The Sentence, A Family's Prison Memoir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The garage door rumbled open. Jerry was home early. He came into the kitchen, his summer blazer rumpled, his tie loosened at the neck. He leaned against my back and kissed the side of my neck. “Mmm, eau de turpentine.” I smiled. It was a good sign; he was in a joking mood. I turned my head and caught the corner of his mouth with my lips. Reaching over my shoulder, he grabbed a lime out of a bowl of fruit on the counter, brought a frosty bottle of vodka out of the freezer, and set it down with an attention-getting clink.

He tossed the lime, plucked it out of the air, and grinned as if he’d caught a fly ball. Slicing wedges, he said, “I had a very interesting day.”

“Interesting” was not a word Jerry would use to describe a promising new personal injury case. “Interesting” implied a case that he would call creative; one that would turn out to be a time waster and ultimately a loser, but worth taking for the “challenge.” He scooped ice into our glasses, poured generous slugs of vodka and added jiggers of Rose’s lime juice. He squeezed the larger wedge of lime into my drink—I liked it that way—and fit a thinner slice onto the rim of my glass. Smiling like a magician, he handed it to me with a flourish.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked, knowing he needed a substantial fee to end what he underplayed as a “little slump” of disappointing verdicts and low settlements.

He sipped, let out an appreciative, “Ah,” but watched me warily, anticipating the need for damage control. “Reuben Sturman invited me for lunch today,” Jerry said, sounding defensive, yet impressed with himself.

I took a large swig of my gimlet, its acidic liquid going down harshly. “I thought you said something good happened.” I sipped again, this time for the drink’s harsh heat. “I was expecting you to tell me you signed up the case of your dreams.” I faced Jerry sideways, swishing my hand in the bowl of cold water holding potato slices, which swam around my fingers like slippery coins.

Jerry leaned against the counter. “Hon, just listen, okay? I need to talk to you about this.”

“Okay, what?” I wiped my hand on my paint-crusted shirt.

Jerry smiled, satisfied that he had my attention. “This is important. There’s a hungry prosecutor, Bruce Taylor, who’s formed a vice squad with the sole purpose of raiding and prosecuting Reuben’s stores, and there’s no let-up in sight. Reuben’s very worried.”

“Well, he should be. You saw yesterday’s headline. ‘The Czar of Pornography’ took up half the page and the photo under it wasn’t meant to get him sympathy, either. What was he doing leaving the courthouse wearing a Groucho Marx mask?”

“Reuben said Groucho Marx was his hero because he made fun of everything.”

“Then the editorial was right. Reuben was “taunting the law.” He deserves what he’s getting,” I said with finality, wishing the conversation were over. Shade was heading over the tennis courts at Thornton Park on the other side of our yard. It would be much more productive to get some exercise before dinner than to engage in another frustrating argument over Reuben, as had been happening too often over the past month every time he made the news.

Jerry sipped. I sipped. The drink went down much mellower now. I started to suggest tennis, but Jerry, his tone gilded with the authority of an insider, said, “Actually, since Larry Flynt was shot by that anti-pornography fanatic, Reuben’s nervous that he’ll be next. Flynt’s paralyzed now.” Jerry gazed out the window at the backyard. “It’s so shocking to see this huge guy with an enormous appetite for life confined to a wheelchair. Reuben said security’s tighter at Hustler than a maximum-security prison and Larry’s constantly surrounded by bodyguards.”

I tightened my hand around my drink, wanting distance from this whole conversation. “Since when did you become Reuben Sturman’s confidant?”

“I’ve known him for thirty-three years, and for eleven of them he was as brotherly to me as Joe, sometimes more.”

Reuben’s brother, Joe, who was fifteen years younger, was one of Jerry’s best friends since sixth grade. “That was when you were an impressionable kid and Reuben sold comics and candy, not girlie magazines.”

Jerry added a slug of vodka to his drink, looking deflated. “I can’t talk to you when you get like this. I’ve been out in the heat in this jacket all day. I was at two arraignments in two different courts and an arbitration. I missed the loop bus and had to walk up to Lake Erie Plaza. I’m all sweaty. I’m going to change.” He left the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” I said, too softly, after I heard him go upstairs. I needed to change, too, but first I wanted to finish preparing the potatoes for the grill. With Jerry’s jazzy whistling coming from the upstairs bathroom, I recalled how my husband had come to know Reuben, which was in the top ten of Jerry’s fondest recollections.

Joe had begun to work for Reuben at Premium Sales, his wholesale magazine, new and used comic books, and candy business. When Reuben needed more help, Joe recommended Jerry, an enterprising kid who was always on the prowl for lucrative ways to fill his pockets. Jerry gladly gave up scavenging pop bottles for redemption and grabbed this “real job” working with Joe. From age twelve through the first couple years of college, Jerry bought his own clothes, dated, and saved money for his first car, all as a result of his earnings working for Reuben after school, on weekends, and during most of his school vacations, even after he went to college.

Jerry’s parents were relieved to have their son practically paying his own way. Though his father, Max, earned a living as a house painter and paperhanger so that Jerry’s mother, Helen, didn’t have to work, frugality was a necessity. Times were rough for everyone in our old Cleveland neighborhood, filled with uneducated immigrant Jews and Italians without silver spoons. Jerry and I both grew up on 140th Street and Kinsman, just six apartment buildings between us, with Stein’s Grocery smack in the middle. Though both sets of our parents were first-generation Americans, they were still coping with the hardships brought on by the Depression followed by World War II.

Unknown to me, Jerry was my crossing guard on Able Street when I came home for lunch from kindergarten, and I must have stood next to him at Stein’s Grocery waiting to pay for a loaf of Wonder bread or a bottle of milk. Because our parents weren’t in the same crowd and because of a five-year age difference, we didn’t know each other. Jerry’s younger brother, Bobby, occasionally showed up and joined my small troop of friends in a game of Red Rover or dodge ball. But he was known in the neighborhood as wild and rough. My mother didn’t approve of him as a playmate, and I was happy to keep my distance.

I will never forget hearing my mother tell my best friend Debby’s mother, Ida, about Jerry’s mother. Ida was watching my baby brother, Howie, and me while my mother went down to the corner to pick up Passover chickens from the live poultry market. When my mother returned, she could hardly wait to exhale the smoke from her Camel before she began. Appalled, she reported seeing Helen Kraig at noon, her hair tied up in a rag like Carmen Miranda with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, shamelessly standing on her porch in a negligee as she shook a mop over the side of a rusty railing. She wore glamorous, high-heeled satin slippers, and her toe nails were painted the same deep red as her lips. Then, my mother said, stubbing out her cigarette, Helen yelled like a common washerwoman for Jerry and Bobby to come home for lunch, while she waited for them as if she had nothing to do but stand there all day. Debby and I exchanged thrilled looks. News from the street like this didn’t come along every day. What extraordinary new material to spark our imaginations when we played house.

Besides the negligee scene, Helen and Max Kraig were known to throw wild parties, at which drinking and dancing went on into the wee hours. For my parents, Ida and Max, and our other neighbors, big nights together included lots of cake, coffee, and tea, mah-jongg for the women and gin rummy for the men. If the pot got as high as a dollar, they were living on the edge.

I first met Jerry on a blind date, Memorial Day weekend, 1957. I was fifteen and he was twenty, but he liked to say it was the reverse: I was as mature as a twenty-year-old and he was as immature as a fifteen-year-old. Though five years’ difference pushed the limit, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for me and my girlfriends to date older boys. I was more mature than most of my friends. That same year I taught Hebrew at temple to twenty-eight second graders after high school two days a week and Sunday school to kindergartners. I thought of myself as an independent thinker and an adult, and by August Jerry and I were gaga in love. We knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. The depth of our shared...