“Well, he’s no Don Johnson.”
“Or the way he talks.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I think you don’t want to hire him because he’s too Jewish.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, really, Victor. And this isn’t the first time I noticed it. What is it with you?”
I never knew what it was with me, but I knew even as I denied it that she was absolutely right. I doubted whether this Morris Kapustin could do the job, but in reality I didn’t care. I’d just as soon Stocker not be found, so that I could get the settlement and take my cut and be done with the case. But I had to admit feeling a touch of revulsion at the sight of Morris Kapustin, sweating that very moment in my office, with his Orthodox hat and tangled beard and the dirty cotton tzitzis that flowed over his belt. The great firms in the city from which I sought acceptance would not hire the likes of Morris Kapustin to investigate their cases.
I had often wondered if my failure to land a job in the firms of my choosing was due to my religion. It was no longer like the old days, of course, when the Drinker of Drinker, Biddle decried the influx of “Russian Jew boys” into the law, men who had risen “up from the gutter and were merely following the methods their fathers had been using in selling shoestrings,” when the Bar Association thought up the barrier of its prefectorship to handle what McCracken of Montgomery, McCracken called “the question of the social origins of men.” Aspiring Jewish lawyers in those years who could actually find a prefector to sponsor them were either tapped for the Jewish firm, Wolf, Block, or forced to chew the legal scraps tossed them by their betters, petty crimes and bankruptcies and slip and falls. Do I sound bitter? Now Jews are hired everywhere, in moderate quantities, as long as they dress appropriately and speak without spitting and don’t answer questions with questions or sprinkle Yiddish in their conversations. But though I had mastered those qualifications, I still hadn’t been able to crack that crowd. In one great moment of clarity the holders of the keys had judged the Jew before them and in a collective voice had said, “Sorry, no.”
My father was a lawnmower man, cutting other people’s grass for a living, surviving without great modesty in a modest house. It was bad enough that my family lived on the cusp of poverty, it was worse that we were Jews living that way, Jews without money. If my father had made a fortune in shoestrings or plastic hangers or potato chips or something maybe I wouldn’t have fought against my ancestry so, but he hadn’t and so I fought. I had wanted to become something new, something glorious, but there was still no estate in Bryn Mawr for me, no BMW, I had not yet been invited to play golf at Merion or tennis on the clean grass courts of the Philadelphia Cricket Club. There was nothing new in what I had become. I was still just a Jew without money. And as I sank into professional failure and a financial despair so deep I had been forced to ask my father, the lawncutter for God’s sake, for a loan, I realized with a growing horror that my failures were sending me spinning back into everything I had sought to escape. And I didn’t need Morris Kapustin sitting in my office reminding me. And I didn’t need Beth staring at me with a pained disappointment in her eyes, the look a mother gives her son when he behaves badly, not my mother, who never cared enough to be disappointed by me, but someone else’s mother, a kindly loving mother who only thought the best of her child and died a little when she was shown the worst. Who the hell was Beth, as Protestant as Luther, who the hell was Beth to tell me a thing about the curses I felt so keenly? Who the hell was Morris Kapustin, sitting in my office, begging for a job, making me feel lower than a slug? Who the hell needed any of it?
“Just shut up,” I told Beth, even though she hadn’t been saying a thing.
“I was thinking, Victor,” said Morris Kapustin when Beth and I had returned to the office, “now that I know it’s your last name Carl not your first name Carl, that I might know your mishpocheh. By any chance was your grandfather Abe Carl?”
“As a matter of fact.”
“The shoe man?”
“He sold shoes.”
“Mine first pair of shoes in this country came right from his store on Marshall Street. What a thing. I was just a yekl then, thin as a piece of grass, that thin, Accht, too long ago to even remember. Abe Carl, the shoe man. Later we used to go to shul together when he moved out to Logan. In shul always he was looking at mine shoes, checking if I needed new ones. ‘You ready for new shoes, Morris,’ he would say. ‘For you I run a special.’ He had a beautiful voice, Abe did.”
“He used to sing me nursery rhymes,” I said. “And Irving Berlin songs.”
“Erev Shabbos, singing L’cha Dodi, his voice was like an angel’s, only sweeter. Mine first American shoes were good sturdy shoes. You can tell everything about a country by their shoes. Ever wear German shoes?”
“No.”
“You put on one pair of German shoes and you get a whole new understanding of the last hundred years. Believe me. He sold good shoes, your grandfather. Whenever I was needing new shoes it was off to the shoe man for me. You look like him.”
“They say I look like my mother.”
“I see Abe in you. That’s not such a terrible thing. Can you sing?”
“Not a note.”
“Too bad that is. Like an angel’s, only sweeter.”
I thought about it for a moment, thought about my grandfather too, his round peasant face and shock of white hair that I used to muss with my fingers and then call him Albert Einstein, about how it was my grandfather, not my father, who would read me stories and take me to the ball games at old Connie Mack Stadium, thought about it all and then reached into my desk drawer. I handed Morris Kapustin a thick file filled with all the information I had about Frederick Stocker, including press clippings about his trust fund swindle and flight from authorities.
“Stocker. Stocker,” said Kapustin, as if he were chewing on a piece of gristle. “Stocker. I know that name Stocker. How do I know that name? Morris, Morris, think. This Stocker, he stole trust funds?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Accht, of course. Stocker. Herman Hoff, a wholesaler, watches and such, gave this very man Stocker money to invest and then it was gone, poof, just like the wind. I’ve heard of this Stocker. Herman is not a rich man, nothing like our friend Benny, what this man Stocker took was Herman’s retirement in Boca. You been to Boca, Victor?”
“No.”
“That’s where they go now, Boca. Who needs to shvitz so much, I say, still that’s where they go. But not Herman, he still sells his watches. Seventy-three already, still selling. He wanted to go to Boca.”
With his glasses back on, he began looking through the file, asking me questions I couldn’t answer.
“All I know is what’s in the file,” I said.
“Anything about this man’s hobbies, his relatives, his friends, where he grew up. It is these things, I’ve found, it’s good to know about.”
“He lived in Gladwyne,” I said.
“I’ll ask around. I have mine contacts there.”
“Really?”
He looked at me strangely from under his brow and for an instant his smile disappeared and there was something fierce about this little man. “I think you have no faith,” he said to me.
“What do you mean?”
“No faith that Morris Kapustin will find this man. For what he did to Herman Hoff, not to mention Benny, he deserves to be found. He’s a crook, a gonif, finding him will be a shtik naches. You think this is a hobby, this finding people. I didn’t start this line with jewelry. But this too needs doing. Talmudic justice. It is mine mission. You study Talmud, Victor?”