Wherever There Is Light (2 page)

In the great room, Julian sat on the built-in couch and sifted through the papers: report cards, mostly straight As, from schools in Paris and, part of the last two years, in Lovewood; a list on notepaper, in Kendall's precise handwriting, of Bobby's childhood diseases and vaccinations with corresponding dates; his passport, the pages with stamps from every country in Western Europe except East Germany; and a signed letter, notarized a month ago at a bank in Fort Lauderdale, naming Julian as Bobby's legal guardian in the event of her incapacitation or death.

But it was Bobby's birth certificate, issued by the New York State Department of Health, that set off Julian's anger, both old and new, at Kendall. Bobby had been born on November 14, 1953, a date approximately nine months after Julian's last encounter with Kendall. A Dr. Claude Balt had signed the document, certifying that he'd delivered Bobby at Harlem Hospital. That was less than thirty miles from where Julian was living, and he was dumbfounded that Kendall hadn't called him until he'd read the name in the box reserved for Father: Otis M. Larkin.

Lucinda's warning had to be about the birth certificate. She probably thought Julian wouldn't take Bobby in if his paternity was in doubt. Kendall knew better. She knew that Julian loved her and that he, having arrived in America from Germany at the age of fifteen broke and alone, would never refuse to care for her child—regardless of whether he was the father. Did Kendall know about Holly? Julian didn't see how that was possible, but he couldn't think about it anymore because he was crying quietly and his throat was as dry as sand.

NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

N
OVEMBER
20, 1938

O
n Sunday morning, thirty men from the Third Ward Gang were eating in the Weequahic Diner and giving the waitress with the big hair a workout, sending her to refill the baskets of Danish so often she said, “I'm not standing on a conveyor belt here.” The men broke up like she was Groucho cracking wise, and the waitress joined in because their collective tip would pay her rent and because, despite their kibitzing, these fellas were the salt of the earth, even if some of them had nicknames out of a vaudeville act.

For example, the Goldstein twins. Everybody began calling them Looney and Gooney during Prohibition, when the twins, whose faces brought to mind a matched set of demented owls, specialized in uncovering where shipments of competitors' liquor were going so their colleagues could hijack the trucks. The Goldstein method was to douse a member of a rival gang with gasoline and flick lit matches in his direction until he gave up the routes. Looney was not as gifted with the matches as Gooney, so on occasion they had a bonfire.

Abner Zwillman, leader of the Third Ward boys, owned the most famous nickname—due to the press and a potpourri of US attorneys, FBI agents, and IRS examiners—and he strode into the Weequahic as dapper as a Latin bandleader. He was known as Longy, in Yiddish,
der Langer
, the Long One—a nom de guerre that went back to when fourteen-year-old Abe, already over six feet tall, and his friends used to protect Jewish peddlers from the hooligans who harassed them. Longy sat at the table behind his men, where Julian Rose was reading the play
Strange Interlude
.

Longy said, “That O'Neill's depressing.”

Julian put down the book. “I think that's his point.”

“His point's you should leave the theater and go hang yourself?”

“Saves money on dinner.”

“Funny,” Longy said, except he wasn't smiling. He and Julian were at odds about the diverging paths of their careers. Longy was thirty-four, nine years older than Julian, but he was the closest thing Julian had to a real father. Less than a week off the boat, Julian had gone to the Riviera Hotel to see Longy, who had made millions in liquor and had most of New Jersey in his pocket. First thing Longy said to him: “You're taller than me,” and then he put his arm around Julian and added that his friends called him Abe. He gave Julian a job on his trucks, protecting his bottles of liquid capital, and Abe came to respect the kid: give Julian the business, he'd put your lights out before you could blink, and he had a brain like an adding machine. Julian was also the only one who could control Looney and Gooney, and he was smoother than mouse hair when it came to paying off any guy Abe needed on his side.

When Prohibition ended, Julian was halfway rich and wanted to repay Abe, pressing him to be his partner buying the woods and farmland that ringed Newark with an eye toward residential and commercial development. Abe kept saying no, and Julian kept trying. Now he said, “Saw a swell piece of property in Verona.”

“C'mon, Newark's what Jews got instead of the Promised Land.”

Abe was kidding himself. He had nothing against real estate but preferred nurturing his gambling action, cutting sweetheart deals with union bosses and politicians, and strong-arming the proprietors of any place you could stick one of his jukeboxes and cigarette machines. Why? Because Abe believed being a gangster was his edge when he was hobnobbing with the moneyed cream of the American crop. To them, Abe Zwillman was a kike from the tenements of Newark. Longy, however—Longy was a man they could respect, or fear, and Julian thought that all this game would get Abe was a trip up the river, and Julian wanted to save Abe, the man who had saved him, from dying in jail.

Longy said, “You'll deal with those Nazi jerks in Irvington?”

Irvington was a shot-and-a-beer town just south of Newark with few Jews and lots of Germans who attended the rallies of the Hitler-worshipping Deutsch-Amerikanischer Volksbund. Julian had retired from the intimidation racket, but Nazis were a special case.

“I'll handle it. Eddie O dropped me off and went to hand out some Christmas money to the Irvington cops so they'll go slow when the calls come in.”

“Don't let Looney and Gooney croak nobody. I can live without the headlines.”

Eddie O'Rourke was outside, leaning against his white Chrysler Imperial. “Top of the morning, boys,” he said as Julian and the Third Ward Gang filed out of the diner.

Any strangers passing by would conclude that they were beholding a good-natured, freckled-faced fellow in a snazzy tweed coat and cap with some merry Galway music in his voice. They would be partially correct. At other moments, when someone was paying him to collect from recalcitrant debtors or when he was in a less benevolent mood, Eddie O could be unruly enough to make the Goldstein twins appear well-adjusted.

“You're goin' with us?” Looney said. “Since when're you a Jew?”

“Since your sister chewed off my foreskin.”

Most of the flesh bulging Looney's plaid sports jacket was muscle. He said, “Say somethin' else about sisters, I'll knock your teeth out.”

Gooney said, “We ain't got no sisters,” but Looney was not deterred by this technicality, and as he moved toward Eddie, Julian smacked him on top of his head with his book.

“What'd ya do that for?” Looney asked Julian, his feelings more bruised than his scalp.

Eddie replied, “To hear if your head was really hollow.”

Looney said, “You wasn't his best pal, guess how long you already woulda been dead.”

“Time to go,“ Julian said, and climbed into the passenger seat of Eddie's Chrysler.

“What's eating ya?” Eddie asked as Julian stared glumly out at the statelier homes of the Weequahic section, where Jews who'd cut themselves a slice of America the Beautiful had relocated from the Third Ward.

“My folks just arrived from Berlin. My father got a job teaching at a college in Lovewood, Florida. I'm going down tomorrow.”

“That's good, no? With what's going on in that hellhole?”

Eddie was referring to the mobs rampaging through Berlin, smashing the windows of Jewish shops, setting fires, and beating Jews in the streets. Julian had seen the pictures in the papers—the glass shining on the sidewalks like rime and smoke spiraling up from the cupolas of the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, built by prosperous Jewish Berliners like Julian's father, the esteemed Herr Professor Theodor Rose, who had proclaimed their Germanic pride by erecting a temple indistinguishable from a Teutonic castle. The mobs had swept across Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and the rioting already had a name:
Kristallnacht
, the Night of Broken Glass.

“I been trying to get them out for a year,” Julian said. “My father claimed he was too busy writing his history of the Enlightenment.
Building a Better Tomorrow
, he's calling it. His argument that science and reason will save us from ourselves.”

Eddie laughed. “Don't he read the papers?”

Julian kept looking out the window. Then: “I used to skip school to hang around the nightclubs. It pissed off my father.”

“That makes sense,” Eddie said.

“I loved those joints. It was like going to the circus.”

The German-American Bund held so many rallies at the picnic area on Montgomery Avenue that the locals dubbed it Hitler Park. It was surrounded by a flimsy wooden fence, a challenge that Gooney addressed by throwing his beat-up DeSoto in reverse and smashing through a section of fencing. Eighty or ninety Bundists in storm trooper regalia dashed toward the splintered wood, but over half of them fled when they saw who had invited themselves to their party. Julian and Eddie stood under the bare trees as Longy's men, armed with Louisville Sluggers, began flattening the Bundists who lacked the judgment to flee. Eddie was bored, and Julian was preoccupied thinking about his parents and recalling the day he'd left home—October 9, 1928.

He was holding a suitcase and standing on the stairway of the Roses' four-story stone mansion on Mauerstrasse, his right cheek stinging from his father's slap. His father was up on the landing, screaming at him, and his mother was at the bottom of the stairs, sobbing. Julian had to catch a train to Hamburg and a ship to New York, where he'd been born, toward the end of Theodor's lecture tour, exactly fifteen years before. His mother had paid for the tickets, believing that if Julian stayed in Berlin, the fights with his father would've escalated until one of them murdered the other. Elana Rose had always seemed so fragile to her son, as if she had never recovered from being abandoned on the doorstep of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Newark, and Julian hugged her. “I love you, Mama.” His mother didn't stop crying, and his father was still screaming that Julian was a lazy bum when he went out the door. Julian didn't return to Berlin until 1935, after the Nazis had dismissed Jewish professors from their posts. To survive, Theodor had sold the house to a gentile colleague from the university, who allowed the Roses to reside on the top floor, though he charged them
Jüdische Miete
—Jewish rent—triple the going rate for Aryans, and made them use the side entrance. Theodor scowled when he saw his son's sleek, double-breasted gabardine, but Julian hadn't come to patch up things with his father. He was there to arrange for Elana to receive a monthly stipend via a Swiss bank in Lucerne. His mother handled the bills, and they both knew that Theodor wouldn't have accepted the assistance even if he and his wife had starved.