Rich Boy Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Sharon Pomerantz

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Twelve

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub.

  Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  The Twelve name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: August 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-446-57198-2

  Contents

  Copyright

  PART I

  One: Oxford Circle

  Two: Domestic duties

  Three: Roommates

  Four: Robert learns a few things

  Five: Robert takes a road trip

  Six: Home away from home

  Seven: Mrs. Trace

  Eight: Summer of ’66

  Nine: The world comes crashing in

  Ten: The natives are restless

  Eleven: Gwendolyn

  Twelve: Senior year

  Thirteen: Holiday

  Fourteen: Revelations

  Fifteen: Graduation

  PART II

  Sixteen: The drawing

  Seventeen: The sweat zone

  Eighteen: Cambodia

  Nineteen: Aftermath

  Twenty: Chelsea

  Twenty-one: Homecoming

  Twenty-two: Eighty-fifth Street

  Twenty-three: The blind lead the deaf

  Twenty-four: Nixon

  Twenty-five: Law school

  Twenty-six: Barry to the rescue

  Twenty-seven: Robert makes the grade

  Twenty-eight: Robert learns about beauty and its opposite

  Twenty-nine: Tuxedo Park

  Thirty: Welcome to the club

  Thirty-one: Outdoor grilling

  Thirty-two: Robert discovers a few more things about Crea

  Thirty-three: First fight

  Thirty-four: Down the shore

  Thirty-five: The period of trials

  Thirty-six: Meet Barry Vishniak

  Thirty-seven: Prenuptus interruptus

  PART III

  Thirty-eight: Of trading floors and shoe shines

  Thirty-nine: Everybody into the water

  Forty: Of deals and dames

  Forty-one: Empty house

  Forty-two: Sally will not give in

  Forty-three: Independence Day

  Forty-four: Summer, part II

  Forty-five: Robert is up for partner

  Forty-six: Christmas comes round at last

  Forty-seven: Back at the office

  Forty-eight: Crea takes a trip

  Forty-nine: Mario

  Fifty: The summer before the storm

  Fifty-one: Sally gives an inch

  Fifty-two: Showdown at the Traces

  Fifty-three: The fall of ’87

  Fifty-four: The verdict

  Fifty-five: Where is Barry Vishniak?

  Fifty-six: Telling Gwendolyn

  Fifty-seven: The end of Disston Street

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Twelve

  In memory of my beloved father, Julius Pomerantz

  (1926–2006), who believed that I could do anything.

  “We’ll be poor, won’t we? Like people in books. And I’ll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!” She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss.

  “It’s impossible to be both together,” said John grimly. “People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two.”

  — F. Scott Fitzgerald,

  The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  Oxford Circle

  For as far as the eye could see were miles and miles of Jews, families of four, five, and more packed into long, solid-brick rows—so many ’Steins and ’Vitzes, Silvers and Golds—each house with its own narrow scroll of front lawn and a cement patio big enough for exactly two folding chairs. On Robert Vishniak’s block, the 2100 block of Disston Street in Northeast Philadelphia, an Italian family lived three houses down from him. “Italian from Italy,” his mother liked to say, born over there, unfamiliar with the lay of the land, and so no one told them until it was too late that they were buying on the wrong side of the Roosevelt Boulevard, a highway that might as well have been a river; Jews stayed west of it and Catholics east.

  The area was known by residents as simply “the Northeast,” and Robert’s neighborhood was called Oxford Circle, named after a traffic circle that drivers had trouble navigating their way out of. Most of the fathers in Oxford Circle worked at government jobs or in factories, did physical labor, or owned small shops. The mothers stayed home with the children and were house proud. They hung their wet clothes on miles of line that stretched from house to house in the endless shared back driveway—the heavy canvas work shirts were spotless and the white bedsheets gleamed, as did the kitchen and bathroom floors that the women scrubbed, on their hands and knees, as if in worship.

  The Vishniak family moved here in 1953. Before that, they’d lived with Robert’s grandparents, Cece and Saul Kupferberg, in a three-story row house in Southwest Philadelphia. Robert made the fourth generation to reside in that overcrowded house, yet the adults greeted the arrival of the first grandchild as if he warranted his own national holiday. Saul—who worked long hours at the tannery and came home so tired that his dinner was often served to him in bed—asked that the baby be brought to him after his last glass of tea so that he might hold him for a few minutes before bed. More than once he was found with his arms locked around the infant, both of them fast asleep. When Robert’s young uncle Frank, just a year out of high school, returned each day from his job at the supermarket, he lifted the boy into the air, parading him around the living room high above them all, where they believed he belonged. As Robert grew, his grandmother indulged him with endless homemade desserts, and his aunt Lolly, who lived just down the block and did not yet have children of her own, came over every afternoon to hold him on her lap and smother him with kisses while declaring Robert the most beautiful child she’d ever seen.

  She was not completely biased in her assessment. He had a full face, with olive skin like his mother’s and straight black bangs that skimmed large brown-black eyes. On his chin and on the right but not the left cheek was a dimple that, when it chose to appear, seemed to be awarding a prize. Mostly, the boy smirked rather than smiled, as if possessing a secret that might at any moment corrupt him. Women particularly responded to his charms. When walking the child in the stroller, Stacia and Cece were often stopped by strangers who wanted to smile at him and, in Stacia’s words, “make fools of themselves.” A neighbor once took a picture, hoping to enter him in a local contest for adorable toddlers, but his mother would not hear of it—there was no cash involved, so what, Stacia asked, was the point? She was the only one who didn’t slobber over her son; for that matter, she didn’t hug or kiss most people, be they child or adult. But affection is affection, no matter where it comes from, and in Cece and Saul’s house Robert grew drunk on it.

  Though Stacia worried that Robert would be spoiled, she could not deny that so many baby
sitters, cooks, and assistants made her life much easier. She would have been happy to live in her parents’ house forever, paying no rent and letting others fuss over her firstborn, but then, when Robert was five, Stacia had another child, Barry. The second son brought none of the novelty of a first grandchild and was a loud, colicky baby who kept the house up all night. The adults were five years older, five years more crowded and tired. Cece’s father, now age ninety-five and referred to by all as “the old man,” was still occupying the attic and showed no sign of going anywhere. Frank was as yet unmarried and remained at home. Instead of happily making room for the new baby, the family wondered where on earth they’d put him. It was not that they were unloving, or neglectful, but they went about their duties this time with significantly less enthusiasm. Then Saul got sick, and it dawned on his wife that Stacia, her husband, and their growing family might stay forever, and Saul would never be able to retire. So she kicked them out.

  Stacia argued with her mother and then, for the first and only time in her life, she begged—“We haven’t saved enough for our own place; we’ll pay more into the household expenses; I’ll keep the baby quiet, I promise”—but Cece’s mind was made up. She folded her arms over her significant chest, told Stacia to get a mortgage like everyone else, and declared the decision final.

  They bought the house in Oxford Circle for $6,300 with 30 percent down. Even at six years old, Robert knew those figures because Stacia Vishniak believed that hearing what things cost was good for children, like castor oil. There was a mortgage to pay now, and Vishniak, who worked at the post office during the day, began moonlighting nights and weekends as a security guard. After Barry went off to first grade, Stacia took the school crossing guard job so that she could still keep an eye on her sons after school. Mornings and afternoons she ferried the children from Solis-Cohen Elementary School safely across Bustleton Avenue. It was a strange vocation for a woman who hated automobiles, considering them wasteful and dirty. But no crossing guard was more diligent, keeping her charges in line with only a look, and holding drivers to the school-crossing speed limit, memorizing quickly the license number of anyone who infringed. Robert’s mother not only shopped for and prepared their meals and did the cleaning, washing, and general housework, but she also did all her own home repairs, fixing plumbing and unclogging drains, plastering and painting hallways and replacing light fixtures. Every other Sunday morning Stacia mowed the small front lawn with a rusty hand mower. She paid all the bills, too, squeezing twenty dollars out of each nickel. If the neighbors sometimes gossiped about her standoffishness, her plain appearance, she ignored them. No one’s opinion mattered to her but her own.

  Eventually Saul died, followed by the old man. Cece sold her house and moved to an apartment near Stacia. Then the rest of the family trailed after her to Oxford Circle, so by 1960 the Vishniaks and Kupferbergs—cousins and grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles—were once again within blocks of each other. And for a long time that was all Robert knew—the embrace of family, blocks and blocks of people who if they were not related to him, might as well have been. But he was older now, did not need them as he had in childhood. No matter, they still crowded around, wanting to be close. On the streets, he heard his name called out too many times, noticed too many familiar, familial, faces always watching him. As he grew to adolescence, preparing for the ceremony that would declare him a man, he could get away with exactly nothing and he began to yearn, more and more each year, to be a stranger.

  * * *

  WITH SO MANY COUSINS, Cousins Club was an event to be dreaded but not ignored. Every few months his mother and her two siblings and most of their many cousins, and sometimes all the elderly parents as well, got together at someone’s house. The system that determined who hosted was part economics and part caprice—some had it twice within a short time; others were overlooked completely. Eventually, though, when Robert was thirteen and Barry eight, the wheel stopped on Stacia and Vishniak.

  His mother made the announcement at the dinner table that February. “The Cousins Club is here next month,” she said. “Even the rich cousins, back from their fancy winter vacations, are coming to look us over.”

  “When was the last time we had it?” Robert asked. He could only remember his parents leaving for other people’s houses dressed in their best clothes. They returned late at night, often waking up Robert with their fights; the evenings were not without controversy.

  “We’ve never had the club,” Stacia said. “When we lived with Cece we didn’t have to. Now we have our own place and we can’t escape. It’s a family obligation.”

  “Jesus!” Robert’s father said, suddenly pounding his hand on the table. The boys and their mother started in their seats and then looked at him, waiting for some additional verbiage, but he went back to his mashed potatoes.

  “What does the club do, Ma?” Barry asked, hoping for special passwords, or time spent in a tree house.

  “They play cards for money,” Stacia said. “Too much money.”

  “They eat like pigs,” his father added. “Like termites.” He paused. “They eat like the Russians are at Camden Bridge.”

  “Great!” Barry said.

  “It’s not great,” Robert replied, five years older and more in touch with the general sentiment. But he was desperately curious to meet the mysterious rich cousins—two of his grandmother’s nephews who’d been in the junk business, barely making ends meet, when the Second World War broke out, bringing with it the incessant demand for scrap metal. What would prosperity look like on the face of a Kupferberg? How, he wondered, were these cousins made?

  By now Robert knew that the children of Cece and Saul Kupferberg, while intelligent, did not have heads for business. At one time or another, all had tried their hand at entrepreneurship and failed. The Vishniak side of his family was no better — his father’s father had a brief period of entrepreneurial success as a bootlegger during Prohibition, but then his basement still caught fire, forcing the family to make a narrow escape as the house burned almost to the ground. Stacia and Vishniak’s story, while less dangerous, was no more optimistic. Just after the war they owned a candy store in South Philadelphia. A lover of sweets, Vishniak ordered too much merchandise and gave away endless samples, carried away by his own enthusiasm, insisting that generosity brought in business. Stacia, who operated the cash register, mostly stood up front, arms folded, glowering at the freeloaders. Vishniak hired his brothers to work for him, and often one or the other sat in the back reading books for their night school classes. After three years the store went belly-up, and all Robert’s father had to show for his efforts was a bad case of diabetes and a garage full of stale Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews.

  Were these rich cousins somehow constituted differently than the rest of the family? Or was it, as his mother claimed, merely luck? The rich cousins lived in the far Northeast, meaning farther north on the Roosevelt Boulevard. Even that was a mysterious place to Robert, a distant neighborhood where, he’d been told, brave settlers carved aluminum-sided single homes and a shopping mall out of a virtual wilderness.

  During the month leading up to their hosting of the club, Stacia was in a terrible mood. Theirs was a loud house with two boys, but in the weeks before the cousins arrived, even Barry did not dare set anything on fire, pass wind at the dinner table, or slide down the carpeted steps on his stomach yelling, “When the hell are we finally going to buy a used car?”

  Generally his mother could always be counted on to cheer up when his father returned from work with new treasure—a broken but serviceable umbrella, a man’s watch with a cracked face that still ran, a pair of barely used pantyhose, or a lady’s scarf, sometimes monogrammed, often still smelling of its owner’s perfume—all left behind by passengers on the bus or elevated train. His parents kept these collectibles in the drawers of the china cabinet in the dining room, where most people would keep their good silverware and cloth napkins. In the week before Cousins Club, Robert noticed
Vishniak making a particular effort, but even when one of that week’s scarves turned out to be silk, Stacia said barely a word, her eyes scanning the living room in search of excess dust.

  Stacia cleaned and vacuumed, not to please her sister or brother or mother, or even the various cousins who lived blocks away and were seen with regularity; her worry focused utterly and completely on the two rich cousins, their wives, and a third man, a brother-in-law, who was also a distant relation. In their family, out of either habit or tradition, cousins often married cousins.

  The much-anticipated Saturday night arrived, and despite the constant shortage of parking on the block, the rich cousins somehow found spots in front of the house. Robert looked out the window and saw three Cadillacs in a row: pale blue, silver, and pink. His parents and aunts and uncles waited in the living room, assembled near the bay window, peering as if at a passing parade. He heard whispers of “those earrings” and “that coat” and “with all his money you’d think he could buy a better rug.”

  The rich cousins burst through the door, the men first, wearing leather jackets and jingling the change in their pockets. The wives had blond hair the color of yellow corn before boiling; all three wore long furs of varying colors and patterns. They shook hands and smiled and kissed the air like movie stars as the crowd gathered around them. Barry and Robert stood by to take their coats.

  After exchanging fast greetings, the men went downstairs to play poker and the women remained in the living room, sitting around a spread of food on snack tables—chopped liver and herring, creamed cheese stuffed inside olives, knishes and kishke and pumpernickel and all kinds of fruit. This was only the hors d’oeuvres. The real food came out after the men finished their game and joined them. It was a basic rule of all family functions that no one skimped on food, his mother and grandmother least of all, even if for the next six months they all ate leftovers and bought dented cans from the discount bin.

  All night, Barry and Robert made trips up and down the stairs with sweaters and overcoats, but the long furs and leather jackets of the rich cousins weighed as much as all the other coats combined and needed two trips. The silk linings of the three minks smelled of cigarettes and heavy perfume. Robert put them on top of the stuff on his parents’ bed in a heap, a mountain of coats.