Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

by Bess Kalb

  Your grandfather walked over to the chair, held the back of it, and gave it a shake. “The floor’s fine. The chair’s uneven.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s part of a set.”

  “What does being part of a set have anything to do with it?”

  The two men stared at each other. The reporter was outside with the photographer. Your grandfather had an idea. A gamble. He picked up the chair and walked out the door with it. We all followed him. The reporter sprang into action and the photographer readied himself.

  Your grandfather took the chair all the way to the sidewalk and held it up as he shouted at the small crowd. “They say the house is uneven. They say the chair is proof. I’m here to tell you, this is a case of a wobbly chair, not a sinking house.”

  He set the chair down and gestured to it grandly.

  “Mrs. Lipowitz, will you do me the honor of having a seat?”

  The woman trudged over to the chair and sat down.

  Ka-klunk.

  It wobbled.

  And we got in our car and drove home.

  You enjoyed your private high school? Your college tuition? Thank the chair.

  But let me be perfectly clear about something: all those houses are still standing. Hank made sure they were all retrofitted. There’s nothing wrong with them. Except every few years when the Long Island Sound floods, the groundwater rises up in the front yards and there are ducks swimming around people’s mailboxes.

  * * *

  · · ·

  Eventually, your grandfather grew tired of selling Levittowns. He’d sold hundreds of them. A development with fifty houses one weekend, forty houses another. Each house selling for anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000. He was printing money. And he grew bored immediately. He needed a new market, a new challenge, with less hassle. He left Buzzy the Long Island developments and he went off on his own.

  There was another way to build—cheaper houses, but better quality—without paying the Mafia a cut for the labor, which is how construction worked back then. They called it “prefabrication.” Prefab. The idea was all the pieces were made in a factory ahead of time and shipped to the job site. There was very little overhead, and buildings could go up fast.

  In those days, only the Russians were doing prefabrication. It was considered Soviet technology. Your grandfather read about it and he found the whole thing marvelous. “Bobby, they make an entire floor of a building in a day. They make rooms in a factory—with the wires and pipes and everything.”

  “That’s wonderful, Hank.”

  It all honestly sounded like science fiction. But your grandfather was determined. And he found a way to do it. In the 1960s the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave out twenty-two grants nationally to support prefabricated housing to help families move into affordable homes.

  Your grandfather got one of the grants. So he went to Russia on a diplomatic mission to study postwar building technology. That’s what the official cover was. “Diplomatic missions.” He’d go and talk to their ministers of housing and walk through their factories, and when he returned to the States he’d be debriefed for hours and all his luggage would be combed through by a man in white gloves. He must have gone to Russia ten times throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

  Your mother once asked him if he was a spy, and he winked at her and said, “Robbie, I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you,” and she burst out crying. I hit him over the head with my newspaper.

  After his very first trip to Russia, he came back to the States and used the grant money to buy a factory along the East River in the north Bronx, and he hired a nonunion crew and paid them a union wage, full benefits. He went into the local community, which was very poor and suffered from terrible unemployment, and passed around flyers at churches and popular restaurants. By the time the factory was up and running, he had hired an almost completely local crew. He didn’t bus in labor; he wanted the community to profit. Not just the assembly-line workers—the foreman, the accountant, the secretary in the front office. The whole factory was run by people who lived nearby in Fordham Heights.

  By the next summer, he had a billboard on the Cross Bronx Expressway of a happy family swimming and lounging around a turquoise swimming pool with a gray tower looming over it. LIVE SWIMMINGLY! Nobody will tell you he isn’t a born salesman. Every unit was sold by the time the final story was laid in place by an enormous crane.

  He had learned his lesson from the houses he built accidentally on a swamp. These new apartments were perfect. He wanted to be an engineer. He could tell you about drying temperatures to make the concrete lighter but strong enough to bear weight. He had his notes from eight different Soviet factories and combined the technology to maximize the quality of the materials, the durability of the buildings. They required very little maintenance. They were affordable, too, but they were solid.

  To this day that first project is the tallest prefabricated residential building in Westchester County. Your grandfather mentions that to you only about thirty times a year.

  There’s only one other building that makes him more proud: his tree house. It was 1965 and the whole country was panicked about the possibility of a nuclear missile. Our neighbor in Ardsley dug an enormous hole in his backyard and poured in a concrete shell. He brought in pallets of canned soup and an oxygen tank and sleeping bags. A fallout shelter. It frightened me. I asked your grandfather, “Hank, should we build a bunker?” He said, “I’ll do you one better.” That weekend, he brought in lumber and a cherry picker, and he built an enormous tree house in the elm tree right on our property line with the doomsday neighbor. When it was done on Sunday night, he brought me up the ladder. There was a table and chairs, a white tablecloth, and a bottle of champagne and two crystal glasses. “Bobby, when the bomb hits, here’s where I want to be. Up in the sky with you.” We spent the better part of that night in the tree house.

  So they completed the prefabricated tower and started making smaller apartment buildings, and suddenly hundreds of families who lived all cramped in unsafe conditions could afford three bedrooms in a good school district out of the city. He sold the apartments to any factory workers who wanted them at a discount. The community in Fordham Heights was thrilled and the new homeowners were thrilled and I was thrilled.

  Everything was hunky-dory until the Mafia got involved.

  In those days, the Mob controlled construction because they controlled the unions. And your grandfather had created a building technology that made those union workers obsolete. And so one day, two men showed up to the factory in a black sedan and asked for your grandfather by name and found him in his office kibitzing with the workers, and they cleared the room and told your grandfather he had to close the factory. They didn’t ask him. They told him.

  Your grandfather knew why they were there. So he asked them, “How much do you take from the unions per job?” And one of the men gave him a number. And your grandfather laughed and said, “I’ll double the graft.” And he wrote him a check.

  As the men were leaving, they noticed your grandfather’s red Chevrolet. It was a flashy car—I always thought it was tacky. But your grandfather loved it. He took me all around, gunning the engine down Central Avenue on the way to the movies. Anyhow, one of the guys opened his coat and showed your grandfather the handle of a revolver. Your grandfather just reached into his pocket and tossed the guy his keys.

  As the man left, he turned around and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll mail you the plates.”

  A week later an envelope showed up at our house containing the license plates, no note. The return address was the prefabricated apartment building.

  * * *

  · · ·

  In the fall of 1968, a German-born American philosopher, who would later take over the department of urban planning at the Columbia School of Architecture,
gave your grandfather a call. The man—Peter—had utopian ideals about affordable housing, and he had followed how your grandfather was hiring untrained people to build subsidized apartments for families. How he paid them living wages and gave them health care and enriched the communities directly. To Peter, your grandfather was the living embodiment of socialist utopianism operating within a capitalist system. But you and I know your grandfather was just trying to figure out the smartest way to make a buck.

  Peter wanted to get your grandfather’s ideas about fighting Columbia’s plan to take over a residential area of Harlem to build an enormous athletic complex and Olympic-sized swimming pool. It would have displaced the residents completely and been off-limits to the community that remained. Terrible. Peter needed someone smart to go up against the board. Someone who understood laws around affordable housing. To prevent Columbia from becoming a predatory slumlord.

  Your grandfather knew eminent domain law backward and forward, and he came in and drafted a plan to protect the housing projects around Columbia. He won. He defeated the board. And as a reward, Peter got him hired. Columbia gave him a faculty position in the department of urban planning. Your grandfather developed a course about the building business: Real Estate Entrepreneurialism for Architects, Builders, Developers, Buyers & Sellers. He taught the kids all his tricks.

  The board tried every way to toss him out. And they would have succeeded if the Students for a Democratic Society didn’t rise up and take over the administration building in the spring of 1968. The SDS kids loved your grandfather because to them he was a Russian socialist who fought on behalf of Harlem, and they named your grandfather the faculty representative. The SDS headquarters during the student occupation was in the Columbia School of Architecture. In your grandfather’s office.

  When you were a little girl, your grandfather took you to his office and pointed out a faint mark on the white marble staircase in the building lobby. He had you kneel down and squint. You barely saw anything, but you humored him. “What is it?”

  “That’s the blood from the back of my head when the university police dragged me out the door during one of the protests.”

  “Why did they drag you?”

  “Because I didn’t want to go!”

  Stubborn. For the greater good. To get us out of the attic.

  At ninety-one he still teaches his class at Columbia every Tuesday morning in the fall semester. He loves the students. Loves challenging them. Fighting with them. Pushing them to find new technologies to solve problems. During his office hours, if a student asks him how he went into business, his eyes will glimmer and he’ll smirk and he’ll lean forward in his chair and say, “Let me tell you a true story about a chair that wobbled.”

  ESTELLE

  I had one other great love aside from your grandfather. Estelle. My dearest friend.

  Estelle was my sorority sister, and we were very close until the day she died far too young at seventy-two.

  We were two Jewish girls from Brooklyn at Hunter College, and she had grown up very, very poor. The whole family on a mattress in a one-room apartment, scraping by for food. Her father was very ill and one of her siblings was always near death, and her mother worked as a cleaner or whatever else she could find for work. Estelle was brilliant. When she was a young girl she sat down at a piano in a bar and could play it. She sang for money. She saved it all. She never missed a day of school and read books like a maniac. She learned French from an Algerian coffee man and spoke it fluently. She read at the dinner table. She read walking. She once tripped over a garbage can and got a scar on her forehead, which never healed properly. That really happened, I swear on your life.

  When I first saw her, she was sitting on a bench in a hallway outside a sorority mixer, reading.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  She scooted over without looking up. I watched people file by and waited until she finished her chapter.

  “Bobby Bell. I think we’re going to get along.”

  She looked over at me and smiled and shook my hand, her long black curls swept to one side and her eyes glinting blue gray like a wolf. She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my entire life. Everybody agreed.

  She met Albert around the same time I met your grandfather. The two men hated each other. Your grandfather was smart and could look right through a person. Albert was a big pear-shaped man with a temper, and he was already a drunk. But he was training to be a doctor—a urologist, which was a very good specialty. He came from money—Jewish money; his parents were Austrian diamond dealers and they owned a brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And he was infatuated with Estelle. He waited for her after class, he waited outside the sorority house, he would show up in the middle of the night and stand in the street singing, “Estelle, Estelle, I’m livin’ in hell, wake up, my belle, Estelle, Estelle.”

  I told you she was very poor. In those days, you didn’t marry up, you married out. So she did. The second she graduated. And they moved to a big white colonial house in Mount Vernon with these stupid columns. Estelle got her teaching certificate and taught French at the high school there, which she adored. She couldn’t carry a child for many years, and Albert grew impatient with her. I told you he had a temper. We didn’t have the term for it then. He was severe. She would call up my mother’s house—your grandfather and I were still living in the attic with your uncle—and she’d be whispering and often hang up abruptly, click. I’d get a call back in an hour and her voice would be flat and she’d apologize for nothing.

  When I got pregnant with your mother, she conceived Nancy. Your grandfather and I bought the house in Ardsley, which was even nicer than Mount Vernon—better schools—and Estelle and I would meet up at each other’s kitchen tables and drink tea and smoke cigarettes and just chat. We didn’t talk about Albert, we didn’t talk about the babies we were carrying; we just gossiped about the horrible people in our neighborhoods and the dumb housewives, and then we’d read the paper and smoke some more. Nancy and your mother were born a month apart in December and January—two winter babies.

  Estelle and Nancy were very bonded; she protected her. She taught her constantly. I didn’t know your mother could read until she pointed to my Sears catalogue and said, “ ‘Now in red!’ ” Nancy and your mother got along—they didn’t have a choice, really. Robin knew there was something off about Nancy’s house. She’d talk about being scared of Nancy’s father—that he’d take things out of Nancy’s hands. She kept saying, “He takes things from her.” Who knows.

  I’ll never forget the afternoon in the kitchen in Ardsley when Nancy and your mother were around five years of age. Estelle had driven Nancy to the house that morning. They were two little girls giggling at the table, talking their heads off. Estelle and I were cleaning up lunch dishes when I looked over. She was just standing there, her back toward everyone, straight as a rod, not moving with the water filling up the sink. The girls were just a few feet away, in their own world, and there she was, tears streaming down her face. I turned off the tap and I held her hand in mine, and we just stood there together taking deep breaths.

  We never talked about it after that. That’s just how it was.

  When Nancy graduated from Barnard, she joined the Hare Krishnas and cut off her hair. It lasted only a few years before she came to her senses and married an estate lawyer, but for her early twenties she wore the robes and everything. Estelle was beside herself. What could she do? So I told her: “You go to Paris.” She made an arrangement with Albert: For half the year, she’d live in the house in Mount Vernon. The other half of the year, she’d teach English in Paris. He bought her a small apartment on the Left Bank, and she’d go there and get big and fat and happy and read great books in French and have the time of her life. And then she’d wither up in Westchester in the summers, and then she’d go back, and she did that for over a decad
e until she died of a heart attack coming off the plane in Newark Airport. There was duck liver wrapped in tinfoil hidden in her suitcase.

  BREAKFAST, PALM BEACH

  GRANDMOTHER: Did you know I marched on Washington with Martin Luther King?

  GRANDDAUGHTER: I didn’t!

  I took the bus down from White Plains alone—your grandfather threw a kinipchin fit about that.

  About what?

  About how I took a bus ride to Washington by myself. In the dead of night.

  GRANDFATHER: What do I care if you took the bus? It’s a miracle you got on a bus.

  Well, I was traveling alone as a very attractive young girl.

  GRANDFATHER: This is true. I grant you that.

  And so I got there and walked straight to the Washington Monument, and I marched. I marched arm in arm with perfect strangers. And I kept at it until I fainted.

  GRANDFATHER: You didn’t faint.

  I came very close.

  GRANDFATHER: Bull!

  I kept at it through a pouring rainstorm.

  GRANDFATHER: A monsoon, I’m sure.

  It was a rainstorm and I can prove it.

  [REGARDS THE OCEAN OUT THE WINDOW]

  I had a beautiful green alligator handbag—what I thought was an alligator handbag—and I was out on the Capitol steps and I looked down and all down the front of my khaki trench coat was green ink. A green mess. Awful! Can you imagine?

  GRANDDAUGHTER: Well, no.

  There are two lessons here, Bessie.

  Okay.

  No matter what happens, keep walking. My zayde always said that if the earth is cracking behind you right up to your heels, you put one foot in front of the other. You keep going. Nothing’s as important as moving forward.

  What’s the second lesson?