“Yes, we’re all well. All—”
“I’m really pleased to hear that. Give my regards to your wife and children.”
“Jack, you know how fond we all were of your father . . .”
“Yeah. Everyone used to be fond of him. Anyway, good-bye, Ben. Take care.”
He hugged him.
“You, too, son.”
Back on the street, Jack sat on the steps leading up to the complex. He couldn’t go home empty-handed. While he tried to think of something, he fiddled with the tickets that his uncle had given him for Radio City Music Hall, the magnificent theater that everybody was talking about and that had yet to open. He thought they were neat. They announced the premiere of a show called “the Rockettes,” with Caroline Andrews as the diva, and a performance by the Flying Wallendas circus act. Seeing on the reverse that the theater was located just behind Rockefeller Center, he headed there to find out what the tickets cost and inquire whether it would be possible to return them for a refund.
As he reached the box office, he had to pinch himself when he saw that each ticket was worth nine dollars, an outrageous sum compared to the quarter that it cost to go to the pictures, or the dollar twenty-five to watch a baseball game. The eighteen dollars from his two tickets would be enough for a month’s rent with some left over. The problem was they did not accept returns.
He decided he wouldn’t give up so easily. He remembered how, in Detroit, he had sometimes bought tickets for Tigers’ games at Navin Field from touts—for double the normal price. If he could find the right buyer, he could make a tidy sum.
The opportunity presented itself when, after he had hung around outside the box office for several hours, a Duesenberg twice the length of a normal car parked up under the Radio City Music Hall’s impressive neon signs, and a well-dressed couple stepped onto the sidewalk. The man must have been about forty years old, with slicked-back hair and a thin mustache, fashionably trimmed. He was accompanied by a stunning young woman, whom he was obviously trying to impress. He went straight to the box office and argued for a few moments with the clerk, before turning to consult with his girlfriend. The young woman made a face when she learned that the best seats were taken. The box office clerk could only offer them seats on the third balcony. The man had turned up his nose as if he had just been offered a piece of garbage.
Jack waited for the couple to retreat from the theater. Right when they were about to climb back into their car, he rushed up to offer them his tickets. At first, the wealthy man looked at him with scorn, but then he considered Jack’s proposal. He took the tickets and examined them more closely.
“These wouldn’t be fakes, now, would they?”
Jack’s only response was to wave them at the box office clerk, who confirmed their authenticity.
“Sir, I can assure you that, had my wife not been taken ill, nothing in the world would’ve stopped us seeing this show, on the opening night,” he improvised.
“And you say you’re selling them for thirty dollars?” the man tried to barter.
“The cream of New York will be attending. You and the young lady will be shoulder to shoulder with Jean Harlow, Douglas Fairbanks, Kid Chocolate . . . As you already know, the best seats are sold out. But if you can’t afford thirty dollars, that’s understandable.”
“Douglas Fairbanks?” the young woman cut in, wide-eyed. “Oh, please, darling! Buy them! Please say yes!”
The man stoically withstood the girl’s arm-twisting, but he eventually shook his head in resignation. He counted out the bills and handed them to Jack.
“You’re sure Douglas will be here?” he grumbled.
“Absolutely,” lied Jack as he said farewell with his best smile.
On the way to Brooklyn, he rued having argued with his father. Though the anger was always short-lived, it wasn’t the first time that, in a fit of rage, Solomon had ordered him out of the apartment. But at least now his father would have cause to be happy. Despite his father’s drinking problem, Jack was convinced that sooner or later everything would return to normal, and the best way for that to happen was to start paying some of the rent they owed Kowalski. Then he would find a job doing whatever he had to and find a way to make Solomon give up the booze. They would get through it together, he and his father. He was certain of it.
By the time he reached South Second Street, it was almost night. People who still had somewhere to live would be in their homes as it was Christmas Eve, which was why he was surprised to find a crowd gathered outside his father’s apartment block. Wanting to know what had happened, he picked up his pace. As he approached, he saw women sobbing and wailing. One of them gave him a look filled with pity. His pulse quickened.
He made his way through the crowd until he reached a ring of men busy trying to resuscitate a bloody body. Jack assumed someone had been hit by a car, but a number of people were pointing up at an open window on his father’s building. Jack’s heart stopped. He tried to shoulder his way through, until finally one of the men tending to the unfortunate person moved away to call for help, revealing a devastating sight.
Flat on the road’s surface, atop a spreading pool of blood, lay the lifeless body of Solomon Beilis, clutching his beloved menorah.
3
The cemetery on Bay Parkway was the final stop for Brooklyn’s destitute—a landscape of blackened gravestones permeated by misery, tears, and desolation. Jack hadn’t set foot there since his mother’s death. Now, wearing a borrowed black tie, he stumbled along in the rain with the other pallbearers under the weight of a cheap pine coffin, its edge digging hard into his shoulder.
As he walked, he suffered the irritating silence of the handful of mourners who had attended the burial, imagining their eyes fixed on his back. He was convinced they all blamed him for his father’s suicide. When they stopped in front of the grave, Jack once again regretted arguing with him, though he was certain that his words had not caused the tragedy. He knew exactly whom to blame. At the vigil, a neighbor from the same landing had sworn that she had heard Kowalski and his goons hammering on Solomon’s door the night of his death. They had banged on the door viciously, again and again, but Solomon hadn’t opened. Instead, he had thrown himself from the window. The woman wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t been the first and he wouldn’t be the last to take his own life during those desperate times.