The Last Marlin Read online

  Mother hated Globe. To her, the showroom was a humiliation, a glitzy advertisement for wealth and success, and for reasons that I did not understand, moneyed success was to her equivalent to abject failure. Whenever possible Mother tried to pretend that she was a pauper, a rag lady. She would come to the showroom wearing a shirt that was torn and smeared with oil paint or black tights with runs. She would arrive at the fancy Bar Mitzvah of one of I.R.’s nephews smelling of turpentine. Over the years her slovenly dress was a source of humiliation to I.R. But Mother believed that being the heir to the Globe fortune damned her as a serious artist. It made her furious to have this legacy around her neck. One of Grandma’s tiny sisters, Rose, was a Communist who disavowed the evils of capitalism on a soapbox on 14th Street in Manhattan. Occasionally Mother would join Rose on the street, or at least she would tell her father that she had. Another sister, Dora, was also a Communist, though less strident. Once or twice Mother met Dora at “black and white parties” and danced with Negroes to assert her open-mindedness. When she announced this to her father, I.R. turned red in the face.

  But capitalism was not my mother’s battle. That was old and picked-over material and Mother valued originality above dogma. She positioned herself against the status quo, hallowed traditions, social norms, banal success, bourgeois dreams, humdrum realities, wherever she found them. In Great Neck she cultivated a tiny legion of followers and kindred spirits, mostly painters and failed actors, showered them with little starbursts of revelations. For a time one of her closest friends was Gus, a corner grocer. Though Gus had no formal education Mother could sense from his eyes and the delicate turn of his head that he was a great aesthete. Gus became her primary cause. Over a period of months she urged him to give up the store and devote his life to painting or acting. Though caught in the sway of Mother’s charisma, Gus hesitated. How would he support his family, his new baby? They arrived at a compromise. Gus would close the grocery, open an art supply store and paint through the night. Within months the new store went under and Gus, broke and exhausted from lack of sleep, was gone from Great Neck, driving an Entenmann’s delivery truck. Mother hardly noticed his downfall. She spoke of the great contribution he might have made as an abstract painter.

  I.R. and his daughter were pursuing irreconcilable dreams. My grandfather envisioned Globe as a kingdom. He pleaded with his daughter to dress in a manner appropriate to her station as heiress to Globe. When strangers asked my mother about her father, she referred to him as a designer, a gifted artist, a glassblower, an inventor—anything but a manufacturer. Even adulterer was preferable to entrepreneur. At the least it would be passionate and wicked. Mother burst my head with her outrageous ideas. But maybe it was true. Visiting the showroom I observed that Grandpa’s door was closed for a long time while he was in there with his long-legged secretary. I sighed deeply.

  This gossip about Grandpa instilled in me a new urgency, even a responsibility, but I did not know how to proceed. I hated the showroom but now I felt pressure to come. I looked at the girls differently. They were fair game. I tried to imagine them on the sofa with me. I snapped off their girdles and brassieres, felt their luscious wetness with my hands. Then I no longer knew what to do. Two or three times I even tried to engage a showroom girl in conversation. I was received with boredom or irritation, which made me worry about my pimples and kinky hair that bird-nested no matter how hard I brushed. After my feeble attempts I fell back into sullen malaise about the showroom. I leaned on the fact that Dad rarely made visits here. The showroom was not a place for serious business.

  The Globe plant in Maspeth was a different story. It was huge, a half-million square feet on two floors, and designed to mirror the essence of modernity. With its sleek lines and enduring construction of concrete and brick, the factory proclaimed that Globe would do its part designing and manufacturing the lighting of America for centuries. I have a reel of film shot in the fifties showing my grandfather smiling at his factory. The Maspeth plant was the embodiment of I.R.’s dream.

  As a teenager I savored the size and texture of the factory. I was thrilled by the roar of a thousand big machines cutting heavy metal, stamping, bending, punching, welding, lifting, hauling. When lighting fixtures are reduced to discrete parts, it is not entirely obvious which will go into commercial or residential models. I would pretend that all of this activity was the fulfillment of my dad’s work; the giant maw of the shipping bay was pouring out fixtures for Dad’s high-risers.

  Globe was too much to absorb in a single day, in three days. Usually I would spend an entire visit in one of the many departments, nearly all of which were managed by Grandpa’s brothers and cousins. One day I devoted myself to the intricacies of the block-long paint-spraying department, which Grandpa had designed himself. A spinning wheel threw electrically charged paint onto eight-footers that rolled past hanging from hooks on an overhead conveyor before going into the oven. At other times the imported glass for lenses rested on top of molds that were also Grandpa’s invention. After a trip through the oven the glass had melted into the shapes Grandpa had shrewdly designed for fickle American buyers. I.R.’s technology for melting glass allowed him rapidly to modify a large line of fixtures, giving him an advantage over other manufacturers.

  On another day I would visit the shipping department, strolling past rows and rows of benches where a hundred men and women twisted wires, mounted ballasts, sockets and starters into metal housings and tightened the nuts down with screeching electric screwdrivers. The next time I visited they might be assembling the framework of my dad’s miracle hinge. The workers gave me a glance and then returned to their jobs and conversations. I was Abe’s son, I.R.’s grandson, someday this operation, or a big chunk of it, would be mine. I felt like a prince.

  Usually I took a break to have a grilled ham and cheese with one of Grandpa’s brothers in the factory luncheonette that was run by I.R.’s sister Anna. Often I ate with Sammy, who owned a truck and made deliveries for I.R. He was a serious bowler and I would ask him to tell me again about his greatest game, the 299. Sam recalled his picture-perfect hook that day, one ball after the next sliding right into the pocket, until, alas, he came in high on the last shot. Sammy always smiled when he described his achievement, but I felt the wrenching sadness of the 299, one pin short of perfection. In the ensuing years Sammy had become a diabetic, his best games were now behind him.

  Sometimes my grandfather would stop by, his face flushed with pride that the different generations of his family, his own flesh and blood, were eating and enjoying themselves under his roof. I.R. was not one to mask his emotions, and it was his vision to employ all of his brothers and sisters and children, for the family to share the prosperity of his tremendous achievement. It occurred to me this might be the reason that he became so emotional when watching This Is Your Life. He saw Isadore Rosenblatt appearing on the show one day, basking in the adulation of all the little brothers and cousins he had brought over from the old country. Of course he knew that family members envied his wealth, especially the wives of his brothers who seethed that he drove his new Caddy and lived like a king while they played out their years in little apartments on Eastern Parkway. But Grandpa regarded such complaints as foolishness. He had brought them all to America. He was confident that Rose and Dora loved him despite their little rebellions. Grandpa had the perspective of a man acting out his destiny on a very large stage.

  Usually, at the end of the day, I would visit him in his wood-paneled office. He would say to me, “So?” and I would look at him. A pause hung in the air but we both knew what was coming. “So, mister?” he repeated. Eventually I told him something about my life. To whatever I mentioned he responded wryly with “So what?” That was the signal for us to talk about politics. Grandfather was a liberal Democrat. He loved Truman and, later, JFK. I was greatly impressed with his understanding of politics. Occasionally he hinted that his information came from more direct sources than the newspapers, and whenever we shared our
views of Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson, I felt that our ideas would have a hearing beyond his office.

  In the late afternoon the big circular urinals were crowded with men pissing, then scrubbing their filthy thick forearms with Borax. Outside on the street the block swelled with Globe workers. On Fridays men held fists of dollars in their hands and I could feel the pulse of the weekend. Globe would be there on Monday. Five hundred men and women relied on the business acumen of my grandfather for food, rent, vacations, cars, babies, sundry little dreams. I.R. was the man for the challenge. He was a daunting figure striding through the huge factory or waving smartly as he pulled away from the curb in the new Caddy.

  My father was often away from the plant, but he was a presence nonetheless. While he was off making deals, Dad’s faithful secretary Kate filed the blueprints of all of his office buildings, answered the phones, typed letters, putting her initials on the lower left corner of each of them as though it were an honor to be a part of Abe’s work. Kate had a caring manner and a lovely smile to go along with her unwavering fidelity to my father. My uncles and aunts resented Kate for the secrets she would never divulge. Her sweet good mornings were an irritation. How did he get so many orders? they wondered while Kate smiled tenderly and took shorthand as Abe spoke from Detroit or Cleveland.

  Apart from conversations with my grandfather, I avoided the executive offices at the plant. I knew that my father was a subject of gossip and jealousy. Why should Abe earn more than us, more even than I.R.? was a favorite dialogue between my uncles and aunt. I could imagine their fervor complaining to I.R. behind my father’s back. Whenever I showed my face I saw their tight smiles. I returned them in kind. I wanted them all to know where I stood.

  Abe was gall in their sides and I relished it. My father, with his emaciated hawk face and gangster hat, was an outsider who had wedged himself into this tight family group. Family members found his style as detestable as his success. He slept late and was rarely inside their clanging, bending, molding, assembling universe. Abe did his business in planes and airports, marinas, nightclubs, ringside, courtside, at the fifty-yard line; even in the hospital, he kept the orders coming in. His large empty office was a reminder of an alien and distasteful power.

  “Abe was a sick man but completely remarkable,” recalls an old business friend who still marvels at my dad’s enigmatic artistry. “When he was in New York he might come into the Globe office for one hour, make a couple of phone calls, close a deal. He didn’t need to spend eight hours like other salesmen. That’s why they hated him.”

  Before Abe came into the business, Globe was known internationally for the residential line. Commercial lighting was a relatively small part of the business. My father changed all that. The office building deals were sweet because they were all in one high-rising shell, fifty thousand homes’ worth of lighting, a hundred thousand homes within one breathtaking edifice. Huge as the Globe plant was, my father could close more orders than the factory could produce.

  Naturally, with all the backbiting and plots against him by the in-laws, Dad did not feel completely devoted to Globe. If they could, they’d cut my balls off, he said of my uncles and aunt. Occasionally Dad made side deals with one of his competitors, like Ruby-Philite. He did not keep this a secret. Dad operated as an independent force within Globe. But more often other companies would come to him. “Other lighting companies would call Abe in as a kind of doctor,” recalls Dad’s friend. “To close an order that was hung up. Abe would speak with the contractors or union guys. Often, just a phone call from Abe resolved the problem. More complex situations would sometimes require his presence at a meeting or dinner. Abe’s involvement always seemed to provide the magic touch, though the actual mechanics of what went on during his meetings and phone calls remained a mystery to most of us.”

  Despite the ill will Dad liked the security and cachet of Globe behind him and was constantly pressing I.R. to back off on the residential line, to leave more machinery for fluorescents. I.R. dragged his feet. He was dubious. He believed in the line; the line was like wheat for my grandfather. He cherished his catalog with hundreds of models to choose from. He trusted his sense for what designs the American public desired for their bedrooms and dens. He had no feel for Abe’s mega-orders and late-night selling. But my father prevailed. How could you ignore million-dollar orders—today they would be ten- or fifteen-million-dollar jobs—one after the next? I.R. agreed reluctantly, because of the numbers. The numbers were staggering. Such grandiosity from a sickly little man. Every office building in America was my father’s prey.

  But even while the company prospered and grew, I.R. resented Abe. I once heard him ask my mother, Was Abe doing monkey business? Even if it was monkey business, I wondered, how bad could that be? None of the other salesmen could close orders like Abe. All of them together couldn’t match his sales. What did it matter if they talked? If they hated him, so what? They couldn’t touch him.

  Baiting Fischbach

  ABE’S FATHER, JOE WAITZKIN, WHO LIVED IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, was acidly critical of his son’s lavish spending and murky business style. Where does it all go? Joe railed darkly in his thick Jewish accent. Abe spends the money before he earns it. For all his fancy jobs, one big building after the next, what money does he have to show for it? Joe complained about Abe’s profligacy to whoever was around, to me and my mother whenever we visited, to members of his minyan in shul, but mostly to his daughter Celia, living upstairs with her husband Lennie and their three children in the same three-story house in Cambridge where Dad had been raised. As Abe’s fixture sales reached dizzying heights, Joe’s invective took on greater urgency, as though his son’s way of life were violating the very essence of Judaism. And at the same time, “Pop,” as we all called him, extolled I.R. as an American hero. During those years Pop earned his livelihood working in the Lee Products shop in nearby Everett that had been founded by Abe, an irony that did not escape my father.

  As a younger man, a recent immigrant, Joe Waitzkin had been ambitious and hardworking and had accumulated considerable real estate in Cambridge. With the Depression he lost everything, and to my father’s humiliation, Pop was forced to make a living in a corner grocery store. This big failure left Pop a frustrated and angry man. I recall one afternoon when the Lee shop was in the midst of moving from one location to another. I happened to be standing in the doorway while Lennie and a few workers were dismantling the dingy office. My grandfather began striking the unyielding timbers of the wall with a hammer. He struck blow after blow as though trying to slay an enemy. This went on for what seemed like a long time with Pop sweating and Lennie and the others begging him to stop. He beat the wall until he was doubled over and heaving.

  Even during Pop’s calmest moments I found it difficult to pierce his simmering rage and religious fervor to have a proper conversation with him. I cannot remember ever seeing my father and his dad together when there wasn’t anger. I wonder if Pop ever paused to consider that his own fall from success contributed to his son’s unremitting drive to reach the top, to live rich. On the other side Dad complained to me that Joe and Lennie operated the business in Everett like a mom-and-pop store, kept no inventory because of the financial risk and had no plan or ambition to expand. All they wanted from Lee, Dad would say, was a modest weekly income. With all the big deals in New York, Dad had little time to focus on expanding the Everett shop, which employed only six or seven men who labored on out-of-date presses and lathes. Still, the timidity of his family was frustrating to my father, who would have liked to send them large orders from New York contractors he had befriended.

  Dad’s sister Celia was caught in the middle of warring sensibilities, titillated by her brother’s flair and success and yet mindful of both the wrath and reproach of her father and the more conservative business approach of her husband, who ran the Everett shop. Probably because my mother couldn’t have cared less about Abe’s wheeling and dealing, Dad frequently called Celia in Cambr
idge with stories about the union guys he courted, what clubs they went to and such. In the Great Neck house, Dad talked on the phone to his sister with the door closed, and it made me jealous that he told Celia secrets he kept from me.

  My smart, chesty aunt glowed in Abe’s presence and at the names of the great men who never kept him waiting, like Charlie Zweifel, another electrical contractor, not to mention Alan Fischbach himself, who would soon take over the presidency of the enormous Fischbach and Moore. Dad and I often visited Cambridge. As the family sat around the kitchen table chewing salad with Kraft French dressing, Celia chose the best slices of steak for Abe, turned them lovingly on a counter rotisserie until they were perfectly well done, the way her brother enjoyed his meat. She served Abe first, while the rest of us waited for our steak. Later, when the kids were in bed, Celia stayed up until two in the morning eating ice cream and talking with her brother about his newest deals. Between them was the tacit promise that Abe’s skyrocketing prosperity would spread north to Cambridge and Everett, the Lee shop would someday swell with Charlie Zweifel and Fischbach deals. There was no need for formal agreements between these two. In a world of sharks Abe trusted his sister completely. Within the pull of their intimacy, I felt like an intruder.

  Whenever Celia tilted too far in her brother’s direction, her husband, Lennie, became irritated—why was Abe such a big deal? After all, Lennie had also bought a boat, a little lapstrake, and trolled daisy chains of squid off Magnolia on summer weekends. Why do you cook the best pieces of meat for Abe? But then, Celia had ways of making it up to Lennie, and he worshiped her.

  One time Dad brought Alan Fischbach to Celia’s summer cottage in Magnolia. “Alan loved Abe,” recalls Celia. “The day he came I accidentally locked myself out of the house. Alan was very tall, six-feet-four, but he crawled through the bedroom window to unlock the door. The sheets were messy but Alan didn’t mind.” Celia titters over this incident forty years later, as though the king of England had crawled across her messed-up sheets.