Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

“Ronnie,” he said, “good to see you.” He got up to shake Rosenberg’s hand and motioned him to one of two chairs in front of his desk. “I think we’ve found something for you that will produce a substantial profit in a fairly short time. We’re going into it in a big way here at Hawthorne, and I thought maybe you could pick up a few shekels going into it in a smaller way. I have to tell you that we usually don’t deal with accounts of less than five million dollars. I’m doing this for old times’ sake.”

  “I’m grateful,” Rosenberg said, though the truth was, with the certified check for $100,000 in his coat pocket, he was a lot less grateful than nervous. A hundred grand may have been petty cash for Natey Klein, but for Rosenberg it was a serious sum.

  “Don’t mention it,” Nate said. “And speaking of old times, I was thinking about our days at Camp Ojibwa. I spent only that one horrible summer there. Did you keep going?”

  “I went for three more years,” Rosenberg said, “and then I went to Ray Meyer’s basketball camp.”

  “Ray Meyer? Coach at DePaul, no? When they produced winning teams.”

  “The last time they did, in fact.”

  “Getting back to Ojibwa, that summer, 1956, I was friendless, with tormentors everywhere. I’ve never felt so lost and lonely.”

  “I hope I wasn’t one of those tormentors,” Rosenberg said.

  “You weren’t. On the other hand, you weren’t a protector, either. No one was. It would have been a help to have the best athlete in the cabin on my side. But then I suppose it would have been unnatural if you had been.”

  “My memory is that I was having too good a time to worry about your or anyone else’s troubles. Kids, I guess, are pretty thoughtless.”

  “I wonder at what age a child develops a moral sense,” Natey said. “Eight? Ten? Twelve? I suppose it differs from kid to kid. I came to mine early because I had a tough father who didn’t hesitate to show his disappointment in me. I craved justice, especially at home, where I didn’t very often find it. But back to business.”

  With a tremulous hand, Rosenberg reached into his suit jacket and took out and handed Natey his certified check for one hundred thousand dollars. Nate picked up the phone—“Malcolm, need your help,” he said—and ten seconds later a young man, very well turned out, came in to take Rosenberg’s check.

  “See that Mrs. Lindstrom prepares a receipt for Mr. Rosenberg to pick up on his way out,” Natey said.

  When the young man left the room, Natey returned to Ojibwa days. “You remember a kid named Barry Dobrin? He taunted me without letup. He used to come over every morning to check my sheets. He once nailed a blue ribbon to my bed with a sign attached to it that read, ‘Congratulations to Natey for not wetting his bed six days in a row.’ I begged my father to let me come home, but it was no-go. ‘Be a man, Nathan,’ he told me. ‘Stick it out. Don’t let them push you around.’”

  “Do you think about this stuff a lot?” Rosenberg asked.

  “When I saw you,” Natey said, “it all came back to me. But I’ve more important things to think about, like earning a few bucks for you and my other clients.”

  Back on the street, Rosenberg realized that he hadn’t even bothered to ask Natey Klein what, precisely, the “good thing” was that he was putting him onto. He supposed he could call Natey when he got back to his own office, but then thought doing so might reveal him for the financial idiot he was. He’d just have to wait it out.

  Rosenberg gave Natey the hundred grand out of a simple enough motive: He had a strong hunch that he could make some easy money that way. The fact was that Rosenberg had never made any easy money in his life. Everything he’d earned he had to work for, to grind it out. His father had been no different. Rosenberg remembered when he was a kid his father had a fairly large chunk of AT&T stock, blue chip it was called in those days, when AT&T had the monopoly on the phone business. Then in 1969 the stock market took a serious dip, and every night his father would come home, open the Daily News to the stock-market pages, and note that he had lost another five or six grand. It made him almost sick with worry. After less than two weeks Sam Rosenberg sold off all his AT&T stock, put the money in CDs, and never went back into the market.

  Rosenberg recalled his father explaining at the dinner table that the stock market wasn’t for little guys, small-time investors. It chewed them up and spat them out. What he most disliked about having his money in stocks, his father said, was that it wasn’t in his control. His inventory of desks, file cabinets, chairs, lamps, and the rest, he could change the prices on; hustle around to find outlets for them; lay them off on another supplier. He had the whip hand.

  His father wouldn’t have been proud of him, Rosenberg thought, turning over so large a sum to a stranger. As he walked back to his office, he wished he had the nerve to call Natey and tell him that he had had a change of mind and would like to have his money back, though he guessed that by now Natey had already put it into play in some investment or other.

  Over the next weeks, Rosenberg scarcely thought about anything else. The worry became so intense that life before Natey Klein suddenly seemed wonderfully simple and placid and manageable—sad daughter, autistic grandson, and all. What the hell was I thinking? Rosenberg asked himself. Ten or twelve times he picked up the phone to call Natey to ask how the “good thing” was going, but each time he hung up. To show nervousness about his money would seem unmanly.

  Rosenberg also began to wonder why Natey Klein was doing Rosenberg this big favor. What was in it for him, apart from showing what a powerful operator he was? And then a frightening idea occurred to Rosenberg. What might have been in it for Natey was, just possibly, revenge. Nathan Klein was going to take Ronald Rosenberg for a hundred grand for not coming to his aid during his summer of torment at Camp Ojibwa.

  Hadn’t he all but told Rosenberg that this was what he was doing—with his rehearsal of his misery of those awful days, mentioning that he didn’t usually take on small-potatoes clients like him, not bothering to fill him in on the good thing he had lined up for him? A hundred grand down the crapper! God! How was Rosenberg going to explain this to Arlene?

  The more Rosenberg thought about it, the more certain he became that Natey had decided to bilk him out of his money. In bed, sleepless, he imagined different scenes in which Natey told him that things hadn’t worked out, that the good thing turned out to be a rotten thing. He imagined Natey, behind his desk, with a sly smile, saying, “Way it goes, Ronnie. Sorry. Better luck next time, pal.”

  Roughly five weeks after he had handed over his certified check to Natey, on a Tuesday morning, a little after ten o’clock, a woman’s voice asked him to please hold for Mr. Nathan Klein.

  “Ron,” Natey said, “some disappointing news. Can you drop over later this morning? I’ll explain.”

  Well, thought Rosenberg, the shoe had fallen; hell, make that the guillotine blade. He hailed a cab, and on the way over to Natey Klein’s office he wondered just how much of his money had been blown away: a third, half, all of it?

  Natey didn’t get up from his desk this time when Rosenberg entered his office. He had his suit jacket on. Behind his black-frame glasses he had a dour look.

  “Sit, Ron. I’ll explain,” he said.

  “How much did I lose?” Rosenberg asked. Natey didn’t answer but took an envelope from the top of his desk and handed it to Rosenberg.

  “Open,” he said.

  The envelope contained a check. Rosenberg put on his own glasses to read the sum. The check was made out for $100,287.26. He exhaled.

  “Pathetic, I know,” Natey said. “I was hoping it would be a check for at least a hundred and fifty grand, maybe two hundred. The action we had figured on for the stock never turned up. It was a fizzle, a wash. Sometimes happens.”

  Rosenberg was trying to hide his relief. Everything ventured, at least nothing lost, he thought. After the anxiety of the past
weeks, nothing lost felt like pure triumph.

  “I was hoping to make a nice little score for you, Ron,” Natey said. “First because I sensed you could use the dough. And second I guess because I wanted to impress you, to show you that the pisher from Cabin Three at Camp Ojibwa was now a serious player.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Natey,” Rosenberg said. “I appreciate your effort on my behalf.”

  “If another good thing turns up, I’ll get back to you pronto. Promise.”

  “Sure,” said Rosenberg, “that’ll be great.”

  Natey stood up, leaned over his desk, and held out his hand. Rosenberg shook Natey’s small soft hand, noting the clunky Rolex on his wrist.

  Out on LaSalle Street, Rosenberg felt himself grinning. He touched the left breast of his suit jacket, the inside pocket of which held his check from the Hawthorne Fund. $287.26 profit for five of the worst weeks of his life: For all his anguish that came to a little more than fifty bucks a week. Easy money! Back at the office, he instructed his secretary that if a man named Nathan Klein should ever call, she was to tell him that Mr. Ronald Rosenberg had died.

  Race Relations

  “C’mon, Flowers, you redneck, you cracker bastard, throw, let ’er fly, baby, if you got the balls.”

  I don’t exactly know what had happened: whether in the boredom of a Saturday afternoon at the end of our fourth of eight weeks of basic training Bobby Flowers, late of Jonesboro, Arkansas, had called Jackson Gates, late of Detroit, Michigan, a nigger, or Gates had applied some similar magic word to Flowers. But someone had said something to someone, and it appeared as if we might have a small race war on our hands in Charley Company, Second Battalion, Third Training Regiment, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Gates, along with five of his black pals, was on the porch of their barracks, while Flowers, with nine of ten of his good ol’ boys, rocks in their fists, was about to charge up after them.

  The scene reminded me that when I was a boy growing up in Chicago, at Riverview, the great amusement park at Western Avenue and Belmont, for a quarter you could get three lumpy baseballs with which to try to knock a black man in the water. The blacks, four of them, sat in separate cages, each upon a swinglike platform three or so feet above a shallow pool of water. A bar extended out from the left of each of these cages, at the end of which was a disc of steel perhaps a foot in diameter. Hit the disc with a ball and the bar triggered the platform, which fell away, dropping the man in the pool of water. In accomplishing this feat the lumpiness of the baseballs and the throwing-distance of some ninety or a hundred feet were really minor obstacles. The major obstacle was that the men within the cages taunted the customers, picking out some trait in them and playing it for a public laugh at their expense. “C’mon ya squinty little mothah,” a black man in one of the cages might call out to a Chinese guy about to try his luck, “les’ see what you got.” And then, when the man missed all three throws, the black would return with, “Sorry, squints—no bowl of rice!” Men with girlfriends or wives in tow were especially vulnerable. “That the best you can do, Peewee?”—or, as the trait might have been, “Fatso,” or “Four-eyes,” or “Baldy.” Sometimes they would turn their buttocks toward the customer, bend over, and call out from between their legs, “Pit-i-ful.” I have seen men grow so enraged that they forgot the disc that triggered the platform and threw directly at the cage, hoping the ball would go through the wire and crash against the black’s skull. Often a man would spend five or six dollars and damn near throw his arm out before he had the satisfaction of knocking one of those jeering blacks in the water.

  “All right,” Sergeant Alerton boomed, striding across the company area. “I see where I got me the chance to kick some ass before I knock off for the weekend.” A tall man, ebony and elegant in fatigues, boots, and helmet liner, Sergeant Alerton adopted the style with trainees of a menacing Kingfish: he could make jokes—fine Kingfishian ones—but he was not a man you fooled with. His first announcement to us recruits after we had arrived at Charley Company, our heads freshly shaved, writhing in the itchiness of our new uniforms and nearly lame from the stiffness of our boots, was about religious services. “On Sunday mornings,” he yelled, en basso, “every swinging dick among you will get your can out of the sack to attend church in the denomination of your choice. As for those of you of the Hebrew extraction, you will haul your cans off to Friday evening services, making arrangements to help GI the barracks for Saturday inspection later in the evening.” While helping out for two days in the orderly room when the company clerk took sick, I learned that Sergeant Andrew Alerton had been awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Korea. Eleven years ago, before joining the regular army in 1948, he had worked as a soda jerk in St. Louis.

  Alerton’s intervention was enough to calm things down. Gates and his gang disappeared into their barracks, Flowers and his walked off. Some of the troops went back to their touch football game in the Fort Leonard Wood dust; others returned to writing letters or to poker games or to listening to radios in the barracks. I went off to the PX with two guys from my platoon for a beer and to pick up a can of shaving cream. The Gates-Flowers wrangle could have turned into something very ugly. Before I had thought Jackson Gates a somewhat comic figure; I now began to think him perhaps also slightly dangerous.

  Whatever else I might have thought about black people, I was not accustomed to thinking of them as dangerous. Most of what feelings I did have, I suspect I must have taken over from my father. Without being a particularly political character—years later I was surprised to learn that he had twice voted for Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson—my father had rather special feelings about black people. Ernesta Robinson, a most upright middleclass black woman, was the secretary and bookkeeper for his small but successful business at a time when blacks, men or women, were not generally allowed in office jobs. Once, when I was four or perhaps five years old, my father heard me recite the street rhyme “Eenie meenie minie mo, catch a nigger by the toe, if he hollers let him go,” and upbraided me for it so severely that, not knowing why he was angry or where his anger was coming from, I collapsed into tears. “Of all people,” my father said, “we as Jews must never use such words.”

  Then at home, not living with us but coming in two days a week to clean and iron, was Dell, a short and very dark woman who was “with us,” as my mother used to put it, for as long as I could remember, but whose last name I never knew. Dell did not say much, but I remember her being especially kind to me, the oldest child, perhaps because she knew me longer than she knew my sister. “How Dell’s baby?” she used to say to me when she had changed into her work clothes. When I was seven or eight, she would occasionally slip me a nickel. My mother told me I must find a polite way not to take these nickels; Dell worked hard for her money and had better things to do with it than give it to me to spend on candy or gum. My mother used to give Dell those of her dresses she was no longer interested in, or make up for her a bag of fruit—some of it bruised, which neither my sister nor I, being finicky about such things, would eat—to take home for her family. One day in my eleventh year I came home from school to learn that Dell had had a heart attack while washing our dining-room windows and, before an ambulance arrived, had died on our living-room couch. She was forty-seven years old. Could she have borne a son like Jackson Gates?

  Although Gates was in the third platoon and I was in the second, I recalled noticing him on our first full day in Charley Company. Sergeant Roscoe Mullins, our field sergeant, a white man with a devoted beer-drinker’s stomach—“Ah,” he used to exclaim, as we headed back to the company after one of our long marches, “I can taste that Falstaff now”—asked if anyone among the trainees had any ROTC experience. Gates sprang forward to announce that he had had three-and-a-half years of ROTC at Morgan State College. That three-and-a-half years sounded fishy to me—with four years, after all, he would have qualified as an officer—but apparently it did not sound so to Sergeant Mullin
s, who appointed Gates trainee sergeant of the third platoon. With exaggerated posture, Gates saluted and screamed out, “Thank you, sir!”

  “Goddamn it,” Mullins returned, “what the hell they teach you in ROTC, Gates? You don’t, damn you, salute and you don’t say ‘sir’ to a noncommissioned officer!”

  My father used to write an annual check of $1,000 for the NAACP, but as he wrote out those checks I doubt that he had in mind someone who looked like Jackson Gates. In appearance, Gates was a liberal’s nightmare of a black person, a middle-class black’s nightmare of a black person, but a Ku Klux Klan cartoonist’s delight. He was not merely very dark but about four or five different colors; his skin rather resembled the leather of an old boot that had been shined first with black polish, then with cordovan-colored polish, then with oxblood, then brown, then black again. His large lips protruded, the bottom one pendulously; two of his bottom teeth in the front were capped in gold. His nose was flat, the nostril holes the size of quarters. His skull had an odd shape to it, as if it had once been bashed in on one side. His hair was shaved, as was everyone else’s in basic training, but in civilian life I imagine it must have been straightened and heavily pomaded in the style known as processed. He wore glasses with thick lenses and wide black frames, which, when he took them off, left him squinting with the look of someone who had just come up from a lengthy underwater swim. He was about five-foot-nine and muscular, but his muscularity had no athletic gracefulness about it—a point worth mentioning if only because, at a later time, he told me that in college he played second-string behind the Chicago Bears’ great running back Willie Gallimore. Certainly it seemed unlikely that Gates played behind Gallimore, yet who knew for sure in those days how deep in talent black colleges like Morgan State were? He probably didn’t, but then again he just may have. The same went for those three-and-a-half years of ROTC. Why three-and-a-half years? Nothing in Gates’s way of speaking or general manner hinted at his having gone to college at all.