A Secret Gift Page 17

  Sam’s documents may have been fraudulent, but he was no fraud. He never put on airs, pretended to be high-born, or said an unkind word of those who were forced to scratch out a living. To the end, they were his people. The vulnerabilities he shared with them trumped any differences of religion, race, or gender, and if he fit in with those of privilege it was because they recognized in him something authentic, and not because he pretended to be one of them. So it was with Mr. B. Virdot. It was a made-up name, a pseudonym, but one that allowed him to express his truest self. That was the only contradiction in the man, that to be himself he had first to be someone else.

  Such an act of prevarication would have found an understanding audience in Depression-era Canton, and well beyond. A lie that liberated one from encumbrances past and over which one had no control and bore no responsibility was still a lie in the eyes of the law, but if it moved a man and his family closer to their dream, if it distanced him from ancient prejudices, if it merely allowed him to be judged on the merits of his work, most, I would wager, would have withheld judgment. Canton was a place that had drawn its share of immigrants from countries deemed undesirable by the town’s longer-established upper crust, those same people who used the laws to close the door behind them. Being unwanted by others was something many in Canton had in common, that and the need to be valued, if not for who they were, then at least for who they or their children might become. For them, emancipation was more than a simple matter of emigration. Back then, many did not speak of the past, and some, like Sam, chose to fictionalize it. No one thought the less of them for it. Canton had summoned them all with the promise of a second chance.

  V.

  Families

  The Crisis That Brought Them Closer

  For Sam Stone, the real and final break with the past did not come until 7:45 Sunday evening, March 14, 1926. That was when his father, Jacob Finkelstein, died at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh’s predominately Jewish Hill District. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. He was sixty-five and determined to the end to honor the old ways. He died as “Finkelstein,” not “Stone,” and in the medical care of Jacob Grekin, a Russian Jewish doctor who emigrated the same year Jacob did—1902—and whose native tongue, like Jacob’s, was Yiddish. He was laid to rest in the New Light Cemetery in Millvale, just outside Pittsburgh, across the Allegheny River.

  His obituary in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Criterion lists his surviving children. The sons are named “Samuel J., Max, David and Albert Finkelstein, all of Canton, Ohio and one brother.” Restoring the name Finkelstein to the sons, albeit in an obituary, was perhaps a last nod and concession to the old man, for by then all four sons had long since adopted the name Stone. If the boys had come to despise the baggage that went with their birth name, their father reviled its bastardization.

  But, in one final act of defiance, my grandfather signed his father’s death certificate “Sam J. Stone,” not “Sam J. Finkelstein.”

  Eighty-three years later, in May 2009, I went in search of the cemetery of Sam Stone’s parents, Jacob and Hilda. I found their graves just below the summit of a steep hill in the crowded New Light Cemetery, just outside Pittsburgh. In death, as in life, the American experience seemed to have touched them little. There is no “Stone” buried here, only “Finkelstein.” Jacob’s stone is a pillar of granite with an acorn for a crown. The acorn symbolizes birth, strength, and fertility. On the stone is written, in Hebrew, “Yakov ben Moshe Shmuel Finkelstein” and the dates of his birth and death. The Hebrew side of the stone has been worn down by the wind and is hard to read. The English, on the back side, shielded from the elements, is clear:Jacob Finkelstein

  Died

  March 14, 1926

  Aged

  67 Years

  Father

  The word Father at the base makes me uncomfortable, knowing what I know of him. Still, as is the Jewish custom, I placed two pebbles on the marker, one in Sam’s name and one in my own. Sam’s mother’s orthodoxy, which had smothered my grandfather in life, continued in death. Hilda died on September 17, 1939, and, in accordance with Orthodox tenets, was buried in a casket free of all metal (“earth to earth”). Her grave is not beside Jacob, nor at his feet, but catty-corner. She is buried between one Sophie Klapper and one Bessie Mandelbaum. The undertaker suggested that some Orthodox women would not risk being laid to rest beside another man, and so preferred to be placed between two women, even if not contiguous with her husband’s grave. (Her death certificate lists her maiden name as “Bacall,” and so it seems plausible that what Sam once told me was true, that he was related to the actress Lauren Bacall, whose mother was born in Romania and was Jewish.)

  Hilda Stone’s obituary was itself, at best, a half-truth. It said she “was a native of Rumania and had lived in this country 50 years.” That would have meant she came to America in 1889—fourteen years earlier than her arrival as recorded by passenger lists. Doubtless it was Sam who placed the obituary in the newspaper, and, in fabricating the date, avoided any public inconsistencies with his own fictionalized account of being born in America.

  JACOB HAD BEEN more than Sam’s father (or less, if affection is a requisite of fatherhood). He had been a living symbol of the duress of the past. Sam had not one picture of him. His father’s passing brought a change over Sam, who was then thirty-eight, single, successful, and something of a playboy. After that, he seemed to take stock of himself. The succession of sleek convertibles, women, and trips abroad had not filled the void within.

  Not long after Jacob Finkelstein died, Sam found himself at a dance in Canton. He noticed a shy, dark-haired girl sitting in the dim light of the dance hall. He walked over and introduced himself. Her name was Minna Cecilia Adolph. He asked if she would care to join him on the dance floor. She accepted, but was a little tentative in her steps, having removed her glasses before the dance. They danced through the evening, said their good-byes, and parted. Sam came away with the address of the law office where she worked.

  The next day, Minna Adolph, then a stenographer for Judge Harvey Francis Ake, was at her desk when an elderly gentleman—elderly at least by her standards—approached and greeted her warmly. Minna had no idea who he was. “Sam Stone,” he said, his ego deflated to have been so quickly forgotten. But now, in the full light of day, nineteen-year-old Minna had her glasses on. She eyed the fatherly figure before her. He was, by his own count, thirty-five. (Actually, he was at least thirty-eight, and quite possible forty—twice her age.) Even the twenty years that separated them did not do justice to the experiential divide between them. He stood all of five feet five, his hair thinning, his face far older than she had imagined it. He invited her to dinner. Only reluctantly did she accept.

  Before long, they were courting. But Minna was of a different social stratum than Sam was accustomed to, and his wily ways of winning women lacked a certain refinement. The last week of July 1926, Minna Adolph splurged and treated herself to a stay at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, drawn by its music, arts, and literary salons. When she checked into her room there was a new set of golf clubs waiting for her and a note from Sam. She was thrilled, but her parents were less so. She was ordered to promptly—but graciously—return the gift. It was deemed inappropriate. Minna’s parents, Al and Rosa Adolph, had something better in mind for their only child, someone with less wear and fewer rough edges.

  But something about Sam’s wild side appealed to Minna. On their first date, he had been pulled over for speeding. Minna liked that.

  Sam, though more worldly, was insecure in Minna’s company, and keenly aware of his lack of education. To him she seemed a nearly unattainable prize. She was everything he was not. On August 5, 1926, Minna received a letter from him. The postmark was from the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It began:Dear Minna:

  I can write a book filled to capacity with reasonable explanations “why the delayed writing” but the fact will remain unchanged so please excuse me. I promise it will not ha
ppen again.

  Do you remember the first night I met you—and do you recall one of my remarks that I was semi-interesting ; so again I will say: I am not a waste of English and many a time I possess wonderfull thoughts but no ability to express them . . . so this is my predicament . . . wonderful thoughts, unsurpassed sentiments . . . but no command of English to convey them.

  . . . It is 3:30 AM. I have just returned from a local time killing event; a dance at the Ritz . . . and early morning lunch served a la Grabo [sic] a wild ride out in the country and here I am writing to Minna: So you see no matter of time or circumstances, I am always thinking of you and I shall continue to do so. . . . I look forward to hearing from you soon . . . until then I miss you beyond words. Yours, Sam

  If the letter was a testament to his deep feelings for her, it was also a measure of his insecurity and the ends to which he would go to conceal his inadequacies. It is almost certain that Sam did not write the letter. They may be his words, but they are not written in his hand.

  The cursive strokes are elegant and the words almost free of spelling errors. Sam could not write cursively and his spelling was atrocious. But he did not yet feel confident enough with her to risk revealing how little education he had.

  In Minna, he had more than met his match. From the beginning, she could see his foibles and his roguish ways, but they only made her feel that much more alive.

  Minna and Sam became a pair, though a more unlikely pair would have been hard to find. Minna was a bookish virgin, he far from it. She had skipped the second, fifth, and seventh grades and graduated from high school in 1923 with the highest honors, at fifteen, the youngest graduate in McKinley High’s history. Her picture was featured on the front page of the Canton Repository under the headline, MCKINLEY HIGH GIRL HAS UNUSUAL SCHOOL RECORD. “Although still a little girl in years and in many of her mannerisms,” the article began, “Miss Minna Adolph, 15 years-old . . . finds real fun in solving problems in higher mathematics and conquers experiments in chemistry with the ease of professionals.”

  She matriculated with a 99 percent average, was so smart that she was never asked to take an exam (according to the Repository), had more credits than she knew what to do with, and in her spare time had been active in half a dozen clubs, excelling in debate, while working part-time. She was also an able golfer, a talented tennis player, and an intellectual who liked nothing better than to debate the affairs of the day, from civil rights to the place of women in society.

  All of this was new for Sam, and thrilling. He was shrewd and intuitive—no one doubted that—but had little formal education. He tried mightily to smooth out his rough edges, not yet sensing that they were a part of his appeal.

  Minna came from a fine family, German Jews with deep roots in America. In 1861, her grandfather Isaac had enlisted in Company D of the 5th Pennsylvania Regiment in the Civil War, and had left the Army of the Republic in 1864 as a captain. Her father, Elias, or “Al,” was a tall, broad-shouldered figure who had served in the Spanish-American War as a private in the 28th Company, United States Coast Artillery, and had returned from the Philippines with a case of malaria that would dog him to his final days. While Sam’s father rolled cigars in Pittsburgh’s Jewish ghetto, in nearby Jeannette, Pennsylvania, Minna’s father, Al, and mother, Rosa, ran a hotel, overseeing a staff of cooks, clerks, and chambermaids.

  In 1912 the Adolph family settled in Canton, where they were soon accepted well beyond the confines of their faith. Al Adolph would hunt with Ed Bender, founder of Bender’s restaurant. Al Adolph had been a liquor salesman and later sold cigars, something Sam would just have to get over. (Al Adolph probably would have agreed that tobacco was cursed after his dentist discovered cancer in his mouth.)

  The Adolphs were a family of considerable class but modest means. Disabled by malaria, Al Adolph in 1933—the year of B. Virdot’s gift—was living on a meager sixty dollars a month from his military pension. But Minna had been raised properly; she carried herself with squared shoulders and head erect, her words enunciated clearly, her command of the language dazzling. She knew where the salad fork went—and how to tackle an artichoke. She aspired to be a lawyer, and was already clerking for one of the city’s most esteemed attorneys. She had turned down a college scholarship to help support her parents.

  Sam was an immigrant, untutored and determined to conceal his foreign birth. In Minna Adolph, he found social acceptance, legitimacy, and the kind of love that had long eluded him. She was the door to a whole new life, someone who could introduce him to all that he had missed. She was a prize, someone to tutor him and fill in the massive gaps in his education, someone of such dignity and intellect that some of it was bound to rub off on him. His own mother had married beneath her, to the consternation of the family. A union such as that between Sam Stone and Minna Adolph signaled to the world that Sam Stone had risen beyond all expectation, that he possessed not only property but something even more elusive—class.

  In the Canton of that day, it was rare that one would cross a social divide as wide as the one that separated Sam and Minna. Class lines were well marked and, more often than not, respected. In Canton, they were defined less by wealth than by the intangibles of culture, manners, and breeding. The chasm that separated Minna and Sam by education and age further complicated matters. It was a crushing disappointment to Minna’s parents, who had hoped for someone more refined, and it raised eyebrows in social circles where this parvenu was viewed with suspicion. But these very differences made for a mutual fascination that fueled their attraction to each other, and what Sam lacked in polish he more than made up for in charm.

  They were married on April 24, 1927—not in a temple, but in the backyard of the Adolphs’ modest home on Canton’s Oxford Street. Even on the marriage license, Sam once more attempted to distance himself from his past, swearing that he was born in Pittsburgh, and fudging his birth date by four years, claiming to be thirty-five, not thirty-nine.

  Sam’s father, Jacob, was now dead, and a new life lay before him. None of his six siblings was invited to the wedding, though some lived just minutes away. Sam feared they might embarrass him with their crude comments and common manners or inadvertently reveal too much about his own past. But if Sam thought he was free of the Old World, he was mistaken. His mother refused to attend the wedding. Minna was a Reform Jew who did not speak Yiddish, did not keep kosher, and did not observe the Sabbath. In Hilda’s eyes, it was worse than if her firstborn son had married a gentile. Minna was not allowed to set foot in Hilda’s home. It was not until more than a year later, after the birth of their first child, a daughter named Virginia—my mother—that the two actually met. It would remain a frosty relationship. Minna, who rarely said an unkind word of anyone, would tell me years later that Sam’s mother was a captive of her faith and Old World superstitions. Her mother-in-law, she said, was “dumb.”

  It is almost certain that in 1933, six years into their marriage, Minna played a key role in the administration if not the conception of B. Virdot’s gift. It is her signature on each check that went out that Christmas. She was a woman of conscience, a social activist whose heart went out to the needy, and she was a skillful organizer. Many of the documents associated with the B. Virdot gifts—the ledgers, the retention of canceled checks, the very preservation of those records—bear her imprint.

  She had endured her own Hard Times, having had to help support her family from an early age. Minna did not know the meaning of prejudice. She cared only about character and had no tolerance for bigots or snobs. She worshipped Eleanor Roosevelt, and on the afternoon of January 20, 1938, as a delegate to the Cause and Cure of War Conference, had tea with her in the White House. (In a letter home that afternoon, she wrote to her three daughters that she slipped a number of White House cookies into her purse and was bringing them home for them.)

  She saw Christmas as a secular holiday, a celebration of giving and sharing in which she took great delight. She was proud of being Jewish but w
holly ecumenical in outlook. The notion of Jews as “the Chosen People” made her squirm. All faiths, she would say, were “Chosen.” She was president of the temple and temple sisterhood but was equally comfortable trimming the towering Christmas tree that Sam dragged into the house each year. The tree was clearly visible to every passerby, Jew and Gentile alike. Lighting the Chanukah candles paled by comparison.

  Sam was beyond Reform. The old ways reminded him of the orthodoxy in which he was raised. He openly rebelled against them. He rarely went to temple, thought nothing of working on the Sabbath, and even went to the office on the holiest of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur. He was not ashamed of being Jewish, but he drew a line between faith and practice, the latter being inextricably linked to bitter memories of Romanian and parental oppression.

  It is easy to imagine how Minna’s upbringing would have brought her to Sam’s side in devising the B. Virdot gift. In her high school autograph book classmates and friends inscribed notes. But the first entry is from her mother, dated January 21, 1923:Dearest Minna

  Question not but live and labor

  Till your goal be won

  Helping every feeble neighbor

  Seeking help from none.

  Life is mostly froth and bubble,

  Two things stand like stone,

  Kindness in another’s trouble,

  Courage in your own.

  YOUR DEVOTED MOTHER

  MINNA , AN ONLY child, had come from a tightly knit family, held together by love and common respect. Sam’s family had been held together by the brute strength of his father’s will. But by the week of Christmas 1933, Sam and Minna had created their own family with three daughters, Virginia, five years old; Dorothy, four; and Barbara, one. That week, as Sam and Minna Stone prepared for their own holidays, they also oversaw the gifts that were to go out under the name “B. Virdot.” That Christmas, above all others, they must have been mindful of the misery all around them. Even in their neighborhood of relative privilege, there were homes vacated under duress, family businesses failing, and worry on the faces of neighbors like George Plover, a Hoover executive who watched as the company’s sales plummeted and workers were furloughed en masse.