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By Root 3787 0

of his ambitions for me was mostly in terms of money. “Don’t be dumb like your father,” he would say, joking with the little boy on his lap, “don’t marry beautiful, don’t marry love—marry rich.” No, no, he didn’t like being looked down upon one bit. Like a dog he worked—only for a future that he wasn’t slated to have. Nobody ever really gave him satisfaction, return commensurate with goods delivered—not my mother, not me, not even my loving sister, whose husband he still considers a Communist (though he is a partner today in a profitable soft-drink business, and owns his own home in West Orange). And surely not that billion-dollar Protestant outfit (or “institution,” as they prefer to think of themselves) by whom he was exploited to the full. “The Most Benevolent Financial Institution in America” I remember my father announcing, when he took me for the first time to see his little square area of desk and chair in the vast offices of Boston & Northeastern Life. Yes, before his son he spoke with pride of “The Company”; no sense demeaning himself by knocking them in public—after all, they had paid him a wage during the Depression; they gave him stationery with his own name printed beneath a picture of the Mayflower, their insignia (and by extension his, ha ha); and every spring, in the fullness of their benevolence, they sent him and my mother for a hotsy-totsy free weekend in Atlantic City, to a fancy goyische hotel no less, there (along with all the other insurance agents in the Middle Atlantic states who had exceeded the A.E.S., their annual expectation of sales) to be intimidated by the desk clerk, the waiter, the bellboy, not to mention the puzzled paying guests.

Also, he believed passionately in what he was selling, yet another source of anguish and drain upon his energies. He wasn’t just saving his own soul when he donned his coat and hat after dinner and went out again to resume his work—no, it was also to save some poor son of a bitch on the brink of letting his insurance policy lapse, and thus endangering his family’s security “in the event of a rainy day.” “Alex,” he used to explain to me, “a man has got to have an umbrella for a rainy day. You don’t leave a wife and a child out in the rain without an umbrella!” And though to me, at five and six years of age, what he said made perfect, even moving, sense, that apparently was not always the reception his rainy-day speech received from the callow Poles, and violent Irishmen, and illiterate Negroes who lived in the impoverished districts that had been given him to canvass by The Most Benevolent Financial Institution in America.

They laughed at him, down in the slums. They didn’t listen. They heard him knock, and throwing their empties against the door, called out, “Go away, nobody home.” They set their dogs to sink their teeth into his persistent Jewish ass. And still, over the years, he managed to accumulate from The Company enough plaques and scrolls and medals honoring his salesmanship to cover an entire wall of the long windowless hallway where our Passover dishes were stored in cartons and our “Oriental” rugs lay mummified in their thick wrappings of tar paper over the summer. If he squeezed blood from a stone, wouldn’t The Company reward him with a miracle of its own? Might not “The President” up in “The Home Office” get wind of his accomplishment and turn him overnight from an agent at five thousand a year to a district manager at fifteen? But where they had him they kept him. Who else would work such barren territory with such incredible results? Moreover, there had not been a Jewish manager in the entire history of Boston & Northeastern (Not Quite Our Class, Dear, as they used to say on the Mayflower), and my father, with his eighth-grade education, wasn’t exactly suited to be the Jackie Robinson of the insurance business.

N. Everett Lindabury, Boston & Northeastern’s president, had his picture hanging in our hallway. The framed photograph had been awarded to my father after he had sold his first million dollars’ worth of insurance, or maybe that’s what