“The big fight will be on the radio tonight,” my stepfather said. “We can listen. It will not be for long.” I tried to comprehend what was happening. He didn’t speak directly to me very often, and almost never about something we would do together. That the topic had to do with sports was perhaps a first. As always, I rushed to parse his words so I could formulate a careful response. I had long since learned that the puns or flip, wiseguy sort of comments so appreciated by my mother often annoyed or angered him. Did he mean that I would only be allowed to watch for a little while or that there would be a quick knockout? I thought it better not to ask, which meant that I held my breath after each round, fearing I would be sent to bed. It was a relief when the fight ended.
I can only recall one other occasion when my stepfather and I enjoyed an experience together. It was a few years earlier when I was about ten. “There’s a program on the radio you don’t know about. It’s good. We can listen at 5:30. It’s about the Lone Ranger and Silver,” he said. “Long John Silver? I just read about him in Treasure Island,” I said. “No,” he said, annoyed. “It’s a cowboy and his horse, Silver.” We listened together, absorbed in the story, without talking.
During the high holidays of my adolescence, synagogue meant many hours sitting beside my stepfather with no words passing between us. As a small child, I would reach for the fringes hanging down from his tallit and wrap them around my fingers. He never seemed to mind. After I started Hebrew school, I was able to keep up with the prayers and read loud enough for him to know that I could manage. In my imagination, he was pleased with me.
On several occasions, when it was time to say Yizkor, the prayer for the dead, the synagogue elders would try to shoo me out, saying, “This is not for children.” My stepfather would correct them, saying, “It’s all right, he says Yizkor.” It was one of the few times I felt protected by the man who may well have saved my life by supplying the affidavit that allowed my mother and me to escape from Nazi Germany to the United States.
Once, after an awards event at the Hebrew school I attended, our next-door neighbor said, “Congratulations, I understand you were a big star last night.” “How do you know?” I asked. “Your father told me all about it. He is so proud of you,” he said.
We did have a joint activity where I could earn his approval. When we were out walking, he always instructed me to look down since I was small and could more easily find coins. He beamed when I occasionally did. Sometimes we walked together to the beach in the late afternoon. He carried a makeshift sieve and I carried a sack. He would spend hours sifting the sand, looking for coins and jewelry.
In the street he rarely passed a trash basket without looking inside for a discarded treasure. For me that was his most embarrassing activity, but I softened when he found a serviceable tricycle, which became one of the prized toys of my childhood.
Saving money by paying less was a credo he lived by. He would happily walk a mile from Brighton Beach to Coney Island where a grocery store was charging a penny or two less. Losing money was not to be contemplated, which made a particular Sunday morning so traumatic for me. He started to dress leisurely, then suddenly shouted out, “Where’s my wallet? I don’t have my wallet!” He ran around in a panic. Then he started to rock back and forth and cry. “My whole year’s earnings, gone.” “What?” my mother screamed. “You didn’t use the bank?” I cowered in a corner, overwhelmed by the scale of the tragedy and by seeing my stepfather cry.
The wallet later turned up and life returned to normal, but I still carry that scar. When I married Ruthie, I became aware of how many of her sentences begin with, “I can’t find …” or “What happened to ...” or “Where is ...” or “Have you seen ...” For a while, this would cause my pulse to quicken. Eventually, I consciously trained myself to remain calm. A meaningful portion of Ruthie’s life is spent looking for things. I am now more at ease as I join the search.
My stepfather is almost always with me in spirit these days. I find myself making risk-reward calculations before spending trivial amounts of money, even more than with significant expenditures. And at home, as I pass from room to room, I turn off unnecessary lights and electronics. “After all,” I hear his voice echoing from my childhood, “Edison is rich enough.”