Thy Neighbor's Wife Read Free

by his father, for whom he worked long hours in the garage; and Harold’s grandmother did not feel sufficiently close to Harold’s mother to share the frustration and bitterness she felt. So it was mainly Harold, sometimes accompanied by his younger brother, who interrupted the prevailing silence and boredom in the house. And as Harold became older and more curious, more remote from his parents and his own surroundings, he gradually became his grandmother’s confidant, her ally in alienation.
    From her he learned much about his father’s boyhood, his grandfather’s past, and why she had married such a tyrannical man. John Rubin had been born sixty-six years ago in Russia, the son of a Jewish peddler, and at the age of two he had immigrated with his parents to a city near Lake Michigan called Sobieski, named in honor of a seventeenth-century Polish king. After a minimum of schooling and unrelieved poverty, Rubin and other youths were arrested staging a holdup during which a policeman was shot. Released on probation, and after working at various jobs for a few years, Rubin one day visited his older married sister in Chicago and became attracted to the young Czechoslovakian girl then taking care of the baby.
    On a subsequent visit he found her in the house alone, and after she had rejected his advances—as she had previously donewith men when she had worked in the boardinghouse—he forced her into her bedroom and raped her. She was then sixteen. It had been her first sexual experience, and it would make her pregnant. Panicked, but having no close relatives or friends nearby to help, she was persuaded by her employers to marry John Rubin, or else he would go off to prison because of his prior criminal offense, and she would be no better off. They were married in October 1912. Six months later they had a son, Harold’s father.
    The loveless marriage did not greatly improve with time, Harold’s grandmother said, adding that her husband regularly beat his son, beat her when she interfered, and devoted himself mainly to the maintenance of his trucks. His lucrative career had begun when, after he had worked as a deliveryman on a horse and wagon for Spiegel, Inc., a large mail-order house in Chicago, he convinced management to lend him enough money to invest in a truck and start his own motorized delivery service, thus eliminating Spiegel’s need for several horses whose performance he said could not match his own. After buying one truck and fulfilling his promise, he bought a second truck, then a third. Within a decade John Rubin had a dozen trucks handling all of Spiegel’s local cartage, as well as that of other companies.
    Over the futile protests of his wife, his son was summoned as an adolescent into the garage to work as a driver’s helper, and although John Rubin was amassing great personal wealth at this time and was generous with his bribes to local politicians and the police—“If you wanna slide, you gotta grease,” he often said—he was a miser with the family budget, and he frequently accused his wife of stealing coins that he had left around the house. Later he began deliberately to leave money here and there in amounts that he precisely remembered, or he would arrange coins in a certain way on the bureau or elsewhere in the house in the hope that he could prove that his wife took some or at least touched them; but he never could.
    These and other remembrances of Harold’s grandmother, and similar observations that he made himself while in his grandfather’s chilly presence, gave Harold considerable insight into hisown father, a quiet and humorless man of forty-four resembling not in the slightest the photograph on the piano that was taken during World War II and showed him in a corporal’s uniform looking relaxed and handsome, many miles from home. But the fact that Harold could understand his father did not make living with him any easier, and as Harold now approached East Avenue, the street on which