Who was the one who listened and who actually had money now to invest? Seymour Bloom.
“Something big is happening tonight, my friend,” the Terrier told him the day after Frances had shown up in Westchester. “Don’t say I never did anything for ya,” he said.
Seymour’s heart filled with dread at the phone ringing this time of evening. What horrible thing would he have to do? Some of the boys got used to it, he knew, but Seymour never got blasé about roughing someone up, even a young punk who was trying to move in on the territory. No matter what the nature, these calls to get Seymour to play cards uptown caused him trepidation. The idea of sitting across from those terrible faces, each a broken palm, knife marks as long and deep as life lines, the talk of all the plans and deeds to come, rumors of who had betrayed whom, who was about to, it was all so foreboding.
“Not tonight, Terry, please,” Seymour said. “I have plans to take Sarah to a show tonight.”
“A show.”
“Yes, Terrier. Fifty Million Frenchmen.”
“Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, Terrier. This is the show we’re planning to see.”
“You and your big fat ideas,” the Terrier said. “You and your culture. Relax, Mrs. Grundy. I want to talk to you about the pictures.”
“The pictures?” Seymour asked.
“Sure, Seymour. Just about the pictures.”
When the Terrier explained what he could of Vladimir’s invention and this demonstration at the New Amsterdam Theater, what Seymour saw immediately was what he had spent his life trying to find: a way out. Would it be possible to tell the Terrier, No, I mean it, not tonight, not ever, thanks for the memories, but let me out of my deal with the devil. Seymour had been careful. But he knew how it was with those guys. He knew they told you, Okay, buddy, go to your little shack in the woods, go to your nice little life in the country. And they let you sit there for a week, thinking that you had made it. That you had cheated God in some way, maybe, that out of all the men placed on this earth, this one, this schlemiel with a brain as sorry and crackable as a goose egg, was going to get away. Such mean, false hope. That’s when the boys came for you. Seymour knew because he arranged it. They pulled up just to say hello, hey, putz, how’s it going out here in the shack in the woods, your wife making jam in there and pickling radishes, how sweet, come on, let’s go for a ride. And still, sometimes they didn’t know, or they pretended it was just an old friend come for some fresh air to catch up. As if any of those guys were friends. And yet, Seymour knew there was loyalty, only it never seemed to be to one another. Even the widows, the ones he had kids from the neighborhood drop fifty bucks a week to. Some of the women ripped it up in their faces, it was true, but some kept that money, lived on it their whole lives. Those were real gangsters’ wives, thought Seymour. Women who could watch their husbands murdered and take the money from their killers, invite them in for dinner every Monday following.
Just the way he had laughed in the face of that gun the Terrier had pointed at him the year before, Seymour decided now he would laugh in the face of his destiny. What did he care? Sometimes, he reasoned, a man has two fates, two fortunes. The one he stumbles into and the one he has to work to find. He is destined for both. Who cares if they’re mutually exclusive? And so in November 1929, Seymour Bloom walked down Broadway to Forty-second Street to the New Amsterdam Theater to see if this Kinescope was the golden path out he had hoped it would be.
As Seymour walked into Times Square, he was thinking not about what he was about to see—Broadway! the future!—but about what it would bring him. What would it be like, he wondered, not to be beholden to the Terrier, who was beholden to Greenberg, who in turn answered to Rothstein? What would it be like for Seymour to look at his father-in-law and for once not feel shame about all he was not providing, or shame about the manner in which he was providing it? What if something happened and the Terrier just sent Seymour’s family to live upstate? He could see it now, Sarah in some country cottage, poured like spilt gin over a wooden table. It made him laugh for a moment, the thought of his wife in the middle of a pastoral setting, peeling potatoes. He saw his future children running around without clothes on, their feet as dirty as gypsies’. How much worse could it be?
When Seymour arrived at the theater, he walked straight up to the stage to Vladimir Zworykin, director of research for the brand-new RCA, a division of Westinghouse, and introduced himself. “Seymour Bloom,” he said, reaching out his hand. “The Terrier sent me.” He shook the inventor’s trembling hand.
Seymour felt Vladimir’s fear and for a moment was confused by it. Then he realized exactly what this man was thinking: Oh my God oh my God oh my God, was what he was thinking. All this work, all my education, all my studying, my faith in God, it’s all come to this? He’d seen it half a million times, and Seymour chuckled a little to himself as he thought of Vladimir, wondering now if it had been his wife who had sent him. No. Seymour knew this man would not believe it had been his wife, not his wife, the very same girl he’d mounted last night? How could that be?
Seymour knew it was cruel, but he did enjoy watching Vladimir shift his feet, clear his throat, and look around, perhaps to see if the two Westinghouse execs were in the theater. Seymour knew how it worked for a man like Vladimir—those men practically owned his internal organs, his blood and muscle, his entire insides. David Sarnoff could easily have sent for one of Terry the Terrier’s minions to get rid of Vladimir for good. This power to make men question their entire existence just by my presence will be hard to lose, he thought.
Seymour gave in. He touched Vladimir lightly on the arm. “Not to worry,” he said. “I’ve come to see this invention of yours,” he said. “It sounds so exciting. Image and sound at the same time. I want to help,” he said.
Vladimir took a step back, and his entire body seemed to sigh with relief. His mouth quivered into a smile. He nodded. “Well then, I have something to show you.”
He led Seymour to the back of the stage. There Vladimir uncovered the receiver, and, without too much fanfare, he turned it on.
A pinpoint of light on the black screen blew quickly into an image of a dark-haired woman waving to the camera.
“My wife,” Vladimir said, breathing.
Seymour nodded, knowing what Vladimir had to be feeling, which was that his wife was a good good girl, how could he ever have thought she would hurt him?
She looked like a good girl. And she looked pretty in an old-world sort of way, her white skin a bright contrast to her dark hair and eyes.
“Frances,” Vladimir said. “This is Frances.”
Seymour shook his head and then stopped, watching this woman wave to him. The image was grainy, but he could make out her hand slowly waving. At him. Hello, America, she said, earnest and self-mocking at the same time. Hello!
Seymour’s heart crashed. Here was his childhood in Brooklyn, his young adulthood in his mother’s beauty shop, the girl at reception knocking her pencil to her head, a calendar spread out in front of her filled with her unintelligible scribble. He could smell that shop still, and hear the women’s screams as Inez tore at their scalps, and he could smell the present, the stench of alcohol all day, those dropped bottles on the Long Island shore from a sloppy delivery, and then the night smell of his wife, gin often spilt in their bed. Nights he would have to peel her off the floor. Here was his past, but on the screen this man’s wife was all of a sudden the future, some Jewish girl from Russia, beckoning him away from memory, waving hello.
It was fairly unbearable his life, and yet, the money. The money. His mother with her hair salon and his little brother, Jacob, on his way to college. College. It had once been an impossibility. And his father-inlaw always pointing at him with a mean, knowing finger. He’d always reminded Seymour of the old photographs he’d seen of Abraham Lincoln. Seymour could not give up what he had without something. Something like this.
“Wow!” he said to Vladimir. “Very complicated
. Very scientific. But at the same time very beautiful, as art is beautiful.”
Vladimir seemed pleased with this assessment. “Thank you,” he said. “I think of it as art as well. Shall I tell you how it works?”
“Of course.” Seymour scratched his chin. “Please.”
“Well, it’s quite simple, really. A camera is focused on an image through a lens and onto an array of photoelectric cells that coat the end of a tube.” Vladimir opened his receiver to show Seymour the inside. “The electrical image found by the cells is scanned line by line by an electron beam and transmitted to the cathode ray tube here.” He pointed at the tube.
Seymour had gained interest and lost interest at the exact same time. “I see!” he said. How he had tired of sitting before the radio looking sideways at his wife’s disappointed face. Surely all men felt this way. But were all women disappointed? Seymour believed right then that they were, that perhaps Vladimir science could explain it. Disappointment, he reasoned, was a female gene, part of their chemical makeup. And if this were so, all men would pay to the gills to welcome this dark-haired, thankful, and smiling girl into their living rooms. “Okay, Vladimir,” he said. “Where do I go to invest in our future?”
Seymour Bloom became one of the primary Westinghouse backers. And were it not for the fact that all that beautiful science was to be used for military applications, Seymour could have had his television, woman after woman smiling into each and every American living room, in a matter of months. But the immediate returns, along with the money he had made already, were enough that, as the Panic spread its inky tentacles across America, Seymour could get out of the Mob. He had been careful. For one, the cops loved him for the very reason the Terrier had brought him in in the first place—they could talk to him. And getting paid by Seymour was easier on them than getting paid by someone they couldn’t talk to. Seymour had managed to make only a few enemies—he had dealt with the shipping of goods exactly as he was told to. He had been on time and prepared for every task he was told to perform.
And because the Terrier had brought him in, the other boys let the Terrier handle what they came to call the “goyisha situation,” which was how they referred to Seymour in moments when he missed vital meetings because he just had to go to the opening of Funny Face. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust him—Seymour was known for his honesty—they simply did not understand him. Men admired Seymour for his quiet strength, a trait regarded as a weakness in his own home. Everyone liked and relied on Seymour, and though he could have risen quickly in the ranks thanks to his Protestant good looks and his highfalutin’ airs, could have become the heir to Rothstein himself, he was for these very reasons a threat to the higher-ups and, for these reasons as well, a safe man to let go.
“You’re lucky as hell, Sy, no one’s gonna take you for a ride,” the Terrier had told him. “Least I don’t think so.”
Seymour pushed out of his head all the scenarios, the calls that could be made, the car stolen, the plates changed, and Seymour to be picked up and driven to his death. He knew he could be found and buried in a marsh way out in Canarsie.
After they threw him back like a bad fish, as the Terrier would always put it, Seymour waited for science to reward him for all his troubles. Night after night he went to the theater. Each evening was connected to the one before, the years before, those nights he had sat next to his wife in the dark and for the first time been transported to another place and time, a place where all he had to do was sit back and enjoy the show. While Seymour waited for Vladimir Zworykin to make him even richer, Joseph was still driving in the dark, making his way through cities and towns, opening and closing doors, begging people to buy. Both men were searching out the destiny neither had yet been fortunate enough to stumble upon.
Chapter 11
The Joint: 1931
SEYMOUR WAS WRONG. Destiny is destiny. Either one stumbles upon it or it is completely elusive. Joseph, whose routes were mapped out for him each week by a Procter & Gamble dispatcher, had not yet found his; Frances was polishing the fruits of her own; and Seymour was lucky enough to stumble over his destiny twice.
Seymour had the perfect opportunity to realize his dreams when, after seeing Of Thee I Sing at the Music Box, he sat at a back table at Sardi’s, wishing he had become an actor. He thought of all the girls lined up onstage in bathing suits at Atlantic City, typical birds waiting to be chosen. Couldn’t he have been the presidential candidate in that show, picking the nicest one? If not in life, thought Seymour, then certainly in theater. In many ways Seymour knew he had acted his whole life, yet he had never received applause for a single performance. Who was waiting in the reeds to clap their hands together for Seymour Bloom’s role as the Broadway-loving mobster? The Terrier? Hardly. Seymour always knew there was part of Terry the Terrier that wanted to see him slip and fall.
At Sardi’s, a stranger took a seat in the empty chair across the table.
“Seymour Bloom?” he said.
Seymour shut his eyes. Please, he thought. Not here. The Terrier would do it here, at Sardi’s. Poetic justice, as it were. In front of everyone. There was Louise Brooks, right there. Was this astonishing beauty going to see him die? Not now, thought Seymour. So many things to do. He opened his eyes to get a look at the man he was sure would do him in when he realized, there was no way this was the one. This one had seen better days in his faded suit, which was at least a size too large. His hair, what there was of it, was in complete disarray, and the man needed a decent shave. Even the Terrier had more class than to off him like this.
“You probably don’t remember me,” he said. “I’m Caleb Candor. The writer?” The man held out a bony hand, and Seymour took it grudgingly. “I used to hang out at the Joint. With your mother and Joe. Joe Crews. I remember you when you were a teenager,” Caleb told him. “Now”—Caleb Candor put both hands out in front of him, palms up—“now I see you’re all grown up.”
“Why, thank you.” Seymour bowed his head toward the stranger. The Joint. Seymour thought of it often, the way his mother ran to meet the clientele at the door, her dresses billowing out behind her, revealing that she was glamorous yet necessary. Nights Seymour came with his mother to work, she watched out the window for the fancy cars to pull up. As the driver got out and opened the door for a film star or a theater actress, Inez would motion Seymour over and point. Look, Seymole, she’d say. There’s Minta Durfee!
Seymour always looked over her shoulder to see who was about to come inside.
“Of course I remember you,” he said, though he couldn’t place this man. He didn’t know any writers. Or if he did, he did not know they were writers.
What Seymour remembered in the moment this man took a seat across from him was really Madame Lutille, the cruel old French lady who owned the Joint. She sat in the back room going over her receipts and cursing America and the women of the Christian Temperance Union. Seymour’s mother pretended the place was hers, and she greeted the guests as if it was her home, the leather banquettes and long wooden bar part of her own living room, when in truth it all belonged to Madame Lutille. That she hired Inez, as far as Seymour could tell, was the Frenchwoman’s single act of kindness in the world. But the arrangement had its advantages: Inez was a fellow Parisienne, which meant Madame Lutille could shout out commands in her native tongue without stopping to use lowly American idioms. More important, Inez was neither too pretty nor too thin; no one famous would fall in love with her. She was not terribly tasteful in her appearance, and she was trying to get out of the factory to save some money. Madame Lutille was happy to have Inez pretend she owned the establishment because it made her work harder, which meant Madame Lutille could do less without the worry of paying Inez a competitive wage. It also brought Joe Crews around most every night, and this was a man—a boxer on a winning streak!—who so many people wanted to see.
Madame Lutille didn’t know what Seymour knew, which was that Inez was just waiting for Joe Crews to make enough money to buy
the place out from under the old bitch.
Seymour smiled. “Madame Lutille. Remember Madame Lutille?”
“Vaguely,” Caleb Candor said. “She didn’t come out front too often,” he said.
The one distinct memory that emerged out of the hot sticky soup of Seymour’s youth was of that woman. One night he had gone looking in the back rooms for Joe Crews. What he needed from Joe he couldn’t now recall, though Seymour would always remember the way Joe made him feel as if he had a father, a strong man, who would protect him in the world. A boxer. Seymour was constantly amazed at what Joe did—he fought for a living. And, even after his accident—which left him unable to fight, yes, but also, it seemed to Seymour, left him unable to think, or to remember words and how to close his mouth when eating—Seymour always looked up to Joe Crews. He was powerful, and Seymour had not known personally many powerful men. When Seymour was fifteen and wandering around the back of the establishment looking for Joe, he’d stumbled upon Madame Lutille counting her money. Her fat legs were spread before her, and her horrible, nearly blue tongue slithered from her black mouth. She licked her thumb and then separated each bill before slamming it down on the table, where money was stacked in huge piles. Seymour sucked in his breath at the sight of her. Madame Lutille looked at him with a steely gaze: You want my money, little boy, don’t you? her look seemed to say. And he had wanted her money, he had wanted to run in and swipe a stack of bills; yet at the same time that money was repulsive to him. How many hands, how many dirty fingers had handled those bills before they had gotten into Madame Lutille’s clutches?
“What can I do for you, Caleb?” Seymour asked, shaking the image away.
“I hear that you love the theater,” Caleb said. “And I have a little something you might be interested in.” He took out a large manila envelope, as frayed as his lapels. He unwound the red string that clasped it closed and took out a sheaf of papers, which he then handed to Seymour.
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