The Gossip Columnist's Daughter, page 17
What had he been up to?
A girlfriend? Prostitutes? Gambling? I don’t know. I’ll never know.
Once, after Lou’s death, I asked my father. He howled with fake laughter.
“A smoking gun? The old man loved money as much as the rest of us. You’re still buying the old Robert Lincoln crap. What did Abe’s kid say? ‘I get drunk off math’? Here’s the math. Money evaporates. Embezzled money vanishes even faster.”
“Embezzled?”
“Go ahead, search for a milder term. That’s what you want, right?”
“Borrowed?”
“That’s fine. It’s just not accurate.”
MY CONJECTURE IS he was in the hole. He couldn’t afford 1414 Waverly Road. In today’s market, the house is valued by Redfin at $1.8 million. In 1983, it might have been worth half that, and in 1965 even less. Still serious Chicago money, and Lou never had serious Chicago money. Nobody in our family ever has, though my father used to make false claims.
Lou might have been in over his head from the beginning.
Here’s what I think. In 1965, when Babs and Lou exiled themselves to Highland Park, Lou was determined to do it in some style, to leave the old life behind them. If it took multiple mortgages over the years, mortgages he could barely pay, so be it.
THE NEW HOUSE on Burton Avenue wasn’t any happier than our house, but it was a lot quieter. By 1983, my mother was sleeping in the guest room with the door locked. My father would stand out in the hall and rattle the knob and shout in whispers and my mother would say, Stop shouting, and my father would shout, I’m not shouting!
No need to dwell on this. And the scenes in our house weren’t any different from the scenes in who knows how many other houses. I was in eighth grade. Lucy was already gone to Middlebury. After school, since I didn’t do any sports, I’d walk to Babs and Lou’s.
Even before Lou’s trouble, any expectation of mutual happiness between Lou and Babs, notwithstanding the good years on Waverly Road, had long since dimmed. But there was never hostility—the opposite. For as far back as I could remember, Babs and Lou had loved each other out of familiarity and routine. They led separate lives under one roof. It’s not the worst kind of love. Don’t a lot of people spend a significant portion of their lives getting by this way?
NOT QUIETER, BURTON Avenue was silent. Lou’s trouble not only squeezed them into a much smaller space, it seemed to shrink the number of words they said to each other, which were never that many in the first place. It was like they were on a tiny island and they retreated to either side of it. Lou at the kitchen table going over his financial statements and talking to his lawyers, and Babs in their bedroom, either on the exercycle or sitting at her dressing table or reading in the big green leather chair in the room Babs and Lou always called the library on Waverly Road. Now he had no study, no library, and the entire house on Burton Avenue was crowded with furniture like that green leather chair, pieces that Babs and Lou were too nostalgic to sell. There was a spare bedroom you couldn’t walk into, it was so packed with couches and chairs and stacked tables. Though neither ever said as much, I think both believed the move was only temporary.
I’d go over to Burton Avenue after school and Lou would be at the kitchen table, rubbing his face. And Babs, who’d rarely cooked for him, would stick something in the microwave for a late lunch.
THEY FOUND SOLLY floating facedown in the north branch of the Chicago River. They fished him out near Goose Island. What Solly was doing in the Chicago River should have been the subject of more speculation. Nobody swims in the Chicago River. If the fish had a choice and could opt out, they would. In any case, according to Lou, Solly had never learned to swim.
Either he put himself in that water with no intention of coming out of it, or someone else did.
July of 1983. Though Lou’s legal trouble seemed to have passed, he and Babs were still struggling to adjust to their circumscribed lives. My parents were finally splitting up. I was thirteen, which itself is havoc. Nobody wanted to dwell on the past, and Solly, the idea of Solly, really, belonged to another time. Things were collapsing, for worse and better, and there wasn’t a lot of space for mourning a man who’d become a ghost to us years earlier.
That summer, too, the entire city of Chicago was seething. A vicious race for mayor. Harold Washington versus Bernie Epton. No such thing as a general election in Chicago. Unless the Democrat is Black and suddenly a little Republican Jew isn’t a joke.
Solly’s death was essentially a distraction from everything else that was going on.
The police said they had no evidence of any foul play. It had been a hot day, mid-eighties. A simple explanation was arrived at. Solly had only wanted to cool off, and in the course of dousing his face with river water, he must have slipped.
Cool off? In that sludge?
That was the story.
Lou drove downtown to the Cook County morgue on Harrison Street. Solly’s body was swollen beyond recognition. Still, he knew immediately who it was, as if in the back of his mind he’d already pictured Solly just like that, laid out on a table, bloated with river water.
I was at my grandparents’ when Lou came home.
“There wasn’t a sheet over him,” he told Babs.
My head was in the refrigerator, but I was listening.
“Isn’t there supposed to be a sheet? City of Chicago can’t afford a sheet to pull over a man who was born here, died here?”
SATURDAY IN MAY, warm, sort of, when the wind lulls a little, and I pick up Snook and we go buy some bread and cheese and a Hershey bar with almonds, and we make a little picnic on the beach at Loyola Park. An impromptu picnic, we’ve got no blanket. Snook says she doesn’t like almonds. Why did I get chocolate with almonds? There’s an Andre Dubus story called “The Winter Father” where a recently divorced dad on a picnic with his two kids thinks, I’ve become a winter father. Being a winter father means something specific to the father in the story. I don’t remember what exactly, but it must have to do with being the sort of father I’ve become, a more distant one. A Wednesday-night father? “You can eat the chocolate and spit the almonds out,” I say. “Like this. See? The chocolate’s still the chocolate.” “That’s disgusting,” Snook says. I tickle her and she laughs, and I laugh. We’ve become good at pretending we’re having a good time. We’ve become decent actors, the two of us. Technically, I’m not at all a winter father. I’m at least an every-other-day father. I drive Snook to pre-K. I pick Snook up from pre-K. Swimming. Art lessons. Gymnastics. The park. The beach. Ice cream. Pizza. Spaghetti. She sleeps at the apartment at least two nights a week, sometimes three. She plays with Rudy when he deigns to allow her to. She draws at the kitchen table. She watches Minions. She’s got a legion of stuffies here. She brought them in a suitcase. The living room looks like a zoo gift shop.
Winter fathers.
In Kup’s Chicago, Kup writes that when his son, Jerry, was born, he was at Toots Shor in Manhattan gathering copy for a column. He also says that though he doted on Cookie (and Jerry, Jerry is always in parentheses), when you’re out six, seven nights a week, you miss a lot.
Lou, too. He spent much of my father’s and Aunt Judith’s childhoods away at the war. And even after, he was more distant from his children than he was from his grandchildren.
Solly?
Solly was never a father.
But isn’t an uncle a kind of winter father?
Snook and I at the beach. She keeps telling me to stop scribbling and dig.
“Dig, Dadda, dig.”
“One sec, honey. One sec.”
A BRIEF FUNERAL at Pritzger’s in Skokie. Lou found a young, unaffiliated rabbi just out of seminary (none of us belonged to a temple anymore) to officiate. Lucy called him a rent-a-rabbi. We were all waiting to see if Pauline would show up, and she did, a bit after the rabbi started to speak, with a small boy in tow. She wore a brown business suit and flat shoes. When she took off her glasses—a few prayers and the service was over—her eyes were wet. She wasn’t crying. It was as if she was storing up her tears for later. Wishful thinking (we pretended not to notice the ring), but Lucy and I couldn’t help but believe, if only for a few moments, that the boy might be Solly’s son. A lost son we hadn’t known was lost. The child was three, maybe four; the math didn’t work out. Nobody asked any questions. Pauline hugged everyone, brief, efficient hugs, but they weren’t without a genuine squeeze of affection. The little boy shook hands with everybody, one by one.
One of Pritzger’s assistants, a pimpled kid that didn’t look old enough to have a license, drove Solly out in the hearse to Waldheim Cemetery, unaccompanied.
Pauline and her son didn’t come back to the little house on Burton Avenue for cold cuts.
HE WAS THERE. That’s part of it. Maybe most of it. He was there in December of 1963 when Irv and Lou went to Los Angeles to bring Cookie’s body home. Had Solly not joined them on that trip, it might have gone worse, if such a thing were possible. Lou, on his own, might not have managed to get Irv back on the plane to Chicago.
“Dadda.”
“Be right there, honey. Just one more note about Cookie—”
“What cookie? Where are the cookies?”
“No, Cookie’s a person.”
“You’re making it up.”
“No, Cookie’s real, I mean—”
“Where is he then?”
“No, Cookie’s a she. Not that it. Hang on.”
Cookie and Solly. Now, in my mind at least, they’ve joined the same long, sad parade.
In life they hardly knew each other. Solly might have remembered Cookie as a laughing little girl. Cookie, of course, would have recognized his face from those times the two families got together. And his size. He would have been hard to miss even if she’d only barely glanced at him. Uncle Lou’s brother. His name? It might have gone in one ear and out the other. This was a kid who’d ridden on Gary Cooper’s shoulders. Mae West read her “The Three Little Pigs.” James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn, W. C. Fields, Wallace Beery, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Harpo Marx—Enough with these fucking lists already.
Solly Rosenthal?
It occurs to me now that he was the single person in our family who never made it into “Kup’s Column.” What a way to shine, Solomon Rosenthal was named custodian of the year at the National Conclave of Custodians held biannually in Wichita… Sonny Bono, blah, blah, blah…
“Dadda—”
“Yeah, honey?”
“This is so boring and I’m hungry.”
FOR A WHILE, I thought, without saying it out loud, that eventually Lou might be heading for some jail time. That either he’d go on trial or he’d plead guilty to at least one felony or another. Not to Stateville. Some minimum-security, white-collar place where he could wear his own clothes and garden.
I’d call Lucy up at school, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She told me to get my head out of my ass. “The sun doesn’t rise and set with our damn family. We’re descending into barbarism. What kind of superpower invades Grenada? Talk about imperialist dick wagging.”
And then poof. Nothing happened.
I only learned later that Lou had quietly, without fanfare, voluntarily surrendered his license to practice law. But the trouble itself seemed to vanish. All the whispers of impending charges. The sale of the house, the constant talking to lawyers. The stacks of files on the kitchen table of the little house on Burton Avenue.
Nothing. No indictment was ever handed down.
Lou was still broke. But the threat was over. Lou carried the files down to the basement.
The following month, my grandfather swallowed whatever pride he might have had left and went to work for my father as a file clerk.
He needed the money.
IN THE SOVEREIGN on North Broadway, there’s a bulletin board on the south wall with photographs pinned to it. The pictures are all faded and curling at the edges. Even so, the faces are alive with laughter, as if the past was all camaraderie and hilarious romp. Arms around each other, hoisting high cans of Pabst.
It’s a place you want to be, back in the 1990s with these effortlessly happy people.
I imagine all those connections have long since been severed by death or moving away or betrayal or the ordinary exhaustion of just working and living. I’ve never seen any of these faces at the bar, or maybe I just don’t recognize them because it was all so long ago and everybody’s older now and looks different. I sit at the table closest to the bulletin board and look at a group picture of a motley softball team—a woman sitting in front holds an eighteen-inch softball in two hands like an offering.
With this oversize softball I bestow upon you eternal life.
SOLLY WAS THE last of us to be buried at Waldheim.
Lou, Babs, my father, and Aunt Judith are all buried north—at Memorial Park in Skokie.
Chicago Jews equate the north with progress. To go west is to go backward.
Waldheim is directly west of the Loop. Shortly before his death in 1945, my great-grandfather Max was worried that by the time Solly, the surprise child of his old age, passed away, there might not be anybody around to make the arrangements.
Maybe Maxie had a vision of a Rosenthal in a pauper’s grave.
He bought Solly a plot and gave the deed and plot number to Lou for safekeeping.
To get to Waldheim you can take the Eisenhower Expressway to Harlem Avenue. Or you can go the long way and simply drive west on Madison, away from the lake, the direction Solly used to head on his solitary walks, for eleven miles of stop-and-go traffic, until you reach a vast, flat expanse, a throwback to the prairie that was once this city. It’s a land of forgotten Jews, of headstones flush with the grass. The stones are arranged in small ghettos, often enclosed by a sagging, dilapidated fence. Every Jewish enclave in Chicago used to have multiple burial societies, sometimes there were three or four on the same block. For a small monthly fee that built up principal over time, you’d receive a plot and perpetual care. Waldheim isn’t one cemetery, it’s hundreds.
A few years ago, I went out there, but the office was closed and I didn’t have a map. I thought I knew roughly where Solly was, on the south side near the wall that separates the cemetery grounds from a shopping center parking lot. It was March. There’d been a thaw. The snow had mostly melted. Headstones flush with the grass. No trees. Soggy, uneven ground. Name after name after name after name stretching up a small rise that wasn’t quite a hillside. All the graves that weren’t Solly’s.
WE WERE NEVER a picture-taking family, and whenever we did take pictures on Thanksgiving at the house on Waverly Road, Solly either fled to the bathroom or, at the last second, managed to step out of the frame.
So, no, there aren’t any photographs of Solly Rosenthal, and aside from the degree from Roosevelt and his grave (which I still can’t find), there doesn’t seem to be any other trace of his name anywhere. At the Cook County Clerk’s Office, I did manage to unearth Solly’s birth certificate. No first name. It says only: Baby Rosenthal. My great-grandparents hadn’t chosen his name yet. Maybe they were still getting over the shock of his arrival and how big he was.
I’ve noticed something about certain physically large people. How sometimes they are abashed about how much space they occupy. Solly was one of these people. When he’d duck through a doorway, he’d apologize, as if he’d offended the doorway. We must have seemed so Lilliputian to him, and yet he moved among us deferentially. He left early, but he arrived early, too, and in his unobtrusive way would always help Babs set the table for Thanksgiving.
ABOUT A YEAR and a half ago, I tracked down Pauline. It took less than four seconds. She’s since retired but at the time she taught in the French department at Johns Hopkins. I called her office and left a voice mail. About three hours later, she called me back.
“Little Jeddy!”
“Auntie Pauline!”
“I bought one of your books. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. You know how it is. You teach, too, right?”
“I make a pretense.”
“That’s half of it anyway. Good god, it’s been, what, forty years?”
“Something like that.”
“Not possible.”
We both took a breath.
I had an image of her rubbing Solly’s forearm in a house that’s long since been sold.
Now her voice? Her laughter? Eons away.
She asked about the family. I told her Babs and Lou were both gone. Babs just a couple of years ago at one hundred and one. My father, too.
“A hundred and one! Tough that woman. Always kept things close.”
“I’ve got a daughter.”
“Mazel tov.”
“And your son?”
“Anthony’s in New Zealand. Couldn’t get far enough away from me. A programmer, but isn’t everybody? Unmarried, still playing the field. He’s having a fine time. I’m heading over there for a long visit, three weeks. He says he’s looking forward to it, but we’ll put that to the test.”
When I asked her about Solly, she said she’d rather not talk about him, if I didn’t mind.
Of course I didn’t. Not knowing what else to say, I said, “It’s nice to hear your voice, Auntie Pauline.”
She laughed again, and four decades vaporized. Maybe that second “Auntie” shook something loose.
“You know Sol never wanted children. He loved them. He loved you and Lucy, but underfoot all the time? No chance.”
“Is that why you two—”
“No.”
“I don’t mean to be invasive.”
“You don’t? But I’m the one who said I wouldn’t and then—Do I think of him? Yes, I do. I do think of Sol.”
