A Secret Gift Read online

  How many letters came in—whether it was hundreds or thousands—no one knows. And true to his word, within days, the shadowy B. Virdot sent out the promised checks, all of them arriving before Christmas. Initially he had intended to send ten dollars to some seventy-five families, but he found himself unable to turn away so many worthy appeals, so he doubled the recipients and halved the amount to five dollars. Today, five dollars doesn’t sound like much, but back then, it would have been worth closer to one hundred dollars. For many, it was more than they had seen in a long time. In 1933, you could get a loaf of bread for seven cents, a pound of ground beef for eleven cents, a dozen eggs for twenty-nine cents. Eighteen cents bought a gallon of gas. The newly passed minimum wage was thirty-three cents, but many counted themselves lucky to make a dollar a day.

  B. Virdot never imagined his modest checks would reverse the course of the Great Depression, but they did allow for many a child to go to bed with a full stomach, for presents to miraculously appear, for enough coal to heat the house that week and into the next, and some token payment for the family doctor who’d looked after a son’s polio, a daughter’s jaundice, or a father’s tuberculosis. Given that many families had six, seven, or eight children, the 150 checks cumulatively reached a wide swath of Canton’s neediest.

  But B. Virdot’s gift was more than just a long shot at a lottery. It raised the spirits of thousands with the knowledge that someone—one of their own—cared. He had invited them to share with him their years of pent-up grief, disillusionment, and feelings of worthlessness, burdens that could not be shared with loved ones without the risk of breaking their spirits. That Christmas, even those B. Virdot did not choose received more than a glancing blessing from his gift.

  But who was this B. Virdot? There must have been rampant speculation. Perhaps the donor was one of Canton’s millionaires, a Hoover, a Timken, or some other highborn son of privilege able to ride out the Depression in style. But they had not known any such “darker days,” as hinted at in the Repository. Perhaps, then, he was a man of the people, someone more like themselves who had also suffered. Had he perhaps been sitting there amid the congregants of the First Presbyterian Church, himself moved by Dickens’s tale of redemption? Perhaps he belonged to St. John’s, the nearby Catholic church. The deed itself shed little light on the man. But it was so Christian an act, this gift, with its wish that its recipients have a “merry and joyful Christmas.” Whoever he was, he must surely be a person of faith to shore up the faith of so many. And what had he endured—again, that reference to “darker days”—that he could understand so well what so many in government and charities did not—that those without were not without pride?

  For seventy-five years, B. Virdot’s identity remained a secret. The letters seemingly vanished and B. Virdot went quietly to his grave, joined in time by all who had written to him. But the mystery surrounding his gift lingered: Who among so many needy had been chosen for such a gift? Did it make any difference in their lives? Who was B. Virdot and why all the secrecy? Finally, what in his own life had so moved him to make such a gift?

  In the decades that followed, Canton once again enjoyed the blessings of prosperity. The factories boomed once more, the forges glowed, and the vacant storefronts came back to life. For many, Christmas became a time of overindulgence, when presents were piled high and food and drink were in abundance. Memories of the Hard Times grew mercifully dim, but so too did its lessons. Three generations later, it was as if none of it had happened—the Great Depression and B. Virdot’s gift both seemed beyond remote, mere figments of that collective imagination called “history.”

  And there, this tale might well have ended, but it did not.

  Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: The Suitcase

  June 24, 2008. That day, my son Matt and I drove three hours from our log cabin in Bucksport, Maine, south to Kennebunk, to surprise my mother, Virginia. It was her eightieth birthday. After dinner, she took us to her storage room under the attic eaves. There was something she said she wanted me to have. I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the artifacts of her downsized life—a century-old brass cash register, a bronze stand for umbrellas and walking canes, an ivory mah-jongg set, a crated chandelier. She made straightaway for an old black suitcase that lay on a shelf, wedged between Grandfather’s adding machine and some Pyrex dishes. On top of it was a box of memorabilia and a wooden case of serving cutlery.

  Mother freed the suitcase from its niche and set it on the floor. Inside, she said, were some “old papers”; exactly what, she did not know. But she knew about my interest in family history and my passion for research and, eager to clear out storage space in the cramped attic, she’d decided to make a present of the suitcase. Twice widowed, she had begun to pare away her belongings, not wishing to leave my sister Audrey and me with the sort of monumental cleanup she’d faced when her mother, Minna, passed three years earlier.

  Like me, Minna was a pack rat. Both of us were teased for our inability to throw anything away. We were the family archivists. For us, every old scrap of paper—be it a canceled check, the stub of a movie ticket, a book of unused World War II ration stamps—held a narrative that could fill an afternoon. Clearing out the detritus of Minna’s ninety-seven years fell to her two surviving daughters, who had neither the time nor the patience to sift through the thousands of pages she’d accumulated. Much of it went out with the trash. That the suitcase and its contents escaped this fate was something of a miracle.

  The next morning I loaded the suitcase, unopened, into the car, along with our backpacks and gear, and returned to the cabin. I slid the suitcase under my bed, where it remained for days. Then, one evening, I remembered it, and placed it on my bed. I studied it for a moment. But for a few bruises, it looked to be in decent shape. The corners were frayed and there were places where the faux leather had been scraped clean down to the gray boarding underneath, but the hinges were strong and the latches retained their snap. The suitcase measured eleven by eighteen inches and was six inches deep, with a black leather handle, pebbled to the touch. It was too big to be a briefcase, too small to be of much use as luggage.

  Taped to the top of the suitcase was a four-by-six-inch piece of paper, with notes written in faded blue ink in my grandmother’s hand: “Memoirs: Minna’s Baby Book, etc., Mother and Father, Sam’s Clippings and Pictures, Sampler, Baby Dress, Wedding Book, Family Misc.” Beside one latch was a blue tag, evidence that it had once been shipped by Allied. It was one of a dozen moves the suitcase had endured on its journey from Canton to Miami to Kennebunk.

  I popped open the latches. It released a musty smell, a mix of old papers, decayed suitcase lining, and air long trapped within. The top inside of the case had five yellowed pockets of varying sizes, each with a snap. I imagined what each might have held in its day—perhaps a brush, a comb, a mirror, a nail file, tweezers. The suitcase was crammed with old papers, stacked tightly, one upon the other.

  On top was a large and tattered ten-by-thirteen-inch yellow envelope written in my grandfather Sam’s hand: “PERTANING XMAS GIFT DISTRIBTION.” He never was much for spelling.

  Inside the packet was a tight sheaf of letters. I withdrew a handful. All of them were dated December 18, 1933—the week before Christmas. Among the letters I found a tiny black passbook from Canton’s George D. Harter Bank. It recorded a single deposit of $750. There were also some 150 canceled checks, each neatly signed “B. Virdot.” I had no idea what to make of any of it. The name “B. Virdot” sounded vaguely familiar, but why, I did not know. Even by my grandmother’s standards of hoarding, this collection of papers—canceled checks, all of them for five dollars, the passbook with an account opened and emptied within a week, the mass of letters—seemed unworthy of saving. Perhaps, I speculated, they were remnants of some exotic Christmas promotion my grandfather had staged at his clothing store.

  I skimmed the first lines of a few of the letters but the handwriting was poor and put me off. I soon lost interest in them,
distracted by more recognizable treasures—my grandmother’s baby book, letters from Sam and Minna’s courtship, dozens of faded black-and-white photos from the 1920s and 1930s, files from my grandfather’s business. The hours passed. It grew late and I was tired. I gathered up the contents of the suitcase, which now lay scattered across my bed, and set them back in the suitcase in the order in which I had found them, placing the packet of letters to this stranger, Mr. B. Virdot, back in its original position on top of all else. I then closed the suitcase, fastened the latches, and slid it back under my bed. I promptly forgot about it.

  Then, some days later, I found myself again sorting through the suitcase, but this time I was drawn to the envelope marked “PERTANING XMAS GIFT DISTRIBTION.” This time I withdrew all the letters. There appeared to be a couple hundred. They were in no particular order, but someone—presumably my grandmother—had gone to some trouble to keep them all carefully together and safe. I began to read through them, beginning with those that looked most legible. They spoke of hunger and cold, of endless searches for work, of dead ends and growing doubts. I was startled by their candor and disturbed by the grim terrain they described. The street names and landmarks were all familiar to me. The writers poured their hearts out to this B. Virdot, describing their anguish in such detail that it made me uncomfortable, as if I were peering through a keyhole into the misery of strangers, or eavesdropping on others’ prayers. How, I wondered, had these letters and their appeals found their way into my grandparents’ hands?

  It was then that I found, folded into quarters, a front-page section of the Canton Repository dated December 18, 1933. The paper was yellowed and torn at the edges. I gently unfolded it and set it on the bed, searching the page for some reference to my grandparents. There was none to be found. There was a story about a fatal car crash and another about two freighters caught in a Pacific gale. There was an account of a steel strike and a brief note about a burglary that netted the robbers twenty-five dollars. But there was nothing to link any of this to my grandparents.

  Then I noticed, at the bottom of the page, with a tear running up the center of the story and dissecting the headline, an account of a mysterious donor named “Mr. B. Virdot.” As I read it, I felt a cold shiver pass up my spine. The contents of the envelope, the letters, the canceled checks, all began to fall into place. I searched for B. Virdot’s offer referred to in the story but could not find it. I searched again and again. Nothing. Finally, my eyes fell upon it on page 3, a tiny ad so easily missed it seemed a wonder anyone found it. I read it over twice and then again. Here, before me, the seventy-five-year-old secret had been revealed.

  B. Virdot was my grandfather. His name was Sam Stone.

  THAT EVENING I called my mother to share my discovery, but it was something she had known her entire adult life. Her mother had let her in on the secret when she was considered old enough to honor Sam’s wish and to keep it in the family. The moniker “B. Virdot,” she said, was constructed from the names of Sam and Minna’s three daughters: Barbara, Virginia, and Dorothy, known as “Dotsy.” My mother was the “Vir” in “B. Virdot.”

  She also explained why the name sounded familiar. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the three girls were not yet teenagers, Sam would take them jetting across Turkey Foot Lake in his sleek twenty-seven-foot Chris-Craft Custom Runabout, with its varnished mahogany and 350-horsepower engine. Just above the waterline was stenciled the boat’s name—The B. Virdot. It was a county away from Canton and no one made the connection between the name and the mystery donor of years earlier. He liked such inside jokes, parading before the world clues to his identity that only he could decipher. That was where I had heard the name B. Virdot, from stories about the speedboat and my mother’s halcyon summer days on the lake.

  But in 1933, when my mother was just five, she had known nothing of her father’s gift. Preserving the secret had been critical to its success. Many of those who wrote to B. Virdot were known to Sam Stone, as he was known to them. He passed them on the streets, frequented the same restaurants and shops, and sent his daughters to school with their children. In his store he measured their sleeves, cuffed their pants, squared their shoulders, and sold them their overalls. And they, in their countless trades and callings, attended to his needs. It was only the promise of anonymity on both sides of the divide that had persuaded his fellow townsmen to speak freely and to come forward. They were proud men and women, acutely sensitive to the situation they found themselves in, and would never have felt comfortable writing such letters to anyone whose face they might recognize or see again. Their appeal to B. Virdot was less an application for relief than it was a prayer for deliverance. It just so happened to carry a local address.

  But in solving one mystery, I had given birth to another. Why had my grandfather done such a thing? And why, over the course of four decades and countless conversations with him, had he never mentioned it? In my mind I retraced my memories of him, searching for some clue he might have dropped along the way. There was nothing that tied the man I knew to the benefactor others knew only as B. Virdot.

  As a child I called him “Sambo.” He stood a stout five feet five, and was bald and barrel-chested, with Popeye-like forearms. His eyes were soft and brown and looked out on the world through thick lenses. Somewhere I have a photo of him in his eighties wearing my father’s red flannel pajamas. The legs were long by nearly half a foot. I watched him climb the steps, his Chaplinesque figure trying not to trip over them. He looked like a melted candle and laughed at his own comic figure.

  There was an impishness to him and a mimelike quality, as if there were more to be learned from his movements than his words. Mother recalls nights watching him teach himself to ice skate, taking a dining room chair out on frozen Turkey Foot Lake and dancing with it as if it were his partner. That image—in his pas de deux under the stars—and countless other exuberant moments invited none of the modern psychobabble suggesting early trauma or scarring. There was always about him a sense that what you saw was exactly what you got. It was a tactic that served him well.

  At every party, he was the toastmaster. His remarks tended to be wooden and grandiloquent, sounding vaguely like a Marx Brothers caricature of high society. It was how the formally educated sounded to him. I have a tiny joke book of his in which he jotted down his favorite punch lines. It’s divided into three sections, “Safe,” “Caution,” and “Danger.” The first two are all but blank. “Danger” is packed with off-color entries. To me he was a grandfather so mischievous and impulsive that even as a child I felt I should keep a close eye on him.

  He was also a magician. He could withdraw a quarter from behind my ear or from my navel and make it vanish with a sweep of his hand. He knew the eyes saw what they wanted to see, and no more. He played this to great advantage in his magic and in his life. The more public his persona, the less, it seemed, he had to hide. He courted the limelight in part perhaps because it gave him control over others’ attention and kept it from straying into private realms.

  The Sam I knew was well-to-do. The Sam my mother knew was downright rich. My mother grew up with a live-in butler and maid, Steve and Hermene, a Hungarian couple, in a summer cottage on a lake and a Tudor home with a library and a well-tended garden. Mother and her two sisters wanted for nothing. As a senior in high school, my mother was treated to a luxurious full-length beaver coat. But such wealth was to come only after 1933, and some portion of it was gone before I really knew my grandfather. He had lived with great poverty and wealth, and made his peace with both.

  The Hard Times he’d known had not waited for the Depression. I knew nothing of the years before 1918, when he turned thirty. No one was privy to those years, and any attempt to pry into them was instantly deflected with humor or a story. He told me only that he was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from the “School of Hard Knocks.” He spoke of working in a coal mine, a job he despised. He said he scoured dirty soda bottles until the acid ate his fingertips. As he to
ld the story decades later, his thumb gently caressed the tips of his digits as if they still needed soothing. He said he learned to swim after being pushed off a barge in Pittsburgh’s Monongahela River. But no narrative reached back as far as childhood, adolescence, or early manhood. All his many stories seemed to abruptly run out of track before arriving there.

  He looked upon his life as an alchemist might have viewed base metals, transforming sorrow and treachery into gilded tales of mirth and high jinks. I remember him telling me about the first suit he bought. It had taken him months to save for it. He related how proud he was carrying it home in the box the salesman had handed him. But once home, he discovered that instead of a suit, the box held nothing but a brick. He returned to the store and demanded his money back. The salesmen ignored him. Sam laughed when he recounted the story. It was the laugh of a man whose idea of vengeance was grounded in living large and well. Twenty years after being cheated, he owned a chain of clothing stores that stretched across four states and held a thousand suits.

  He told me that he was once lured to board a train in the middle of the night, bound for where, he did not know. All he knew was that there was a job for him at the other end. When the train arrived—I think it was Chicago—he and hundreds like him were ordered to follow closely behind those who had brought them, to race through the darkness and stop for nothing and no one. This he did, until, in the melee that followed, he was bloodied and struck by the fists of strikers and the clubs of company guards. He had been duped into being a strike breaker. Again, he laughed. A onetime socialist-turned-capitalist, he’d seen the faults in both and was a true believer in neither.