Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty Read Free Book Online Page A

making and mending clothes for many of her neighbors, as well as converting old bedsheets into curtains. At night, she withdrew into her bedroom to read Tolstoy in Yiddish, especially Anna Karenina over and over. She had always loved to read. In Russia, members of her family worked as bookbinders (many years later, her brother Sam would land a job repairing books for the Brandeis University library).
    The Hellers occupied an upper floor in a small yellow-brick building on West Thirty-first Street, between Mermaid and Surf avenues. Lee was fourteen now. A daughter, Sylvia, had been born in 1914. Everyone in the family called the youngest boy Joey. They shared the building with a family named Winkler, and little Joey shared a baby carriage with the Winkler infant, Marvin. “He used to wet my carriage, and he was ten months older,” Marvin told Barbara Gelb for a New York Times Magazine profile of Heller in 1979. When Heller was older, his mother swore to him that whenever he’d nursed, she’d have to snatch him away from her breast, for he would never stop. Among the first smells he recalled were the duskiness of walnuts, the sweet softness of old apples, saved from going to waste by his mother, who would fold them into noodle puddings, and the floury flatness of day-old cakes, rescued from the bakery by his father. His father sat at the kitchen table at night, eating slice after slice of dry, hard cake.
    Joey’s first memory of his father’s voice was a sharp command: One day, Joey wandered close to an open window, curious about the fire escape, and his father called him back. Sometimes at night, strange noises from the street or from the beach a few blocks away woke Joey in fright, and he’d crawl into bed with his parents, warm and content in the space between their bodies. On some afternoons, his father took him riding in the delivery van, letting him press the automatic starter and pretend he was driving. Slowly, they passed through a bewildering mélange of voices—the census reveals an immediate neighborhood teeming with Russians, Germans, Armenians, and Italians. Though Joey’s parents rarely took him to synagogue (occasionally, they made exceptions for High Holiday services), he was surrounded by Jews and Jewish culture. Lists of the area’s religious institutions at the time (the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Coney Island, Adath Israel, the Jewish Communal Center, and the Coney Island Talmud Torah) indicate large and active memberships.
    Sometime before his fourth birthday, Joey had to have his tonsils removed. As he remembered the experience, his father drove him to Coney Island Hospital and left him alone, with a parched throat and little understanding of what was happening. Figures in white moved along the corridors, silent and remote. Where was his father? Why had he gone? How could he have gone?
    Lee distrusted Isaac even more than Joey did. He recalled riding with the older man in a horse-drawn delivery wagon in Manhattan upon first arriving in the United States. On steep, icy streets, Isaac whipped the horse so brutally, passersby berated him for cruelty. Though Lee claimed his father was never mean to him, he would grudgingly admit, in later years, with tears in his eyes, that the two of them did not have an easy relationship. “There were lots of Jewish criminals around and he didn’t want me to turn out bad,” he once explained to his little brother. Isaac’s pressure on Lee to work hard and obey him was so intense that, one summer soon after Joey’s birth, Lee ran away from home. One morning, he traveled to New Jersey to apply for a job, realized he wouldn’t get hired, and, rather than go back to face his father’s disappointment, decided on the spur of the moment to board a train west. He was gone for nearly three months, traveling with hoboes, working odd jobs with farmers and ranchers in Arizona and California, sending