist, Pete Hamill. I think the Post job was dreary for Brian as well and we talked a lot waiting for the rancorous shout for pencils. One day Brian jolted me with the news that his dad had put in more than twenty years working as an electrical wirer for a lighting company called Globe. Brian, an irreverent kid, spoke with fondness about the company where his dad had been employed; he knew Isadore Rosenblatt as a distant and benevolent figure. It was very odd, because by now I thought of the Globe saga as my own devious and dark invention.
Brian recalled that when Globe had moved from its Brooklyn location near their home to the new plant in Maspeth, his dad, an amputee from the war, had traveled there with some difficulty. Now with the Globe plant in Maspeth closed down, Brian and Pete’s dad was out of work.
About the only thing I liked reading in the Post besides the sports was Pete Hamill’s column and particularly his writing about the war in Vietnam, which heaved with moral outrage and the stench of power and capitalism run amok. I always opened the paper to his column with excitement and jealousy. I never met Pete, although he was sometimes in the office. Maybe I steered clear of him because of the disturbing connection between our fathers and the fear that, journalist that he was, Pete might discover the inside Globe story and write one of his incomparable excoriations. Anyhow, I grew comfortable with the idea that Globe was different things to different people. If Brian and Pete remembered Globe as an undefeated champion put out to pasture, that was fine.
On most days my brother was oblivious to convention, shuffling around New York in a fine bourbon haze, not caring about the day of the week and vaguely pointing toward the next exotic adventure, when his life would kick in. But other times protocol and nostalgia roared with importance for Bill. He suffered terrible grief over his dead pets and commemorated them with formal burials. Bill paid exorbitant fees to ensure perpetual care for the grave sites of his dogs and cats.
Bill had loved Uncle Alfred for his serenity. In my brother’s view it had been preposterous for this gentle, sympathetic man to have been in the Globe factory, maneuvering around the tensions and petty deceits of Abe, Thelma and Chet. With an indulgence of self-recrimination Bill admitted that he had been too tied up to visit Alfred’s grave before now, but on this morning, for some reason, my brother insisted on going with Grandpa and Mom on one of their regular visits to the cemetery.
Although Bill rarely spoke to his father, he kept a half-dozen of Abe’s custom-made Freed and Sons business suits hanging in his closet. Bill treasured these expensive suits, which had been fitted for an emaciated man during the Great Neck days and were now too large for Dad. Bill had shoehorned himself into a dark gray pinstripe, trying for respectability for the cemetery. He had furiously brushed his long bushy hair, but still it gathered in huge side clumps and had ratty tangles and knots.
During the drive back from the grave site Grandpa didn’t say a word. His yearning for Alfred sapped the car of hope. While Globe Lighting had continued to shrink and wither, I.R. was tortured by his loss and had nothing left for the business. The legacy of Globe had no meaning to him without Alfred. My brother had his forehead pasted on the window as Long Island gave way to the asphalt and grimy high-rise apartments of Flushing. Coming back from the Island was always an ordeal for Bill. Stella was impatient with the weight of sorrow. Daddy, you have other children, she said, but Grandpa didn’t answer.
In Manhattan Grandpa turned south on Second Avenue. In the East Village, across from Ratner’s, suddenly the Cadillac swerved and careened ahead onto the curb with the engine racing, throwing people into the air, smacking them off the hood and windshield until the car slammed into a light pole; Grandpa clutched the wheel with the tires spinning in place.
People were lying on the sidewalk. After the police arrived, Grandpa climbed out of the big car looking righteous and wounded, as though someone had accused him of this mayhem. This was what my brother remembered for years, the bewilderment of his grandfather trying to explain that the engine had raced and the brakes wouldn’t work. He had done the right thing. The car didn’t work properly.
I was at the Post sitting around with Brian and some other copy-boys when the call came from one of my aunts, or maybe it was Mother, describing Grandpa’s terrible accident. One elderly man had died and four others had been badly injured, Grandpa had decided to give up his license, I was told, as if this would give the event immediate closure. But there was one other thing. Someone in the family had come up with the brainstorm that as I worked for the Post I would be able to kill the story. I went across the room to a more private place to speak. I tried to explain I wasn’t a big shot like Pete Hamill, but my excuses were tossed aside. Otherwise Grandpa’s picture and this sorrowful story would be plastered on page one and sold at every newsstand in the state.
I knew that in the next couple of hours someone would bark “Copy” and one of us would hustle the story of Grandpa’s accident downstairs to the pressroom. If along the way the smudged pages fell into the garbage, the accident would miss the early edition of the Post and then something more important might happen in the world to push my grandfather off page one—this was my plan. News is only news if it goes into the paper.
Somehow the shameful pages got past me; but as it turned out, there hadn’t been much to worry about. To the surprise of the family, the article about Grandpa’s accident was only a few paragraphs on page forty-seven. It was hardly there at all, like Globe itself.
After this terrible event my brother wandered further from the main highway. In New York he had been writing occasional magazine profiles about afternoon soap opera stars and now he stopped doing this. He decided that he had already experienced the mundane side of life and no longer considered making a living viable.
My tight allegiance with Dad was unbearable to Bill, senseless and ugly. My kid brother had no interest in competing for Dad’s affections. He gave us the Gulf Stream, all the islands and sharks and marlins. He yawned at my Bimini tales and referred obliquely to a stratum of experience beyond the horizon of my conventional attitudes and married life. In distant places there were delectable possibilities enhanced in ways he wouldn’t explain, variations I could not imagine with multiple partners, the smell of curry and tiny dark-skinned girls. He became coy or dismissive when I asked him particulars. Then Bill would change the subject to my precarious health just to hear my voice go quivery at the mention of disease. With his face in a mask of solicitous sorrow, Bill appraised his big brother mired in fear, his father and the box business. My weakness made him soar, convinced him that he was right about Elizabeth Taylor and the timeless beauty of Great Neck.
For my father Bill had become occasional postcards from distant places: Hi Dad. I’m here exploring the ruins of Machu Picchu. I’m trying to find time to get out fishing in the Humboldt Current for black marlin. Wouldn’t it be great if I landed a two-thousand-pounder? Sometimes he drew the outline of a hefty marlin at the bottom of his postcards. It was very similar to the fish he began drawing at eleven on his school assignments.
What could my salesman father make of Bill’s grand airs and great escapes, his need for drama and shadowy worlds? My brother was putting it to both
of us.
My friends saw Bill as Dean Moriarty, racing off on oddball quests, gathering his rosebuds in the androgynous wild country of San Francisco and Tangier, sipping deeply of the night. Bill fed me tidbits. He wanted to buy a proper home in the Mediterranean and was planning a wild caper to raise the money. He showed me a gun, and in his toujours gai style hinted he was going to rob a bank or smuggle drugs to get the money. My baby brother left me sputtering or preaching pitifully.
I can imagine Aunt Celia pretending that there was no crisis in her family. A break with Abe was unthinkable, and whenever she came to the brink of war with her brother she backed off. She tried to assuage Joe Waitzkin’s rage against his profligate son who went to fancy restaurants and sent back his food uneaten. Abe is a sick man, she said to Pop, who was now dying himself, bleeding in the toilet and not telling anyone so he wouldn’t have to go back into the hospital.
She would tell herself, Abe loves the boat. So what if it costs us a few bucks to fix it? No one is starving at 15 Fayette Street. In no time Abe would be leaving for Florida. Her frail brother could no longer take the cold of Boston and had spent the last few winters in a friend’s Fort Lauderdale home on a canal off the intracoastal waterway. Cele had visited her brother there, and she knew the routine. Abe liked to have drinks on the patio with his friend Bob and Bob’s elderly mother, Frances, while admiring the Ebb Tide, which was docked behind the house. When late afternoon storms blew over from the Everglades, they grabbed their drinks and scurried into the Marlin Room, decorated with fish mounts and Abe’s Tycoon rods and Fin-Nor reels, which hung from the ceiling on a tricky little bracket Abe had invented and manufactured. In the Marlin Room they nibbled hors d’oeuvres and had a picture window view of the boat riding out the lashing wind and rain. On lovely evenings they would take the Ebb Tide to one of the trendy marinas on the intracoastal for drinks and dinner.
Cele could easily fall into the old habit of enjoying her brother’s hoity-toity lifestyle even if she was burdened by the cost. He deserves it, she would sometimes say to Lennie, all the pain he has suffered. And Lennie would nod sullenly. After Abe left they would rarely hear from him except for monthly canceled checks and a few postcards extolling sunsets on the intracoastal or marlin hookups off Bimini.
In the meantime Cele made steak and salad dinners, hoping that the family would knit together. She would feed Howie before it was time for Abe slowly to climb the squeaking back stairs that led from his kitchen door to hers. Howie rushed through his meal, which made Cele unhappy. Then, before Abe arrived, Howie quickly left to visit his friend who owned a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store in Central Square.
At the brightly lit kitchen table Abe would carefully chew his meat, trying not to choke. He’d meticulously form the words, it’s good, to his sister; and after she’d served him sherbet for his throat, thank you. He wiped his face neatly. During these dinners Lennie would occasionally make a stale joke and Abe would smile, though he’d heard it two dozen times before. She took this as a good sign.
She knew that once the cold weather had driven Abe south, Howie would again linger over dinner with the family and her oldest son would have his way in the shop. Soon enough Howie would become the president of Lee Products. With Abe in Fort Lauderdale Lennie would be able to relax and she wouldn’t worry so much about his heart. Just cool it until Abe left for Florida.
Except one morning over breakfast Dad told Celia that it was time to put the business back into his name. Abe was looking very collected in a white business shirt, smelling of starch and morning coffee, glancing at the sports section of the paper. It was a new day and he hadn’t had a drink. Give the lawyer a call, he wrote on his pad. It was very reasonable. There was nothing more to discuss and Dad turned back to the newspaper after spelling it out for her.
A dozen years before, Abe had transferred his fifty percent ownership in the business and its real estate to his sister to protect the shop from I.R.’s schemes against him during the divorce proceedings with Stella. In those black days when Abe was still weak from surgery and I.R. had put him into the mental hospital and then forced Abe out of Globe, his sister had been the only one he could trust. Without her he couldn’t have survived the conniving and deception, the humiliation.
Celia was dismayed, though she responded in her singsong voice with hands on her hips, puffing out her ample chest, What’s the big rush, Abe? Why all of a sudden call the lawyers? Do it today! She didn’t like it when her brother gave her orders as if she were a secretary. Dad smiled at her show. He was such a master of timing. Maybe this was not the right time to push Cele? But why should he have to push? He wanted the goddamned shares back in his name.
Abe backed off but Cele worried now that something very bad was happening behind her back, in her own home. Why did Abe want this change? They gave him everything he wanted. Cele had worried about Diran ever since he had left the car dealership for Lee Products. Why come into their tiny company to earn less than he had made selling Pontiacs? What promises had Abe made to Diran? She knew better than anyone the power of her brother’s ambition and avarice. Abe played by his own rules and he never looked back. She decided Abe and Diran were planning to push Howie and Lennie out of the company and her brother was pressuring her to give him the leverage.
Celia went to her sick father for advice and Joe reminded her that Abe’s kids had a rich grandfather. From the Great Neck days Joe remembered Globe as a vast city of men and machines supplying lighting for communities across America. Pop had always admired Izzy Rosenblatt, an immigrant like himself, who had come to this country with nothing and had become a legend in the industry. Cele needed to protect her own children, insisted Pop, who urged her not to return Abe’s shares in the family business.
Cele continued to be indirect with her brother. What’s the problem, Abe? There’s no rush, she would say when he asked about fixing the paperwork. We’ll see about it during the winter. Her tight, angry smile told another story.
Diran called me on the phone with the news. In the big man’s voice there was a tension I had never heard before, a lack of clarity and direction. Diran had always had all of Abe’s answers, but now Dad was concerned and uncertain. He had assumed that his sister would stand by him. For all the married years it was Cele who had grasped Abe’s vision, had ennobled his razzle-dazzle and dark maneuverings while Stella was out to lunch. Diran was only a diversion and now his bluster was making Abe impatient. Diran was window dressing. It was Cele who had energized Dad and made him glow. She had bathed his seeping wounds when Dad was too weak to stand, had propped him back up—now an enemy from deep within the camp. Abe was incredulous and daunted. She knew all his weaknesses and fears, the pills and props of his weird, irresistible strength. She knew where he spent the money, how he closed the deals.
Maybe Cele was pulling a fast one. We’ll see, said Diran reaching for the old cockiness.
By now Pop was back in the hospital, dying. Dad was in the bleak house by himself. He couldn’t speak on the phone. He was drinking at breakfast, missing days of work, and he no longer went upstairs for his dinner. No more late-night visits from his sister but sometimes Cele dropped by a plate of food. Dad was too damning and tense to eat it, his longing for her turning to bile. No one would ever take this business away from him. Never. He couldn’t look at his sister. He wanted to break them. But then he felt weak and sick, dizzy. Loneliness and wretched aversion were all over him. He was losing weight from his bones and skin. He had stomach cramps like the Great Neck days and he fought them back. But he was hurting bad, as if old surgeries were coming apart. He would dial my number in New York.
Dad, how ya doin’?
He would tap faintly like demise.
Things are going badly with Cele and Lennie? They won’t give back your shares?
Frantic flutter of taps with his fingernail.
They’re trying to screw you, Pop?
They’re trying to screw me. My dumb son-of-a-bitch brother-in-law.
I want to get him. I want to get the prick bastard.
Can’t Diran help you?
No, a slow sullen beat.
You mean he can’t handle it? Diran doesn’t know what to do? Bing, bing, on his glass with a spoon. That’s right.
Is he spending more time with his family? You don’t want to go over and visit Diran in his house?
That’s right.
You feel out of place there now with the problems on your mind?
That’s right.
Listen, Pop, don’t worry. I’ll come up next weekend and we’ll figure it out, come up with a plan. Stop worrying. It’s gonna work out. Now listen to me. Just one thing. I want you to back off on the bottle a little. Only one or two drinks, no more. Promise me that. Promise me.
Dad promised with a tap.
I visited Cambridge and we had long talks. My father’s destitution empowered me and I gushed with bright ideas. I calmed him down. We went out and Dad watched me eat linguine with shrimps and clams. He took pleasure from my appetite. We spent evenings on the musty sofa watching the Celtics run the fast break and drank beer together and talked. We were having a rough time, I agreed, but it would turn out okay. I believed that. He smiled sweetly. I was his boy. There was still a bright light at the end of the tunnel.
I remembered the name of a lawyer friend, a hard drinker who fished in the spring in the Bahamas for bluefin. I was surprised Dad hadn’t thought of calling him. He was a partner in one of Boston’s biggest and best law firms. The lawyer was delighted to hear from me and was appalled by Dad’s difficulties with his sister. Abe is such a great guy, he said, and recalled good times with Dad in the islands. We retained the firm to fight for Dad’s shares. Dad felt relieved having such a good plan.
The Last Marlin Page 20