He headed out into the evening. Taking a long, deep breath, Seymour looked up at the black sky and began to walk uptown. Perhaps he had been wrong about musicals, he thought, passing the theaters just letting out, people in their hats and furs milling on the sidewalks. Theater was just like the movies after all. This is America, the theater and the cinema told America. Buster Keaton; Clark Gable? Here is the Wild West. Here is the Dust Bowl. Here is the beautiful girl. But it wasn’t real. It troubled him now, the way the audience had laughed and laughed at his mother’s accent. Was Frances Gold playing it for laughs, or was the laughter something sinister, something he would once have been able to fix with a simple phone call to the right man?
He would no longer be able to call in the right man. A shame, thought Seymour, remembering what it had been like to wield power in the world. This, he thought, would remain broken.
No one can say if The Joint could have been a hit had Seymour not gone and scolded poor Frances, ensuring that, the next night and the few that followed, she played the part for what it was: a dramatic musical. Whatever might have been, The Joint, and Frances, never recovered from the way Seymour had forced them both to be something they were not. The press panned the show as “false,” the characters as “one-dimensional,” the story as “banal.” Frances Gold, the stage name she would always use, was called “laughable in a dramatic role.” The Joint closed after only eight shows, and Seymour, who had put up all the capital, promptly lost it all. Inez could not sense the separation between herself and her character, and, until the day she died, she was furious about the injustice done to her in that horrible play. The only reason Inez forgave her elder son was that he was the connection to her new, first grandson. For her grandson, for David, she would rise above it.
But after the first preview, Seymour did not yet know what the critics would say. He did not know that no one would buy tickets once the critics said it or that the production hinged on people buying tickets based on what those critics would say. It had not gone the way he’d dreamed, but there still was the potential for greatness. Seymour was heading home, and tomorrow his new son would be there with him. Turning south for just a moment, he could see the Empire State glowing. See how high? Twelve hundred forty-five feet, he’d read in the papers, and open to the public. He shook his head—it was really unbelievable. He would take his new son there and tell him: You can do anything. See, see what they’ve done? See what they’ve built? Together they would look past the new George Washington Bridge. How wide. This city, Seymour thought. How could he ever live elsewhere? His mother had brought him here on a boat to Ellis Island, and he had shamed her. He had been a bad son. Did this make him a bad man?
The lighted buildings surrounded him, their visceral brilliance quickly a memory as Seymour continued uptown. Life and theater? he thought. The same thing. Only the theater was supposed to be much more fun.
Chapter 12
Fleeing: 1934
FRANCES DID NOT RECOVER quickly from her not-so-stellar reviews. Devastated that her first show had closed after less than two weeks, she went back to Brooklyn to help her mother with her washing. She scrubbed Rose’s undergarments and linens and hung them on the line. As her mother’s bloomers billowed in the wind on those few cool spring days, Frances took stock of her old neighborhood, how much the young people had changed in the short two years since she had been gone. The younger brothers of the boys who had once taunted Frances thought the Terrier was a hero. Like Solomon when he was a kid, standing on the corner by Mr. Berkowitz’s store waiting for an opportunity, these boys, Frances reasoned, were all looking for anything to take them away from the hunched, weeping Jews. That sadness had stayed the same on South Fifth Street. Gangsters countered that sadness and fear: being taken, Cossacks chopping off their heads, the haunting feeling in their mothers’ stomachs of the danger of a world of hate moving closer and closer still. How those young boys hated weakness! Frances could see it in their greased-up hair and their scowling, freckled faces. They hated their fathers’ lectures, their mothers’ bending toward candles, toward sorrow, toward a memory their sons did not want to touch. It was always mourning. Those boys started smoking and making catcalls on the corners. They looked different, it was true, like little wiseguys, Frances thought as she passed by carrying smoked fish wrapped in butcher paper under her arm. Those boys, she determined, had begun to have hope.
And then, two years after The Joint opened and closed, two years after David Bloom and Miriam Brodsky were born, Tom Dewey, assistant district attorney of New York City, who had been secretly tracing everything the Terrier did out of the Knickerbocker Hotel on Forty-second Street, took Terry the Terrier to court.
But Tom Dewey was not the only one who wanted the Terrier to fall.
In the end it was Brooklyn who betrayed Solomon Brodsky, just as he had turned his back on Brooklyn. Plenty of the gangsters starting up, the ones who were not cowed by the cross looks from old ladies or from the young mothers who shifted their babies to the opposite hip when they saw those heavies turning down their streets, the ones who weren’t so desperate for love, went back to the old neighborhood and walked around. They jiggled their pocket change and showed off their watches and gold rings, they bent down to smile and cluck at the babies. They talked to those angry, freckled boys and became their role models.
But the Terrier got big enough never to have to go back to a place where he was no longer wanted. Why suffer? he would say to Frances when she berated him for staying away. They hate me? Well then, I hate them. I have enough hate without going to greet it on that horrible street.
On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment pulled back the Eighteenth, legalizing liquor and rendering the Terrier instantly obsolete. Who needed him or his booze now? And when his power was gone, a couple of Brooklyn small-timers to whom the Terrier had denied access to Rothstein sent Tom Dewey some papers that showed he hadn’t paid his taxes in full since 1926. By August, Tom Dewey had more than he needed to go up to Egypt and bring the Terrier downtown in handcuffs. Solomon Brodsky—a.k.a. the Terrier—was the very first Jewish mobster to go down.
Frances decided not only would she go to the trial but she would bring Joseph Brodsky with her.
“This is not a question,” Frances said the second time she called Joseph long distance in five years. “This is a demand.”
Joseph was silent upon hearing the news. See? he thought. God sees everything. The world is coming undone, and my brother is the criminal here. Was Solomon aware of what was going on back in Europe? There a man was consolidating his power so as to take over the world. This man was setting up camps for killing. He was setting fire to the place of government. And Solomon was torturing some poor man to death beneath the brothels and candy stores of this city that had taken them in and saved them.
Joseph thought of his father turning in his newly dug grave, turning because of his son, and over what was to come. This was the golden promise? Never here, Herbert would have told him. Nothing will happen in America, this is the golden country. Joseph had gone back to say Kaddish for his father, but he realized then, The man is already dead. Can he see me here crying over his grave? Can he see me here with this fistful of dirt? It had taken him weeks to get the sound of the dirt and stones hitting wood out of his head.
“You’re crazy,” he said to Frances. “I’m not goink. To a trial? It’s beyond crazy.” For the first time Joseph was happy his father was not alive to bear witness to this; he simply felt sad for his mother, enduring more humiliation alone.
“It’s only for taxes,” Frances said. “They’ll only be talking about the money.”
Joseph laughed. “That’s vhat you think. They’re gonna bring up everything, believe me,” he said. “I don’t even vant to know it.” Joseph was thankful that his brother had remained so much of a mystery to him. He read the papers, yes, but he did not know what going to narcotics or expanding the operation out west had really entailed.
“You k
now this may be the last time you see your brother,” Frances said.
Joseph meant to laugh—ha! ha!—but instead he snorted. “The last time I saw my brother, Frances, was vhen he left my father’s house to go be a criminal. I believe he had a gun in his belt vhen I watched him through the door. Zhis man? He is not my brother.”
“Then you should come and watch him be punished. It doesn’t matter. You should be there. For your father’s sake.”
Joseph was silent. “You brink up my father? He would not have gone near zhis trial. Belief me.”
“You only have one chance, Joseph Brodsky. He is your only brother.”
“It is true. My only brother. I zhink I will sit zhis one out too,” Joseph said. “But, Frances, it’s always nice to hear your voice.”
Frances sat up front on October 20, the day Solomon Brodsky’s trial began. As she climbed the steps of the courthouse, she remembered walking up these same steps holding Vladimir’s hand and a fistful of daisies. Today was a gorgeous autumn day, the brown, red, and yellow leaves swirling around her feet as she made her way into the massive building.
Frances sat in the aisle seat of the third row and watched Pauline enter the room. She wore a hat the size of a small planet. For a moment Frances imagined she was watching her sister being married, and here she was, slowly walking down the aisle. Had Pauline been the bride, Frances would have gasped at her sister’s beauty. But they had not attended each other’s weddings, small and unceremonious as they were, and Pauline walked not like a bride but like the shamed wife of a criminal. She looked as if she was terribly ill or prematurely aged, and Frances refused to catch her eye. Instead she turned to see who else had come to watch the Terrier fall.
Frances recognized so many people from the neighborhood, including the many men who had sat discussing business and politics, drinking Turkish coffee with her father in the kitchen until dawn broke over the city. She and Rose used to clear the cups and saucers, sneaking peeks at each man’s fortune in the settled coffee grounds. Were these men here to gloat over the Terrier’s demise, to prove to themselves that selling brassieres and fixing the soles of shoes, unrolling reams of cloth, cutting swatches of taffeta and raw silk, was the purer work, the moral work? So what it doesn’t give you a glitzy life, at least you are working for your children so that their lives might be better, at least, at the very least, you are on the right side of God. Or were they there to pay their respects to Herbert Brodsky’s son, who came over from Russia and got lost, as lost as they feared their own children would be, as lost as they were when they looked in the mirror and wondered who they had become.
The mobsters, Frances had read in the papers, had been warned off coming. Rumor had it Greenberg forbade it, and there was a car outside making sure no one from inside entered the courthouse. There was no Greenberg, no Rothstein, no Kid Kugel. Somehow Frances had expected those worn, cruel faces to be there, and she wasn’t sure if they were protecting Solomon from their association with him or protecting themselves from an association with him.
As she watched the neighborhood file in, Frances saw Joseph slip into the courtroom. She had not seen him since before she’d married Vladimir, and his face revealed each minute of every day of those years. Joseph had gone from a boy to a man, and his features were already sinking. Frances had a strange urge to touch his face, to somehow fill his collapsing features with air.
She could see Joseph in the middle of the back row, still standing, his hat clasped in his lap, his head bent forward, as if he were at shul. His lips moved, but she wasn’t sure if he was making a sound.
Yeetgadal v’ yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah, Joseph said. B’almah dee v’rah kheer’utey…
The Terrier was brought out in cuffs, and he sat next to his attorney, Ed Wolfsheim, stripped of all his dazzling accoutrements, looking straight ahead at the judge.
v’ yamleekh malkhutei, b’chahyeykhohn, uv’ yohmeykhohn, Joseph continued his Kaddish. As if the Terrier had heard, which he could not possibly have, so softly was Joseph speaking, he turned around in his seat, searching for a sound or a smell he seemed to recognize. But he couldn’t have seen Joseph, so far back was he, hidden in the crowded courtroom.
Frances had said it would be only the money, but Tom Dewey had done his homework. He had interviewed over a thousand witnesses, reviewed two hundred bank accounts, traced the toll slips of more than one hundred thousand phone calls. He presented information on the washhouses for liquor barrels, drops for the delivery and concealment of liquor, a vehicle repair garage, an Egyptian lair in Rye, several hotel suites, and sixty Mack trucks. Dewey asserted that the Terrier, who had claimed a net income of $8,100 in 1930, had an unreported net income of $1,026,000 for that year. Where, the assistant DA asked, his mustache twitching, did the extra million and eighteen go?
After five days, 131 witnesses, and over nine hundred exhibits, Dewey rested his case. It was now up to the Terrier to prove how, with such a meager income, he had acquired so many assets.
Under the advice of his counsel, the only thing Solomon told the jury was, I plead the Fifth.
He’s saying nothing? thought Frances. She had never heard of such a thing.
His brother was defying everything they’d been taught yet again, thought Joseph. Here is a man—a Jew!—and he doesn’t talk? Only fights with his hands. Joseph said Kaddish for his brother each day of the five-day trial. Five days of not selling, someone else traveling the roads he traveled, someone else begging on the streets on which he begged.
It was the verdict that stopped Joseph’s obsessive prayer, his praying for the dead, as if this final judgment was what finally brought Solomon Brodsky back to life.
Nineteen years, the judge said, pounding that mean gavel, and Joseph sat back, his elbows on his knees.
What he remembered was before any of this: playing stickball in the street with his big brother, the sun going down somewhere far away, the eely twilight creeping across the neighborhood, a signal for them to head back home. Joseph though of Saturdays, how they had held hands walking together to shul, their parents close behind them. Joseph had not enjoyed synagogue, though. He was embarrassed to say so, but he hated to be separated from his mother. As she walked away to pray in the upper section, Joseph would be left with his father and brother. We are men, Joseph thought. Men are different, they see the world differently. He had looked to his brother to show him what this meant. Solomon stood when he should stand, but he wore his yarmulke down over his right eye, so that he looked like a pirate. He pretended to read the prayer book, not right to left but upside down. Their father tried to still Solomon, but he couldn’t. And Solomon would always set out to prove that their father was a powerless man. Even as a boy, Joseph felt shul was a place to be serious, and when Solomon would not listen to their father, it hurt Joseph, as he imagined it hurt God. It was as if Solomon was born without respect.
And look at what all of Solomon’s power had done. Joseph sneaked a glance at his brother, a short, stout man in a blue suit, seated next to his lawyer, whose only defense for his client was not to utter a word.
Didn’t say a word. How could that ever help you unless every word you had to say, anything you uttered, would prove you guilty?
Nineteen years.
Frances watched the Terrier, who was suddenly transformed back into the man his parents had intended him to be: Solomon Brodsky. Solomon, a man like anyone else—not old, not young, not slim, not pretty, not tall—looked at the floor. Pauline sat straight as a coffin, avoiding her husband’s eyes.
How could her sister have been so stupid? thought Frances. Gave everything up for what? A couple of mink coats, a seven-carat ring, and a mansion so far away from home. Her family’s good name. Pauline did not look up once, not even to watch her husband be taken away in handcuffs. Now what would become of her? Frances had heard stories. When a Mob husband was killed, the killers often looked after the widows, made sure they had the money they needed, made sure their kids were safe.
But what would happen now that the Terrier had simply been put in prison? None of his gang had been sent to jail before, and Frances wondered if her sister would be killed because of it. Somehow she expected one day soon to get news of her in the East River, a photo in the Daily News of a fashionable woman washed up somewhere in Astoria, still wearing her big hat.
Frances tried to smile at Solomon as he walked by, but if he saw, he made no sign of it.
When the verdict reached Brooklyn, those cruel young boys destined to find their own way in the Mob world, who couldn’t wait to watch the Terrier go down, were heartbroken. They had always thought that the gangsters would fight back and that, finally, finally the Jews would win.
Joseph refused to pay his respects with Pauline, who sat shiva up in Westchester.
“Shiva.” Joseph shook his head when Frances told him where she was going. “That is disgusting. The man’s not dead, after all.”
“Didn’t I see you there saying Kaddish, Joe?” Frances asked him.
“I was saying the mourner’s prayer,” he said. “I was mourning.”
“That’s what one does at the shiva,” Frances said, though she did see his point. Even so, she decided that out of respect for Solomon, who had actually been her friend, and who was dead to the world now, she would carry a kugel upstate.
Frances made her way up to Egypt alone, without Joseph or her husband, who had refused to be a part of any of it. She watched her sister, who had not so much as lifted a finger to help when their father passed, prepare the house for the shiva. Pauline covered the mirrors and lit the candles. She put out the herring salad, the smoked salmon and bialys, the silver coffee and creamer.
“Should we call a rabbi?” Frances asked.
“A rabbi? Why would he come? Do you know who my husband was?”
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