When Addie and baby Frankie were still at home, he’d find an excuse to go out to the Polo Grounds, catch a Yanks game. They were great years, just after the First War, people with smiles on their faces once again, anxious to get dressed up and get out to one of the new speakeasies that were growing up round the town, desperate for a cocktail, a steak and a dance. They were a heedless crowd and he knew how to work them.
That’s how Morrie saw it. He could afford to, he had it all. And them all, most of them anyway. Their friendship, their trust, their business, their favours, occasionally their sexual favours. He was not a philanderer, God forbid, but with a few drinks in him he liked some fun. There was one girl. He met her at the Stork Club, not a waitress or hatcheck girl, nothing tawdry, just the niece of one of his acquaintances, with a taste for mature men. He treated her well, and she didn’t ask more than the occasional meal and bottle of hooch, and some pretty clothes. He could supply all of those, and he was a better lover than her young suitors. He made her crazy, for a while.
She was in a compartment, and happy to stay there, part of that life, not this one. Out of her company, he couldn’t think of her. Lying in bed at night with Perle, an image of Flora would have kept him awake for hours. Best to read.
He was a poor sleeper, and glad of it. Even after a few hours’ rest he felt fresh in the morning, and managed to read two or three books a week during the nights. History and biographies mostly, but an occasional novel too. Howard Fast perhaps, nothing fanciful, something with a good story that you could learn from.
He had a bookplate designed with a black and white image of books on a bookshelf, with one obviously missing, and glued it into his books: STOLEN FROM THE LIBRARY OF MAURICE KAUFMANN. He liked lending the books to friends in the sly hope that they might forget to give them back and be caught out by a visitor looking casually through their bookshelves.
Worse than getting lost, way worse, was what was coming to them all, and soon! Addie quailed at the prospect, the children caught her anxiety, only Ben was immune from the fear. Even when they were an hour away, the children could see their mother withdrawing, opening a bottle of pills and tossing one in her mouth, swallowing it without even a sip of water. How could she do that?
The threat was called the Holland Tunnel. Not that this particular tunnel was so frightening – they might as well have taken the Lincoln Tunnel, a few miles down the road, or that other one on the other side of the city that they would have to take next.
Addie had explained it to the kids when they were little. The tunnel went under a river – the Hudson River – so you could get to the other side. It was built with extra care, it was perfectly safe, the water that surrounded it couldn’t get in. It was dry, it was totally dry! And safe, safe as houses!
Once they had entered the fearsome underwater space, the spooky darkness only partially lit, there would be a terrible hissing of tyres, and Addie and the children would peer out the windows and scan the walls anxiously for moisture because that would mean the tunnel had sprung a leak and they would all drown when it filled up. Unless they kept the windows up! Then the car would just float until they got rescued by the frogmen.
Jake dealt with his mounting anxiety as his father might have, by goofing around. He peered out the window, raised his finger and shouted: ‘There! There! It’s coming out, it’s spouting out! The pollute is coming to get us!’
If Addie could have smacked him she would; instead she punched Ben, who was giggling away.
‘Both of you shut up. It’s not funny!’
There was moisture! Everywhere the walls were wet, drops ran down them. Addie hunched down in her seat and held her breath, Becca began to cry. Your lungs would fill with water, you wouldn’t be able to breathe.
Ben tried to explain once again. Outside the walls was dirt, not water. It went under the riverbed, not through the river itself.
That was pretty stupid.
Ben resumed humming his arias, to soothe them. When they emerged on the other side and began making their way crosstown to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, Addie said she’d had enough and threatened to get out at the next red light. They should go uptown, she said, and take the Triborough Bridge. She trusted bridges: the water couldn’t sneak up on you.
She was rather surprised when Ben refused.
‘It will take an extra hour almost,’ he said. ‘It’s a schlep, you’re going in the wrong direction! And you’ve already done the hard bit: the East River is drek compared to the Hudson, you can get right under it in a minute!’
Addie looked at the children, who nodded weakly, accepting their fates.
‘OK . . .’ she said.
‘Anyway,’ said Ben, ‘if we drown I will take full responsibility.’
Becca put her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and hid on the floor.
Though a man’s man in most respects, Maurice was genuinely interested in women’s clothes, kept abreast of fashion, studied the designs of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli – none of your American schmatas – and instructed his designers and fabricators to make inexpensive versions of haute couture classics, strong on style and low on quality. He talked fashion with the girls, and unlike his fellows was more interested in getting them into clothes than out of them.
He made a great market for Chanel-style clothes (with Chanel labels!) which he produced off site and off the books. He was a fashion bootlegger, and patrolled the clubs and bars stealthily, insinuating himself into conversations and cliques, making his market. The girls loved him, and they loved his clothes, so airy, so dreamy, so light, they made you feel free. To be, to move, to dance: thanks to Morrie! He hugged them, took their cash, watched their tuchuses sway and their bubbies bounce, freed from the constraints of stays, heavy bras, girdles, garters, their bodies released, no dread demarcation of top, waist, bottom, just one organic unit, freed at last.
There was less to the new dresses than met the eye: they may have been sheer and free-flowing, nothing to them at all, but they were lies, like their owners. Sheer fabrications, he would joke, but nobody ever got it. His bootlegged versions never looked quite the real thing. But their new owners weren’t the real thing either, it was a fair deal, everyone gained, especially Morrie.
He talked about fashion with such enthusiasm that some of the girls supposed him a homosexual. In fact, he cared about flapper’s finery as much as he cared about pogo sticks or flyswatters. If he’d been selling either he would have done so just as knowledgeably and enthusiastically, citing statistics about jumpability and squashability, producing references from satisfied customers. Two feet in the air! Dead flies galore! His enthusiasm was for the process, not the product.
He was always paid in cash. He believed in paying tax – the country needed schools and roads and hospitals – but you could take such rectitude to excess. He got away with it. It was the gangsters and bootleggers who attracted the eyes of the IRS – tax evasion brought down Al Capone, you can steal and murder your heart out, but the government has to get a cut – and no one was going to enquire about Maurice Kaufmann and his little sideline.
It saw him through the Depression. When he later bought the bungalow in 1939, he pretended to Perle that it was going to be a stretch. He’d have to work extra hours, burn some midnight oil drumming up business. In fact, he paid cash and spent those extra days and nights on the town, anxious for the next drink, and deal.
He met some swell people. Babe Ruth was round town most evenings during the home stands, tanked up, surrounded by well-wishers and floozies, heedless, with a talent so immense that even a man of his indiscriminate appetites couldn’t abuse it. Maurice spent some evenings in his company, even got in a few words one night at the Cotton Club with the Bambino, who never had much to say for himself: ‘Hey, kiddo, good to see ya, have a drink!’ He was an