Touch and Go (3 page)

The last time I saw Bernays, he was approaching the century mark. He was frail and hard of hearing, and his memory played hide-and-seek at times, but he still had almost all his marbles.

I put the earphones on him. It was a tape recording we had done years before. Immediately on hearing his younger voice, his face
glowed with the wonder of a child. The subject was the nature of his work and, in this instance, of his powerhouse client—the tobacco industry. He was recounting an early moment in the twentieth century, when the feminist movement was in its resurgence. Names come to mind. Margaret Sanger. Helen Keller. Alice Paul. Jane Addams. Florence Kelley. They were advanced in many areas. Certainly the evils of tobacco were among them. Bernays himself was pro-suffragist as well as a peace and civil-rights advocate. But he did have a job to do, one of his biggest as a public-relations counselor: to make smoking cigarettes not only acceptable to the suffragists but a sign of liberation! And, to some extent, he succeeded. As I remember our conversation, to which he was listening at that moment, pressing the earphones tighter to himself, eyes wonder-wide, he had talked some of the spokeswomen, militant and courageous, into smoking during their celebratory march on Fifth Avenue. Puffing away publicly, lighting small fires of flaming tobacco, was their symbol of emancipation. As I relieved him of his earphones, he looked up at me. Mouth slightly open; a small boy bewildered by something. Was he aware of his giftedness and triumph? Did he realize the nature of his works, his expertise?

Parenthetically, Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Whenever he visited his uncle in prewar London he always presented him with a box of Havana cigars.

 

 

MY FATHER was a master of his craft, too. He was a men's tailor. I look at the gilt-edged daguerreotype of my two brothers, about four and six, in fancy woolen winter clothes sewn by Sam. What stand out are the earlaps, of identical corduroy fabric and design. They add just the right panache to the classy attire. You'd think the photo had been snapped by a Slavic Margaret Cameron. Oh, he was good, my father. I'm still much moved when I come across the picture of the three of us boys. There I am, in my little white nightgown, two years old, looking somewhat bewildered. I am standing
on a stool as my two brothers (each in short pants, made by my father, of course) pose protectively on each side of their darling baby brother. When my father and his young wife, Annie, arrived in New York from the Russian-Polish border city, Bialystok, they were both good at what they tackled. She was a nimble-fingered seamstress. When she was not at the factory during a strike or slack time, I still see her, in our living room, on her knees, pins in her mouth, fitting a neighbor woman into a new dress.

It may have been in 1902 or '03 when they arrived. It was quota time instituted by the Brahminesque Henry Cabot Lodge, a quota aimed primarily at Italian immigrants. A shoemaker, Nicolo Sacco, and a fish peddler, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, may have been among them.

I look, from time to time, at an old-world gilt-framed daguerreotype of my mother, Annie, and my father, Sam. It is so obviously unlikely a pairing, and the photograph says it all. His curly-cued flowing jet-black mustachio gives him an Italian look: a Calabrian or Sardinian. He is Mateo Falcone of Sardinia's best credentials for honesty, courage, and above all, sanctuary to all seeking to escape from authority.
³
His eyes appear bright, blazing and ready to face the day, whatever it may bring.

She wears a pince-nez, which instantly adds an air of anxiety to her eyes that appears at odds with her piercing, squinty look. Could it be fear, for which I could sense no reason? I was about to say there was a wild touch to her portrait, but that would be redundant.

These two were not born to be a vaudeville team. They were certainly no clones of George Burns and Gracie Allen. No, not even Broderick and Crawford, with the acerbic Helen and the easy-does-it Lester. HE: “Do you mind if I smoke?” SHE: “I don't care if you burn.” How often had my brother Ben and I seen their act and how many times had we fallen out of our second balcony seats at the Palace on hearing that line as though for the first time?

No, Sam and Annie were creatures of different spheres whom some God of the perverse had blessed and cursed into union.

It was my father's popularity among his landsmen and the women that I remember best. He was the one they all sought as a guest at gatherings. He was easy and quiet in speech and small matters, avoided gossip, admired Gene Debs because he thought all union people did that. It was Gene's style of speech, easy as well as fervent, that won them over. My old man puffed away at his Mu-rads, sipped tea and sampled cakes—life was paradise now. Of the mother of us all, Annie, he said little in public; though there was much commiseration offered, he accepted none. The words he would say of her: “She's a nervous woman.” He was right. She had from the moment she first appeared anywhere—a weekend
vereins
party, a neighborhood gathering—added not so much a spark as a blast to the proceedings.

Consider a jovial gathering at the home of my wealthy uncle (the one who lent us money for our Chicago adventure, money which we returned), general laughter, sighs of contentment. It all changes in an eyeblink. She appears at the threshold. A sudden silence possesses the parlor. A tension. She merely poses, all 5'1” of her, smiles softly. The hostess timidly approaches her and offers tea and cakes. My mother demurely accepts. The festivities resume, but there is always the fear of some sort of outburst. It could be as mild as a narrowing of the eyes, or of slightly more dramatic intensity.

Often Dora and Herb would appear at these gatherings of landsmen from the shtetl near Bialystok. Dora, working day and night running a bakery, is something of a lackey. Herb, always, always looking for work, somehow never finds any that suits him. Herb's favorite pastime is puffing away on a Charles Denby ten-cent cigar. (Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice president, memorably commented: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.”) While Herb is looking heavenward, admiring the smoke rings, my mother simply takes the cigar from his hand. As he watches, she smashes it into the standing ashtray, grinding and grinding until it is
bereft of smoke. “So much for you and your ten-cent cigar. Go help Dora in the kitchen. What is she, your slavey?” Perhaps she saw her own mother, Fanny, in Dora. Fanny, the widow baker, her hands huge from kneading, calloused and bruised.

The story goes that Annie had once been engaged to a dentist. It was he who had been her first shot at the brass ring. Though nothing like a great beauty, she was lively, in her quicksilver Ruth Gordon way, but his family had rebuffed her. Not of the same class. On the rebound, she married the easygoing, genial Sam.

Late on Friday nights, still awake though pretending sleep, I'd await my father's return.

I shared my bed with my father. There was a weekly poker game at the Harkaveys'. Usually, my father lost. In no way did that prevent my mother from going through his tossed-aside trousers and searching the pockets. When, on rare occasions, he wound up a winner, she mumbled, “Well, well, well,” and extracted a few bills. On the usual empty night of the hunter when the pheasant was not there, she cursed to herself. It was nothing loud, not even bitter; merely further proof that her life was one of wasted chances. As for Sam and Annie, how did these ill-matched two ever share a bed? More to the impertinent point, how did they ever cohabit? Helen Morgan, an iconic singer of American musicals, the ideal torch singer, is, in my mind, seated on the piano top. She sings “Why Was I Born?” Of course. I am guessing that my brothers had joined me in asking the most pertinent of all questions: How were we conceived?

Annie doesn't live here anymore and yet she does in me. I am genetically more hers than his. The imp of the perverse has come to possess me and has had a pretty good run of it. From time to time, a touch of contrition may appear. It is the best way of paying tribute to Annie.

 

 

MY HEAD was often swathed in bandages due to my bouts of mastoiditis. It was described as an inflammation of the middle ear and
frequently afflicted small boys. Abscesses came uninvited, aches that led us to tightly cup our diseased ears. I have noticed in recent years—say, 2006—young girls and boys walking the streets in like manner; hand over ear, intently listening, oblivious to all surrounding them, including fellow humans. Oh, my God, is there a recurrence of mastoiditis, as may be the case with tuberculosis? No, dearie, it is our young using their cell phones.

I was a constantly sick child. I had a case of whistling asthma. It had its whimsical as well as its traumatic moments. At night, with my whistle-as-I-breathe especially clear, my eldest brother, Meyer, seven years up on me, would sing along, “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” or an ethnic pop song, “Lena is the Queen of Palestina.” And where did Meyer pick up “I Shook the Hand of the Man Who Shook the Hand of John L. Sullivan”? Ben, five years my senior, would croon “My Gal Sal” or “I Wonder What's Become of Sally.” Sally was, hands down, the most popular lost heroine of song and story.

Aside from a foggy memory of being in a Manhattan hospital ward, the mastoid kid, with my bandaged head, my more graphic childhood memories lay in Clinton, an ever-busy street in the Bronx. There was often a moment of awe, and also a show of respect for our betters.

It was usually in the late afternoon that an electric automobile made its ten-miles-an-hour tour of the block. Two elegant elderly ladies were seated up front. They wore Queen Mary hats. Had we worn hats, we'd have doffed them. Our tiny caps did come off. A matter of reflex. What I remember best is the silver lever in place of the steering wheel, so serenely handled. The confident manner—an up, down, and away motion—was an art form wholly strange to the children on the street.

Ours was a triply diverse neighborhood: Irish, Italian, and Jewish. There was the occasional Dutch boy whom we reflexively called Van. He was no child of a wealthy patron. His father was a sanitation employee doing the best he could with the city's considerable detritus.
Yet the boy always called on his family's escutcheon: “I am a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant.” Unfortunately, his constantly running nose, always wiped clean by his left sleeve (he was a southpaw) didn't help his case.

There was the usual ethnic slurring among the neighborhood's youngbloods (eight, nine, ten were their ripening ages). And there was 1920, when a tripartite understanding overcame. It was the time of the troubles in Ireland; the time Yeats celebrated the birth of “a terrible beauty.” It was a time when all the kids on the block became Irish. Terence MacSwaney, Sinn Fein's Lord Mayor of Cork, was on a prison hunger strike of which the whole world was aware. We all wore huge buttons that covered the lapels of our tight little jackets three times over: FREE TERENCE MACSWANEY. After seventy-five days of fasting while in Brixton Prison, he died of starvation and the troubles multiplied. Nonetheless, we had done our bit for Irish freedom. Had we known “Kevin Barry,” we'd have sung it out, with more fervor than the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. There was a worldwide protest, no demonstrator more fervent and fiery than my brother, Ben, a flamboyant ten, displaying as many buttons as a cockney pearlie. No shining scholar at school, he astonished all with his eloquence: “A nation which has such citizens will never surrender.” Was this our street-talk Ben or a young William Jennings Bryan? My mother immediately touched his forehead to make certain his temperature was 98.6 though she'd settle for 102. Ben had picked up the lingo from his nonscholarly buddy, Quinton Moore, who'd had it smacked into his head by his scholarly brother, Jerry. Jerry had read the item somewhere in a Sinn Fein sheet. It was a comment of Ho Chi Minh, a young dishwasher at a London restaurant just before he latched onto the job as pastry chef for Escoffier at the Ritz of Paris.

The ones we most respected on the block were the big boys on the corner. Getting on their good side was our prime desideratum. They bore their names with a tribal pride: Irish, Dutch, Blackie, Greek. (In fact, though the two left fielders of the Giants and the
Yankees, the Mueller brothers, Emil and Bob, were German, they were popularly known as “Irish” and “Dutch.” My brother Ben was a true neighborhood boy. Schooling was not his true love; his mentors and patrons were the big guys on the corner. There was little doubt that of all the kids Ben was their runaway favorite. I can still hear their requests for his throbbing rendition of “Break the News to Mother.” They tossed nickels and dimes at him, though there was nothing patronizing about the gesture. It was as though sentimental passersby were paying tribute to a street singer. He picked up enough change in that manner to occasionally take me to a Saturday feature and a Pearl White serial. The Civil War song was to Ben what “Casey at the Bat” was to DeWolf Hopper, or “Over the Rainbow” to Judy Garland.

Now and then, Dutch or Irish or Greek would engage Ben and Quinton, the ten-year-old wonders, to box a wild round or two. Winner take all—a dime. It would usually wind up in a draw and each warrior would be a buffalo nickel richer. Neither Ben nor Quinton knew of the Marquis of Queensberry rules nor did they much care. They aimed for each other's groin; they rabbit punched. And even pivot punched, a maneuver that was outlawed a half-century before.

Meyer was respectfully recognized as the family scholar. He was known in the neighborhood and respected by Irish, Greek, Blackie, and Dutch. It was a case of all being neighborhood boys. He had college in mind and they knew he'd become a teacher. The fact that he enjoyed and understood baseball and was a Giants fan didn't hurt matters. There were few Yankee fans in the community, even among the Italian kids. This was in the pre-DiMaggio days and Tony Lazzeri was the only recognized name.