A Book of Great Worth Read Free Page B

he’d done enough.”
    The two men observed each other in tense silence. After a minute or two, Eastman drank down his whisky. “No more nuisance, then?”
    “And no one gets hurt,” my father said. He drank his.
    “One more to cement the bargain, Morgenstern?” Eastman asked.
    •••
    That evening, my father left the Day office and headed towards the subway and the train north. He still felt a little light-headed, and elated. He’d called Bronstyn, met him for a coffee at the Café Royale and was satisfied the danger was over. It hadn’t been hard to convince his friend that he’d had an effect on the white-slavery problem and to turn his attention to other issues. The problems of unwed mothers and abused women were especially pressing, my father argued . Bronstyn agreed.
    “And the photos, they just disappear?” he asked.
    “As if they never happened,” my father said. He didn’t think the photos would actually disappear – Eastman, he thought, was a bit of a gentleman, but certainly no fool – but the threat of their being sent to other newspapers had pretty much evaporated.
    At the entrance to the subway, he hesitated, then, changing his direction, headed towards Allen Street. The two men who had been his shadows the past couple of days were no longer to be seen, and he walked slowly, breathing in the bittersweet aroma of what he thought of as the perfume of the Lower East Side, a heady mixture of cooked cabbage, baking bread, sweat, sour meat and horse manure, spiced by the sharp salt aroma of the bay wafting inland on a cool breeze, and enjoying the pastel light of the setting sun that softened the hard edges of the tenement-lined streetscape, imbuing it with a dignity it lacked during the bright glare of day. At Allen, he stopped to admire a trio of young women in bright clothing, engaged in conversation, across the street. He could hear laughter drifting in the light breeze. It was a pleasure, after the long winter, to see women without their coats and boots, mufflers and hats. These three were even showing off a bit of leg. They glanced at him, but didn’t stop their conversation.
    My father was not intending to purchase their wares – when he was a younger man, in Cleveland, he had indulged once or twice, but now he was content, on a fine evening like this, merely to do a bit of window-shopping.

• • •
    The Farmhand
    When my father was a very young man, not quite twenty-one, he spent one summer in the Catskill Mountains working for a rich family. He liked to say he was a farmhand, and there are a few grainy old photos of him, skinny and shirtless in baggy overalls, pitching a bale of hay, bareback on a horse, and milking a cow – this latter the only photo I’ve ever seen of my usually reserved father grinning. But the truth is that, while he did do some farm work, his primary responsibility that summer was to tutor the children of the family. This was a delicious irony, as my father had dropped out of school himself in the fifth grade, when he was thirteen. Any knowledge and skills he may have possessed that would make him qualified to be a tutor he had acquired on his own and were hard-earned.
    He didn’t know, when he accepted the job, that he would be drawn into an early skirmish of the Great War; would come close to becoming one of its first casualties.
    My father’s father was an eminent journalist on the Lower East Side, editor of the conservative daily The Morning Journal, and my uncle Sam, my father’s eldest brother, was also working on a newspaper, The Day , and beginning to establish a reputation as a columnist. My father too had dreams of being a writer, though he thought he’d rather write novels and poems than fodder for newspapers. “What would you write about?” my grandfather asked him when my father told him of his ambitions, and this was very much on his mind for many years afterwards. Certainly it was on this day, as he contemplated the possibility of an