Button Man

by Andrew Gross

  He folded his pad.

  “What you don’t want, to be sure, are any work disruptions. Things like that can get very messy. Very messy, indeed. I’m sure you’ve had experience with what I’m talking about.” The union man stood up. “Maybe someone you know.”

  “My brother and I will give it some thought,” Sol said, knowing he was referring specifically to what happened to Manny. He got up as well and held the office door open for him. “But I think you heard what he said.”

  “Noted.” The union man got up. “That’s what everyone says.… Then, once the benefits are pointed out to them—sometimes graphically, I’m afraid—eventually they see what’s best.” He took his hat, smoothed it out along the brim. “If, as you say, you intend to remain a going concern. I’ll convey what you say to my bosses. They won’t be happy, of course. But it’s how things sometimes have to go. I’m sure you’ll be seeing us again, Mr. Raab. Quite soon. And don’t bother, I can find my own way out.”

  “We weren’t offering,” Morris said. He let the man go out, watching him peek once or twice around the cutting room, and the receiving area, to see what was going on. “So, Cy…”

  The organizer turned around, maybe hopeful there would be some reconsideration.

  “Long as you’re up here, you want us to press that suit for you before you leave?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A week later, the union sent in the troops to accost his workers on the street.

  Old guys. Jews. Italians. Tradesmen. Loyal, union folk.

  People like Morris’s staff. Even a few women. They intercepted them on the street outside as they left at the end of the day. “You work for Raab Brothers?” they would ask. “Are you happy? Can we talk?” Wearing union signs. “Just a minute is all we need.”

  They looked like people who were being forced to give them the spiel. Who knew they were pressuring workers into a raw deal, but were forced into it. “You’d all like to make more money, wouldn’t you?”

  After Cy Haddad’s visit, Morris and Sol had rounded up the staff in the cutting room. “Some people may want to talk with you,” Morris told them. “It’s their right to do so, so Sol and I can’t interfere. If you think things sound better with them, it’s your right to take a vote and have them represent you. Before you do, you ought to talk with your friends in other companies who have made a deal with them. See how life is for them, which I think you’ll find isn’t always as promised. Ask how things are, and how business is—are they busy or slow? Are they growing? I’m not saying it’s bad for everybody, but we’ve always tried to treat you fair and do right by you. Just remember, if you choose to accept them, my brother and I, we can no longer stand up for you directly anymore. Only the union can. That has to be clear.”

  “So what should we do?” asked Felix Kupperman, one of their tailors, who was about sixty, and looking kind of helpless. “We all like it here, Mr. Raab. You treat us good. And with respect. We don’t want to upset things as they are.”

  Morris looked at Sol. Sol said, “All you can do is what you think is right for you. It’s a new world. We can’t advise you. Just remember, you’ve always gotten a fair shake from Morris and me. And since you’ve been with us, business has always been good, right?”

  “That’s right,” many of them murmured.

  “The only thing is,” Morris said, “you ought to know, you decide you want to keep things the same, things are liable to be different around here.”

  * * *

  Now, Morris and Sol looked out the window at six P.M. as the sewers, pattern makers, and warehouse men left and were met on the street by union workers set to talk with them. They put out their hands and greeted them like they were meeting long-lost friends. Like their welfare was even a speck on their minds. They only wanted a deal.

  Buck, the Negro vagrant who camped out near their entrance, and who Morris rarely left without handing a dollar to, was edged further down the street.

  “You know we’re not going to beat this, Morris,” Sol said, looking on. The union had women too, who spoke Yiddish to them. And gray-haired grandmas from Little Italy, telling them how easy life was for them now. You never have to ask for a raise. It’s all in the agreement. Any grievances, the union handles it for you.

  “Felix Kupperman told me they’re making it pretty tough on them,” Sol said. “They say if they don’t agree, they’ll close the place down and then they’ll all be out of work. They say even if business is good now, it’s only a matter of time before it turns down, and then who else but the union will have their backs? Some of the people say they’re even coming around to where they live, and threatening them on the street, on their way to work, if they don’t vote to sign up. He said some of the people are scared.”

  “They’re selling them all down the river,” Morris said. “They gotta show they’re adding something, so they take what we pay them and add thirty cents an hour to it. In six months, we’ll have to raise our prices.”

  “Still…” Sol looked at him with kind of a helpless expression and took off his glasses. “It’s not really in their hands anymore, Morris, it’s in ours. All this, it’s for us, not them. You know what’s going to happen if we keep saying no.”

  “We have to say no, Sol. What other choice is there? You know what happens if we cave in. It’s not just our sewers and warehouse staff.… It’s who we’d be forced to buy from too. It’s how much we pay for our furs and fabric. Not to mention how much we’ll have to pay them to keep them off our backs. You know very well they don’t care who stays in business and who doesn’t. They’re just bleeding the whole industry dry. It’s just a shakedown, Sol, to them. Another racket. We’re not talking about a real union here.… We’re talking about a bunch of thugs and killers who found a new scam.”

  “Maybe I’m just not as strong as you, Morris,” Sol said. Morris could detect a weariness in his voice. “I’m good with numbers, following a plan, not standing up to hoodlums. Those people, whether it’s Lepke or Gurrah or whomever, they respect you. They respect that you’re tough. That you’re a bit like them. But, sure as day, one day they’re going to come after us. You know that as well as I do. And what then…?” He indicated their workers outside. “Maybe this time we should try to strike a deal.”

  “You want a deal so bad, Sol, go see what you can strike. And see how we can stay in business.” Morris shut the window. “My fifty percent says no.”

  “Well, my fifty percent would like to remain fucking alive,” Sol said.

  Morris had never heard his brother swear.

  Sol looked at Morris and nodded with an air of futility. “All right. Well, I have one idea how we can hold ’em off. At least for a while. We do have one ally over there.”

  Morris looked back, what his brother meant settling in on him. “You mean Harry.”

  “We always talked about bringing him in. Maybe it’s time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sunday afternoons, Morris and Ruthie had the family up for lunch at their apartment on the Upper West Side.

  Sol and his wife Louise and their sons David and Paul took the Lexington Avenue train down from where they lived on the Grand Concourse and then the crosstown bus. Morris’s sister Anna and her husband Leo rode in from Brooklyn. Bess’s too. Their mother, Bella, usually took the subway from the Lower East Side, always declining Morris’s requests that she take a cab, which he’d be “happy to pay for,” as far too lavish. (Though, against her objections, they always put her in one for the trip back home.) Even Harry came most weekends. It was nice to have him a part of the family again. He had taken like a dream to Morris’s son, Samuel, and the boy to him as well. It took everyone back years and years. Harry like a kid again, laughing, rolling around on the floor, chasing around Samuel, who could barely walk he was laughing so hard. Other than Morris and Sol, the family members had gone their own way for several years, living in different parts of the same city. And it made Morris feel good to see them all, the R
abishevskys back together. Like back on Cherry Street. And it made him feel especially good that it was his wife, Ruthie, who had made it all happen.

  One Sunday in May, Morris and Sol asked Harry to come with them out onto the terrace overlooking the Hudson River. “There’s something we want to talk to you about,” Sol said.

  Harry handed Samuel over to Ruthie. “Sure.”

  Gin fizz in hand, Harry threw himself into the wicker chair on the balcony, while Sol and Morris sat on the love seat facing him. “It sure is nice out here,” he said, admiring the clear, blue day and the view of the cliffs of New Jersey unobstructed across the river. “So, what gives?”

  “We’ve been talking,” Sol started in. “We want to ask you again to come into the business.”

  A decade of managing pool halls and speakeasies where gambling went on had put a little money in Harry’s pocket. He rented a small apartment on Twenty-eighth and Lex. Over the years, he’d paired up with the occasional girlfriend, the casual type you’d meet in such places, but never anything serious. But it wasn’t hard to see in the way he tumbled around with little Sam that inside he longed to have a family of his own one day, though with his life how was it ever possible?

  Harry shrugged and took a sip of his gin. “We’ve talked this over before. You both know I’m not cut out for the nine-to-five thing. Sitting behind a desk. Besides, what would I even do? Stamp purchase orders?”

  “You leave that to us. We’ll teach you,” Sol tried to assure him. “Things have grown, Harry. We can no longer do it just ourselves. And just so you know, it ain’t nine to five at all. More like seven to seven. Six days a week. But the sign on the door says Raab Brothers. And we want to finally make it official. Otherwise, we’ll have to bring someone in from the outside.”

  Harry looked over at Morris. “You okay with this, too?”

  “’Course I’m okay with it. Things are changing, Harry. Not just for our business. We’re talking about you. You’re not hanging around with a bunch of street toughs anymore who take tourists for a ride or bang a few knees. They’re killers now. You know what they do these days, as well as me. Mendy. Maxie. Buchalter. It’s called Murder, Incorporated. They kill. For hire. And you know what they did to Manny Gutman in the union. It’s time to say good-bye to them, Harry. So, yeah, we’re both okay with it. We want you to come in.”

  “What would my job even be?” Harry hunched his shoulders and shrugged. “I don’t know anything about making clothes.”

  “You don’t have to know about making clothes. We’d find you a role. You could manage the warehouse. Or the receiving department. You get along with people. That’s important.”

  “Receiving?” Harry took a sip of his drink and looked at Sol with a smile. “Receiving what?”

  “Piece goods, Harry. Fabric. If you could log in bottles of booze, you can take an inventory of bolts of fabric.”

  Harry grinned, as if this was confirmation that it was all a bad idea. “See, it just goes to show you.”

  “And I promise you’d be making a helluva lot more money than what these guys throw at you now,” Morris said. “That’s tip money, Harry.”

  Harry put his head back and looked out over the river. “Well, it would be nice to finally be able to put something away. I look at you guys and I see how well you’re doing. But…”

  “But what, Harry?” Morris leaned forward. “These guys you’re tied up with are bad. I know you think of them as your friends. But you’re a patsy to them. They use you for a laugh or to do odd jobs. Then they’ll toss you aside, and where will you be? You’ll see, one by one, they’re all going to go down. Prison, Harry. Or the morgue. You don’t want them to drag you down too.”

  Harry sat back in the high-backed wicker chair. “I read the headlines. I’m not exactly stupid, y’know. I see what’s going on. I ask myself all the time, why did I make the wrong choices? All these years I’ve watched you and Sol, seen what you’ve put together, how you’ve built this thing, something important, from scratch, our name on it, and I think sometimes, yeah, it would be nice. Why do I have to be on the outside? That maybe I deserve a little respect too.”

  “You’ve wanted that, Harry,” Morris said. “You know why…”

  Harry nodded and let a long exhale out his nostrils. “Yeah, I know. I know.”

  “Harry, you’ve been beating yourself up a long time. Time to let it go.”

  He was silent for a while, his thoughts taking him somewhere, then he smiled and nodded again. “I really like being with your kid, Morris.”

  “And you’d have a chance to finally meet the right girl,” Sol said. “Start your own family. Anyone can see how you are with Sammy.”

  “So what do you say?” Morris said. “Like we said, the sign on the door says Raab Brothers. We’ve waited a long time.”

  Harry nodded and peered past them out at the water. A barge went by. On its side, McKenzie Maritime. A tug sounded its horn. “Look at that. It would be nice to have my name on something,” Harry said. “It would be like, you meant something in life. You mattered.”

  Sol said, “That’s what we’re offering you, Harry.”

  Harry turned back around. “You say you’ll teach me, huh? I’m not starting with very much, I’m afraid.”

  “Mr. Menushem Kaufman once said to me, ‘You watch, you learn. Only way to pick up this business.’”

  Sol said, “Like Morris said to me, it ain’t exactly rocket science. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing it. None of us exactly went to Harvard.”

  “Listen,” Morris said, grinning, “for what it’s worth, Harry, you stayed in school three years longer than me.”

  “Not that it got me very much,” Harry acknowledged ruefully. “Or I paid much attention.”

  Morris got up and went over and stood by Sol. “So what do you say?”

  Harry seemed to run it through his head. Then he finished the rest of his drink and put the glass down. “I say, I think we should finally give ’em what the sign on the door says.”

  Elated, Morris went over and put out his hand. “Just one more thing … Whatever happened in the past, Sol and me, we’re first now. You say good-bye to your cronies. You can’t have both. We’re your family. This business, it means everything to us. And it will to you too. From now on, you sit at our table, not theirs. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I won’t make you ever doubt that, Morris. I’d never put them first.”

  “In that case…” Morris glanced at Sol, who gave him a final nod. “Welcome to the business, big brother.” Morris and Harry shook, a little tentatively at first, then as the grin widened on Harry’s face, heartily, and Morris pulled his older brother close.

  It was the first time he had embraced his brother in almost thirty years.

  Sol came up and gave him a hug of congratulations too.

  “Want to make it official?” Morris motioned to the family inside. “There’s someone waiting in there who I think would give the world to hear this news.”

  Harry looked through the glass at his mother in a chair. “I guess.” Then with a wide grin, he said, “Why the hell not?”

  The three of them went back inside. Everyone stopped talking and just looked at them. “We just had a board of directors meeting,” Sol announced. “Harry’s agreed. We’re going to make an honest man out of him. He’s going to come into the business.”

  “Raab Brothers,” Harry said, grinning widely, “will finally live up to its name.”

  “Harry, that’s wonderful!” Ruthie said, and went over and gave him a hug. Morris and she had discussed this many times.

  “Mazel tov!” Sol’s wife, Louise, beamed happily.

  “We need to have a toast,” Ruthie said. “I know just the thing.” She ran into the kitchen to find the bottle of champagne and the fancy flutes they’d been given at their wedding that they’d been keeping for such an occasion.

  “So what about you, Ma?” Harry looked at her. “You happy too?” He stoo
d there, his drink in hand, waiting.

  It took a moment for her to say anything, seemingly thrown back to a moment in time she had long shut out. Maybe back on that street, a brother’s guilty tears soaking her skirt. I’m sorry. I’m sorry still echoing in her ears. Then she looked at her grown, aching son with a nod that after thirty years seemed to put that moment finally behind her. Eyes glistening, she nodded and said in her broken English, “Nothing could make me happier in the world.”

  She got out of her chair and opened her arms to him. And he melted in her long-sought embrace, tears smearing his face, home again, for the first time in years.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lepke and I ran into each other not long afterward.

  It was at Aqueduct Racetrack. It was a beautiful autumn day and I’d taken a box there and brought Ruthie, along with one of my largest customers, Reg Leavis, who was merchandise manager of Strawbridge and Clothier in Philadelphia in those days. He was up for the weekend with his wife. I think her name was Alice.

  It was a warm autumn day, and the ladies wore blue-and-white dresses, Ruthie’s with blue nautical trim and a wide hat, and the men, we still dressed in sport jackets and Panamas.

  I bet the ponies every once in a while. And occasionally on baseball with Lief O’Malley, who sat in the booth of his tavern across the street from my office. My wife disapproved, of course, but when I won, sometimes big, I’d always buy her something: a fancy brooch, a necklace. Once, I even got her this new Buick convertible. I guess she always knew where the money came from. And when I lost, well, we didn’t talk about that so much.

  That day with Reg Leavis, we never bet more than twenty or thirty dollars on a race. And mostly, we let the women pick the bets. We were just having fun. I knew as much about picking ponies as I did about the stock market, which was no more than the last person who came up and gave me a tip.