With apologies to Joseph Epstein, whose collected short stories in books like Fabulous Small Jews and The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff capture the middle-class ethos of my family in Chicago, where I'd spend my boyhood summers.
The rain had been talking all night long, and was still talking this drizzly morning. Much as he'd always loved rain, he wasn't able to tell what it was trying to say, and never would. It had an untranslatable language of its own. No matter. As long as it was talking, Bernie Silverman would listen. Lying there abed, he knew that, 24 stories down, the trees on the Outer Drive and all along the Magnificent Mile were swaying with the gusts of wind and rain now sweeping the grimy downtown streets clean. He could listen forever.
Looking up, he realized the bedroom ceiling was growing worse, the plaster showing more and more hairline cracks. But he knew he'd never get around to having it repainted. Why bother? Besides, he rather liked the signs of aging, not being free of them himself. He stayed right where he was, listening to the rain come down, enjoying the peace.
He was no longer alone. He had the rain now. This had been his favorite time of day, when he used to get up to make coffee and toast, maybe slice a grapefruit, even scramble some eggs for Rose. How long had she been gone now? Going on 20 years this month? Her house-proud touch was still everywhere, along with the furniture she'd picked out so carefully. "Why don't you get rid of some of this old stuff?" a friend had asked, trying to be helpful. Bernie Silverman might as well have been asked when he was going to get rid of himself.
Maybe he'd wear his cufflinks today, the silver and black ones the boys used to admire. They were gone, too. The Greatest Generation fought World War II, but Steve had been killed in Vietnam, the stupidest war. A year later, Ben was killed in a car accident on a narrow, rain-swept highway downstate. The same rain that was trying to tell him something now. It was something urgent, imperative, immediate, filling the whole sky. Just what it was, he couldn't tell. But it was also something lulling, assuring, comforting--a story To Be Continued.
What about the gray tie with stripes? It went with the light-blue shirt and dark-blue blazer with the brass buttons. Mrs. Levine from the Temple had liked it. Sweet lady, Gus' widow. He wondered if she was still around.
Maybe he'd call old man Goldberg the tailor, or George Riley at his packing plant. They could try one of the new places in the neighborhood for lunch. A hole-in-the-wall dubbed The Oriental Palace had just opened near the scrap yard; it specialized in those simple, trifold dumplings that were getting to be so popular. Chinese kreplach. But he knew they'd go someplace else, someplace familiar they'd been to a hundred times. Like the deli down the block or The Bagel on Devon, creatures of habit that they were. Thinking about it, he started to get a craving for a pastrami-on-rye with lots of sauerkraut. And a really sour dill pickle on the side. Nothing like it.
Okay, maybe it wasn't Maxwell Street in the old days with the pushcarts and kosher restaurants, but maybe Maxwell Street hadn't been, either. The taste and smell of the fresh bagels and bulging corned-beef sandwiches . . . . It all may have been just a reflection of a little boy's appetite. Just as it was a product of an old man's nostalgia now. The mind played games.
Things change, he thought, but not all that much. There was no longer a Mayor Daley, either, but a new one by a different name. Just as hard-nosed and hard-driving. The only kind of mayor a town like Chicago would ever need. What was the name of that lady mayor who couldn't even get the snow off the streets? She was long forgotten. Mayor Daley would just dump it into the south-bound boxcars at Union Station or maybe Dearborn, and let it all melt en route South to Joliet or St. Louis--problem solved. Now there was a mayor.
Another presidential campaign was warming up, but he'd lost interest in them years ago. Just as long as the buses ran and the city was still humming, he was satisfied. Anyway, the country hadn't had a president with class since Roosevelt. There was no substitute for class. Whatever class is, the Bushes and Clintons don't have it, that's for sure. Neither did the Kennedys, despite all that bull about Camelot, as he'd known from the start.
His had been the Age of Nixon, and, like its namesake, it seemed to go on forever. If the man wasn't president, he was hoping to be, or had been. Awkward, shambling, uncomfortable in public, he was completely unsuitable--like those wingtips he'd once worn for a walk on the beach, a foto op that would turn into a typical Nixonesque fiasco.
And yet Nixon could show an unexpected--and still unappreciated--genius now and then. Now and then? Every day in every way, though nobody seemed to notice. Everybody remembers the opening to China. Brilliant. But there was so much else. He'd fool you, Tricky Dick would. And everybody else. He was all right, Nixon was, till he went crazy there toward the end, with his Enemies' List and all that.
Never hold grudges; they'll kill you. Besides, they're bad for business. You got to learn to get along with all kinds of people in this world. You'll never have a friend if you insist on having one without a fault.
It wasn't time for his every-other-week haircut at the Italian's. He might stop by the old neighborhood on the South Side for a shoe shine. The dusty Oxfords in the corner of the closet could sure use one.
Class. Hard to define, easy to tell. There hadn't been any class in baseball so's you'd notice since DiMaggio. You could have Ted Williams--too mechanical, too scientific, a place hitter. But to see DiMaggio take the field, loping across center like a gazelle that had escaped from the Lincoln Park Zoo . . . or when he was at bat with that unbelievably wide stance of his, and hit it up, up and away somewhere beyond eternity . . . . Now that was class, that was style, that was . . . Italian.
Silverman remembered Jackie Robinson, too, but Robinson was perfect. Too perfect. That was the trouble. Even the way he never lost his temper despite all the catcalls. Too wholesome, too All-American, perfectly bland.
A ballplayer ought to have some peculiarities, some identifying marks. Robinson didn't have a one, not really. And after him came the great black ballplayers--Willie Mays and all those, but by then Bernie had lost interest. The game was no longer The Game, not to him. Maybe he could get interested again. Yeah, like the Cubs could win the Series this year.
One year Rose had insisted he go to Rochester for a checkup. Of course he went. Yes, dear. And found himself being prodded and poked and X-rayed and generally over-doctored in that world capital of medical clinics. After a few days he was sent home with a long list of prescriptions so he could be over-medicated, too. He didn't think the food was all that great.
How describe the Mayo Clinic? In the words of the poet,
This is the Oxford
of all sicknesses.
Kings have lain here
and fabulous small Jews
And actresses whose legs
were always news.
When he got home, he flushed all the pills down the toilet and told Rose he felt just fine now. And he did.
He really ought to get up, he thought. But why? The sound of the rain held him, trying to tell him something. Just what he'd never know, but it didn't matter. He was supposed to get by his stockbroker's this week, but that didn't matter, either. He'd bought a few stocks when he'd started the business years ago and held on to them. Then added some others. Sure, there had been down years, but mostly it was up. He had no complaints.
He'd learned one lesson from it all: Never bet against America; she always came back. And always would. So long as there were always new Americans arriving every year. This year they were Mexicans; who knew where they'd come from next year. There would always be a new crop as long as there were wars and plagues and poverty in the world--and there would never be a shortage of those. His investments were safe.
He'd have to get some salami and good cheese--and Kaiser rolls--for the pinochle game Sunday night. At least that hadn't changed even if the players had. Once he'd told Soon Lee, before he'd had a chance to think about it, that with the hand he'd drawn, he didn't have a Chinaman's chance.
Nobody minded, least of all Soon Lee, any more than he did when somebody said he was just trying to jew them down. Now the kids get all huffy-puffy about such things. Big deal. The country had changed, they said, and maybe it had, but not that much. Any more than the rain had. Or ever would. It just went on and on . . . . and he would go with it.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 08/16/2015