You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  “And all the money we make!” my father chimed in, which made my mother look at him as if he were some drunken fool who’d wandered in from the street.

  “You go wash up, and don’t forget to use hydrogen peroxide,” she said. Then, to my father: “And you—who invited you to this party? Because you can drop dead for all I care. In fact, the both of you can, and I mean it this time, to have this little pisher talk to me the way he did…”

  Which words seemed to give my father the excuse he was waiting for to take a turn whacking me around while proclaiming that nobody talked to his wife the way I did without having to deal with him. But I got away easily—I was always too quick for him—and locked myself in the bathroom, where I cleaned out the scratches on my face.

  By the time I came out my mother was gone, who knew where, so I headed out to meet my friends, and we went to Minsky’s and had a great old time. When I explained the marks on my face by saying I’d picked up this wild chick in Greenwich Village—a real tiger—and had started celebrating early by taming the beast in her, my friends were skeptical, but not totally disbelieving—I had a reputation for taking dares and doing wild things back then—and I doubt that it would have occurred to any of them to think it was my mother who’d done the damage.

  My mother and I never mentioned Doctor Margolies or black market babies again, but I think it broke her heart—not that I knew about what she did, because how could I not have known, given all the talk that went on over our phone about babies and money and lawyers and when and where deliveries and exchanges would take place, but because by saying what I’d said I’d broken some unwritten agreement we’d had about never acknowledging out loud that she did what she did.

  But there was something else at work too, because if we’d talked about it, I would have agreed that though she and Doctor Margolies may have been breaking laws, they weren’t hurting anyone: that they were, in fact, doing what my mother said they were doing—helping some people out of jams while helping other people fulfill their dreams. Plus—the main thing, from my point of view—they were giving a child who would have been stigmatized as a bastard, a life that child would never otherwise have had. I’d heard my mother whispering her justifications and rationalizations into the phone to one or another of her sisters (she had three sisters and one other brother besides Herschel), or to Doctor Margolies, a thousand times, and except for when she’d cover the mouthpiece with her hand and go more hush-hush if I passed through the foyer, where our phone was, I never thought much about the effect on me of what she did, partly because I’d heard her talk about other doctors and nurses who were doing the same thing, so that it just seemed what people did to avoid being at the mercy of adoption agencies and the crap and lousy choices they put you through.

  What I began to see, though—what became clear around the time of Herschel’s death—was that one reason I got so angry with my mother wasn’t because of what she and Doctor Margolies did—in a weird way, I was proud of her for being a kind of outlaw who risked her life and career to rescue people from misery—but because I’d always wanted to be one of the children she’d bought and sold.

  Because if a mother and father paid large amounts of money and risked going to jail to make you their child, they must really have wanted you and loved you.

  “Dogs fuck dogs and make more dogs,” I’d hear my mother say to people she was providing babies for. “It’s raising the child that makes you a parent, and you’ll see—the minute you hold that precious package in your arms, you’ll fall in love with it and feel it’s yours and will be yours forever.”

  My cousin Joey had been a black market baby—born, bought, and sold into our family before I was born—and because he was my favorite cousin, it made me wish I could have come into the world the way he did: illicitly, and in a way that, once he discovered his true origins, he could, as I saw it, have had it both ways—he could be grateful to his parents, my Uncle Herschel and Aunt Rose, for wanting him so much that they made him their child even though he wasn’t biologically theirs, and he could also have held a trump card against them if he ever needed one by being able to say: You’re not my real parents.

  But I didn’t love Joey mainly because he’d been a black market baby. He’d become my hero years before I knew this about him, when he was fighting in the Pacific as a navigator in a B-24 over Saipan and New Guinea. When I wrote letters to him, he answered them, and at the end of each letter always said that my prayers were keeping him and his buddies alive—that they were fighting to keep us all alive and free—and that I should keep my chin up and the home fires burning.

  When he came home from the war in 1945, he brought me a box of souvenirs—insignias, medals, a compass in a flip-open metal case, a small gnarled item wrapped in plastic that he said was the ear of a Japanese soldier (while I was sleeping one night, my mother took it from my room and threw it away), three bullets still filled with gunpowder, and his dog tags, which I wore on a chain around my neck.

  And he told me again—this was at a welcome home party his parents made, a big red-white-and-blue sign over the entrance to their apartment building—WELCOME HOME OUR HERO JOEY!—that it was thinking about me that had kept him going when he never knew if, in the next minute or hour, he was going to live or die. He just kept telling himself, “If I stay alive, I bet there’ll be another letter from Marty waiting for me at the base when I get back, and you know what? I lived for your letters, Marty! I showed them to my buddies and they agreed that you’ve got one hell of a talent there and are gonna be a great writer some day.”

  “Really? ” I’d say.

  “You bet,” he’d say, and chuck me on the shoulder. “When it comes to words, you got the gift. But there was this, too, see—because most of the other guys got their letters from their wives or sweethearts, what they worried about—almost more than getting shot down and captured, which we figured would be worse than dying, the way the Japs did things—was if their women would stay true to them, them being away from home for so long.”

  “Did you see any of them die?” I asked.

  “I saw some of my buddies die,” he said, and as soon as he did, he walked away to the table where the booze was, poured himself a drink, and began slapping people on the back and telling them how great it was to be home.

  Joey went to college on the G.I. Bill—to Brooklyn College, where he was a star on the basketball team (he’d been high scorer for his high school team when he’d played at Erasmus before the war), and I’d go to all his home games. He always left me comp tickets at the door, and I usually sat with Herschel, who’d go wild whenever Joey scored, but even wilder when a referee called a foul on Joey that Hershel disagreed with. He’d scream and curse at the ref, and ask him who his optometrist was, or if the other coach or some bookie was paying him off, and if a ref looked his way, Herschel would stand up and point right at him and tell the guy to meet him outside after the game and he’d show him what playing fair was all about.

  I think Joey looked up to his father as much as I looked up to Joey, though when I once said something to my mother about how much Joey admired Herschel, and about what a great man he was, she sneered.

  “My brother has his fans, that’s for sure, but don’t count me as one of them,” she said. “I love him, I suppose, and he probably loves me in his cockeyed way, but mostly Herschel’s an operator who’s always been hot after the buck.”

  “But he was a great boxer,” I protested, and talked about all the trophies in his apartment, and the signed photos on the walls of him with famous fighters—Jack Dempsey, Max Baer, Benny Leonard, Gene Fullmer, Carmen Basilio, Jimmy Braddock, and lots of others.

  “He got around, Herschel did,” my mother acknowledged. “And he had some talent and lots of grit, I’ll give that to him.”

  “Joey says he knew all the great fighters, even Joe Louis!”

  “He knows Louis,” my mother said, and looked at me in a funny way that made me think she knew I was thinking ab
out Louis’s training camp in Lakewood, New Jersey, where I’d been with Herschel and Joey, and which was near the place where a lot of the young women who got pregnant, and who my mother and Doctor Margolies worked with, stayed before they gave birth.

  After Joey graduated from college, he got a start in the garment business through a guy who owed Herschel a favor from gambling debts Herschel had helped him with, but a guy who also said that with Joey’s record—a war hero, and a star athlete—along with his terrific personality and good looks (he was a dead ringer, the man said, for the actor John Garfield, who’d grown up in the man’s neighborhood when his name was Jacob Garfinkle)—he’d be a natural.

  Which he was, and within less than two years he’d moved up from salesman, to head of sales, to full partner. By this time, he’d also married—Carol Schifrin, a very pretty lady who’d gone to Adelphi College and ran a travel agency with her parents—and they’d had a house built for them in Scarsdale they helped design. Although my mother and father didn’t like to praise much connected with Herschel or Joey, they couldn’t keep from being in awe at what they called the dream-come-true house and life Joey and Carol had. And on rare occasions my mother would accord Joey the highest compliment you could pay a guy in those days. “He’s good to his parents—I have to give him that,” she’d say. “He’s good to Rose and Herschel, and that goes a long way with me.”

  We visited Joey for his Open House party in Scarsdale, and, since everyone I knew until then lived in small one or two bedroom apartments (I didn’t have a single friend or relative who owned a private home), the house seemed incredible. It had four separate bathrooms (including one attached to the guest room), sky-lights in all the upstairs bedrooms, a landscaped backyard with an in-ground swimming pool, and—my favorite part—a finished basement with a bar, a first-class stereo system, an enormous TV, and a workout room where, along with weights and barbells, there was a gym-quality heavy bag, a speed bag that hung down from the ceiling, and, the bag Herschel loved most of all, a free-standing reflex speed bag.

  After school sometimes, I’d take the subway into Manhattan, to Eighth Avenue and West 38th Street, to visit Joey, and no matter when I did, he’d stop work and tell his secretaries to hold his phone calls so he could show me around. The main factory floor was over a hundred feet long and about thirty to forty feet wide, with two long tables running its length on which there were bolts of cloth spread out flat and stacked high that the cutters worked on. Around three sides of the room were dozens of sewing machines where women—mostly Spanish, but with a few elderly Jewish ladies too—assembled and stitched together material that came from the cutting tables.

  Joey’s company manufactured sports shirts mostly, the kinds with little emblems on their breast pockets of animals—crocodiles (this was before Lacoste trademarked them), ducks, sharks, tigers, bears, lions—or sports stuff: baseballs, footballs, basketballs, tennis balls, tennis rackets, golf balls, golf clubs—and Joey would give me a tour of the place, introduce me to workers, tell me what they did, and praise them for how good they were at their jobs. He’d always ask which of his new line of shirts I liked best, and before I left he’d give me a box with three or four shirts packed up in white tissue paper.

  When I was fifteen, and playing JV basketball at Erasmus, Joey came to some of my games, gave me pointers, mostly about passing and defense, which he called the dying arts of the game, and when the season was over, and I’d made it up to varsity for the last half-dozen games and the playoffs (we went to the quarterfinals of the city championship that year, and had two guys on our team, Doug Moe and Julie Cohen, who eventually wound up being All-American college players), to celebrate my season, he and his father got permission from my mother to take me out to Lakewood for a weekend, where Joe Louis, well past his prime and in big trouble with ex-wives and back taxes (and drugs, we’d later learn), was training in the hopes of making another comeback, even though, while still champ, he’d already been badly shown up by Billy Conn and Jersey Joe Walcott, and, in his initial comeback attempts, had been badly beaten by Ezzard Charles and Rocky Marciano.

  I’d been to the training camp twice before, but when I was much younger, and this time being there was a dream come true. I was able to go jogging with Joey, Herschel, and the fighters and trainers every morning—Louis too—and to spend my day in the gym, working out on the machines and watching the fighters spar. I ate my meals at the training tables with them, and it felt wonderful to see the way people still looked up to Herschel, and lapped up the stories he told about the way things had been in the fight game in what he called the golden olden days.

  That year Joey had gotten Jackie Robinson to endorse a line of shirts—long-sleeve shirts with leopard skin patterns—and he’d brought a few boxes of the shirts with him, before they were put on sale in stores, and gave them out to everyone, including Louis, and they were a big hit. At night, after the fighters went to sleep, Herschel and the managers and trainers would reminisce and argue and drink until the early hours of the morning, when—their way of signalling it was time to hit the hay—one of them would tell the old story of Max Baer stumbling back to his corner when Dempsey was acting as one of his seconds, and telling Dempsey, “I see three of them.” “Hit the one in the middle,” Dempsey advised.

  Although Herschel had never fought professionally, he’d been a top-flight amateur boxer, undefeated in twenty-six bouts, and he’d sparred with the best of them—Willie Pep, Barney Ross, Solly Krieger, even Kid Gavilan and ‘Sugar Ray’ Robinson—and he was an amazing storehouse of anecdotes and facts, especially about Jewish fighters. He could name them all—Ross, Leonard, Tendler, Attell, ‘Battling’ Levinsky, ‘Slapsie Maxie’ Rosenbloom, Lesnevich, and he loved to be able to point out, when people brought up Baer as the greatest of them all (Baer had killed two men in fights, including Frankie Campbell, the brother of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first baseman, ‘Dolph’ Camilli), that even though Baer wore a Star of David on his trunks, he was less of a Jew than Jack Dempsey. Baer’s paternal grandfather, a butcher, was probably Jewish, Herschel would say, but Dempsey’s maternal grandmother, Rachel Solomon, was truly Jewish, and that made Dempsey a Jew in his book, and surely would have made him a Jew if he’d been living in Hitler’s Germany.

  What also surprised me was that most of the men, Louis included, had great respect for Max Schmeling, who’d been known as ‘Hitler’s boxer,’ and who’d beaten Louis for the world championship in their first fight, then lost to him in the first round of their famous rematch, but who, according to Herschel, had been ‘a real mensch’ to Louis, and—Louis nodded agreement—was now helping him out financially in his battles with thugs from the Internal Revenue Service.

  On our second day in Lakewood, Joey took me on a drive around the area—a first—just the two of us, and when we drove past a house that was up a long driveway, partway into the woods—a colonial style building that looked as if it had once been a classy hotel, but which clearly, starting with rusted cars in the front yard, had fallen on hard times—he told me that this was probably the house he was born in: one of the places where the women my mother helped out lived while they waited for their children to be born.

  The house is surely gone by now, and that part of the world’s been taken over by Jews, not only Chassidic Jews with their huge families, but modern Orthodox Jews, and middle-class Jews who prefer to own their own homes or condos near New York City rather than retire to assisted living places in Florida. Years later, when Joey was drinking hard and deep in the soup one night, I asked him about the house, and about the women who lived in them—asked if he’d ever wanted to find out who his mother was—and he got a sudden wild-fire in his eyes, as if, had he been sober, he would have tried to kill me, and he said that say what you would, the women in those places were all sluts.

  “Oh come on—!” I began, but he grabbed me by the front of my shirt. “Yeah, yeah—I know all about it,” he said, cutting me off, “the way you people think now—ho
w the guys were dishonorable shits and didn’t pay the price women did—but say what you will, they were all dirty sluts, my mother included.”

  I was stunned by the venom in his voice, but when we were driving around the Lakewood area together that first time, I loved him so much I would never have dreamt he could have had such a vicious, unkind thought in his head. That was also the day he explained how it all worked: how when families of pregnant young women came to certain doctors—after they found out their lousy news and wanted to avoid the shame that would accompany an illegitimate birth—these doctors would tell them there was an alternative to the danger of abortion, and refer them to doctors like Margolies who were associated with lawyers who could guarantee that the women we now call ‘birth-mothers’ would never know to which families their infants were given away. The lawyers also took care of whatever papers were needed—health forms, birth certificates—and dealt with financial arrangements, and with people in the Lakewood area who needed to be paid off for looking the other way. For this, Joey said, his father’s connections with gambling big shots, many of whom vacationed in the Lakewood area and spent time at training camps like the one I went to with Joey and Herschel, had been helpful. He also said that no matter what my mother said about him, he never took offense because in his eyes she’d always be the most courageous woman he knew—that it was because of women like her that guys like him got a break in life.

  On our third and last day at the camp, Herschel taped up my hands, brought me headgear and gloves, and put me in the ring with a young professional fighter named Danny Mancuso, who was about my weight, maybe one-forty, and bet that even though I’d never been in a ring before, given how good an athlete I was, I could go three rounds with Mancuso without being knocked down. I looked to Joey, who gave me a big grin and said he was going to lay a hundred smackers on me against any and all takers.