DECADES 2014 by Ruth Harris

Author:Ruth Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub

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Nick Bain was born Nat Baum and the story of his life seemed poignantly sad and madly exotic to Evelyn.

He had grown up in a tenement on Essex Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The main room, an all-purpose living, dining and parents’ bedroom, faced an air shaft, and its brown-varnished walls were sticky in the summer and dank in the winter. Nick shared an alcove and a lumpy bed with two brothers—David, two years older, and Irwin, two years younger.

Their father, a Russian Jew from Kiev, was addicted to chess and allergic to work. An atheist and free thinker, he considered himself an intellectual and grudgingly went off to the handbag factory where he sewed handles on ladies’ purses twelve hours a day. Their mother, who had defied her Roman Catholic family to marry him, listened to the old man’s laments, cooked and washed and cleaned and mended, and when Nick was seven, she died of tuberculosis.

On David’s twelfth birthday, his father announced he was quitting his job. At twelve a boy was able to get working papers, and Nick’s father announced he had slaved long enough to support his children and now it was their turn to support him. David got a job in a drugstore, sweeping out, making deliveries and dispensing medicine, although he had no license and no training.

Nick, in his turn, went to work when he reached twelve. After school and on weekends, he delivered groceries, carrying bags and boxes up five and six flights of tenement stairs, happy when a generous housewife gave him a penny tip. At thirteen, he worked as a busboy in a restricted club in Wall Street. He cleared dirty dishes and empty whiskey glasses from the linen-draped tables of men who smoked big cigars, talked in millions and dispensed nickel tips.

At fourteen, he got a job at Wanamaker’s department store. He worked for a tough Irish foreman in the receiving room, unloading heavy cases of merchandise in July’s steamy heat and January’s bitter cold. There were no tips, but there existed an unspoken understanding that whatever Nick could take, Nick could have.

He acquired warm coats for himself and his brothers, gloves, underwear, sweaters, scarves, bathing trunks and shoes. At fifteen, he janitored a building in the fur district and made the first real money of his life running bets for a bookie who operated out of a back booth in a nearby luncheonette. His father suspected Nick was holding out on him and beat him every Friday night in an attempt to force him to disgorge more money.

When he was sixteen, Nick had had enough. He quit school, lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, leaving behind all traces of the scruffy boy he had been.

The army offered steady pay, and took him miles away from the tyrannical oppression with which his father ruled his impoverished household. Nick did well in the Army, reenlisting at the end of his first three-year hitch.

He liked the predictability of military

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