When I imagined the tables on our front lawn, one beside the other, what they also brought to mind were my father’s wives and girlfriends, each of whom, as he grew older, was younger than the one before, and all of whom seemed, in the way I pictured them, like a series of older, larger women within whom—as in a set of Russian matryoshka dolls—younger, leaner, more beautiful women lived.
My father had had five wives, starting with my mother (who was two years older than he was), and there were also a dozen or so long-term girlfriends, though none of the girlfriends had ever moved in with him. Still, my father was not, he’d state whenever I asked about a new relationship—this usually in response to his inquiries about my love life—a philanderer. “I’ve always been an unregenerate serial monogamist,” he’d say, “though I really do love women.”
In all their varieties, he might have added, and as different as we were in most ways, in this we were alike, because whenever a friend would offer to fix me up with someone and ask what my type was, I’d be stumped. Like my father, I had no particular preferences because, like him, I found most women, whether girlfriends or friend-friends, more interesting—and better company—than guys. And because just about always—the thing I know my father valued above all, once you’d gotten past whatever it was you found initially attractive, and maybe because, it occurs to me, it was his pre-eminent quality—they were usually kinder than guys.
Be kind, my father would say to me from as far back as I can remember, and for a long list of situations—whether it had to do with guys I played against in sports, store clerks who were incompetent, strangers who were rude, or friends and relatives who were nasty—be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
The quote was from Philo, he said, and I grew up imagining that the name belonged to the man who’d invented the kind of pastry dough you use to make strudel or spanakopitas. When I was ten or eleven, though, I found out who Philo was, and the way it happened tells you things about my father you wouldn’t suspect from the quiet, somewhat shy man he was most of the time.
I was changing out of my uniform after a basketball game at our local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon when my father came into the locker room to see how I was doing, and while we were going over the game, one of the guys along our row of lockers called another guy a faggot. Without hesitating, my father walked over to the boy and told him that using such a term was vulgar and unacceptable, that he hoped the boy would never use it again, and that, to this end, he intended to speak with the boy’s father. My father waited for the boy to get dressed, after which he accompanied him to the Y’s lobby, where he told the boy’s father—a huge guy, six-three or -four, wearing a Boston Bruins hockey shirt—what had happened.
When the man told my father to mind his own goddamned business, my father repeated what he’d said to the boy: that use of such a word was vulgar and unacceptable, and that it demeaned not only the person to whom it referred, but, more profoundly, the person who had the unexamined need to employ such a word.
The man laughed in my father’s face, then jabbed him in the chest, told him that it took one to know one and that he’d better watch his own ass or he’d wind up skewered butt-first on a flagpole. Grabbing the front of my father’s shirt, the man said that he bet the last time my father had seen pussy was when he shoveled out cat shit at the A.S.P.C.A.
A woman at the Y desk picked up a phone—a crowd had gathered—but my father gestured to her to put it down and, very calmly, he addressed the man who was holding his shirt, and the way he did it made me think ‘Uh-oh!’, because even though my father could be a polite and accommodating man most of the time, he could, at times, be seriously roused, and then—watch out!
“Sir,” he said to the man. “I would have you know that I have known more fine women in my lifetime than have ever existed in your imagination.”
The man warned my father not to be a professor smart-ass, made a fist, and said the only reason he’d been holding back till then was because he didn’t like to hit little old men. At this point, my father, who was five-foot-six and weighed perhaps one-fifty, stepped forward and pointed to the ceiling. “Well, look at that,” he said, and as soon as the man looked up, my father stomped down hard on one of the man’s feet, and let loose with a swift one-two combination to the guy’s mid-section. When the man doubled over, my father gave him a terrific roundhouse chop to the side of the head that dropped him straight to the floor.
“In my youth, you see,” my father said, and without breathing hard, “I studied at the Flatbush Boys Club with the great champion Lew Tendler, who himself had learned the trade, in and out of the ring, from the immortal Benny Leonard.”
The man opened his eyes, but stayed where he was while my father advised him never to discount the benefits of a good education in teaching us that the use of verbal insults against those we deem inferior only served to reveal our own ignorant shortcomings.
After word of the incident got around, my father became a hero to my friends, who, when they hung out at our house, would ask him for boxing tips, and it turned out that my father knew more than a little bit about the sport. He had published a novel, Prizefighter, when he was in his twenties, and it was based in part on the life of Barney Ross, a Jewish boxing champion who’d also been a war hero, and had, from the morphine they gave him for pain when he was wounded, become a drug addict, and then a recovered drug addict. My father had been a pretty good bantamweight himself in Police Athletic League competitions, though he never did A.A.U. or Golden Gloves, and when my friends asked, he’d offer them basic stuff about feints and jabs and being alert to an opponent’s weaknesses, and, using Ross as an example, about the will to win, which derived, he asserted, from fighting for something larger than yourself.
My father told us Ross’s story: how Ross’s father was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store in Chicago and was killed by gangsters in a hold-up, and how the family was made so poor by the father’s death that two of Ross’s brothers, along with his sister, were placed in an orphanage. The result was that whenever Ross was in the ring, he’d imagine he was fighting against his father’s murderers, and when he won the first of his three world championships, he used the prize money to rescue his brothers and sister from the orphanage.
After he’d finish telling us about Ross—or about Tendler, or Leonard, or “Kid” Kaplan, or Abe Attell, or Daniel Mendoza, or other great Jewish fighters—and after he’d given us a few pointers, he’d stop, hold up an index finger to indicate that the most important advice was coming, and then touch his tongue with his finger and emphasize that because it could produce words that allowed you to avoid a fight, or if you had to fight, that allowed you to distract your opponent, the tongue remained far and away your most important weapon.
“And always, always,” he would add, “be kind—fight as hard as you can, but at the same time don’t forget to nurture the kindness in your heart, the way Barney Ross did”—and one time when he gave out the saying, a friend asked if it was from Ross, and my father said no, that it was from Philo, and my friend asked who Philo was, and my father explained that Philo had been a philosopher from Alexandria who lived about fifty years before Christ, was known as Philo-the-Jew, and had been instrumental in the founding of Christianity by having combined elements of Greek mystery religions with Jewish theology.
My father usually had answers to most questions my friends asked, and if he didn’t, he’d say, “Now that’s an interesting question—may I get back to you on it?” In truth, I grew up in awe not so much of things like his boxing expertise, but of his mind, of its sheer range and intelligence, though he would dismiss praise from me and others by acknowledging that yes, maybe he had a few smarts, but if he did they were merely a result of the lucky genetic hand he’d drawn at birth.
In this, he said, he liked to think he had something in common with James Michener, though my father’s own writing—the