A Secret Gift Read online

  But there was something unmistakably personal behind this crime. It was a fraternal insurrection, a statement that the brothers would never again be content to live in the shadow of their older, more successful sibling, that no longer would they accept a supporting role. Underappreciated and underpaid, they’d had enough. Sam had done much for them, bringing them out of the ghetto, giving them jobs, providing housing, an Americanized last name, a new life. From Sam’s point of view this thievery was an act of supreme ingratitude. The brothers doubtless saw it differently—it was a long-overdue comeuppance and a declaration of independence. For all the good Sam had done them, he had inadvertently taken on the same authoritarian role he so reviled in his father, and now his brothers had broken away from him. They flaunted their newfound pride and in 1931 named their new store Stone Brothers. It was almost as if they no longer considered Sam one of the brothers.

  For well over a decade the two stores were bitter rivals. Even as the Depression deepened and business dwindled, they carried on their commercial feud, dueling over competing prices and promotions in the advertising pages of the Canton Repository. Finally, Sam bought out his siblings, and eventually, in the midfifties, sold Stone Brothers to my father. But the wound between Sam and Mack never healed. Even decades later, the brothers’ names were not uttered in our house. It was as if they never existed. For much of my life, I believed my grandfather was an only child, oblivious to the fact that he had six siblings, several of whom lived a few minutes’ walk from our front door.

  MUCH OF SAM Stone’s life—his ambitions, his appetites, his view of money as a means to help some and control others—was shaped by early hardship: the Romanian exodus, anti-Semitism, relentless poverty, a home devoid of affection. All these took their toll. The house at 51 Rowley Street in Pittsburgh was a place of crushing religious austerity and superstition. Sam and his siblings were raised with a paranoia that at any moment Old World prejudices could seize them in the New World. Even today, some of the grandchildren believe that America could be ravaged by anti-Semitism. As the eldest son, Sam was the first to distance himself from that home and its toxins, and perhaps for that reason the most successful in escaping its influences.

  But those same forces defined the lives of his six siblings, who were exposed to them for the entirety of their childhoods and adolescence. Several of those lives were marked by tragedy and eccentricity. Their attitude toward money was pathological, their insecurities in the new land profound, their abilities to connect emotionally, even with their own families, damaged. From Jacob, the patriarch of the family, several inherited a kind of frozen heart unable to show affection.

  As a child and a young man, I knew nothing of Sam’s siblings. I knew only that there were people in town who were to be avoided and never acknowledged. I had been led to believe that they were related to us in some distant way, and that it was in our interest to maintain and expand that distance. Three of Sam’s siblings lived within a few blocks of where I grew up, though I never met them, did not know their names, and was expressly told not to try to find out.

  The barrier between us was erected partly to protect me from danger, real or imagined. There was also a measure of snobbery on the part of my mother and my grandmother, who viewed much of the rest of the Stone clan (though not all) as belonging to a lower social class. They were nameless specters flitting about my childhood landscape whom I came to look upon with a mix of dread and pity—and the curiosity that comes from years of stifled inquiries.

  Sam had a brother David, who at twenty-three was still living at home in Pittsburgh and rolling cigars for his father’s in-home factory. Sometime in the 1920s he came to Canton to work for Sam. He was a misanthrope who, like Mack, was suspected of stealing from his own brothers. It is said he bet what little money he had on the 1948 Truman-Dewey race and lost. He was suspicious of women and uncomfortable in their presence. His sister Gussie once asked him when he might marry. “Never,” he replied. “Why would I want to feed a strange SOB?”

  And yet for all the toughness of those words, he was never unkind to others. He was shy and socially awkward, had few friends, and preferred to bury himself in books at the public library. He is said to have been brilliant and quoted Shakespeare at length. He worked at Stone Brothers, selling clothes alongside brothers Mack and Al, but even there he did not fit in. He drank, usually alone. He died in November 1964 at the age of sixty-nine. At first, no one noticed his passing. It was the odor that led authorities to his decomposing body, found in his one-room flat above a Canton tavern. He left no will. His paltry bank account was divided among his siblings. Until a few years ago, I had never even heard his name.

  Sam Stone’s elder sister Sarah married an English Jew named Jacob Berman. Her grandson, Arthur, says that one day Jacob failed to return home from work. Nothing was heard of him for years. Then he was discovered living in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Home for the Aged. They speculate that he had been the victim of a mugging that had also robbed him of his memory, leaving him incapable of caring for himself. Sarah and her young daughter, Zelda, had been left nearly destitute.

  In 1941, Sarah married Hyman Shapiro, a Russian immigrant who owned a barrel and bag company in Canton. On the marriage application she listed her place of birth not as Romania but “Pittsburgh, Pa.” She had divorced her first husband, Jacob Berman, just one month earlier. She told her sister Gussie that she had found a man with money and that when they counted it she would hide some of it in her skirt. She lived out her final years in Santa Monica, California, overseeing the charwomen at the Shangri-La Hotel. She walked the twenty-two blocks between home and work to save the nickel bus fare. Sarah died just short of seventy on March 27, 1953, and, as evidence of her Orthodox faith, was buried that same day at two in the afternoon at the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

  Sarah Berman would pass on the legacy of hardship to her daughter, Zelda, who died at ninety-nine on May 17, 2009. So miserly was Zelda that she would never buy stationery, but instead would gently open the writer’s envelope, press it flat, and write her response on it. She even reused greeting cards from birthdays and holidays, taking scissors to excise the sender’s salutation and signature, and sending them out again. Her sons, knowing this, sent her cards in which the greeting and signature were written on a separate piece of paper and slipped into the blank card, leaving it for Zelda to send out without need of tailoring.

  Zelda washed clothes by hand in the washing machine to conserve on electricity, bought her clothes secondhand, reused turkey bones that had been cleaned off the dinner plates to make soup, and collected used Styrofoam cups from trash bins, washed them out, and put them on her shelf, some of them complete with the indentations of others’ teeth.

  Her husband, a onetime bookie turned real estate investor, left her millions. But she lived in constant fear of poverty and carried with her the dread that anti-Semitism would grab her and her loved ones, even in Santa Monica. She could never bring herself to trust a Gentile or to believe that she was safe in America. To the end she saw herself as “a poor little waif,” says her son. “She was so afraid. The wolf was always at her door.”

  Zelda donated her body to the University of Southern California Medical School—apparently in part to avoid the cost of a funeral.

  As for the house in Canton that I had been forbidden from stopping by on my way to and from elementary school each day, there was, I would learn five decades later, ample reason for apprehension. That was the home of Sam’s brother Mack. For whatever reason, he did not apply for U.S. citizenship until 1949, half a century after coming to America. He married a woman named Edna Cook, but the marriage ended in divorce. They had a son, Don, who was in and out of trouble. Don eloped with an underage girl, for which he later went to prison. The story made the papers. “When someone was in trouble,” recalls an aging cousin, “they would say, ‘They had to go away for a while.’ ” That was what they said of Don.

  Mack’s ex, Edna, drank gin and bec
ame a recluse. She made the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other papers around the country on April 22, 1952, when police raided her home at 1406 Pennsylvania and discovered her with her three young grandchildren—Don’s children—living in squalor amid dozens of cats and dogs. The children had not been allowed to go to school, had not bathed, had no working toilet, were malnourished, and were dressed in rags. An eight-year-old granddaughter had rarely been allowed to leave the house and had lived like the dogs, only with less to eat. The children were removed from the home and placed in the custody of the juvenile court.

  It was not the last time Edna and her son would make the news in Pittsburgh. On June 21, 1970, Edna Stone, then eighty-three, thought she heard someone breaking into her garage. She and Don, then fifty-eight, went out to investigate. Edna carried a .32 pistol. Exactly what happened next is unclear, but this much is known: a twelve-year-old African American boy, Ernest Keith Caldwell, lay dead of a gunshot wound, Edna and Don faced murder charges, and the north side of Pittsburgh erupted in a race riot. Don admitted to tossing the gun into the Allegheny River, but both mother and son were ultimately acquitted of murder charges, arguing that it had been a warning shot gone awry.

  But there were other goings-on in Mack’s Twenty-second Street house that spelled danger and would help explain why as a child I was to treat it as a no-man’s-land. Following his divorce, Mack married his brother Al’s maid, a woman named Eleanor who was thirty years his junior. The marriage scandalized the family. Then, on December 17, 1957, Mack’s stepson, Jack, and a brother-in-law, Richard, both twenty and both with criminal records, were shot to death on the streets of Canton. The double murder made front-page headlines. Jack Stone stumbled into a police station, blood pouring from his wounds. He died hours later. The crime was never solved. The son of one of Sam’s other brothers recalls his mother bringing the newspaper up to his room the day of the murder. “This is what happens to tough guys,” she said.

  That was the house that I walked past on my way to school each day. It was also in that house that Sam’s brother Mack was savagely beaten, allegedly by an in-law. He was discovered by his son Jeff lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, an overturned table on top of him. And though he underwent extensive brain surgery, he never recovered from the beating. He died on October 10, 1961.

  Sam’s sister Esther married Joseph Moidell. They lived less than one minute’s walk from our front door, but I never knew my grandfather even had a sister, much less that I frequently passed her house. To utter that last name, Moidell, in our home was forbidden. There was never an explanation given, and on the one occasion when I asked if they were in some way related, my question went unanswered. Their son Arnold, or “AJ,” was a businessman and gambler who played the ponies and later owned racehorses. He dabbled in any number of schemes. He was a millionaire for a time, but died broke. Two of his three children didn’t speak to him for decades. Though Sam was said to be fond of Esther, I heard nothing of her when I was growing up.

  For years, Sam gave sporadic help to his sister Gussie. The only thing she inherited from the Finkelstein home was a coldness of heart. She was terrified of her father. She would often say things that were “cutting,” remembers her daughter, Shirley. Never did she kiss her daughter or tell her she loved her. The closest she came was when, at age seventy-five, after years of being tended to by Shirley, she told her, “You’ve been a good daughter.” That was it. Gussie’s marriage was largely a sham. Her husband, Abe, drank and was unfaithful. He had a lifelong cough that was said to have been contracted in the Old World when his mother hid him in a well so the Russians would not take him. When their son Meyer was stricken with polio, Gussie seemed to give up on life. The family lived on welfare. Gussie too had her secrets. Shirley remembers a broad scar across her mother’s stomach. She once asked her about it, believing it to be from a Cesarean section. Her mother dismissed it as a birthmark.

  Gussie’s early life and Sam’s were marked by such losses. Their mother, Hilda, had suffered at least two miscarriages, and a daughter named Rozlah died as a child in Romania. The children were led to believe her death was the result of an evil eye put on the child by Gypsies. So when Shirley was pregnant with her daughter, Eva, Gussie insisted that red ribbons be placed all around the house to ward off evil. But the real curse on the family came from within—it was their iciness of heart. Upon the death of her son Meyer, Gussie declared, “Well, God punished him because he got married and left me alone.”

  Shirley was the only relative of Sam’s he felt he could trust. She was a lifelong confidante of his and knew some of his secrets. When Shirley was a young girl living in the projects of Pittsburgh, Sam gave her a powder-blue Dan Millstein designer suit, which she wore to the few special occasions she attended in her early life.

  Shirley is warm and caring, but she too inherited the familial insecurities rooted in the long-ago pogroms of Romania and reinforced by the Nazis. “Jewish people now think we’re good here in America,” she tells me. “Don’t believe it. All it takes is one rough leader and we are all gone.”

  For many of the descendants of Jacob and Hilda Finkelstein, 107 years of relative safety and acceptance in this country counted for little. As eager as they were to put the past behind them, they do not let go of history. Gussie’s mother was part of the Finkelstein conspiracy that took an oath not to reveal the family’s past. Her daughter, Shirley, to this day remembers her words, spoken in Yiddish: “Don’t say anything. I was born in America. The whole family was born in America.” She also remembers her telling her never to utter the name Finkelstein or they might send her back to the world from which they had escaped. My own mother said that not once in her entire life did she hear her father say the word Romania.

  Finally, there was Sam’s youngest brother, Al. On his August 31, 1934, marriage license, he lists his place of birth as “Pittsburgh, Pa.” But unlike Sam, in 1941 he applied for U.S. citizenship and disclosed that he had been born in Dorohoi, Romania. He had a son, Jack, and a daughter, Ferne. Al bore some of the same emotional scarring as his siblings. He never spoke of his father and rarely of his childhood. “They certainly were not emotionally healthy adults,” says Ferne. “I felt that my whole life, I fought to not be like my father who was—I was the apple of his eye—I loved him absolutely—he was an amazing father—but he was a workaholic. He could not easily be with other people. He really never had friends. His entire life was working.”

  In time, the enmity that simmered between Sam and his siblings in the thirties passed. Over the years, Sam and his brother Al reached some reconciliation. His name appears on Minna’s gift list, as do Esther’s and Gussie’s and Sarah’s. But there was no armistice with Mack. It was as if he never existed. I never met any of Sam’s siblings and did not learn of their existence until well after they were all dead and gone. That decision had been made for me.

  Somehow, Sam Stone navigated through all the same treacherous shoals—economic and emotional—that claimed his siblings. He did not emerge wholly unscathed. His attitude toward money, his determination to erase his childhood and place of birth, his fixation on anti-Semitism and the Nazis, were all vestiges of early trauma. And there were doubtless wounds of which even today I am unaware. But his capacity to feel and express love, his compassion and humor, these were largely intact.

  To salvage these traits, he had had to reinvent himself, and not only by claiming to be native-born. “Mr. B. Virdot” was the gift he gave others, but it was also the gift he gave himself. It was the right to a second chance, to be reborn as someone else. He had spent his youth under the thumbs of two tyrants—the state and his own father. As a child and an adolescent, he had been largely impotent in the face of the terrible want and injustice that surrounded him. To finally be in a position to help others represented a sea change in his life. It was not external recognition that he hungered for, but the internal affirmation that such giving conferred upon him. It was a statement not of net wo
rth but of his own personal worth, and the value of others with whom, despite a world of differences, he shared so much.

  VII.

  An Opportunity to Help

  A Dog Named Jack

  Mr. B. Virdot didn’t just spring into being that week of December 1933. He had been taking shape for decades, in the person of Sam Stone and, before that, the refugee Sam Finkelstein. Sam always believed in repaying his debts, and by 1933 he knew he owed much to his adopted country. He also was a man of some compassion, though its source is not so easily identified. As a child no one in his family showed affection or took care of him—even a broken leg did not command sympathy. He knew what it was to go it alone, to have the world rebuff him. For years it was all he knew. But instead of hardening his heart to the world, his own hardships seemed to have made him all the more open to treating the wounds of others.

  Having endured so much himself, he developed a soft spot for anything that was unable to care for itself. In Canton, he once came upon a pigeon with a broken wing. He took it home, filled the tub with water, and over the course of many days nursed the bird back to health. As long as he tended to the bird, the bathroom was off-limits to family members. It was one of many such tender acts his children remember. He also brought home an array of stray dogs, mangy and unwanted creatures to which he devoted himself. Indeed, the more neglected they appeared, the more determined he was to make room for them. His favorite was a mutt named Trixie. He first found her in the middle of the road, bloodied from having been struck by a car.