Pearl Harbor came, and we didn’t hear from him for a long time. Maybe he’s been drafted into the army, we thought, because he was that age, and naturally we worried. But then, in December of 1943, he showed up again with Hanukkah presents for all of us: a gold necklace for me, silver hairbrushes for his father, and even a silver ring with a diamond in it for his sister, Simma, though it was too big for any of her fingers and she had to wear it with a piece of adhesive tape around it. Simma was fourteen then. “Do you suppose he stole these things, Mama?” she asked me later. It was an omen.
“It’s been so long since we’ve heard from you,” I said to him. “We thought maybe you’d been drafted into the army.”
“Flat feet,” he said with a wink.
I don’t know for sure, but I never believed that. I think he just never bothered to register for the draft. A mother should know that, shouldn’t she? If there was anything the matter with her son’s feet?
Anyway, the worst moment came a few years later, in 1949. A policeman came to our door. He had a warrant for Solly’s arrest. Grand larceny, they called it. Grand theft. Of course he didn’t live with us, and we didn’t know how to find him. But somehow they found him. And they arrested him. Oh, my … oh, my.… Do you need to keep that machine running? Yes … turn it off.
Fine. I’m better now. It was just remembering all that. They arrested him for selling fur coats off the racks he’d been schlepping in the streets. His boss had been missing certain garments for some time. He suspected it was one of his employees, and he sent out a company spy to try to catch whoever it was. Solly was schlepping a rack of mink coats down 34th Street, and this spy approached him and said he was interested in buying a mink coat for his wife. Solly offered to sell him one for five hundred dollars, and that’s how they knew who it was.
Oh, my. I’m not saying it’s all right to sell garments that belong to the boss, but was it right for the boss to catch him that way? With a spy he sent out? Somehow, it just doesn’t seem right to me.
Naturally, we were devastated, his father and I. Abe met with the boss and offered to pay full retail for all the missing garments. He went down on bended knee, begging. But the boss had a heart of stone. He wouldn’t let Solly off. He refused to drop the charges. And so there was a trial, and Solly was convicted, and the judge sentenced him to ten years in the state penitentiary, upstate in Hillsdale. Ten years!
Of course his father and I were heartbroken. Abe wanted to sit shivah for him, but I wouldn’t let him. I remembered how I’d felt when my own father did that to me, and I reminded him of that. What does sitting shivah mean? I asked him. It means meaningless.
But it broke poor Abe’s heart. He was never the same after. I know it shortened his life. It had to. After that, he suddenly looked old. He died just a few years later, in 1954. His only son in prison. It was too much for him. He died of a broken heart. So young, only sixty-six.
Solly could have come to the funeral. They would have let him. But he would have had to come to the synagogue in handcuffs and shackles, and he didn’t want anybody to see him like that, and I can’t say as how I blame him. I could understand that.
But the good thing that came of it—there’s a good side for every bad side, my mother used to say—was that when we went through my husband’s things we kept finding all these little bankbooks, hidden under his underwear and in places like that. He still didn’t really trust banks, and so, instead of putting all his money in one bank, he put it in a lot of different ones—a thousand dollars here, five thousand dollars there. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he used to say. And when we added up all the money in the different banks, it came to over a million dollars! Just think of that!
My late husband, may God rest his soul, hadn’t made any will, so the court ordered that the money be divided three ways, between Solly, in prison in Hillsdale, and Simma and me.
I must say that Solly must have behaved himself at Hillsdale, because, instead of making him serve the full ten years, they let him out in a little over six. Time out for good behavior, they call it. They let him out in 1956.
The first I heard of it was in a telephone call from his parole officer. I remember the man’s words exactly. “Your son is now completely rehabilitated, Mrs. Tarcher,” he said. “To be honest with you, we in the New York State correctional system have never seen such a complete rehabilitation of a prisoner in our lives.” In fact, he said, in the whole history of New York prisons, as far as he knew, there had never been a case that had turned out as well as Solly. He’d made a complete turnaround, he said, and it really did the prison people’s hearts good to see it. A former felon was turned into a model citizen, just like that, and the parole officer agreed that my early training of him had a lot to do with it. He told me how I was certainly an admirable mother, and how much the prison people, and Solly too, appreciated it, everything I’d done. “Your son Solomon has seen the error of his ways,” he told me. “He is like a whole new man, and he is ready to embark upon a whole new and productive life.” Solly would be sticking to the straight and narrow from now on, he told me. And he told me that now everybody in the New York State prison system was just hoping for a little more assistance from me. “I am confident we can count on you for that, Mrs. Tarcher, can’t we?” he said.
I thought that was the best news I’d had in years. I’ll never forget that nice parole officer’s name. It was Moses Minskoff.
“Just tell me what I can do for you, Mr. Minskoff,” I said to him.
“Your son is already a prince among men,” he said to me. “You’re going to help us make him a king!”
15
They were standing at the southwest corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue gazing at the stolidly Renaissance seven-story building on the corner diagonally opposite them.
“What you see here is the prelude to a great metropolitan tragedy,” Moe Minskoff was saying. “This is the last of the great private residences on this section of Fifth Avenue, an architectural gem of historical significance. It was commissioned by the late Truxton Van Degan before the turn of the century and was designed by the great Stanford White before his untimely demise a few years later. No expense was spared in the mansion’s construction, and it is as solidly built as the Rock of Gibraltar.
“And yet it is slated for the wrecker’s ball. The Van Degan heirs, unable to find a purchaser for the building and unwilling to pay for its upkeep, have allowed this magnificent structure to be sold for taxes, and the purchaser, a demolition company, plans to raze the building and sell the property for the construction of an office tower. What a waste! But the president of the demolition company happens to be a very, very good friend of mine, and this magnificent building can be yours, Solly, for a mere three hundred thousand dollars.”
“But what would I do with it, Moe?”
“I might even be able to get him down to two-fifty.”
“But—again—what would I do with it?”
“Solly, I’ve known you for nearly seven years. Those years we spent at Hillsdale, sharing the same cell—I feel I know you inside and out. I feel you’re my best friend, which is why I’m making this offer to you and you alone, but I also see you as a young man with great promise. You’re young, you’re smart, and now with all that other business behind you, I see you cut out for great things.
“What you are, Solly, is a retailer. That little business that got you in trouble was nothing more than a retailing transaction. What is retailing, after all? It’s just buying something for less and selling it for more. That’s the origin of the word retail. Re … tail. You buy at the tail end of the market and resell at the top. Maybe what you were doing before wasn’t quite within the letter of the law, but it was essentially the same thing, and it’s something for which you have a natural talent. Retailing’s in your blood. After all, your father was a retailer. Your mother is still a retailer. I see this building”—and he gestured toward the Van Degan mansion with his palm upward—“as
becoming a great retailing establishment, on the most fashionable shopping street in the city if not the world, selling merchandise of the highest quality and the highest price—the same land of merchandise you used to deal in, Solly.”
“But three hundred thousand—”
“I said I think I can get it for two-fifty.”
“Even that would wipe out most of my inheritance. I’d have nothing left to set up my inventory, to—”
“That’s why it’s important that we get your mother to back you in this enterprise.”
“I don’t know, Moe. My mother’s pretty tight with her money.”
“Ah, but I have a plan, Solly.”
“Care to tell me what it is?”
“From what you tell me, your mother is a woman who is impressed with officialdom. My name means nothing to her. What if I were to present myself to her as your parole officer and indicate that this enterprise is part of the state’s overall long-term plan to bring about your rehabilitation? I think the old lady might go for it, Sol.”
“She’d need more than just your word for it, Moe.”
“Ah, of course, my friend. There are at least two things we can offer your dear mother. One is stock in our new enterprise. In return for her financial contribution, she would receive shares of stock. Shares of stock are simply a matter of going to a printer and ordering them. With shares of stock, your mother would become part owner of our store. We can offer her more than that. I visualize this store of ours as a series of small shops, or boutiques as they’re now called, each featuring a different type of merchandise. The layout of the rooms in the house suggests this plan. Leah Roth’s millinery styles are already quite well known and well respected. Suppose we offered your mother a Leah Roth’s boutique in our store? The Leah Roth’s label on Fifth Avenue would have more prestige than it does on Union Square. And she’d be getting her space rent free.”
“Well, I don’t know, Moe,” he said. “I don’t think that even with my mother’s money in it I’d have enough—not enough to run the land of store I’d like to run, the kind we used to talk about up at Hillsdale. I’d like it to be a really super-specialty store, really fancy, really exclusive. For a really exclusive clientele. But that was just prison talk. I think what I’ll do, now that I have a little cash, is put it in some safe stocks and see if I can live off the dividends until—”
“The dividends from three hundred and thirty-five thousand would be peanuts,” he said. “Peanuts, Solly! I’m talking about big bucks. I’m talking about your golden opportunity!”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think so,” he said, and started to turn away.
“Wait,” Moe said. “There are other sources of capital.”
“Where?”
“What about your redheaded sister? She got the other third of the old man’s estate.”
“Simma? That’s out of the question. She hates me. She always has.”
“I have a plan for her as well.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“That red hair of hers. Where’d she get it? Suppose we tell her what you told me—that her father wasn’t who she thought it was? That it was Dr. What’sisname?”
“Weiss. Sidney Weiss, the dentist. But I don’t know that, Moe. It was just something the kids at school used to tease me about. They used to say my mother was having an affair with Sidney Weiss because he had bright red hair, and after Simma was born she had the same red hair, and nobody else in our family had red hair.”
“But would your sister like that rumor spread around? After all, your mother and Dr. Weiss are still living, and Dr. Weiss also has a wife.”
“That sounds like blackmail,” he said.
“Nah, it’s called persuasion. It’s called influence. It’s called salesmanship, which is something you and I are pretty good at, Solly.”
“It still seems like a shitty thing to do to Simma.”
“Do you give a damn? You never liked the bitch, you told me.”
“She made my life miserable from the moment she was born. Kids at school calling my mother a whore—”
“See? So why don’t you let me try both these little tactics, my boy? What can it hurt? Just let me try it, and see what happens. Faint heart never won fair lady, as I read somewheres.”
“I don’t like her, but that doesn’t mean I want to screw her out of her money.”
“You won’t be screwing her out of her money, Sol. We’ll be getting her to make an investment. An investment in your future, your glorious future. Once your store is opened, both your old lady and the bitch sister will start getting dividends.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won’t work, Moe. Even with my mother’s money and Simma’s money, there still wouldn’t be enough. Look, that store was just a pipe dream, Moe. It was just something you and I used to talk about to pass the time. That’s all it was—just talk.”
Moe Minskoff stared at him. “You know what I think when I hear you talk like that, Solly?” he said. “I think, What a waste. What a waste of talent. You know what your talent is, Solly? Well, first of all there’s your looks. Hell, I know what I look like. I look like a fat schmuck. That’s why I’m always a behind-the-scenes type person. I don’t look like a front-and-center type. The first thing you judge a guy by is how he looks. Now maybe you ain’t as handsome as a Rock Hudson, but you have the looks of a high-class type. You look sincere, and that’s a number-one point in business. Number two, you’re well liked. I was never well liked at the joint, strictly because of how I looked. But everybody in the joint liked you. All the guards liked you, even Shitface. Remember Shitface? Shitface used to give you smokes—I seen him, and it wasn’t because you gave him blow jobs, either. A lotta new grubs think they can get favors from a guard by giving him a blow job, but they’re just wasting their spit. You never did that, but even Shitface passed you smokes.”
“Maybe it was because I never called him Shitface,” he said. “Not to his face, anyway.”
“That’s right. You called him sir. And that brings me to talent number three. You got high-class manners, Solly. You got them manners in the joint.”
“I used good manners because I wanted to get out of the joint as fast as possible.”
“Right! But it takes talent to use good manners like that. Me, I ain’t got that talent, either, which was why they kept me in longer than they kept you. You actually improved yourself in the joint, Solly. Most grubs, it’s the other way around. They come out worse than they went in, but not you. You took those courses. You took a bookkeeping course and got an A. You even took a course in French and learned to speak it like a real Frenchman—I heard you. And some of the books you read up there, like that one by Andrew Carnegie.”
“Dale Carnegie,” he said.
“Right, and that brings me to talent number four.”
“What’s that, Moe?”
“Your smile, Solly. You may not be as handsome as Rock Hudson, but you’ve got a great smile. With the right smile, a man can sell anything. Me, I never learned how to smile right, which is why I’m a good behind-the-scenes man. I can talk good, but I don’t smile good. But you, when you smile at a guy you look him straight in the eye, and that’s the real key to success. You know something? When we was roommates in the place, I used to catch you looking in the mirror, practicing that smile. Am I right? That smile of yours didn’t come natural. You worked on it, and you learned to do it right.”
He was smiling now, but he was not looking at Moe. His eyes had traveled to the empty Van Degan mansion across the street. “Dale Carnegie says a man’s smile is more important than his handshake,” he said.
“And Andrew Carnegie was right.” Moe had caught the direction of his friend’s look. “Well, that’s the end of Moses Minskoff’s Sermon on the Mount,” he said. “But when I hear you talk like this, turning down this golden opportunity to buy that magnificent historical structure there, it makes me sad. Sad to see all those wonderful talents of yours go to waste.”
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His friend said nothing.
“There’s other sources of financing, of course,” Moe said.
“Such as?”
“I have certain friends, Solly. Friends with influence. Bankers. Private bankers. Venture capitalists, you might call ’em. They’re often interested in investing in high-class-type businesses. They might be persuaded to back us, if I approach them the right way. And then there are always your regular commercial banks.”
“Aw, the commercial banks would never lend me money, Moe. I’m Solly Tarcher, remember? I’m an ex-con who’s served time for grand larceny.”
“Ah, but you don’t understand, my friend,” he said. “You are not going to be Solly Tarcher anymore. You are not going to have any record. You are just going to be a bright young fellow who’s recently come into a little money, and have a plan to make some more, who isn’t going to be just a merchant prince but a merchant king!”
The way it worked, Moe explained, was like this. You went out to a cemetery, any cemetery—Woodlawn would do, since it was big and close to town—and looked for the grave of a man who had been born in approximately the same year as yourself. Then you went to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, which was open to the public, and looked up that man’s death record, which listed his place of birth. Then you wrote to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in that city and, for a four-or five-dollar money order, you obtained a copy of the birth certificate.
Carriage Trade Page 25
