MASTERY

The Christmas rush begins in early October for Lower East Side retailers and small wholesalers and lasts through the first week in January.  Let’s say it’s one of those darkening months in 1958. My father leaves home early and arrives back late.  All the customers want their deliveries of wrapping paper and gift bags yesterday, he tells my mother, with a grumble and a laugh. This is his backward way of announcing that business is good.  He removes his dark grey fedora and starts to take off his light tweed wool coat.

         We, the three children, have deserted the television in the center of the living room and are prancing from foot to foot, hoping for some surprise – a book of wrapping paper samples, a roll of ribbon. “What do you have for us, Daddy? What do you have?”

         Not that we need more books of wrapping paper or more ribbon. We already own a stack of these and a jumble of toys and games. It’s just the idea of a present, the thrill of the unexpected.  It’s the climax of our ordinary domestic day: Daddy’s arrival.  Our steamship of a parent coming in from the great waters of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

         We didn’t know then that it had been a struggle for him “to go out for business,” his words, which meant finding new customers by making cold calls. We didn’t know that each of his steps toward adulthood came hard. 

         His older, easygoing brother Louis brought in all the orders for the first years of their small company with the grand name, Atlantic Paper Products.  My father did the deliveries. You didn’t need to talk much if you did deliveries.  Just enter the store, find the boss and say “Order from Atlantic Paper.”  Then lift, carry and place the boxes, then nod and hand over the invoice and wait for a check.

         “I wish I could sell,” he writes in the second volume of his diary, age twenty-three, 1939.  “It would help my personality immensely. But I can’t seem to get started."

         He takes long walks in order to think, but finds his thoughts are only repetitions. “If I could go out selling – If I met someone I liked. But you know where that goes, always on the same lines.”

         Sometimes he wishes to be drafted, so that all these yearnings will cease. But as the oldest unmarried son of a widowed mother he would have had to enlist. 

         In the Spring of 1940, he is still afraid. "May try to break into selling, just around here. but am almost certain I won't be able to."   They are prospering, even with only Louis making the sales.  My father can afford to return to City College at night.  And perhaps it is prosperity that finally gives him confidence to join a club at school and even start writing for the YMHA newsletter.

         Triumph comes the next winter:  “Huzzah, Huzzah etcetera and all that goes with it. I started out for orders without being afraid. My heart was in my mouth at the beginning, but that soon subsided. I got some too (11 of them). Hereafter we’re keeping the kid steady and I’ll go out for business. If I could conquer that, I could do anything or so I think --- am interested in movies, the production an distribution end of it – but it’s probably part of my daydreaming…”

         A few days later he notes that “my dancing has also improved immensely.”

         ---

In the last year of my father’s life, when he was already frail, he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk right outside their apartment building in Queens and suffered a hairline fracture of the pelvis. At the hospital, after several shots of morphine he was still moaning.

     Said my brother, “Dad, it shouldn’t hurt anymore. Does it still hurt?"

     “No,” said my father, who moaned again,“but it really hurt so much.”

     “Max,” said my brother, “Think of something good. Something positive.”

     And he did, finally, and calmed down.

     Later that afternoon, one of us asked him what he chose to think about.

     “Getting orders,” he said, “Going out for orders.”

     His royal road. His Everest.

Max at his desk.