Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?
—Kahlil Gibran
I closed my uncles’ dinette window and carefully returned the July statements to my briefcase, as if the pieces of paper were themselves worth millions.
I wanted to go home and share the amazing news with Nurit, but it was almost three o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten lunch. Downstairs, on the west side of First Avenue, I entered a tiny restaurant and ordered a falafel and a Diet Coke from the counterman. I looked through a narrow passageway toward the back of the restaurant and noticed greenery. I walked down the low, dark-ceilinged hallway until it opened to a spacious, tree-filled backyard, where I sat down at one of the outside tables.
I felt I was no longer in Manhattan but had entered a secret garden. An oak tree provided shade, and the smell of fresh soil hung in the air. A lilac-colored rose of Sharon bush bloomed. Never judge a book by its cover, I thought.
I was the only customer, and the counterman brought my order seconds after his microwave stopped beeping. The pita bread felt warm and fresh when I picked it up; tahini sauce dripped onto my fingers. The ground chickpeas, deep fried to perfection, crunched in my mouth. I had never eaten falafel this good. I had planned to eat quickly and leave, but instead I sat and suddenly recalled another one of Uncle Harry’s jokes:
A man walks into a bank, opens a suitcase, and tells the teller he wants to make a million-dollar deposit. The teller counts the cash. There is only $999,999 in the suitcase. The man insists the teller miscounted. The bank manager is summoned for a recount, and he too comes up a dollar short. The man asks for a phone. The bank manager supplies one without bothering to ask if it’s a local or a long-distance call.
“Hello, Ma,” the man with the suitcase whispers, “you gave me the wrong bag.”
As a child, I always laughed at that joke, no matter how many times I heard it. And I heard it a lot. Uncle Harry certainly knew what he was talking about, but I was not laughing anymore. My family was certifiable. What kind of people accumulate millions and yet deny themselves the basics they could easily afford? Their stinginess made even less sense to me than why they had kept the money a secret. I felt like someone had jabbed me in the stomach with a Bayonne Flat so stale it couldn’t even be salvaged for croutons. In the middle of eating the falafel, I lost my appetite.
Where did my uncles’ hoarding mentality come from? To say it was just their Depression-era upbringing didn’t seem right. There had to be more to it. And in later years, I learned that my uncles’ hoarding ways were not unprecedented. In subsequent years, I would read in the New York Times about other people who echoed my uncles’ behavior: a person, usually male and never married, dies alone, without children, after a lifetime working in a job one would never link to owning millions. The man might be a custodian or a clerk, someone who led a frugal life with the spending habits of a monk, perceived by others as being poor or working class at best, but someone who had the good fortune to buy stock in IBM through a dividend reinvestment plan and hold on to it for fifty years, resulting in some lucky charity being left a vast sum.
Mr. Joe Temeczko fit the mold. This family-less Polish immigrant roamed the streets of Minneapolis pushing a shopping cart filled with broken TVS and toys he fixed and sold. He dined for free at the local soup kitchen, consumed the daily newspaper at the corner candy store without purchasing it, and as a man who would have been close to my uncles’ hearts had they known him, bought day-old bread. When Joe Temeczko died in October 2001, he left an estate of $1.4 million.
In our current age, when everyone, and everything, seems to have a psychological label, the term “obsessive-compulsive disorder” encompasses enough variations of hoarding to allow me to drop Uncle Harry and Uncle Joe right next to Joe Temeczko without making much of a splash. In another era, they would have been called odd or, if people knew they were millionaires, eccentric. But what proved most troubling of all was what I did not consciously recognize at that time, and what would later give me pause: I inherited my attitudes toward money from my uncles—workaholic hoarders who had no clue what charity meant. They were my example.
What I did understand, as I sat there, was my anger. No one had abandoned me or beat me or raped me. But in denying themselves, my family had deprived me as well: a bizarre flip side to the usual immigrant tradition of treating the next generation, as Alfred Kazin wrote in A Walker in the City, as “the sole end of their existence.” And all of them did so: they all knew about the money, even my mom and my dad. And that money was as much Mom’s as her brothers’. She spent a lifetime in the Store, working for no pay whenever duty, or Uncle Harry, called.
I had attended Brooklyn College, effectively a tuition-free school that charged students just a registration fee. I received an academic-based Regent’s Scholarship that paid for my books. All college cost me was carfare. I lived at home. I had believed the tuition cost at a private college was beyond our financial abilities. I hadn’t even bothered to take the SATS. And in college, though I had wanted to major in English, I studied accounting at my parents’ insistence, so I could get a job when I graduated.
More recently, I had taken out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to put myself through four long, hard years of evening law school, taken out a second mortgage on our home to adopt our son, worried day and night when I was fired a few years before—all while these crazies were sitting on millions. As a wedding gift, my parents had helped Nurit and me buy that leaky apartment on Ninth Street. But how could I interpret their silence in the past few years while I struggled financially?
My parents and Uncle Harry had visited Nurit and me in our Long Island home a few years before, around the time I had been fired from my job. Uncle Harry had then shuffled up to me when no one else was nearby, reached into his pocket, pulled out two shiny Eisenhower silver dollars, and placed them in my hand.
He whispered, “Morton, these are for you. Do you need money?”
At the time, I had no idea he had millions. I had stared at the frayed ends of his shirt sleeve as he held out the two coins. I took the coins but had shook my head and told him we were okay. I was not going to take a handout from Uncle Harry. I figured he would need all his money for his old age.
The commandment says, Honor your father and mother. Respect your elders. But what was here to honor? I was torn. Should I give them the benefit of the doubt? Perhaps they kept the money a secret because they feared that if I knew, I wouldn’t work, would just put my feet up and wait to inherit a fortune someday? I didn’t believe I would have. What I had inherited was the Wolk family work ethic. Lazy people don’t start their own business and go to law school at night. On the other hand, what would I have done if I had known about the money? Would I have worked so hard? I knew of many cases where trust funds had produced slackers and killed great potential.
Dad would be out of the hospital soon; I had some questions for him.
I left the counterman a big tip on my way out of the falafel place and barreled up First Avenue. There was only one way to end my visit to my uncles’ old haunts. I turned onto Ninth Street. Here, between First and Second Avenue, decades before, I had bicycled past the smell of shoe polish from the shoe-repair shop and the acrid odor of bad cigars emanating from the bowels of the Democratic Club’s sanctum sanctorum. The bicycle came from the nearby Stuyvesant Bicycle Shop, bought for a good price, because the owner knew my uncles.
Since Uncle Harry had sold the Store in 1986, I had passed by only twice. In the late 1980s, it was run by an Orthodox Jewish man who kept things exactly the way they had been when my family owned it, with one exception. He closed for Shabbat. Mom told me he ran it into the ground; this was her way of saying he was a lousy businessman. I wondered if not being opened on Saturday had made any difference. The next time I walked by, a few years later, the Store was closed. I couldn’t believe my eyes: the Store closed during normal business hours? Blizzards couldn’t close the place when my family owned it. The sight of it, shut down and dark, deeply saddened me.
Now, through the late afternoon shadows, a shaft of sunlight flickered across a maroon canopy that read Ninth Street Bakery. Next door, the shoe-repair shop still smelled of shoe polish, but the Democratic Club had disappeared like a puff of cigar smoke. So had the Store I knew. Three-fifty East Ninth Street was unrecognizable. It had been gutted, renovated, and was clutter free. Its spotless front windows reflected sunlight without a streak of dirt. No duct tape. Inside, glass countertops sparkled. Bread and cake lay undisturbed under glass beyond the reach of customers. A black rubber industrial floor with raised circles for increased traction had replaced the old wooden floor. The ancient slicing machine was history. In front of freshly painted white walls sat a coffee pot. An NCR computerized register had replaced the ancient cash register. You could even charge your purchase! No litter-box smells lingered. The place was busy. But no line stretched out the door. Dad would have lost his doorkeeper job.
Instead, a young Russian woman caressed my ears with an accent as rich and sweet and familiar as a thick slice of black bread and butter. “Hello, how can I help you?”
I smiled and imagined my immigrant grandmother, with her Russian accent, standing in this very spot, moving the merchandise seventy years before. It was Friday afternoon, so I bought a challah.
What I really wanted was chocolate lace cookies. They were all out.