I bought an old car, a two-door 1947 Chevy, and rented the extra bedroom in the bungalow of an elderly widow named Susan Singer on Overland Street. (Whenever I saw her, I used to wonder if she, too, had a few screenplays of her own locked away somewhere.) The Los Angeles Times Help Wanted section had nothing in the way of work for me, and so I spent my days driving around, wasting gas and money, looking for help-wanted signs, and beginning to feel that maybe this move wasn’t such a hot idea. I had left my phone number for Harry at William Morris when I moved into Mrs. Singer’s bungalow but hadn’t heard a word from him in more than a week.
I cobbled together a resume of sorts—it was pretty pathetic, working for Sanders Drug Store in my teens and for my father’s business on Saturdays—and sent out copies of it to the various movie studios and large corporations I found in the Yellow Pages, with extreme doubt about why they would want to hire me to do what, in my introductory letter, I wasn’t very specific about wanting to do for them. Finally, I took a job at a subway-sandwich joint called Monty’s, just off the UCLA campus. I wore a paper hat and thin rubber gloves and, behind a high counter, chopped lettuce and sliced tomatoes and assembled sandwiches all day.
I can’t remember any days that seemed so long. My fellow workers at Monty’s were chiefly Mexicans, most without much English. I made no connection with the students at UCLA who came into the restaurant. As for girls, I figured luscious California co-eds were unlikely to find much to interest them in a guy wearing a paper hat.
At the end of another week, I still hadn’t heard from Harry. I went over to his apartment on three different occasions, rang the bell, but no answer. Nights I kept pretty much to my room, occasionally taking in a movie. Days went by when I barely spoke to anyone. This was my first encounter with extended loneliness, and I found it was not at all to my taste. I had no gift for solitude. Where the hell, I wondered, was Harry?
After the third week in L.A., I called again at William Morris and learned that Harry had left the agency and gone to Europe. The woman I spoke with said that she didn’t know why he had left and was sorry but she had no further information.
I didn’t want to return to Chicago, at least not too soon, if only because to do so would confirm my father in his judgment of Harry and of my foolishness in expecting anything of him. But what, exactly, had I expected? That he would help me find interesting work? That I would share his apartment and we should once again become roomies? That we would go to Dodgers games and win small bets? That he would pop girls from some L.A. equivalent of the Maryland Hotel into my bed? Harry was in his mid-thirties and intent on a career. A nephew around his neck was probably a drag he didn’t need, though why I didn’t think of that before I came out here I don’t know. Still, to leave for Europe without a word, that seemed to be, I don’t know, not quite right.
I continued at Monty’s, making subs during the day, and at night I read detective stories in my room. My landlady invited me to watch television with her, but I took a pass on the offer. On my days off I drove down to Laguna Beach, where I sat on the beach and stared at pretty girls. The days creaked slowly by, and still nothing from Harry. I was hoping he might call or send me a letter from Europe explaining why he had left Los Angeles without a word. The man who gave me the best summer of my boyhood was now giving me the worst summer of my life.
Toward the end of August, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I called my parents to announce that I was returning home. Over the phone my mother sounded pleased; my father didn’t say anything. The Chevy, which held up nearly the entire way back to Chicago, broke down just outside Hammond, Indiana. I had to call from a gas station to have my father wire me $140 to have something called a throw-out bearing replaced. Not exactly a triumphal return.
My father never said a word about my failed California adventure, which was a relief. When we were alone, my mother asked about her brother, and after I explained his disappearance, she allowed that Harry could sometimes act impulsively and said no more about it.
That fall I enrolled at Roosevelt University, where I declared myself a political science major. My interest in school was no greater than before, but I was determined to finish, and I did. After being drafted and spending two years in the Army, all of it in Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas, I went into my father’s business.
I was wrong about my father’s using up all the oxygen in the joint, for he trained me carefully about the various aspects of his business and told me he hoped I would take it over someday, which I have now done. I have two sons of my own, and neither, I regret to report, is the least interested in going into what has proved a very profitable business, so what my father built and I carried on will probably die.
As for Harry, I learned from my Aunt Lillian, who kept in close touch with him, that when he had gone off to Europe, he did so with a client, a starlet thought promising at the time whose marriage was breaking up. Harry became her exclusive agent, and through her—I don’t know any of the intricate details—somehow worked his way into producing movies.
Watching late-night or Turner Classic Movies I sometimes note, under the title of associate or executive producer, and more rarely producer, the name Harold Abrams; you doubtless have seen and not noticed the name yourself, one of scores of such Jewish-sounding names that show up in movie credits. So far as I know, Harry worked exclusively on B or below films, nothing memorable, but he apparently made a very good living.
In his forties, Harry married a woman, a widow six years older than he, whose husband had been an important figure during the Hollywood studio days. Lillian flew out to the wedding and brought back a photograph that showed Harry in a cutaway wearing a mustache. Among the guests was Frank Sinatra. His wife had children from her first marriage, and they had no children together. They lived in her large house in Beverly Hills. When Lillian died, Harry sent flowers but didn’t come to Chicago for the funeral.
Harry died six years later, of pancreatic cancer. He was sixty-eight. My mother went, by herself, to his funeral. When I asked her what the funeral was like, she reported that her brother had twenty-seven ultra-suede sport jackets in his bedroom closet; she had counted. “Every color imaginable,” she said.
“Oh, and one thing more,” my mother said, “a lady friend of Harry’s, a woman who looked to be in her forties, apparently his mistress for several years, showed up at the funeral, which outraged his wife. Back at the house, after the burial, she stomped around and called him a son of a bitch, a bastard, and everything else she could think of. Who can blame her? But, you know, that’s Harry.”
When my mother left the room, my father took me aside to inform me that his brother-in-law had never repaid the twenty grand he had borrowed from his sister Lillian. “That’s Harry, too,” my father said, and walked out of the room.
Widow’s Pique
Larry has been dead it will be a month precisely this Thursday, and until now Deborah Siskin hasn’t had the courage—or is it the energy?—to go through the house and remove his things. Energy can’t be the problem, for she is, within her small circle of friends and colleagues, known for her tirelessness. Deborah is head of the department of orthodontics at the University of Illinois School of Dentistry; she raised three children, two now successful physicians, the other a lawyer. Until her husband’s death, she continued to cook dinner five or six nights a week after a full day’s work—Saturdays, she and Larry went out for Chinese food and a movie—and even found time to iron his shirts. No, not energy but courage is the problem, courage of a peculiar kind—the courage needed to face the meaning of her marriage of nearly forty-three years. In Larry’s closet, Deborah finds one suit, which she bought him to wear to accompany her to official dental school functions or to the occasional Jewish charity dinners to which she dragged him. He owned two blue blazers, one for teaching, one for travelling. She also took him to buy these. He had little sense of clothes, and with the passing years even less interes
t. His twelve or so shirts and nine ties (at least the unstained ones) she will take, along with the suit and blazers and odd trousers and his raincoat and down-filled winter coat, to donate to the ORT charity shop. His socks and underwear and handkerchiefs and three pairs of shoes and slippers and tired terry-cloth bathrobe she’ll toss out.
The problem is Larry’s various collections. Over the years, he had bought the jerseys for all the National Football League teams, both past and present. He collected model cars from the Franklin Mint, about fifty of these. He also bought antique model-train cars, sometimes spending three or four hundred dollars for them. Then there are his first editions; he was always claiming that his first edition of some now-forgotten novelist—Stanley Elkin, Vance Bourjaily, George P. Elliott—was selling for $145 or some such price, though Deborah scarcely listened when he told her such things and anyhow she has no notion where to sell these books for the sums he mentioned, if such sums are really available. Thelargest collection of all was his classical music CDs, not to speak of the old vinyl recordings that he kept in boxes in the basement. Maybe the university, Northeastern Illinois, where Larry taught political science for the last thirty years, would want all this stuff, though Deborah knows that the big problem nowadays in universities is finding space even for its own things.
Forty-two years ago in December, Deborah had married an attractive young man, full of promise, who, as they grew older, she watched slowly lose all that promise. She never confronted him with it; in the early years, she pretended it wasn’t happening. She didn’t want to admit the loss to herself. Life meanwhile rushed by. She finished dental school, then went into private practice; they had a daughter and then two sons. The question of divorce never occurred to her; she was not a divorcing woman. Instead, Larry somehow became her fourth child, one who drove a car and brought in some income, though nowhere near as much as she.
Larry didn’t keep a checkbook; when they went out to dinner, Deborah, at the end of the meal, used her credit card to pay. She paid all their bills, was in charge of investing their savings, had the first and last word on raising their children, dealt with car salesmen when it came time to buy new cars. Charlie Malkin, her colleague at the dental school, was astonished when she told him about the last. “Really, Deborah,” he said, “you mean Larry lets you go in there, a woman, alone, to dance with those wolves? Amazing!”
Her older sister Sharon didn’t much care for Larry, and didn’t mind saying so. Sharon once told Deborah that, in marrying Larry Siskin, it was as if, in the old shtetl culture of Eastern Europe, she had married a brilliant yeshiva student whom her father had agreed to support for five or six years so that he could continue his studies. “Except,” Sharon added, cruelly, “Larry turns out to be not all that brilliant, and the five or six years has turned into a lifetime, with you doing the supporting.”
Larry came from a wealthy family, much wealthier than the Pollocks, Deborah’s own family. The Siskins lived in a vast apartment at 3400 N. Lake Shore Drive. His father and mother were both lawyers, and his older brother Mel had recently graduated from Yale Law School. He had a younger sister, Roberta, who had intended to—and eventually did—go to law school, Harvard, in fact. Larry joked that the family dog, a cocker spaniel named Rusty, had just been accepted for law school at Fordham. He never quite said that he thought himself too good for law school, but managed to convey that going into law was a pedestrian choice, a touch demeaning, something rather declassé.
As a young man, Larry was handsome, with dark hair combed in an ambitious pompadour, on the model of the pop singers of the day (Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson, Fabian); his flared nostrils gave his youthful face a dramatic look, suggesting, Deborah used to think, reserves of passion. His walk had a swagger, which later turned into something like a sashay; when he entered a room, his presence seemed to announce, All right, I’m here, things can now officially begin; it still did, but nobody any longer cared.
Deborah used to remind herself of the Larry she married through looking at old photographs. But whenever she took out old family photograph albums, that young man her husband seemed to her a stranger. Larry began to lose his hair in his early thirties, the one physical element in his makeup about which he was touchy. He had put on weight. He had grown sallow, for he had been discovered to have diabetes of a kind serious enough to cause him to take insulin and which slowed him down in various ways, not least in the bedroom. But saddest of all, though you had to look carefully to notice, a look of disappointment insinuated itself in his face, especially when he was tired, which seemed to be much of the time.
As a graduate student in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, Larry had come under the influence of a teacher named Hans Morgenthau. A German émigré, Jewish, of the school of Realpolitick, Morgenthau, a conservative thinker who had nonetheless opposed the Vietnam War, put Larry in touch with an important undersecretary at the State Department named George Ball, who also opposed the war. Morgenthau suggested Larry drop out of graduate school and become George Ball’s protégé, and from there work his way up through the ranks of the State Department and into a life of high-level diplomacy. But Larry and Ball found too many things to disagree about, or so Larry claimed. He talked about being let down, betrayed, hinting that anti-Semitism held him back at State. After three years living in Washington, it became clear that a diplomatic career wasn’t going to work out. They returned to Chicago, where Larry re-enrolled in graduate school, but now with much diminished, even shrivelled expectations.
As a graduate student, he took his time, a little more than six years, finishing his course work and writing a dissertation on Machiavelli for his PhD. Deborah was by then in private practice. They had some help from Larry’s father when they bought a small house in Lincolnwood. Larry was kept on for six more years as a teacher in the political science department at Chicago, but he wrote almost nothing during this time. He complained a lot about the ignorance of his students, and even more about the wretchedness of his colleagues. When his six years were up, Chicago—no surprise here—did not offer him tenure.
Larry was lucky, or so everyone but he thought, to land a job at Northeastern, teaching political philosophy, but he didn’t look at it this way. A city school, tucked away in the residential Albany Park neighborhood, most of Northeastern’s students worked full-time at other jobs and were aiming for degrees they hoped would give them a leg up in the job market. Despite his not having written anything since his dissertation, Larry’s PhD from Chicago carried some cachet at Northeastern. Still, it was a great comedown from his dreams of an important job at the State Department to be teaching Hispanics, Palestinians, and middle-aged Jewish housewives about the subtleties of Rousseau, John Locke, and Montesquieu. But Larry was by then in his middle-thirties with nowhere else to go.
Deborah wonders if she should have said something to him, told him to get off his duff, he had a good mind and was still young, what could possibly be the point of his settling for a life of indolence and complaint? But she never did. She had just established her academic connection at the University of Illinois, her children were growing up—her own life was full, so full that not even an unhappy husband could drag it down.
Soon Deborah began to wonder if her Larry’s early promise was real. She can scarcely remember. Marrying in one’s early twenties, as she had done, is of course an act of foolishness, though in her generation everyone seemed to do it. She had married a man she then thought of as attractive, not unkind, with prospects of doing serious work. Did she love him? Or did she instead feel a touch sorry for him, as she might for a relative with a serious handicap?
The rapture had long ago departed from the marriage. Larry’s diabetes, which worsened over the years, put him all but out of business in the rapture department. She, Deborah, had lots of chances for love affairs—she travelled four or five times a year to academic dental conventions and conferences around the country—but chose not to ven
ture into that land-mined field. Larry, meanwhile, seemed more interested in sex from the voyeuristic angle. She was always catching him staring at bosomy young women; when they went to movies with what she thought of as painfully slow-motion fornication scenes, she didn’t know where to put her eyes, but noticed her husband staring at the screen with great concentration.
One night, at a fund-raising dinner for the dental school, one of the guests at their table, a man named Jim Breakstone, a successful personal injury lawyer, asked Larry what he did for a living. When Larry told him that he taught political philosophy, Breakstone replied: “A sweet racket. I envy you.”
“What do you mean, racket?” Larry asked.
“I mean you’ve got the dream deal. You work six, maybe seven, months a year, no pressures, no responsibilities, just talking all day to young people who can’t even tell you you’re full of crap. Pretty nice, if you ask me.”
Larry didn’t answer, but merely shot Breakstone a look of contempt, and didn’t speak to him again through the remainder of the evening. On the drive home, he castigated him to Deborah, non-stop, all the way from the Loop to their house in Evanston.
“That uncouth bastard, a fucking personal injury lawyer, thinks I have a racket. He should only know how hard I work at perfecting my lectures! Or the amount of time I put into grading my students’ papers. I’d like to see him try to write my book on Hobbes!” And on and on, for fifteen miles. This was the first Deborah had heard that her husband was writing a book on Hobbes. At Larry’s death, no trace of the manuscript was found.
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