A Secret Gift Page 28

  “I’ve loved ponies all my life,” she says. Even today, at eighty, she has fifteen Welsh ponies that she raises and intends to sell, and she likes nothing better than to ride in her horse-drawn cart.

  A check from a stranger named B. Virdot bought that little pony and made such a memory possible. It changed a life.

  The Unexpected

  By March 8, 2010, my research into the B. Virdot letters was complete. My book was finished; the manuscript was edited and in my publisher’s hands. I had cleared my desk of the mountain of papers—a ritual of mine upon completing a project—and had, at last, begun to tidy up my office. I had conducted more than five hundred interviews. I had sifted through thousands of pages of deeds, marriage licenses, census reports, obituaries, and death certificates. Together, they filled six drawers of a file cabinet.

  Still, I felt that there was something yet to be done. I had focused on scores of letters and successfully tracked down the descendants of all but one of the writers, a fourteen-year-old girl named Helen Palm. She was the one writer whose life narrative had managed to elude me. With a few minutes of free time, I decided to try once more to locate her descendants. What exactly I hoped to find, I can’t say. I just felt a need to close the circle. With the help of the genealogy staff at the Stark County Public Library, I located her parents’ obituaries. Her father, Ralston Palm, had died in 1973; her mother, Carrie, in 1984. One of Helen Palm’s daughters, Janet, seventy years old, was said to be living in nearby Magnolia, Ohio. I called her to learn what had become of her mother in the years after her letter to B. Virdot, and to fill out the particulars of her life—marriage, children, work, date of death, place of burial. I was not prepared for her response.

  Helen Palm was alive.

  The fourteen-year-old author—the last and only living link to the B. Virdot letters—was now ninety, a great-great-grandmother who lived at the Laurels of Masillon, a nursing home just outside Canton. Three hours later I received a call from Helen Palm, now Helen Palm Kintz Grant. Her voice was strong and clear.

  Helen had been the second-youngest of all those to have written to B. Virdot. I wondered if she had any recollection of his gift. “I remember the ad,” she said without hesitation. “I wrote to him and told him I didn’t have any money. I think he sent me five bucks.” I read her the letter she wrote in pencil on a five-by-eight-inch slip of paper with a return address of “RFD#4”:Dear Sir,

  When we went over at the neighbors to borrow the paper I read your article. I am a girl of fourteen. I am writing this because I need clothing. And sometimes we run out of food.

  My father does not want to ask for charity. But us children would like to have some clothing for Christmas. When he had a job us children used to have nice things.

  I also have brothers and sisters.

  If you should send me Ted Dollars I would buy clothing and buy the Christmas dinner and supper.

  I thank you.

  HELEN PALM

  “Oh, my God,” she said when I finished reading her seventy-seven-year-old letter. After a pause, she added, “I wanted to do something for my family.” And what did she do with the money? “Oh, gee whiz,” she said, sounding more like the fourteen-year-old who wrote the letter than the ninety-year-old on the other end of the phone line. Well, I asked, do you remember? “You better believe it,” she replied, “because I went right down and bought a pair of shoes.” That would have been December 21, 1933, when the check was cashed. Until then, having a decent pair of shoes—ones that fit and didn’t have holes—had been a constant problem, as it was for hundreds of thousands of others during the Hard Times. She would cut out the shape of her sole from an empty shredded-wheat box and insert it into her badly worn-out shoes. But true to her word, Helen Palm used the rest of the money to take her family out to eat.

  It gave her and the entire family a welcome lift in a holiday season that was marked as much by anxiety as by joy. December, even without the Depression, was a somber time for the Palms. On December 16 more than a decade earlier, a brother, Harold, had been born and died just fifteen days later. His mother would later say that in an effort to keep him warm, she had shared her bed with the infant and inadvertently suffocated him. Helen’s own birthday was December 3, 1919, but the holidays were clouded by uncertainty. Her father had worked at Republic Steel but got laid off repeatedly. Her mother, Carrie, went door-to-door trying to sell Christmas cards. “She walked, God love her—she had such bad legs, I felt so sorry for her.”

  Helen also walked for miles delivering the Canton Repository. Many of their meals came from the garden, particularly the fried potatoes that appeared often on their plates. The upstairs of their small white frame house on Genoa Street was unfinished, and a curtain divided her parents’ bedroom from the children’s. She and her sister, Bernice, shared the room and brother Richard had a cot in the corner. By 1935, the Palms had lost their home and been forced to move. Three years after writing the letter, at age seventeen, Helen got married.

  Her memories of Canton echo those of many others who wrote to B. Virdot. She too went to Myers Lake to see the marathon dancers, drunk with exhaustion, staggering to the music. She recalls the vice and the crime that beset Canton, and how her father would point out the spot where the Mob gunned down Don Mellett, the crusading editor of the Repository. In later years her family would convert their front porch to a tiny grocery they called Palm’s Variety Store.

  But seven decades later, the B. Virdot gift stands out against the pall of the Depression. “I thought that was so wonderful of that man,” she gushes. “Oh, you’re his grandson! Well, God love him. You should be so proud of him. I was so happy. That anyone could be so kind to help people at that time. I know I made those dollars stretch because I tried to make a lot of people happy with it.”

  For years, Helen Palm assumed that B. Virdot worked in a bank, perhaps because he had money enough to share with others. She wouldn’t have guessed that B. Virdot was the short man at Stone’s Clothes where her father bought his clothes and where she would pick out a tie for him in less grim Christmas seasons. “Oh, I’ll be darned!” she exclaimed when I told her that B. Virdot was Sam Stone. From among so many who reached out to him in need, she is the only one to learn the secret of Mr. B. Virdot.

  Mr. B. Virdot’s Story: The Bridge

  Sam Stone never did know the impact of his gift on the lives of Geraldine Hillman, Elizabeth Bunt, Felice May, Helen Palm, or any of the other recipients of his largesse. He had his own three daughters to dote upon, a business to run, and a crush of other matters to occupy his attention. Besides, he understood from the beginning that he could not inquire into the circumstances of those he had helped without compromising his own anonymity and their privacy. What little he did learn came in the trickle of thank-you notes in the days after his gift arrived.

  Nearly fifty years later he was still in robust health, still working, and still thoroughly enjoying life in his oceanfront apartment in Bal Harbour, Florida, where he lived with Minna. At ninety-three, he woke up early each morning, went for a dip in the Atlantic, diving headlong into the oncoming waves, then showered in his cabana, donned a pressed white shirt, tie, and jacket, and drove himself to work. He owned a small shop in North Miami that sold marble pen sets, clocks, trophies, and executive knickknacks. He didn’t really need the income. He had owned a chain of clothing stores, and later, a plastics plant and a real estate company that helped develop Sunset Isles in Hollywood and Miami Shores. But the tiny shop provided a focus to his days, and procuring the marble stands gave him an excuse to travel the world.

  On Thursday morning, January 29, 1981, he set off as always, cruising down Collins Avenue, and eventually turning onto the Broad Causeway, which connects the mainland’s North Miami with the Bay Harbor Islands. He paid the quarter toll and proceeded. But on this morning, the drawbridge was already rising and the pike descended toward his windshield. Instead of braking, he panicked, put his foot to the accelerator, and shot forwa
rd, slamming into the rising concrete span. He died instantly. The time was 10:15 A.M.

  The Miami Herald obituary appeared under the headline, ENTREPRENEUR SAMUEL STONE, 93. The city sent my grandmother a bill for the repairs to the bridge, but she would have none of it, and told them as much. Faced with the choice of badgering an aged widow or absorbing the costs, the city relented.

  Sam’s body was made presentable and flown to Canton. His casket was the color of pewter, and his head was pillowed on a silver crepe interior. I viewed it in the front parlor of the funeral home. The actual service was at three P.M. in the sanctuary of Temple Israel. Just before the casket was closed, his son-in-law and best friend, Don, folded the light blue windbreaker jacket from La Gorce Country Club and gently tucked it into the corner of Sam’s casket, a contradictory symbol of both the New World’s anti-Semitism and the struggle to rise above it. It was the gift that had sealed their friendship.

  Sam was buried in Canton’s West Lawn Cemetery in grave number 5, lot 31, section 6, in the ivied company of deceased friends and family. Not far off in all directions were the graves of those whom, nearly fifty years before, he had helped as B. Virdot. Minna had her own name chiseled on the stone, with her birth date and a dash that would hold its breath another quarter century before exhaling. I pinched a green leaf from the arrangement on the casket and put it in my wallet. I still have the leaf. During the funeral I remembered Sam’s favorite toast.

  He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,

  He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.

  And when he passed away his insurance was denied.

  Because he never lived, they claimed he never died.

  I’d heard him offer that toast scores of times, and always with the same piratical glint in his eye. For us grandchildren, that toast was a welcome manifesto, a license from the patriarch to raise a little hell.

  Two decades later, I came upon Sam’s death certificate. It cited the cause of death as “multiple blunt impact injuries.” His occupation was “Executive.” It said he was born on March 2, 1887, in Pittsburgh. Only my grandmother knew otherwise. And so it would remain for nearly thirty years.

  Knowing what I now know of Sam’s life, I see in his death, if not the perfect exit, at least the perfect metaphor for how he lived. He died crossing a bridge, which was only right given that for my family he was the bridge between the old and new worlds, between the pogroms of the past and the promise of the present. His haste in escaping that former life and embracing the new misled him into thinking he might secure that future sooner by creating a web of lies, but ultimately, those lies put him at permanent risk and proved to be the final obstacle to his own security. How appropriate, then, that the barrier that descended upon him that day triggered panic and, instead of waiting, he sped forward hoping to clear the rising span. Three decades later his descendants cannot cross that causeway without thinking of him and paying homage to the man whose crossing brought us all to this place.

  IX.

  True Circumstances

  Final Reflections

  The gifts that Sam Stone gave that Christmas 1933 came from a man who understood what it was to be down-and-out. But there was more to it than that. It was no accident that he chose Christmas, a holiday marked for Christians, not Jews, and that he specifically wished his Gentile neighbors a “merry and joyful Christmas.” For Sam, the gift marked a kind of final arrival for him. No longer the object of persecution, he was a respected citizen and a welcomed member of the community.

  That nearly all the recipients of his largesse were Gentiles represented a measure of acceptance long denied him. Canton had embraced him in ways he had never thought possible. To the suffering of his fellow townspeople, the act had brought relief and hope. But to Sam, it signaled a personal triumph in which he could finally believe that he had escaped the persecution, rejection, and poverty that had defined his past. In Canton, a small midwestern industrial town against the ropes during the Great Depression, he found what had eluded him all his life—a sense of belonging, a home.

  He had strayed as far as he could from the stifling orthodoxy of his youth, but he never severed his ties with Judaism. He was proud of his faith. He repudiated only the rituals that had weighed upon him and with which he associated so much suffering. At Christmas, in his Market Street home, he always had an enormous tree that he delighted in helping to decorate. On Christmas morning he insisted that he be allowed to open his gifts first. And yet, even as he celebrated his freedom from the past that Christmas of 1933, the manner of B. Virdot’s giving was an homage to that past.

  Raised an Orthodox Jew, he knew well both the concept of tikkun olam and that of tzedakah. Tikkun olam is Hebrew for “repairing the world.” Tzedakah is a Hebrew word embedded in notions of basic justice, but also one that has come to mean caring for the poor. It is not charity but the debt we owe one another and ourselves as human beings. In the world into which Sam was born, it was customary for a new father to make a gift of money to the poor. It was a way of consecrating the newborn to a life of compassion, justice, and observance. “Tzedaka,” observed Professor Reuven Kimelman, “may not save us but it makes us worth saving.” And that was the power of B. Virdot’s gift. It telegraphed to an entire community that it—and he—were indeed worth saving.

  The Bible speaks often of such matters:

  “When you cut down your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go again to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, for the orphan, and for the widow; that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. . . . And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this thing” (Deuteronomy 24:19-22). Sam too had come out of a land of bondage. The exodus from Romania was, in its day, often compared to the exodus out of Egypt. And with him he had brought an ancient appreciation of the commandment of tzedakah.

  He named his pseudonymous donor “B. Virdot” after his own young daughters, speaking to the hope that they would inherit a world free from the bigotry and Old World hatreds that had marked his childhood. Yet, ominously, the year he made his gift, 1933, was the same year Adolf Hitler came to power and Dachau opened its gates. Indeed, the day Sam Stone’s ad appeared in the Canton Repository, the New York Times reported how anti-Semitism was once more inflamed in Europe. A headline in the December 18, 1933, edition read: VIENNA NAZIS IN ATTACK: EXPLODE TEAR GAS BOMBS IN JEWISH-OWNED DEPARTMENT STORE. That same day, another Times headline read: NAZI COURT ANNULS MIXED MARRIAGE: SUSTAINS “ARYAN” HUSBAND ON THE GROUND THAT IT VIOLATES THE DOGMA OF BLOOD KINSHIP. It was a landmark case. In granting a husband a divorce from his Jewish wife on the ground that it tainted his Aryan blood, the court wrote in part: “He could not have understood the essential implication involved in such a union at a time when the significance of race, blood kinship and folkdom was recognized by a small minority only.”

  These were the sorts of accounts that made Sam Stone shiver with boyhood fears. He knew firsthand where such stories inexorably lead. But his faith in America was not misplaced. The sons and daughters of those he’d helped, and millions like them, raised during the Great Depression, would soon march off to defeat Hitler and risk their lives to bring an end to the prejudices and tyranny that had defined his youth. Roy Teis’s sons enlisted the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Nora Romesberg’s son joined not long after. So too did the sons of Rachel DeHoff. And scores more enlisted from among the families B. Virdot aided. They had learned during the Great Depression that they were all in this together—rich and poor, black and white, Jew and Gentile—and that only by acting in concert could they prevail. B. Virdot had sent them five dollars. They repaid his faith in them ten-thousand-fold.

  Epilogue: Canton Revisited

  Over the thirty-five years since I last lived in Canton, I have returned many times. Almost always, it is for a funeral or to pay my respects at the graves of my family. Each time, I
stand before Minna’s and Sam’s graves and gather up four pebbles. I place them on their gravestone—one for myself, one for my mother, Virginia, one for my sister, Audrey, and one for my wife, Peggy. It is how we Jews express remembrance. It is a way to continually build a monument to memory and it is a signal to those who come after us that we were there and that these souls have not been forgotten. Even the smallest pebble says it all.

  Four generations of us are buried on a green hillside in West Lawn Cemetery, almost within the shadow of President William McKinley’s monument. Returning home—I still consider Canton my home, even after four decades away—I rarely miss a chance to eat at Bender’s or drive past Sam and Minna’s old home on Market Street. But with the discovery of the suitcase, I began to see things anew. And on each successive visit, researching this family or that, I sought out the landmarks that routinely cropped up in their letters—the places where they had lived and worked and, when they could, played, wondering what had become of them in the intervening seventy-five-plus years. It felt less like a self-guided tour than one directed by the ghosts of December 1933.

  The Canton they knew is there still, but smaller. The industrial city of 105,000 has shrunk to 78,000, and the uncertainty of its financial future has done little to stem the exodus of its young. Those in whose hands the city now rests have done what they could to put a positive face on things, but the present increasingly looks like the troubled past. Today Canton must cope with the burdens that weigh on all Rust Belt cities: outsourcing, layoffs, plant closures, and a recession that for many bears an uncanny resemblance to the Hard Times.