The Draw Read online

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  A Note About the Author

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  For my children, Julian and Harper

  And if that diamond ring turns brass,

  Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.

  Author’s Note

  Most names and some identifying information about people in this book have been changed.

  1

  HAVE MERCY

  The late August night before I went away to college I stood with my grandfather on 231st Street in the Bronx. We were standing on a rise in the street, a little hill that sloped downward in either direction. I could hear the subway clatter past on the elevated tracks over Broadway, two blocks to the east.

  Over my grandfather’s shoulder was an incandescent coin, a full moon. What is she doing to us? he said in a choked voice. He was referring to my mother, who had decided to leave my father. Despite Menka’s seventy years and his receding mane of pure white hair, he looked like a boy, standing there confused, despairing, under the full silvery moon, with his round, swarthy face and soft brown eyes, on the little hill.

  I don’t know, I said. I don’t understand. I had always called him Papa as a child. Now that I was older I couldn’t call him that. “Grandpa” was out of the question. It lacked the almost tangible warmth of the Russian words I heard my grandparents speak to each other. Walter Brennan, on one of the TV shows I watched obsessively, The Real McCoys, was someone I would call Grandpa. Yet I could not bring myself to call my grandfather by the names everyone else called him by: Menka, which was a Russian diminutive for Emanuel, or Manny, which he somehow acquired as the American version of the Russian diminutive. He was Papa. So for some time I hadn’t called him anything at all. Instead I would smile at him, and he would smile at me. I buried my face in his chest.

  Make a life for yourself, he said. Make a life for yourself. That was my grandfather’s precious phrase. So was: You have to have something to fall back on. Born in Odessa, he had lost much of his family in the 1905 Odessa pogrom, when Cossacks got off their horses to stride through the seaside town and butcher Jewish men, women, and children in the street.

  My grandfather, who was barely a toddler then, never talked about the pogrom. I never knew whether his parents were killed or survived or, if they did survive, what happened to them. He never spoke about his parents. Twelve years later, he said, he made his way to Moscow with two older sisters and an older brother. I had met them once or twice when I was very young: Yeva, Nova, and Zema, all of them old, kind and quiet as they caressed me with fingers that were long and old, with peels of dry, white skin that felt rough against my face.

  The revolution had broken out. My grandfather covered that event with terse comedy. Someone handed him a rifle, he said. He shot a few bullets into the air. Then he made his way to a boat. There he met his sisters and brother, and all of them sailed to America.

  For Jews such as my grandfather, who had suffered in Europe, history was made strictly by the goyim. Like professional sports, history was not a Jewish field. As he told the story of his escape into a new life, with its blatant omissions, exaggerations, and possibly wholesale fabrications, his face took on a glittering sardonic aspect, hard and grasping and touched with malice. You could not imagine that face wrinkling into tears unless you had worked out the equation between excessive feeling and paucity of empathy.

  When my mother, his daughter, was about fifteen, she told him that she wanted to smoke. Fine, he said, handing her his cigar. Suck on this and take in as much smoke as you can. Hold it in for as long as you can without breathing. She followed his instructions and vomited until she had nothing left to vomit. That is how you smoke, he said, laughing. Upon learning from my younger brother, who was then about eight, that he was afraid of going down alone to the basement of my grandparents’ apartment building, where there was a vending machine that dispensed milk, my grandfather took my brother by the hand, walked him into the hallway, and rang for the elevator. When it arrived, he gently guided my brother into it. Handing him a quarter for the machine, he pressed the button for the basement and, smiling, waved goodbye to my terrified brother as the elevator doors closed.

  * * *

  Living with relatives in the Bronx, Menka worked at various jobs until, as a young man, he found a position as a bellboy at the President Hotel on West Forty-eighth Street in Times Square. He stayed there for decades. Whereas he was reticent about Odessa, he enjoyed telling stories about his experiences at the President, a tony hotel much beloved by Harlem’s artistic elite. The fact of my grandfather working as a bellboy, not for rich white people but for rich black people, made a lasting impression on me. The black porters at Grand Central Station, whom I sometimes saw as a young boy on visits to New York City with my family, and on our occasional family trip by rail, mingled in my imagination with my grandfather.

  I saw these black men through the eyes of a boy, fifty years ago, so you must forgive a description that now seems insensitive. But, fifty years ago, I thought I saw that within the yoke of their menial work they moved inside their own free space. I cherished this dignity-in-harness that I also thought I found in Menka, who carried other people’s things for a living.

  The President Hotel was the site of a famous nightclub, Adrian’s Tap Room. Fats Waller and other prominent jazz musicians of the day liked to perform there. Harry Belafonte once gave my grandfather a radio as a gift, Menka told us, his face radiant with pride. Diana Ross presented him with a fifty-dollar tip. His round, boyish face suddenly gleaming and sardonic, he would tell us about the treasures he found left behind in the hotel and kept: jewelry, watches, clothes, money. He never questioned the rightness of making off with these things. They were the spoils of a vicious world.

  * * *

  Rose, my grandmother and Menka’s wife, was born in Minsk. She emigrated to America with her parents in the 1920s. Her four older sisters remained in Minsk and were shot with their husbands and children in a mass grave by the SS after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

  Menka won Rose’s heart with a trick that he performed with money. Every day he would come into her parents’ candy store in the Bronx, where Rose worked behind the counter. He would produce a dollar bill from his pocket. Holding it up for her to see, he made it disappear. Then he produced it again. That was how Menka thought of money. It was the foundation of love, life, and happiness but also an object of contempt because, like a prostitute, it bestowed itself without discrimination.

  The other side of Menka’s idea of money as something like snow, there for the taking, was his fear that once he possessed it, the money would vanish. At the end of his life, he and Rose lived comfortably in their aging, medium-rise apartment building on 231st Street, half a block from where I said goodbye to him that August night. They stayed afloat because their rent was protected by the city, and by means of Menka’s modest savings.

  Nevertheless, as he and Rose sat in the back of a taxi that was rushing them to a hospital after Menka suffered a heart attack—the ambulance they calle
d for was taking too long—he whispered to Rose, There’s forty dollars taped underneath the medicine cabinet. Then he died.

  * * *

  As a young girl, Lola, my mother, aspired to be an actress. At the age of seventeen, just after graduating from high school, she auditioned at the Actors Studio, even then a legendary place, and got accepted. She found herself in a class with Marlon Brando, who was either a student in the class or a visitor, I was never sure.

  Brando, according to my mother, always came to class wearing old, dirty clothes that recalled the torn, sweaty T-shirt that he had made famous in A Streetcar Named Desire. One day, on a dare from some of the other young women in the class, my mother went up to Brando and asked him why he did not come to class wearing nicer clothes. “Fuck you,” Brando said.

  My mother told this story over and over again. Until her separation from my father, she never used the word “fuck.” She said “Eff you.” When she said it, her eyes shone with a faraway look. You would have thought Brando had said “I love you.” My mother, like Menka, had a tremendous capacity for absorbing humiliation.

  After taking a few classes at the Actors Studio, she declared to Menka that she wanted to be an actress and a singer. He slapped her face.

  She was an only child and Menka was the center of her existence. When he struck her—the only time, my mother said, that he did so—he bent her spirit toward him for the rest of her life. She adored Menka as if he had been Brando himself, and she hated him with suppressed, embarrassed fury.

  Even when she was in her late thirties, married with two children and living in a house in a New Jersey suburb, a withering look from Menka could turn her from a wife and mother into a little girl. She would freeze and start to stammer. By then my grandfather, about sixty-five, looked ten years older. A lifetime of heavy smoking had given him emphysema. He would start to cough, and cough and cough, then gag and choke, unable to breathe until, with a long, heavy, paper-crinkling sound, he heaved up liquid like a flame from deep inside his lungs. At moments like that, his eyes bulged almost out of his head. His dark-complexioned face turned a deep red. Tears—from his mortal cells, not from his emotions—ran down his face.

  I did not understand how my mother could be afraid of such a weakened person. But Menka hadn’t just struck her. As my mother told the story, he followed his blow with a short speech about all actresses being whores. He knew that for a certainty, he said, because he had encountered many actresses in the hotel. In that one instant, he thwarted my mother’s ambition and tried to stifle the sexual yearning he felt inside it. In its place, he put a picture of his own sexuality in her head, stuck there, forever, with the adhesive of the slap.

  * * *

  Like the smell from a gas leak, money began to seep its way into every aspect of their relationship. If my mother wanted money to buy herself a new dress, Menka said no. If she wanted money to travel before settling down to marriage, he said no. When she met my father, an aspiring jazz pianist, Menka warned her against him because of his modest income.

  With regard to my father, my grandmother drew a line. She insisted that my mother follow her own heart, and Menka relented. Rose seemed to spend most of her days in submissive silence, perfecting the art of the pot roast, but all the while she was discreetly consolidating her power over a husband who was outwardly aggressive yet inwardly meek.

  A short, solidly built woman, Rose held her cigarette with an elegant delicacy that was like the tip of a submerged, different, commanding self. Simply holding her cigarette in such a way, she announced to the world that, despite appearances, she had ownership of Menka. Every once in a while, when she thought there was a battle worth fighting, she threatened to leave Menka if she didn’t get her way. My grandfather always had weak lungs, suffering from asthma and bronchitis and then emphysema, yet he continued to smoke. The thought of having to fend for himself without Rose made Menka panic.

  Roused to anger, she would insult Menka in Yiddish. The old words, bristling with consonants, left her mouth as though she were spitting out the broken bones of a small animal: Vern zol fun dir a blintshik, un di kats zol dikh khapn: “May you become a blintz and be taken by a cat.” Cats made Menka struggle to breathe. He begged her to stay, often through tears, and gave her what she wanted.

  * * *

  I was an asthmatic child myself, prone to lung ailments throughout my life. I remember many times as a small boy awakening in the dead of night, whimpering and gasping for breath during an asthma attack. My father would rush into my bedroom in his underwear, sweep me up into his large arms, and hurry with me into the bathroom, where he ran the shower as hot as he could until the steam, and also my father’s comforting presence, enabled me to breathe again. At the age of eleven, I caught pneumonia. My mother doted on me, and I grew accustomed to being cared for. Laid up in bed and swaddled in blankets for weeks, sometimes months at a time, I watched television and read the armloads of books that my mother brought me from the public library. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which transformed a patch of sunlight on my bedroom wall into pitiless and romantic Spain; a compact volume titled Understanding the Great Philosophers, where I read about Spinoza, who supported his cosmic thoughts with a meager living as a lens grinder; an anthology of Greek tragedies told in the style of children’s stories that held me rapt with figures who were unaware of how their conscious actions were weaving a countermotion to the fate they took for granted—these were some of my favorite books. I inhabited the real and made-up lives I encountered and pretended that on account of my heroic or poignant actions all the world revered or felt for me, and wished to care for me the way my mother did.

  Once I was well, though, I felt vulnerable in a different way. I had to fend for myself without anyone to care for me. I craved the attention that I had received while sick.

  Soon I found a way to reclaim the importance I had enjoyed. I discovered that I could make people laugh. Comedy conferred on me something like the power I experienced in my sickbed bouts of vicarious action. The sharper my distress, the more compulsive my routines.

  * * *

  One of my bits of business, which I developed around the age of fifteen, took up the centrality of tears in my family. It wasn’t just Menka and I who melted. Tears were the family lingua franca.

  All that family blubbering—a joke I concocted when still a boy: I was born with a silver violin in my mouth: yuk, yuk, yuk—rose up from dark places. It was blatantly manipulative, a tried-and-true gambit meant to induce guilt, but more elemental, suddenly crying was a way of coaxing someone into caring for you. During long bouts of illness, when I would read or watch television in marathon sessions, I sometimes sat rapt before the spectacle of Harpo Marx unmanning himself by putting his leg in someone’s hand.

  My routine, devised for my friends, went like this. I pretended to be one member of my family, and then another.

  The first member wrinkles his face and makes quiet weeping sounds.

  The second member does the same.

  First member begins to sob.

  Second member sobs in response.

  First member weeps, and sobs and moans.

  Second member: ditto.

  Both family members weep, sob, and moan. Then they nod their heads and embrace.

  My routine incited the immoderate laughter of my friends: Paul Dolcetto, Alex Tarmanian, Teddy Di Buono, Terry Cushman, Peter Camino, Arthur Teitelbaum, Matthew Cassidy. They were all, like me, products of immigrant grandparents and white ethnic parents who had made their way out of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. My friends had become my surrogate family, a home away from my increasingly turbulent real home.

  * * *

  It turned out that Menka’s worries about my father were not unfounded. Unable to support his growing family on his pianist’s slender income, but also eager to make a fortune in the booming real estate market that was rippling through postwar New Jersey, Monroe gave up his career as a jazz pianist and got a job as a realtor.
About ten years later, the market collapsed, and after a couple of years of growing tension at his job, he was let go.

  Unable to find another position in real estate, my father returned to music. The opportunities had narrowed for him there, too. Though in his prime he had played with the likes of Stan Kenton and had never wanted for work at various nightclubs and swank private parties, he now settled for doing bar mitzvahs and weddings with his trio. He called himself Lee Sage when he was performing. To make ends meet, he gave piano lessons. It thrilled him to have a student who lived next door to Sam Sinatra, cousin of Frank.

  One minute my father was composing songs that my mother had written the words for and sang while he accompanied her on the piano, the two of them recording their compositions in a studio at their own expense in hopes of hitting it big—the next minute my mother was at his throat, accusing him of negligence, incompetence, all sorts of weakness.

  My father’s own father, Leopold Siegel, died of a heart attack at the age of forty, when Monroe was thirteen. This left my father permanently heartbroken. He stuttered until he was in his twenties. Throughout his life, he became tongue-tied in moments of stress. He could not stand up to my mother.

  Despite my father’s crooked teeth, he was a tall, handsome, good-natured young man who seemed to regard the future with a confidence nourished by his creative gifts—besides being a pianist, he was a natural painter, self-taught, though he never thought of art as more than a hobby. My mother the aspiring actress would have fallen for his artistic side. And for the fact that my father utterly lacked Menka’s malice.

  But more than anything else, it was mutual vulnerability that drew my parents to each other. Sharing faltering parts of themselves that needed to be supported reassured each of them that the other was incapable of inflicting pain. It would not have occurred to them that, at the same time, a race had begun to see which one would become exhausted by the other’s weaknesses first.