Chapter 12

Fleeing: 1934

FRANCES DID NOT RECOVER quickly from her not-so-stellar reviews. Devastated that her first show had closed after less than two weeks, she went back to Brooklyn to help her mother with her washing. She scrubbed Rose’s undergarments and linens and hung them on the line. As her mother’s bloomers billowed in the wind on those few cool spring days, Frances took stock of her old neighborhood, how much the young people had changed in the short two years since she had been gone. The younger brothers of the boys who had once taunted Frances thought the Terrier was a hero. Like Solomon when he was a kid, standing on the corner by Mr. Berkowitz’s store waiting for an opportunity, these boys, Frances reasoned, were all looking for anything to take them away from the hunched, weeping Jews. That sadness had stayed the same on South Fifth Street. Gangsters countered that sadness and fear: being taken, Cossacks chopping off their heads, the haunting feeling in their mothers’ stomachs of the danger of a world of hate moving closer and closer still. How those young boys hated weakness! Frances could see it in their greased-up hair and their scowling, freckled faces. They hated their fathers’ lectures, their mothers’ bending toward candles, toward sorrow, toward a memory their sons did not want to touch. It was always mourning. Those boys started smoking and making catcalls on the corners. They looked different, it was true, like little wiseguys, Frances thought as she passed by carrying smoked fish wrapped in butcher paper under her arm. Those boys, she determined, had begun to have hope.

And then, two years after The Joint opened and closed, two years after David Bloom and Miriam Brodsky were born, Tom Dewey, assistant district attorney of New York City, who had been secretly tracing everything the Terrier did out of the Knickerbocker Hotel on Forty-second Street, took Terry the Terrier to court.

But Tom Dewey was not the only one who wanted the Terrier to fall.

In the end it was Brooklyn who betrayed Solomon Brodsky, just as he had turned his back on Brooklyn. Plenty of the gangsters starting up, the ones who were not cowed by the cross looks from old ladies or from the young mothers who shifted their babies to the opposite hip when they saw those heavies turning down their streets, the ones who weren’t so desperate for love, went back to the old neighborhood and walked around. They jiggled their pocket change and showed off their watches and gold rings, they bent down to smile and cluck at the babies. They talked to those angry, freckled boys and became their role models.

But the Terrier got big enough never to have to go back to a place where he was no longer wanted. Why suffer? he would say to Frances when she berated him for staying away. They hate me? Well then, I hate them. I have enough hate without going to greet it on that horrible street.

On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment pulled back the Eighteenth, legalizing liquor and rendering the Terrier instantly obsolete. Who needed him or his booze now? And when his power was gone, a couple of Brooklyn small-timers to whom the Terrier had denied access to Rothstein sent Tom Dewey some papers that showed he hadn’t paid his taxes in full since 1926. By August, Tom Dewey had more than he needed to go up to Egypt and bring the Terrier downtown in handcuffs. Solomon Brodsky—a.k.a. the Terrier—was the very first Jewish mobster to go down.

 

Frances decided not only would she go to the trial but she would bring Joseph Brodsky with her.

“This is not a question,” Frances said the second time she called Joseph long distance in five years. “This is a demand.”

Joseph was silent upon hearing the news. See? he thought. God sees everything. The world is coming undone, and my brother is the criminal here. Was Solomon aware of what was going on back in Europe? There a man was consolidating his power so as to take over the world. This man was setting up camps for killing. He was setting fire to the place of government. And Solomon was torturing some poor man to death beneath the brothels and candy stores of this city that had taken them in and saved them.

Joseph thought of his father turning in his newly dug grave, turning because of his son, and over what was to come. This was the golden promise? Never here, Herbert would have told him. Nothing will happen in America, this is the golden country. Joseph had gone back to say Kaddish for his father, but he realized then, The man is already dead. Can he see me here crying over his grave? Can he see me here with this fistful of dirt? It had taken him weeks to get the sound of the dirt and stones hitting wood out of his head.

“You’re crazy,” he said to Frances. “I’m not goink. To a trial? It’s beyond crazy.” For the first time Joseph was happy his father was not alive to bear witness to this; he simply felt sad for his mother, enduring more humiliation alone.

“It’s only for taxes,” Frances said. “They’ll only be talking about the money.”

Joseph laughed. “That’s vhat you think. They’re gonna bring up everything, believe me,” he said. “I don’t even vant to know it.” Joseph was thankful that his brother had remained so much of a mystery to him. He read the papers, yes, but he did not know what going to narcotics or expanding the operation out west had really entailed.

“You know this may be the last time you see your brother,” Frances said.

Joseph meant to laugh—ha! ha!—but instead he snorted. “The last time I saw my brother, Frances, was vhen he left my father’s house to go be a criminal. I believe he had a gun in his belt vhen I watched him through the door. Zhis man? He is not my brother.”

“Then you should come and watch him be punished. It doesn’t matter. You should be there. For your father’s sake.”

Joseph was silent. “You brink up my father? He would not have gone near zhis trial. Belief me.”

“You only have one chance, Joseph Brodsky. He is your only brother.”

“It is true. My only brother. I zhink I will sit zhis one out too,” Joseph said. “But, Frances, it’s always nice to hear your voice.”

 

Frances sat up front on October 20, the day Solomon Brodsky’s trial began. As she climbed the steps of the courthouse, she remembered walking up these same steps holding Vladimir’s hand and a fistful of daisies. Today was a gorgeous autumn day, the brown, red, and yellow leaves swirling around her feet as she made her way into the massive building.

Frances sat in the aisle seat of the third row and watched Pauline enter the room. She wore a hat the size of a small planet. For a moment Frances imagined she was watching her sister being married, and here she was, slowly walking down the aisle. Had Pauline been the bride, Frances would have gasped at her sister’s beauty. But they had not attended each other’s weddings, small and unceremonious as they were, and Pauline walked not like a bride but like the shamed wife of a criminal. She looked as if she was terribly ill or prematurely aged, and Frances refused to catch her eye. Instead she turned to see who else had come to watch the Terrier fall.

Frances recognized so many people from the neighborhood, including the many men who had sat discussing business and politics, drinking Turkish coffee with her father in the kitchen until dawn broke over the city. She and Rose used to clear the cups and saucers, sneaking peeks at each man’s fortune in the settled coffee grounds. Were these men here to gloat over the Terrier’s demise, to prove to themselves that selling brassieres and fixing the soles of shoes, unrolling reams of cloth, cutting swatches of taffeta and raw silk, was the purer work, the moral work? So what it doesn’t give you a glitzy life, at least you are working for your children so that their lives might be better, at least, at the very least, you are on the right side of God. Or were they there to pay their respects to Herbert Brodsky’s son, who came over from Russia and got lost, as lost as they feared their own children would be, as lost as they were when they looked in the mirror and wondered who they had become.

The mobsters, Frances had read in the papers, had been warned off coming. Rumor had it Greenberg forbade it, and there was a car outside making sure no one from inside entered the courthouse. There was no Greenberg, no Rothstein, no Kid Kugel. Somehow Frances had expected those worn, cruel faces to be there, and she wasn’t sure if they were protecting Solomon from their association with him or protecting themselves from an association with him.

As she watched the neighborhood file in, Frances saw Joseph slip into the courtroom. She had not seen him since before she’d married Vladimir, and his face revealed each minute of every day of those years. Joseph had gone from a boy to a man, and his features were already sinking. Frances had a strange urge to touch his face, to somehow fill his collapsing features with air.

She could see Joseph in the middle of the back row, still standing, his hat clasped in his lap, his head bent forward, as if he were at shul. His lips moved, but she wasn’t sure if he was making a sound.

Yeetgadal v’ yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah, Joseph said. B’almah dee v’rah kheer’utey…

The Terrier was brought out in cuffs, and he sat next to his attorney, Ed Wolfsheim, stripped of all his dazzling accoutrements, looking straight ahead at the judge.

v’ yamleekh malkhutei, b’chahyeykhohn, uv’ yohmeykhohn, Joseph continued his Kaddish. As if the Terrier had heard, which he could not possibly have, so softly was Joseph speaking, he turned around in his seat, searching for a sound or a smell he seemed to recognize. But he couldn’t have seen Joseph, so far back was he, hidden in the crowded courtroom.

Frances had said it would be only the money, but Tom Dewey had done his homework. He had interviewed over a thousand witnesses, reviewed two hundred bank accounts, traced the toll slips of more than one hundred thousand phone calls. He presented information on the washhouses for liquor barrels, drops for the delivery and concealment of liquor, a vehicle repair garage, an Egyptian lair in Rye, several hotel suites, and sixty Mack trucks. Dewey asserted that the Terrier, who had claimed a net income of $8,100 in 1930, had an unreported net income of $1,026,000 for that year. Where, the assistant DA asked, his mustache twitching, did the extra million and eighteen go?

After five days, 131 witnesses, and over nine hundred exhibits, Dewey rested his case. It was now up to the Terrier to prove how, with such a meager income, he had acquired so many assets.

Under the advice of his counsel, the only thing Solomon told the jury was, I plead the Fifth.

He’s saying nothing? thought Frances. She had never heard of such a thing.

His brother was defying everything they’d been taught yet again, thought Joseph. Here is a man—a Jew!—and he doesn’t talk? Only fights with his hands. Joseph said Kaddish for his brother each day of the five-day trial. Five days of not selling, someone else traveling the roads he traveled, someone else begging on the streets on which he begged.

It was the verdict that stopped Joseph’s obsessive prayer, his praying for the dead, as if this final judgment was what finally brought Solomon Brodsky back to life.

Nineteen years, the judge said, pounding that mean gavel, and Joseph sat back, his elbows on his knees.

What he remembered was before any of this: playing stickball in the street with his big brother, the sun going down somewhere far away, the eely twilight creeping across the neighborhood, a signal for them to head back home. Joseph though of Saturdays, how they had held hands walking together to shul, their parents close behind them. Joseph had not enjoyed synagogue, though. He was embarrassed to say so, but he hated to be separated from his mother. As she walked away to pray in the upper section, Joseph would be left with his father and brother. We are men, Joseph thought. Men are different, they see the world differently. He had looked to his brother to show him what this meant. Solomon stood when he should stand, but he wore his yarmulke down over his right eye, so that he looked like a pirate. He pretended to read the prayer book, not right to left but upside down. Their father tried to still Solomon, but he couldn’t. And Solomon would always set out to prove that their father was a powerless man. Even as a boy, Joseph felt shul was a place to be serious, and when Solomon would not listen to their father, it hurt Joseph, as he imagined it hurt God. It was as if Solomon was born without respect.

And look at what all of Solomon’s power had done. Joseph sneaked a glance at his brother, a short, stout man in a blue suit, seated next to his lawyer, whose only defense for his client was not to utter a word.

Didn’t say a word. How could that ever help you unless every word you had to say, anything you uttered, would prove you guilty?

Nineteen years.

Frances watched the Terrier, who was suddenly transformed back into the man his parents had intended him to be: Solomon Brodsky. Solomon, a man like anyone else—not old, not young, not slim, not pretty, not tall—looked at the floor. Pauline sat straight as a coffin, avoiding her husband’s eyes.

How could her sister have been so stupid? thought Frances. Gave everything up for what? A couple of mink coats, a seven-carat ring, and a mansion so far away from home. Her family’s good name. Pauline did not look up once, not even to watch her husband be taken away in handcuffs. Now what would become of her? Frances had heard stories. When a Mob husband was killed, the killers often looked after the widows, made sure they had the money they needed, made sure their kids were safe. But what would happen now that the Terrier had simply been put in prison? None of his gang had been sent to jail before, and Frances wondered if her sister would be killed because of it. Somehow she expected one day soon to get news of her in the East River, a photo in the Daily News of a fashionable woman washed up somewhere in Astoria, still wearing her big hat.

Frances tried to smile at Solomon as he walked by, but if he saw, he made no sign of it.

When the verdict reached Brooklyn, those cruel young boys destined to find their own way in the Mob world, who couldn’t wait to watch the Terrier go down, were heartbroken. They had always thought that the gangsters would fight back and that, finally, finally the Jews would win.

 

Joseph refused to pay his respects with Pauline, who sat shiva up in Westchester.

“Shiva.” Joseph shook his head when Frances told him where she was going. “That is disgusting. The man’s not dead, after all.”

“Didn’t I see you there saying Kaddish, Joe?” Frances asked him.

“I was saying the mourner’s prayer,” he said. “I was mourning.”

“That’s what one does at the shiva,” Frances said, though she did see his point. Even so, she decided that out of respect for Solomon, who had actually been her friend, and who was dead to the world now, she would carry a kugel upstate.

Frances made her way up to Egypt alone, without Joseph or her husband, who had refused to be a part of any of it. She watched her sister, who had not so much as lifted a finger to help when their father passed, prepare the house for the shiva. Pauline covered the mirrors and lit the candles. She put out the herring salad, the smoked salmon and bialys, the silver coffee and creamer.

“Should we call a rabbi?” Frances asked.

“A rabbi? Why would he come? Do you know who my husband was?”

“The rabbis had a certain use for your husband and his friends when they needed them,” Frances said. “Anyway, he’s still alive, you know.”

“Not to me he’s not.” Pauline set out a bowl of nuts.

“Why? Because he can’t buy you another fur coat?” Frances asked.

“Whatever you say, that man is dead to me.”

“How can you say that? You think anyone believes you didn’t know what he was doing all day?”

“Think what you want,” Pauline said.

“I already do,” said Frances.

Frances remembered mourning for her father. How could Pauline not have sat with them?

“Just who do you think will be coming to this anyway?” Frances asked her sister.

“I don’t care,” Pauline said. “Anyone who wants to know how I feel about it. Anyone who might want me dead and might think I’m still connected to him. So if you don’t like it, you can go ahead and leave.”

Frances nodded. Her sister believed she was going to be killed. Was this a shiva for herself? “I think I will,” Frances said, appalled at just about everything her sister had said and done for the past eight years. “Good-bye then.”

Pauline looked over at Frances and stood still for a moment.

Even with the makeup, all the jewels, her bobbed hair, Frances could see her sister for the first time since she’d left South Fifth Street. She is a scared little girl in a costume, thought Frances. And, in turn, Pauline seemed to be seeing Frances for the first time since she’d gone, looking at her with the fierce and tender love of an older sister. “Bye, Frances,” she said.

As quickly as it had come, her look passed, and Pauline returned to bringing out the silver to place in the empty parlor, which was still decorated like an Egyptian tomb.

Frances walked past Pauline and onto the pebbled walkway, past the palm trees and the sphinxes; she pushed open the golden gate with the flat of her hand, thinking of the bars that Solomon would be behind that evening. Though she couldn’t be sure of it, Frances thought she might not ever see Pauline again. She could never have imagined it, all those nights Pauline had folded back the bedcovers and told her, Come here, don’t be afraid. Cold January nights, the coal always running out, the two of them, pressed against each other for warmth. Had anyone told Frances that she would one day walk away from her sister forever without looking once behind her, she would have thought they were out of their minds.

 

Seven days after the Terrier’s trial, Pauline Brodsky and her son vanished. Into thin air, the Post reported. Many women left New York and changed their names to avoid gangster ties, the Post said. They became Donovan or Dickens and disappeared into the straight world. Perhaps this was what Mrs. Terrier had done. “Has the Terrier’s Bitch Fled the Kennel?” the headline read.

For days the papers reported how repossession men were stripping the house of everything: the furniture, the fine china, the cars and tennis rackets. The papers ran photos of many of these items—fine Chinese vases, silver tea services, solid gold statuettes.

“Would you look at this?” Frances said over breakfast one morning with her husband. She stood up from her chair and went to Vladimir, seated across from her. She punched the paper open for him. “Just look!”

“I see it, Frances,” he said, delicately tapping his spoon at his soft-boiled egg.

She had to laugh at the idea, more her fantasy, of all of Solomon’s possessions—a pharaoh’s riches—being taken away to be buried with him. “I really should go up there.”

Vladimir lopped off the tip of his egg, and Frances gasped. It was as if he had chopped off the top of her thumb. Bits of yolk dribbled down the shell and the silver egg holder, then slowly began to pool in the little saucer she had brought him moments before with such care.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. Do you realize this? It’s the scene of a crime.”

Frances looked over at her husband. He had a permanent red welt on his nose from working so late in his spectacles, and she looked at it now as he put down his spoon and rubbed his eyes. “Come on. It’s not really a crime scene. I just want to know what’s happened to everything. There might be some of my mother’s stuff, you know.”

And just what were they doing with all those books? Frances wondered. She remembered Solomon’s pride in his library. Yes, he loved all his possessions, but he had been particularly proud of having so many books.

“No, I won’t allow it, I’m sorry,” Vladimir said wearily. “Enough is enough, Frances.”

Frances felt like she would cry. “But I must go up there!” she shrieked.

The more hysterical she became, the calmer her husband got. “Nope,” he said.

Frances stormed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she threw herself on the bed. She considered defying Vladimir as she had her parents when Pauline had gotten married.

Frances could hear the tinkling of Vladimir’s spoon as he resumed eating as serenely as he’d been before she’d stomped out of the kitchen. She could hear him turning the pages of the paper in a slow and measured fashion, and this infuriated her.

She wished she was back at her parents’ flat on South Fifth, listening to her mother’s cleaning, her father’s ceaseless talking, as she waited for Pauline to crawl into bed with her. Where had her sister gone?

For one moment Frances thought not of what Pauline had stolen from her but of the small moments of kindness that had passed between them when they were girls. Her earliest memory was one of the first times they’d slept in this country and how, when her excitement had turned to a heightened anxiety, she had crawled into bed with Pauline, slipped beneath the covers, and curled up next to her. Pauline had lifted her arm and let Frances place her head on her chest. Frances remembered crying and crying that night, for no reason she could name even now, but for a general sadness for a lost past, an anticipation of a difficult future, inexorable change, and Pauline had pulled her close and let her sister drench her nightshirt with tears. That night Pauline had been her hero.

Frances got up. She went to her vanity and sat down, looked herself in the eyes. She raised her chin and cast her eyes downward just a bit, her head tilted to the side. Her father appeared in her eyes. Frances could see Abraham, trying to get out of bed, and at the same time she was him, her look now identical to his, the eyes attempting to be strong but instead only pleading. In her mouth, which tugged downward at the sides, Frances saw her mother’s loneliness. She pulled her wild hair back from her face. Everywhere she turned, she still saw her sister.

Frances thought now of the first night of The Joint, before the critics came, the night the costume girl had pinned back that beautiful, fading dress. Frances had twirled before her, and the girl, pins in her mouth, had been hidden beneath her skirts. The night Frances had closed her eyes and lifted her face to the makeup girl, who brushed powder gently over her cheeks and drew a mole above her lip. Frances had wished her sister could have seen her at that very moment, when people bustled around her, preparing her for stardom. Once it had been Frances who had bent over her sister, filling her lips in with colored stain, and that night it was she whom someone dressed and colored, she who was about to take center stage. What now? she thought.

Frances imagined her sister walking through the door, right now. Here I am, she would tell Frances. I’ve been gone, but now I’m back. It’s the two of us again, as it used to be. Perhaps she would be gliding toward her in her stocking feet, a stack of books on her head. Remember Miss America? Pauline would say. Remember Mommy’s roast chicken?

Frances turned away from the mirror and toward the doorway.

“Pauline,” she said. Frances shook her hair free and placed her hands on her wide hips. “Pauline,” she said, “do you recognize me?”