Monkey Boy

tell her stories when she came to give her violin lessons, Lexi knew things about our father that I didn’t. Aunt Hannah would tell her about the family history, which is how Lexi knew about our grandmother Rose, who’d died when my father was a boy and whom he never talked about, just as he never told any stories about his own growing-up years. Aunt Hannah, and Aunt Milly too, were the keepers and upholders of the legend of the thwarted genius of Bert, which supposedly explained why he was how he was. Once upon a time, of course, some of the most prestigious universities and colleges of the Northeast had had very restrictive Jewish quotas, and Harvard, locally aspired to by Jewish immigrant children like no other school, was one of the worst, accepting a secretly designated small number of Jews while otherwise keeping qualified Jewish students out, especially those who came from the Russian and Eastern European shtetl families of Boston’s most abhorred immigrant neighborhoods. Maybe Bert didn’t even know about the quotas, or if he did, had a faith that if it was indeed harder for a Jewish student to be accepted into Harvard than it was for a Christian, it must be by some small degree necessitated by the competitiveness of the process and the unsurprising preference of Christian administrators for Christians over Jews when having to choose, say, between two equally qualified students for a last available place in the incoming class. But Bert, gung ho Americanized as could be, one of the top students at Boston English, a football and baseball star, too, determined to become a surgeon, had expected to be accepted into Harvard because everyone else around him, teachers and coaches, were sure he was going to be too. The ruthless Crimson quota crushed that dream. A year later, he was accepted into Johns Hopkins in faraway Baltimore to study medicine, but it was the Depression, and Grandpa Moe made him stay home and go to work as a locksmith so that he could help support the family. That’s why Bert had to enroll in Boston University part-time, where he studied chemical engineering, eventually leading to his long career in false teeth. I only knew those stories from Lexi.

Aunt Hannah told Lexi that Bert had a boss at Potashnik Tooth Company whom he hated, who’d been “picking on him” for years, Leslie Potashnik, one of the sons of the company founder, Dr. Simon Potashnik. According to Aunt Hannah, whenever Bert would invent a new kind of false tooth, Leslie Potashnik would put his name on the patent. That jerk took credit for all the work Daddy did, Lexi told me. There are patents for false teeth? I asked. Back then I didn’t know anything about it. Whenever you invent anything for any business, said Lexi, of course there are patents. Because of Leslie Potashnik, my father hated going to work. That’s why, my sister said, so often when he got home in the evenings, she could hear him through the thin door of the downstairs bathroom in the shower cursing: You son of a bitch, you goddamned bastard you, get off my back. Lexi said that used to actually make her feel sorry for Bert.

During the years since, I’ve managed to learn quite a lot more about what my father used to do for living. Back when Bert was starting out, the manufacturing of porcelain dental prosthetics was rugged work. He used to travel to granite quarries in Canada to inspect and choose the veins in the rock he wanted for his source feldspar. At Potashnik, he worked in a Vulcan environment of furnaces and kilns, of grinders and iron mixers, pulverizing feldspar into powders. While the company never stopped producing the high-end porcelain teeth that were Bert’s specialty, it also eventually became a major manufacturer of the acrylic teeth that came to dominate the market. The chemistry was completely different, but my father mastered it too.

A few years after I’d left for college, when the Potashniks sold the company to a pharmaceutical multinational, the new managers realized it was going to take a team of five to do what my father had been doing alone at the tooth plant for decades, seriously underpaid throughout. To convince him to postpone his retirement another five years, until he was seventy, so that he could personally train those apprentices to take over after he was gone, they more than tripled Bert’s salary. He’d been resigned to a penurious retirement. Instead, he was able to buy his Florida condo.

Here in New Haven, the train has to change from diesel to electric locomotives or vice versa. It takes about ten minutes. It’s cold out here on the platform, but as the heat is always turned up so high inside the cars, I left my coat inside, on the rack over my seat. Back in the smoking days, this was always one of the great moments to light up. The locomotive, just disconnected, looking as if it’s playing a juvenile prank, goes whizzing off all by itself, and now train-yard workers are huddled around the exposed front of the first passenger car, a few leaning over from the platform, the others down on the tracks doing whatever it is they do so that the second locomotive, when it comes rolling in reverse, will ram into that car, iron against iron, and latch on. If you’ve stayed inside in your seat, even though you know it’s coming, it always delivers a disagreeable jolt, flinging coffee up out of your cup. That routine jarring collision of locomotive and car is a pleasing reminder that not everything is all high-tech, smooth, and quiet, the way the high-speed Acela is, which is almost three times as expensive as this regional train and usually doesn’t even get you to Boston, New York, or DC that much more quickly, its velocity constrained by the archaic tracks and all the other traffic, including