Button Man

by Andrew Gross

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  To

  Fred P. Pomerantz, Pop.

  Only wish you were around to read this …

  Lies is lies … Howsoever they come, and they come from the father of lies.… Don’t you tell no more of them, Pip. That ain’t the way to get out of being common. If you can’t get to be uncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it by going crooked.

  —CHARLES DICKENS,

  Great Expectations

  If I am not for myself, who will be for me. But if I am only for myself, what am I?

  —RABBI HILLEL,

  quoted in the Pirkei Avot

  Prologue

  1905

  For the rest of her life, Bella Rabishevsky would remember the day the K’hal Jeshurun temple burned as the day she lost her son.

  She stood over the coal stove that day in the cramped third-floor apartment on Essex Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that she, her husband, and her six children shared. The heat from the steaming pot, wafting with the sweltering August temperature outside, was almost too much to bear. She stirred the krupnik, the soup of boiled meat, potatoes, and cabbage that would be the family’s meal that night. The twins, Shemuel and Harold, who were six, and even on a calm day a handful, were in the midst of a game they called zuzim, a version of tag from back in Minsk, where the family had emigrated from three years ago.

  Except, as always, the game’s playing field stretched far beyond the three sparse rooms that the eight of them shared, onto the roof, up and down the rickety staircase of their building’s five stories, eventually spilling onto the street, amid the endless throng of horse-drawn wagons, pushcarts, and shouting peddlers there.

  “Two zuzim!” Harold declared, digging his fist into his brother’s back, almost knocking his mother into the steaming pot.

  Shemuel, who always played the part of the victim, cried out in Yiddish, “Ow! He hurt me, Momma. Make him stop.”

  “Genug iz genug, Harold!” his mother barked back. Enough is enough. “You’ll spill the soup and then none of us will have a thing to eat tonight. And I’ll have to tell your father who was to blame.”

  “Yes, Momma,” Harold said, softly enough to appear contrite, but with an impish smile creeping through as he continued to taunt his twin.

  “Three zuzim!” Shemuel called out from his hiding place, upping the ante. Their eyes met in a kind of wordless dare, then suddenly Shemuel bolted past him and out the front door, bounding up the stairs, with Harold whining, “See, Momma, he’s just a little cheat! That’s all he is.” Then he took off after him.

  “Boys, you must stop it now!” Bella shouted after them, wiping her arm across her brow. “This silly game has gone too far.”

  But by that time they were already out the door and all she heard was the heavy pounding of their footsteps as they ran up to the fourth and fifth floor.

  Harold, the older by four minutes, always played the instigator in these affairs. Anything to keep him from doing his chores or schoolwork. But when sufficiently riled, it was Shemuel who, in the end, would lose his temper and up their rivalry to a whole new level.

  “Anna, please, the soup is about to boil. Go and find the boys,” Bella called to her daughter. Nine-year-old Anna was practicing ballet steps near the window while keeping an eye on Morris, the youngest, who was almost two. Her older sister, Bess, was eleven but always lost in a book, so she wasn’t much help around the house. Dance had been Anna’s dream since she first put her face to the window of the Mishnoff School on Norfolk Street and watched the students practicing inside. But of course, all she could do was watch, as they could hardly afford such a luxury as to send her to classes there. When they moved here, Jacob, who had studied to be a rabbi back in Russia, could only find work as the shammash of their temple: opening and closing the doors, sweeping up after services, and adjusting the Torah scroll each morning to the reading of that day.

  “Tell them they must behave,” Bella instructed Anna, “or you know Mr. Yanklovitch,” the cranky neighbor upstairs, “will complain for certain.”

  And they were already a week behind in the rent.

  “Samuel, Harry, come down now!” Anna went to the door and shouted up the staircase in English. “Momma insists that you stop.”

  As she stepped away from him, Morris moved closer to the window, which she had opened in search of a breeze.

  Though each season came with its challenges, for Bella it was always summer that was the most difficult to bear. In summer, it felt like a furnace in their cramped, suffocating rooms. There was little ventilation, and opening the windows only seemed to sweep in more heat from the outside. On top of that, they had to deal with the sweltering hiss from the countless steam irons and the incessant whir of sewing machines of women trying to earn a dollar or two from doing piecework that emanated from almost every apartment.

  Of course, in the winter they all huddled in blankets, as there was rarely heat and often no water from the spigots to boil.

  But in summer, when school was closed, there was never a moment’s peace. The children were always around, the apartment feeling like a cattle car with nowhere for any of them to go. Her husband was always at the temple—if not straightening up the teaching rooms or checking the boiler, then with the men, studying the Talmud. Bella did what little she could to help out with money, sewing garments herself after the dinner plates were cleaned and the rest of the family had gone to bed. Every dollar helped. Outside, there was the constant clop of horse wagons on the cobblestone streets, their drivers selling ice or making deliveries, the clatter of hundreds of peddlers with their overstuffed pushcarts until well after dark, the ever-present haggling back and forth in a dozen accents over prices or bickering if someone felt wronged.

  Bella had given birth to four boys, and loved each as if he was her only one, but if she was truthful, there was one who occupied the space closest to her heart. Yes, Shemuel always hid in her skirt when his brother reached his boiling point. But he was also the sweetest thing she knew, a wounded bird compared to his far more devilish twin. Each of her boys had their own distinct qualities. Sol, the oldest son, was the smart one, his head swimming with numbers and logic. He would surely stay in school and become an accountant or a teacher one day. Harold was as temperamental as he was lazy, always doing his best to slough his responsibilities onto his twin. But he was also the most handsome, with a charm no one could deny. And Morris … Little Morris was the feistiest. He was never still for a moment, even in the womb. He would go far in life, Bella was sure; she just didn’t know where. Just far. But Shemuel, with his apple-red cheeks and doe-like eyes, he was her favorite. She always said a smile from him could make the birds laugh in the trees.

  The twins ran back in, Shemuel in tears. Either from pain or anger. “Harry hurt me, Momma.”

  “What a baby.” His brother mocked him, tauntingly wiping his eyes. “Wah, wah, wah!”

  “I’m not a baby. But you’re a c
heater,” Shemuel shot back.

  “All right, all right…” Bella exhaled in frustration. “Harold, help me peel the potatoes for the soup. Quit trying to avoid your chores.”

  “Let Samuel do it,” Harold protested. Then he rubbed his eyes some more with a glance at his brother. “Wah, wah, wah.”

  “I said, stop, Harold! And now! Or you won’t have even a spoonful of soup for supper,” Bella scolded him in English, smacking the top of his head with her open hand. Maybe she did baby Shemuel just a bit. But Harold just would not quit.

  “Okay, okay…” Harold finally surrendered. The boys knew when she spoke English, she meant business. But after a moment, the impish smile returned to his face and he grinned at his brother. “Last one…?”

  Shemuel glared at him accusingly. “Momma said stop.”

  “I heard her. But five zuzim…,” he said. He winked at his brother mischievously. “For all the marbles.”

  It took a second, the kind of silent dare that ran like an electrical current between them. In answer, Shemuel thrust out his fist and found the center of Harold’s back. Harold cried, “See!” as Shemuel dashed out of the apartment, this time bolting down the stairs, Harold only yards behind.

  “Boys! Boys!” Bella yelled after them, at her limit.

  In a second they were out of earshot. Bella went to the window to angrily call them both back up. “Where is Morris?” she said to Anna, who was now back to her practicing, suddenly noticing he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  “I thought he was with you, Momma.”

  “He’s not with me. I told you to watch him—” Her nerves lit up. That boy could wander off in an instant. She never liked to let him out of her sight.

  Up the street, she heard the loud clang of a bell and leaned out the window. A fire wagon drawn by four horses headed down the block at a steady clop. She caught a whiff of smoke in the air—it seemed to be coming from over on Chrystie, two blocks away. People were running that way. “The temple is burning! The temple is burning!” she heard them shouting.

  The temple. Her mind flashed to her husband.

  Jacob.

  Worry rising in her, Bella searched the street for her twins. She’d have to go, she knew. The temple was their lifeblood. They’d need every hand. But in the meantime, this foolery between her boys must end. They would go straight to bed now, she promised herself, with no dinner. Both of them.

  “There he is,” Anna said. “By the stove.”

  The fire wagon rumbled toward her, people darting out of the way. “Watch out! Let the fire wagon through!” If it was the temple she must go there herself. There were important documents that would need to be saved. The hand-woven prayer shawls in the cupboards, many of which she’d made herself. And the prayer books. They must be saved too.

  That was when she saw Shemuel darting out of the building into the street. Harold stopped on the sidewalk.

  “Harold! Shemuel! Come back up! Now!” she shouted down at them.

  Laughing, Shemuel turned to look up at her. Then he spun back to his brother. “Five zuzim!” he yelled with a giddy smile, his eyes wide in triumph.

  Someone screamed, “Watch out!”

  Above the sudden neigh of horses being reined in, the fire wagon swept upon him. There was another shout, not a stranger’s, but one far more recognizable, not filled with mischief this time, or even anger, but terror.

  Harold’s voice. “Samuel, look out!”

  The wooden spoon fell from Bella’s hand.

  A pall of dread swept over her, the dread only a mother might know, as forces terrible and yet completely unstoppable came together.

  “Shemuel! Anna, watch Morris,” Bella said, her heart churning out of control. “Something has happened.”

  “What, Momma?”

  “Just watch him. Now!”

  She ran out of the apartment and hurled herself down the stairs, a voice inside her pleading with her brain that what she had seen could not be true. But yet she knew it was true. No matter how she tried to banish it from her mind.

  Outside, she ran straight into Mr. Mandlebaum, the butcher next door, who grabbed her and held her as she tried to pull past him. “Mrs. Rabishevsky, please…”

  “Let me go. Let me go. Shemuel!”

  Amid the tangle of horses’ legs, she saw his feet. His body twisted at an angle she had never seen before. His neck, more sideways than straight.

  “He just ran right out in front of me.” One of the firemen, who had climbed down from the wagon, shook his head in dismay. “I didn’t see him.”

  “Let me go, please!” Bella wrenched herself out of Mr. Mandlebaum’s grip. She ran over and kneeled above her son, put out her hand and gently touched his shoes, his bare leg, his face, softly stained with blood. His smooth, red cheek. “Shemuel,” she said again, stroking his face.

  She knew there was no life in him.

  And Harold, burying his face in her skirt, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Momma,” he said, his arms wrapped tightly around her. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry.”

  A dim voice whispered faintly inside her: My little boy, it said, as she stroked Shemuel’s face, knowing his soul had already left him. My little boy.

  My favorite.

  PART ONE

  ALL OF THEM

  1934

  Chapter One

  There was a chill in the air, for April, as Morris Raab headed back down Seventh Avenue. And a chill was always good for the coat business, anyone on the street would say.

  He and his brother Sol had had their own firm for seven years now. They had sixty machines in operation, a steady production in two other factories on Allen and Rivington Streets downtown, and a growing business even in the teeth of the Depression, when dozens of their competitors had been forced to close their doors. There were six years between them—six years which could have been twenty. Sol had always planned to pursue a reliable trade, like accounting or the law. But as the oldest son, when their father died it had fallen on him to take care of the family, so he dropped out of accounting school and found work preparing the books for the bridal shop on Orchard Street and for an engraver on Grand.

  It was Morris, his younger brother, who had asked him to come on board.

  “What would I possibly do for you?” Sol asked skeptically. “I don’t know garments. I know numbers.”

  “I know all you’ll need to know,” his younger brother said. “And what I can’t teach you, you’ll learn. It’s not exactly rocket science.”

  “If it was, I doubt you’d be much of a success,” Sol said.

  From the start it was a schlecht shidech, their mother always said. A bad marriage. A circle made of two squares.

  And yet the “marriage” had worked.

  To Sol, who labored over every dime, Morris never seemed to spend a minute thinking much on anything. He only saw things as he wanted them to be, as he felt he could make them happen. Morris was tall, over six feet, with full shoulders and muscular arms that made him appear even larger. And he never backed down from anything. Sol was shorter and thin, with already receding hair and fists that had never been clenched in anger. The two were as different as two people could be who had come out of the same womb.

  “Ich zol azoy vissen fun tsoris,” Sol would mutter in Yiddish with a shake of his head. I should only have half the trouble you cause for me. “You know that, right?”

  “Du machst nich veynen,” Morris would reply with a dismissive wave. You’re making me cry.

  They had grown up rough-and-tumble on the Lower East Side. While Sol was always in the books, Morris saw no point in staying in school when, at twelve, he was already set to make his way in the world. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way. He had a firm jaw and a wide, flattened nose, as if reshaped by a heavyweight’s jab. His hands were solid and rough, his knuckles scarred from a hundred scraps, not the hands of a man used to solving things by sitting across the table. And he had learned how to use
them early on, and capably.

  When he was only fifteen he had forged his mother’s consent and enlisted to go fight in Europe in the Great War. By then, he had already dropped out of PS 48 on East Fourth and joined in the trade. They sent him to basic training at a camp near Aqueduct Raceway in Queens. He was the only Jew in his unit; his fellow recruits, all street-hardened Irish and Italian boys, acted like they’d never even met one before. A week into their training, Morris’s corporal and four of his tent mates wrestled him from behind and shoved him into the latrine, basically a ditch dug outside half-filled with piss and excrement, while the rest looked on, laughing, peppering him with taunts of “Christ killer” and “Rumpleforeskin.” Two or three even opened their flies and let go. When Morris crawled back out in shame, soiled with piss and shit, the corporal said he smelled so vile he’d have to go sleep with the horses in the stables. When Morris finally told him to go fuck himself and charged, the rest of the unit tackled him and held him down while the corporal ran a sharp-bristled horse brush down his back until his skin was bloody and raw. Morris spent two days in the hospital, bandaged and covered in salve. When the sergeant found out, he tried to get Morris to divulge what had happened, but Morris refused to give up a name.

  A second sergeant got involved, this one a Jew. A drill sergeant, with arms like cannons and a demeanor as tough as any soldier in camp. “I figure you’d like to get back at these bastards,” he said to Morris, sizing up what had taken place. Morris said, yeah, he damn well would like to get back at them. “Well, not here,” the sergeant said. They had a boxing team on base, so he said they would take it out in the ring.

  Morris, who was ready wherever, said, “Fine. Pick any one of them,” leering at the corporal.

  “Not any one.” The sergeant looked at him and handed him his gloves. “All.” All … Morris looked back at him, sure he hadn’t heard correctly. These were tough Irish and Italian kids, all with three years on him. Why would another Jew set him up for the biggest licking of his life?