“And this means he’s in love with me?”
“Why not?”
“You want everyone to be in love with me, Mother. Besides, he’s not Jewish.”
“I said he was in love with you, not that he could marry you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means be careful.”
“I will be careful, Mother. Is this all?”
“If you need to talk to me, Sarah, you can talk to me. Just don’t talk to your father. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. Can I go to bed now?”
Her mother shrugged. “You can always talk to me.”
Let’s hope so, thought Sarah. For the moment, though, she was glad to escape upstairs.
Sunday morning was peaceful. Sarah and her mother made French toast for the boys. Her father went downstairs to practice the piano. After a few scales, he began to play Chopin. He was playing well.
How happy she felt—how glad that she had a home like this. Charlie would be happy in this setting, she thought. He’d be quite content to read the Sunday paper while her father played the piano below. For him, with his views and his intellect, this wouldn’t be such a terrible transition.
Should she speak to her mother about it, after all? Should she tell her the truth after breakfast, when they were alone? She wasn’t sure.
The boys were still eating when they heard a ring at the doorbell. Her mother was at the stove, and there was no chance of the boys stirring from their food, so she went to answer it. For a foolish moment, and though she knew very well he was in the city with his son, she hoped it might be Charlie.
She opened the door.
There were two people standing on the top step. The woman was fair, in her fifties, a complete stranger. The man was burly, wearing a black coat and a homburg hat. She stared at them.
“I’m sorry it’s so early,” said the woman. She looked awkward. Her accent was British.
“Well,” said the man, “aren’t you going to ask your Uncle Herman in?”
They were standing in the kitchen. Downstairs, her father was still playing the piano, oblivious to their presence.
“I told you he plays well,” Uncle Herman said to his wife.
“You shouldn’t have come,” said Sarah’s mother. “You should have written. You should have telephoned, at least.”
“I did say to him …” said Uncle Herman’s wife, but nobody paid attention to her.
“And be told to stay away?” said Uncle Herman. “So I’m here.” He looked at Michael. “You I remember.” He looked at Nathan. “You I don’t know. I’m your Uncle Herman.”
Esther Adler glanced at Herman’s wife, then addressed her brother-in-law.
“I don’t want to say what happened.”
“She knows,” he boomed. “She knows.” He turned to his wife. “I told you. They sat shiva for me when I married you, because you’re not Jewish. I’m dead to them. You understand? They treated me like a dead person. They called all their friends to come and mourn for me, and they never spoke of me again. This is what we do, in families like ours. We’re very particular.”
“I never heard of such a thing before,” his wife said to them apologetically. “I didn’t know.”
“You don’t have to worry,” said Uncle Herman. “It’s only me that’s dead. Not you.”
“You have to go, Herman,” said Mrs. Adler. “I’ll tell him you came. Maybe he’ll see you. I don’t know.”
“This is stupid,” said Uncle Herman.
Sarah said nothing. She slipped from the room.
Her father did not even hear her come into the waiting room where he was playing, but when he saw her, he smiled. His face seemed so contented, and as she looked at him, she felt such love. She stood beside him.
“Father,” she said gently, “something’s happened. I have to tell you something.”
He paused in his playing.
“What is it, Sarah?”
“You have to be prepared for a shock.”
He stopped and half turned. His face looked anxious.
“It’s all right. Nobody’s hurt. Nobody’s sick.” She took a deep breath. “Uncle Herman is here. With his wife.” She paused. “The wife is quite nice. Uncle Herman doesn’t listen to her.” She smiled. “He’s just like I remember him. But Mother’s sending them away. Is that what you want?”
For a long moment, her father said nothing.
“Herman is here?”
“Yes. He just showed up. On the doorstep.”
“With this woman he married? He comes without warning, and he brings this woman to my house?”
“He wants to see you. I think he wants to be reconciled. Maybe he’ll apologize.” She hesitated. “It has been a long time,” she added gently.
“A long time. I commit an offense. I wait a few years. Does this make the offense go away? Does this make it right?”
“No, Father. But maybe if you talk to him …”
Her father was leaning forward now, staring down at the piano’s ivory keys. He shook his head. Then he rocked his body back and forth.
“I cannot see him,” he said softly.
“Maybe if—”
“You don’t understand. I cannot see him. I cannot bear …”
And suddenly Sarah understood. Her father wasn’t angry, he was in terrible pain.
“This is how it begins,” he said. “Always it is the same. In Germany, the Jews thought they were Germans, and they intermarried. But then, even if you had a Jewish grandmother or great-grandmother … they killed you. You think the Jews will be accepted? It is an illusion.”
“That was Hitler—”
“And before that it was the Poles, it was the Russians, it was the Spanish Inquisition … Many countries have accepted the Jews, Sarah, and always they have turned against them in the end. The Jews will only survive if they are strong. This is the lesson of history.” He looked up at her. “We were commanded to keep our faith, Sarah. So let me tell you: every time a Jew marries out, we are weakened. Marry out, and in two, three generations, your family will not be Jewish. Maybe they will be safe, maybe not. But in the end, either way, all that we have will be lost.”
“You feel this?”
“I know this.” He shook his head. “I sat shiva for my brother. He is dead to me. Go up and tell him so.”
Sarah hesitated, then turned toward the stairs. But before she got to see Uncle Herman, his voice came booming down from above.
“Daniel, I’m here. You won’t speak to your brother?”
Sarah glanced at her father. He was still staring down at the keyboard. Uncle Herman’s voice came again.
“Time has passed, Daniel.” There was a pause. “I won’t come here again.” Another pause, then, in a voice of fury, “If that’s what you want, it’s finished.”
A moment later, the front door slammed. Then there was silence.
Sarah sat on the stairs. She didn’t want to intrude upon her father, but she didn’t want to leave him. She waited a little while. Then she saw his shoulders were moving and, although there was no sound, she realized he was weeping.
She couldn’t help herself, she had to go to him. She came back down the stairs, and stood by the piano, and put her arms around him and held him.
“You think I don’t love my brother?” he managed to say, after a little while.
“I know you love your brother.”
He nodded slowly. “I love my brother. What should I do? What can I do?”
“I don’t know, Father.”
He half turned his face to look at her. The tears were streaming down his cheeks to his mustache.
“Promise me, Sarah, promise me you will never do such a thing as Herman has done.”
“You want me to promise?”
“I could not bear it.”
She paused, but only for a moment. “I promise.”
Perhaps it was for the best.
Verrazano Narrows
1968
EVERYONE AGREED THAT Gorham Master was going to be successful. He was sure of it himself. He knew exactly what he wanted, he had it all mapped out, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
At Groton he’d been impressive, and now he was a sophomore at Harvard. If his studies at the university were important to him, so was baseball, and he’d shown himself to possess the true outfielder’s instinct for reacting to a ball as soon as it’s been hit. Men liked Gorham and so did women. Blue bloods liked him because he was a blue blood; and everyone else did because he was friendly, and polite, and a good sportsman. Employers, in a few years’ time, were going to hire him because he was intelligent and hard-working, and knew how to fit in.
His closest friends would have known two other things about him. The first was that, though not lacking in bravery, he had within him a decided streak of conservatism and caution. The second, which was related to the first, was that he was determined to be as unlike his father as he could.
But it was because of his father that he’d returned to New York from Harvard this chilly February weekend.
His mother’s message on Wednesday had been clear. Come sooner rather than later. And when he’d arrived at her Staten Island house on Saturday evening, Julie had been direct.
“You know I hadn’t seen your father for a couple of years when he called me the other night. He wanted to see me to say good-bye. So I went, and I’m glad I did.”
“Is it really so bad?”
“Yes. The doctor told him he has cancer. The prognosis is that it won’t take long, and I hope for his sake that the end will come soon. Naturally I told you to come at once.”
“I can’t quite take it in.”
“Well, you’ve got until the morning. And Gorham,” she added firmly, “be nice.”
“I always am.”
She gave him a look. “Just don’t get into a fight.”
On Sunday morning, as the ferry started across the broad waters of the harbor, there was a cold wind coming in from the east. How many times, Gorham wondered, had he taken this ferry with his father when he was a child? Two hundred? Three hundred? He didn’t know. But one thing was certain: every time he had taken that ferry, and stared across at the approaching shoreline of Manhattan, he had vowed that he was going to live there. And now, here it was again, looking somewhat bleak on a gray February morning, but no less inviting to his eyes.
Of course, the place had changed quite a bit since he was a child. The waterfront, for instance, had completely altered. When he was a young boy, the docks of lower Manhattan had still been crowded with working men unloading cargo vessels. Some of that cargo handling was skilled work, too. But then the big containers had started to take the place of the old cargoes, and there was less and less work for the men on the docks, even across on the Brooklyn wharfs. The new facilities with their giant hoists were at Newark and Elizabeth ports now, over in New Jersey. The passenger liners still came on the Hudson to the West Side piers, but splendid though it was to see the liners, the waterfront now was a genteel echo of what it had been once.
The city, it seemed to Gorham, was being tidied up and streamlined. The mighty hand of Robert Moses had continued to lay down highways for the motor car, and for the huge trucks which now delivered to, and frequently blocked, the Midtown streets. Moses wanted to sweep away the slums as well, and in numerous places along the East River, high-rise blocks, for better or worse, were springing up in their place. Urban renewal, it was called. The masses of small manufacturers and factories that had crowded the poorer districts, especially in Brooklyn and the New York waterfront areas—those dirty, grainy, humble powerhouses of the city’s wealth—had also been melting away.
But if Manhattan was changing its character, if services were replacing manufacture, if Ellis Island was long since closed, and New York’s huge floods of immigrants regulated into a less visible seepage through the nation’s borders, the great city of New York still contained in its five boroughs vibrant communities from all the ends of the Earth.
Some of his friends at Harvard thought he was crazy to want to live in New York. For the city had been having big problems in the last few years. Its budget was in crisis, taxes had been going up. There was racial tension; crime was rising. There were almost three murders a day in the city now. Major corporations, which had been drawn to New York since the turn of the century, had been moving their headquarters to other cities. But to Gorham Master, New York was still the center of the world. As soon as he graduated, Manhattan was where he was going. Somebody might offer him a wonderful job, with a big salary, in some other city, but he’d turn it down for any decent job in New York. The only thing he hadn’t reckoned on was that his father wouldn’t be there.
He had to admit that, whatever his father’s faults, life with Charlie Master was never dull. During the last two decades, the world around them had been changing fast. The certainties of the fifties had been challenged, restrictions been torn down. New freedoms had come, and new dangers.
Yet strangely enough, Gorham realized, he had learned the most about each change not from his own contemporaries, but from his father. While he’d been at high school, it had been Charlie who had joined the civil rights marches, and who had made him listen to tape recordings of Martin Luther King. Neither of them thought the Vietnam War was a good cause, but while Gorham was just hoping that the draft might be ended by the time he was due to graduate from Harvard, his father had made enemies by writing newspaper articles against the war.
At least Gorham could respect his father for his political views. But some of Charlie’s other activities were a different matter. It was his father, not he, who knew all the bands, Charlie who explained psychedelic experiences to him, and who started smoking dope. “I don’t mind Dad being young at heart,” Gorham had complained to his mother Julie, “but does he have to go on getting younger and younger?” And during the last couple of years, his father’s lifestyle had caused some friction between them. Gorham wasn’t shocked by his father, he just thought that Charlie was turning into a middle-aged adolescent.
And yet, adolescent or not, in the last few years of his life, Charlie had had a big success. Having spent years trying to write plays for the stage, he’d become fascinated by television and earned some useful money as a comedy writer. Then, without telling Gorham, he had published his novel.
The ferry was well out into the harbor now. Looking back, Gorham stared at the huge span of the Verrazano Bridge, and shook his head with amusement. Whatever Charlie’s faults, it amused his son to realize that for the rest of his life, whenever he looked at that huge New York landmark, he’d be forced to remember his father.
Verrazano Narrows had been a good choice of title. Not many people remembered that the first European to arrive in New York harbor, way back in the early sixteenth century, had been the Italian Verrazano. Everybody knew Hudson, though he’d actually got there more than eighty years later, but Verrazano was forgotten; and for years the leaders of the Italian community had been lobbying for recognition of the great navigator. When a vast bridge was finally constructed across the entrance to New York harbor, the Italians wanted it named after him. Robert Moses had opposed the name, but the Italians lobbied Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and finally got their way. And it was fitting that the great suspension bridge, joining Staten Island to Brooklyn, should bear an Italian name. For it was one of the most elegant bridges ever built.
Verrazano Narrows, by Charles Master, came out in 1964 in the same month that the bridge was opened. It was a novel, but it almost read like a poem. People compared it to a great book from the forties, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Verrazano Narrows was a love story about a man who lives with his son on Staten Island, and has a passionate affair with a woman in Brooklyn. The Narrows in the title also suggested the narrow prejudices the couple had had to overcome. Gorham had supposed that the story might be somewhat autobiographical, but if so, his father had never indic
ated the identity of the woman to him or to anybody else. Anyway, it had been a huge literary success. They’d made a movie out of it too. Charlie had toured the country, made friends with a bunch of people out in San Francisco, stayed on the West Coast for a while, and learned to smoke dope.
When he reached the ferry terminal, Gorham took the subway. There weren’t many people about. At the far end of his car, a couple of blacks were standing, and they glanced toward him. He cursed inwardly. They were probably harmless, but one had to be careful these days, he thought. People in the city developed antennae that sent warning signals whenever trouble came near. As it happened, he was carrying quite a bit of cash with him today. He really shouldn’t have entered a deserted subway car like this.
Was it reasonable to suspect two guys just because they were black? Was it right for someone who knew parts of Martin Luther King’s speeches by heart to do so? No, it wasn’t. But people did. The two blacks carried on their quiet conversation, and ignored him for several stations. Then other people got in, and the two men left.
Gorham came out of the subway on Lexington Avenue. There was only a block to walk across to Park. He reached the top of the subway stair, turned. And cursed. Then he stepped off the sidewalk into the street.
Garbage. Piles of black garbage bags all over the sidewalk. Garbage as far as the eye could see.
New York: city of strikes. Two years ago it had been a transit strike. That hadn’t shut the city down, because New Yorkers walked to work. But it had done nothing for the city’s reputation. Now it was the sanitation workers who were on strike. The mayor, John Lindsay, was a decent man and an honest one, but whether he’d be able to control the turbulent city and meet its financial problems remained to be seen. Meanwhile, the garbage bags were piling up on the sidewalks in ever increasing heaps. There was only one blessing. It was February. What the stench would be like if it were August did not bear thinking about.