The Boy Detective Read Free Page A

literary figures, such as Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfield lived on Irving Place as well. Local dinner parties were jazzed up by the likes of George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Ethel Barrymore, and Langston Hughes. They spilled gaily into what Van Vechten had called “the splendid drunken twenties.” In 1927, Nathanael West took a position as night manager of the fleabag Kenmore Hotel on Twenty-third, where he wrote The Day of the Locust and snuck other writers into the hotel. Dashiell Hammett registered under the name Mr. T. Victoria Blueberry. West gave him the swankiest suite in the joint, where Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon —telling of wicked women, murderers, and treasure three blocks from where Herman Melville, PI, alone and unnoticed, had tracked evildoers down the vast gray streets of the sea.
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    T O THIS PRECIOUS PLACE, Dr. Milton B. Rosenblatt brought his bride, Mollie Ruth Spruch, in 1939, one year before I was born. Suspicious characters, both. Even their names were aliases. My mother was born Marta, but when she entered grade school, the authorities told my German grandparents that Marta was not an American name, as compared to, say, Mollie. No one seemed to know where my father came from. Whenever I asked, the answer was different each time. Sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, occasionally Lithuania. As for his alias, the B. stood for Barrington, which he picked up on a drive through Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He thought the name gave him WASPy class, which he both sought and derided. He rises from his own ashes, my fastidious father, and dusts himself off.
    He wore three-piece suits. He wore hats from Cavanaugh’s—gray felt hats in the winters and straw skimmers in the summers. He wore neckties indoors, and smoking jackets, sitting alone in the silent home he made. I have a photograph of him when he was two or three, wearing a girl’s dress as all infants did in those days. He looked old even then, with his grim, displeased expression and his Edward G. Robinson jowls. As a child, I was expected to be old, too. “Roger,” he said one day, “that’s no way for a twelve-year-old boy to behave.” “Dad,” I said, “I’m eight.”
    So angry was he with life, his fury often came out funny. All my childhood, I was assailed by his rules for successful living, such as “Never trust a Hungarian.” At the age of three, it was hard to know how to apply such advice. In my teens, he told me, “Never go out with anyone from Brooklyn,” which expanded to include the Bronx, Queens, and New Jersey as well. Reared on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he hated that fact, too. He spent his remaining years trying to get away from the poverty associated with the Lower East Side, and to shake off Judaism as if it were a local curse. He wanted to be up and out. Up from DeWitt Clinton High School. Up from City College, where he was a boxer. When he became a doctor, he and my mother moved up in the world to Gramercy Park, where he had his first office. Later, he moved his office farther uptown, to 1040 Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fifth Street. When Jackie Kennedy moved into the building in 1964, he complained about the Secret Service men. He hated them. He hated her, with whom, of course, he never spoke. He was made chief of medicine at Doctors Hospital, the ritziest if not the most efficient hospital in the city. Ever combative, he told me he won the position “over all the Harvards and Yales.”
    In the 1960s, when I was in my twenties, he became a neocon Republican like many FDR Democrats, and was sneeringly contemptuous of every liberalizing event I celebrated. Often we would argue late into the night, and although I was in the right in our arguments, he always managed to gain the upper hand. One evening, we were seated next to each other in identical red upholstered chairs, watching the seven o’clock news,