“Your coffee, Hymie.”
“Jeremy’s in town?” Lately the mere mention of one of his children was enough to quicken his pulse. It was as if he was returned to the days around childbirth, when the entire world consisted of his immediate family and the sheer physicality and elation of ushering in new life. “When did he get into town?”
“Nu?” Hymie said. “I need a balcony?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That had been Abraham’s favorite saying, “I gotta run the numbers.” Straight-A Abraham: older brother, best friend, lifelong nemesis, business partner, and finally, sworn enemy. So smart, so buttoned-up. Always at the top of his class. It was a hell of a way to grow up, two years younger (but three years behind) Straight-A Abraham. It wasn’t until they were in the same introductory philosophy class at Washington University, Abraham a senior and Hymie just a freshman, that Hymie figured out that he was actually the smarter brother. Hymie understood the material more quickly, appreciated the nuance and implications. His papers revealed the deeper insights. Philosophy, even at the introductory level, condescending Professor Eliot liked to say, often requires you to hold opposing ideas in your head at the same time; Abraham wanted no part of it. Abraham would still receive the better grade—even as a second-semester senior already accepted to law school, fulfilling a meaningless requirement, Abraham took notes on every reading and labored over his papers for weeks in advance—but Hymie knew what he knew. And what’s more, he knew that Abe had seen it, too. For all Hymie’s euphoria, there was a tinge of pity for his older brother that would never go away, even when Hymie wanted to wring the cheap bastard’s neck.
Hymie worked various low-level jobs for a few years after college, so that by the time he graduated from law school in 1952 he was six years behind his older brother. They were at competing law firms downtown when Hymie convinced Abe that they should put out a shingle of their own. He’d practically had to beg his older brother to start the law firm that still bore Abraham’s name and made him a rich man. They were a perfect team, Hymie had said, without elucidating exactly how they’d complement each other. Of course, Abe took that to mean that Hymie needed his money, and there was no denying that the savings Abe had already squirreled away would make things easier. But Hymie had been down south twice as part of the Civil Rights movement and could see the way the wind was blowing. He could also see that there was a huge number of potential Negro clients in north Saint Louis that most white firms wouldn’t touch. Giving them legal representation was a righteous occupation, Hymie insisted, a mitzvah. His line of argument held little water with Abraham. Abraham was interested in mitzvahs only so long as they were good for the bottom line. Even comparing the Negro cause to the Jews’ had no effect.
She’d been a great beauty, Ruth Abramov—tennis player, pianist, beauty. And he, Hymie Schoenberg, had won her. Why not? Even his mother—looking down her hawk nose in her shtetl shawls, refusing to answer in English—could find no physical flaw to pin on Ruth. Today, you saw a pair of tits like that on top of such thin hips, you assumed they were fake. But Ruth Abramov was the real thing. Her own mother had been so jealous of her good looks that she picked on Ruth, out of all her children, mercilessly. When Hymie announced their plan to honeymoon in Miami Beach, the machatunim sat on the wooden chairs in the temple’s basement banquet room and gazed silently at their laps. (Machatunim, “parents-in-law”—the word was a joke to his children and their goy spouses, and entirely unknown to his grandchildren. “Such a loss,” Ruth would say, but Hymie wasn’t so sure. Hadn’t Yiddish always been a pidgin language, the Jew’s bastardized version of their oppressor’s tongue? So what if it died out?) Honeymooning in Miami Beach seemed so ostentatious as to portend bad luck to their old-country parents, but Hymie loved the idea of showing Ruth off.
