1
FEBRUARY 1939
“Eli, just one more,” I said to the man behind the bar, sliding my glass across to him. “The same.”
“How about we think about calling it a night, Mr. Mossman?” the barman replied, likely detecting that rise in my voice that immediately gave me away when I’d had one too many. “What is that now, two, three?”
He was being kind. It was four, actually. Four Rob Roys. And he knew just how I liked them. A jigger of Cutty with only a wave of vermouth skirted around the edge. Pretty much scotch on the rocks for anyone else. Along with an ashtray full of Chesterfield butts. That’s how I passed every Tuesday and Thursday eve.
But he was right—I ought to get myself home. I had a wife and a daughter there, the remains of a once-happy family, even if it was now more of a memory than a fact. For weeks now, after work—if you even called it work, what I did these days, teaching evening classes in U.S. history to immigrants applying for citizenship—I’d been stopping by this dark, smoky bar with its red neon sign flickering on and off—Eli’s, Eli’s … It was in a part of the city most people steered away from after dark, south of Madison Square Garden and north of Forty-second, where the Greyhound Line buses came in. I always instructed the Irish owner who manned the bar as I took a stool, “Just the one, Eli.…” Only to make the bus ride across town and the rickety Lexington IRT back to Yorkville more bearable (though I usually threw my wobbly ass into a cab) and to go over the stories of the day: the deteriorating situation in Europe; that madman Hitler threatening to take over the Sudetenland; the wave of America Firsters and our own isolationist Congress seemingly closing their eyes to the looming danger there. What every thinking person in this increasingly blind world could clearly see.
But invariably, the “one” had a way of always turning into two, and two, three—as the discussion heated. “Let those Europeans work it out for themselves,” Eli would say. “Me, I don’t want a single one of our boys dying over there for them. Not after the last war…”
And then the three might become four, or even more, until it was clear as the torment on my face why I was really there, drinking myself into a dulled state, and that it wasn’t all over the gloomy condition in Europe.
That clearly, undeniably, I simply didn’t want to go home. That home merely reminded me of the promise and hope rapidly fading from my life. That once I had been in the doctoral program at Columbia, instructing graduate candidates in nineteenth-century European history while I finished my dissertation. That once I had a smart and beautiful wife who thought of me as the center of her universe, but now looked at me with scorn and disappointment—if she even looked at me at all. And a daughter, Emma, the apple of my eye no matter what I had done to ruin things, who had seen me stagger home more sideways than straight far more times than she could even count to at the age of four. “Mommy, what’s wrong with Daddy?” she would ask. “Is he sick?”
“Yes, honey, Daddy’s just not feeling well,” Liz would say, doing her best to cover for me.
Hearing my daughter’s words and seeing her questioning look was the most painful part of it for me. Still, as bad as things had become with Liz, and whenever it was that our troubles had truly begun, tonight, it seemed, the whole city was in the same state of unrest. Maybe the world.
Tonight, over twenty thousand supporters of that maniac Hitler had gathered at Madison Square Garden to listen to finger-pointing fascists spew their hate and vitriol on the Jews and the international interests who were threatening our society. Thousands, dressed in khaki shirts and armbands or even in their business suits draped in Nazi flags, listening to anti-Semites like Fritz Kuhn, Father Coughlin, and Joseph McWilliams (known as “Joe McNazi)” rile them up into a hate-filled state; shouting their vile calumnies against the Jews and Bolsheviks who they claimed had infiltrated our government and were now running our country. Bernard Baruch. Henry Morganthau. Felix Frankfurter. And our president, Franklin Delano “Jewsavelt,” and his Commie New Deal.
I’d heard there were over two thousand of New York’s policemen trying to keep order over on Eighth Avenue, and thousands of protestors, the last line of sanity in this world, shouting back and pointing fingers at them for their treatment of Jews in Europe, shouting, “Fascists! Make Europe safe for everyone.”
Now, three hours later, the bastards were still roaming the streets around town in raucous bands of six or ten, singing Nazi songs, busting into fistfights with hecklers who flung curses and garbage back at them. Railing against the “interventionists” who were trying to draw America into Europe’s unrest. America is for Americans, they would say. Yes, it was all crazy. Not just in my soul, in my conscience tonight, but everywhere.
Eli, just one more.
Eli, in his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and a matching apron around his waist, looked at me with a philosophical shake of his head, the wisdom that came from serving a thousand people like me with similarly empty souls: Don’t you have something better to do with your life, son, than sit here? His look said, You’re smart. Educated. You’re not like the usual riffraff who crawl their way in here this time of night. Go on home. You’ve got a beautiful gal waiting for you there, an adorable daughter. Didn’t you show me their picture once?
But then he just shrugged—that complacent, unjudging bartender’s shrug that says, I just give ’em what they want. And he reached to the shelf for the open bottle of Cutty and filled my glass one more time. “Your poison, young man.”
Yes, my poison.
This time I waved off the vermouth and took a gulp, no longer even feeling the bite of the alcohol, just the warmth of it going down and doing its job. Forgetting.
“You know what tonight is, Eli?” I asked him. I lit another cigarette.
“All I know is it’s one woeful night to make a living,” he said, turning his blue Irish eyes at the sparse crowd and at the bedlam going on outside.
You could still hear bands of them parading down West Forty-third Street, roaming the deserted, trash-lined streets, drunkenly singing their “patriotic” songs, kicking over trash cans, scrawling swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs on store windows. The cops all seemed to look the other way. All they wanted was for it all to go away. Hell, half of them probably felt the same way as the mob if you asked them over a beer. Last October, only five months ago, almost a hundred Jews—old men, women, rabbis, even babies—had been murdered throughout Germany, with hundreds more beaten senseless in the streets or protecting their homes and synagogues. Jewish businesses and religious sites trashed and destroyed; Torahs and Talmuds defaced. Kristallnacht, they called it—The Night of Broken Glass. All egged on and even sanctioned by the Reich. The very people these drunken idiots here were celebrating tonight. The world was horrified. It had been the deadliest state-sanctioned attack on Jews since the violent pogroms in Russia in the early part of the century. It made people—even the ones who had supported them initially—think, what had these Nazis unleashed? What dark demons of the soul had they let loose? How could we avoid war?
But as bad as it was outside, it only mirrored the turmoil playing out in my own soul. My once-promising career and marriage were now corkscrewing into a fiery crash like one of those downed Messerschmitts on the newsreels.
It had all begun about a year ago, when the head of the history department was changed at Columbia, my old friend Otto Brickman sacked—two-thirds of the way through my thesis on the punishing effects of the Versailles Treaty on Germany today, the damage fell on me. “All this talk about punishing Germany, it’s just a bit too radical for now,” said the new head, Townsend Rusk, a pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed bigot who’d spent ten years in the State Department before taking a cozy position back in the classroom. “Too inflammatory with all that’s happening in the world.”
But what he was really saying was that there might no longer be a career path for me there. And it was clear it was partly related to my last name. That the full-time professorship I’d had the inside track on with Brickman would now be handed on a platter to someone else. Someone with a different name and background. And that it might be in my best interest to begin looking for a teaching career elsewhere.
There was still a quota around the Ivy League for Jews on the graduate level, and suddenly it was hitting me square in the face. Three years I’d put into that work, into my job there. And it was gone in a day. So, yes, maybe a drink or two as I looked around for a new position did kind of ease the sting and disappointment.
And then there was Ben.
Six months ago, word that my twin brother—six minutes younger, the one with the true brains of the family, we always said (and the guts to put them to use)—had been killed while fighting the fascists in Spain. He’d joined up after a spat we had at our family Seder the year before. “You hate the fascists so much, go sign up and fight them,” I kind of dared him, after he took issue with my thesis argument, that Europe and the United States had forced Germany toward the Nazis by handcuffing them economically with the Versailles Treaty.
Ben, who was in his second year of residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital up in Boston, looked back at me with that gleam in his eye that said he rarely backed down from a dare. “Maybe I just will” was all he said, going back to the noodle pudding, and not six months later he boarded a freighter across the Atlantic and joined the fight as a medic. My father begged him not to be a fool, not to be such an idealist, but he went nonetheless. In August, we heard he’d been tending to a wounded soldier in a hotel lobby in Valencia when a bomb planted by a Nationalist saboteur blew up most of the lobby. For almost thirty years there hadn’t been a day when my brother wasn’t a part of my life. He was the person I looked up to most. Judged myself against. Competed against. For me, it was hard not to shoulder some of the blame. Certainly, my father, who still hadn’t come back from it, made me feel that way. I was the one who had never put much on the line for anything, but always found a way to get by. He was the one who put himself on the line for everything, and now he was gone.
That afternoon scotch soon turned into two or three.
Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Gross
