HEMINGWAY VARIATION
No. 22
This is a story about a fellow named Ira Stonelake, who was a red diaper baby. A red diaper baby, to put it simply, is someone whose parents voted for Henry Wallace in 1948.
Three of Ira’s grandparents had belonged to the Jewish Bund back in Poland. They’d all met at a big convention in Lvov. The fourth, his maternal grandmother, was illiterate, straight out of the shtetl. The family liked to point out that she was the smartest of them all. Ira’s parents, David and Ruth, were childhood friends who played doctor together, then necked on the sofa, then went even further, after which they announced their engagement at a Workmens’ Circle dance.
When Ira was five, he was taken to Wallace rallies, where he would wave a blue flag with the words “Wallace One World” written on it. When Ira went to college, at Syracuse, he found out that girls were impressed by this left-wing background. Unfortunately, not only was Ira tall and skinny, with a long neck and a face where everything was exaggerated, like his lips and his nose, and eyes that popped out a little, he was socially awkward. He never got any further with the girls impressed by his memories of Wallace rallies than sharing childhood reminiscences. The two girls he did get further with were red diaper babies themselves. For them, away from home for the first time, Ira was comfortingly familiar. They were happy to go to bed with him.
The Stonelakes were union all the way. David had started out as a sweeper and was now a foreman at a ladies undergarment factory on 28th St., Gellert-Soft. He’d been in the ILGWU since he was fourteen. Ruth joined the union when she worked as a secretary at a furrier’s. David Stonelake was on a first-name basis with David Dubinsky, who ran the union, although he never let on how that had come about. Dubinsky called David, “David,” and David called Dubinsky, “Dave.”
For a while, Ira was just as gung-ho as his parents about labor unions and socialism and Negro rights, but he lost some of that enthusiasm when he was at Syracuse and found out, in a sociology class, that no one had been killed in the Peekskill Massacre of 1949, which his textbook referred to as the Peekskill Riot. In the Stonelake household, the Peekskill Massacre was considered an atrocity as bad as the Ludlow Massacre or the Holocaust.
The next time Ira was home he mentioned these new facts to his father. It was before dinner and David was lounging in his recliner, reading the New York Post.
“Who told you that, some professor?” asked David.
“Dad, it was only ten years ago. It’s in newspapers in the library,” said Ira.
“Lies. Twenty-eight people, five women, shot, stomped to death. Just fifty miles from here. The cops were involved, so naturally it was covered up. They hauled their bodies away like trash. We would have been there, but it was Tanta Sophie’s birthday. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
It was obvious that Ira wasn’t going to become a doctor or a lawyer. David and Ruth decided he should go into teaching. They thought he might be good with children. They both also felt, although they never talked about it, that Ira would not be happy in the rag trade. (The Stonelakes called it “the rag trade” when they were among friends.) David could get him started at Gellert-Soft somewhere above the ground floor, but Ira seemed uncomfortable in groups and they couldn’t see him fitting in with the rough and tumble of the garment district.
The Stonelakes couldn’t afford teachers college so, after Syracuse, Ira went to work on a roller at Gellert-Soft until he could save enough for tuition. Then, in 1966, with Vietnam heating up, Ira was drafted. “Don’t worry,” his father said, “the army’s not bad if you don’t have to fight. I’ll call Dave. He knows people in Washington.”
Whether it was thanks to Dubinsky or just pure luck, Ira ended up in Thailand in the Quartermaster Corps. He still had to go through basic training, which he would always consider the worst eight weeks of his life, but after that he enjoyed the Army. In U-Tapao he lived in a large cement barracks and played a lot of cards. He made some good friends there, something which hadn’t happened since he’d been a summer camper at Camp Kinderland.
He also found a girl in town. She worked in a Thai version of a drugstore and had a bed in a room in the back. She was a nice girl, poor, with a job – David and Ruth would have approved. Ira knew he could believe her when she said she didn’t fuck anyone else. Her name was Kamala.
“Always one,” said Kamala. “One, then one, then one.” With the last “one” she made a graceful wave-like motion toward him with her hand, like a fish swimming. This lovely gesture reminded Ira that he was in a foreign country, where a guy could behave differently from the way he behaved at home. Whatever he wanted, Kamala never put up a fuss. This gave Ira a new self-assurance.
“I told you the Army would be good for him,” said David, when Ira was home on leave.
“I told you,” said Ruth.
When Ira left the Army, David decided, now that Ira seemed more confident of himself, that he might do well in sales at Gellert-Soft. However, he didn’t. He wasn’t cut out to be a buyer, either. Ira couldn’t seem to tell the difference between good fabric and crap. When Manny Levine, the Shipping, Receiving and Stock Manager retired, David went to Sam Gellert hat in hand, as they say.
Ordinarily, the Stonelakes would have been happy about Ira’s new job. He wasn’t the first red diaper baby to join management. But David felt uneasy about it. “I feel like I’ve taken advantage,” he said. Ruth did not remind David that he had not felt that way about pulling strings to get Ira posted somewhere other than Viet Nam and when he’d pressured Paul Gellert, Sam’s son, into giving Ira job in sales. She knew what the difference was. This was a featherbed job. It was what you did when you weren’t good at anything else.
“It wasn’t taking advantage,” Ruth said. “You’ve been there forty years and you’ve done some favors.” She was referring, in particular, to David’s part in averting a strike in 1962, an episode that the Stonelakes never explicitly talked about.
In 1973, the AFL-CIO asked the ILGWU to send an observer to secret merger talks between the ACWA and the TWU at the New Yorker Hotel and David Dubinsky chose David Stonelake to go. During the meetings, David hit it off with a man from the TWU named J. W. Turner, who was also a foreman, at a cloth cap factory in North Carolina. Turner’s daughter, Eleanor, lived in New York and went to Hunter Teachers College, so his wife had come north with him. David invited them all out to Flushing for a barbecue, during which David and Ruth had a hard time behaving as if everything were normal since they were bursting with pride at being the first ones in the neighborhood to have a black family over for a backyard barbecue.
Ira began to go out with Eleanor Turner. Eleanor teased him in a way that reminded him of his friends back at U-Tapao, and it felt good, intimate. For example, after Ira gave his opinion about something, Eleanor would say, “Now that we have heard from the capitalist. . .” Ira had his own apartment by then, in Co-Op City, and soon Eleanor was practically living there.
Both sets of parents were aware of the affair, and pleased. In fact, they were just waiting for Ira to pop the question. He finally did, on Rosh Hashanah, as he and Eleanor were walking back to the subway after dinner at the Stonelakes’. The wedding was set for after the holiday season had quieted down, mid-January. Nothing fancy. They would go to City Hall, a dozen or so family and friends would tag along and David would reserve a table at Sam Wo’s, in Chinatown.
After the engagement, though, Eleanor changed. Her teasing didn’t seem as friendly anymore, there was something mean about it. That may be why Ira’s heart leapt, a week before the wedding, when Ruth phoned and said that a letter had come for him from Thailand. “Should I open it?” asked Ruth.
“No, Mom, I’ll come get it.”
It was a letter from Kamala, with a Polaroid. The Polaroid was of a boy sitting on a small white elephant. The boy was skinny, with a long neck. He looked a lot like Ira had at that age.
“Dear Ira,” the letter said, “I hope you are well. I am well. I work in kitchen in Hospital in Pattaya. Now floorlady. For 7 years I have a very good friend, but he catched liver cancer and he died. An empty place leaving my own and my son. Very good thoughts marinate this letter, for you and for your wife, unless you do not have a wife by now. Affection lately, Kamala.”
Ira took the letter and the picture up to the spare bathroom, which used to be his bathroom. He locked the door, knelt on the floor, and placed the letter and the picture on the feathery toilet bowl cover. The letter brought back Kamala’s softly singing way of talking. The memory was so intense that he picked up the letter and sniffed it, thinking that it might be infused with the old scent of her room and her bed. And that was his son on the elephant, there in Thailand. Of that he had no doubt.
What he really wanted to do was to drop everything and get on a plane, but he spent fifteen minutes on the bathroom floor, not trying to summon up the courage to abandon everything for the family he just discovered he had, but to summon up a stoical attitude that would get him through what he had known from the start he would do, which was stay and get married. It wasn’t Eleanor that made leaving impossible. Ira had seen enough movies to know that people got over things like that. It was what it would do to his parents if he called off the wedding. David and Ruth’s greatest pleasure lately seemed to be speculating about what color their grandchild would be.
Finally, Ira stood up, opened the toilet, and tore up the letter and the picture into it. He had to flush a few times before all the pieces went down.
Ira and Eleanor bought a house in a nice part of Newark. Eleanor taught school and Ira took PATH to Gellert-Soft every day. They had a precocious son, Dylan, who became an entertainment lawyer and lived in Los Angeles and stayed in touch with a phone call once in a while. In 1999 Eleanor discovered that she really was a lesbian and went to live with a woman who owned a bookstore in Montclair.
By then, Gellert-Soft wasn’t a factory any more, just a warehouse with some offices. Ira’s job had become stressful, since it involved keeping track of finished goods coming in from a half-dozen exotic and confusing countries. He was glad when, in 2008, he was able to retire.
Ira moved to a condo in Lake Wales, Florida. Without anything to occupy his mind, Ira began to brood over Kamala’s letter. He kept seeing the pieces of it and the Polaroid of the boy on the elephant swirling down the toilet bowl. Eventually, this vision started popping into his head when he wasn’t even thinking about Thailand, or Kamala, or the son whose name he didn’t know, or Eleanor, or anything like that, so he went to a shrink.
The shrink prescribed Elavil. Once it kicked in, the disturbing memory maybe occurred less often, Ira wasn’t sure, but at least when it did suddenly come out of nowhere, the image of the bits of letter and Polaroid being sucked into the sewers, it was not as painful as it had been.
This is a story about a fellow named Ira Stonelake, who was a red diaper baby. A red diaper baby, to put it simply, is someone whose parents voted for Henry Wallace in 1948.
Three of Ira’s grandparents had belonged to the Jewish Bund back in Poland. They’d all met at a big convention in Lvov. The fourth, his maternal grandmother, was illiterate, straight out of the shtetl. The family liked to point out that she was the smartest of them all. Ira’s parents, David and Ruth, were childhood friends who played doctor together, then necked on the sofa, then went even further, after which they announced their engagement at a Workmens’ Circle dance.
When Ira was five, he was taken to Wallace rallies, where he would wave a blue flag with the words “Wallace One World” written on it. When Ira went to college, at Syracuse, he found out that girls were impressed by this left-wing background. Unfortunately, not only was Ira tall and skinny, with a long neck and a face where everything was exaggerated, like his lips and his nose, and eyes that popped out a little, he was socially awkward. He never got any further with the girls impressed by his memories of Wallace rallies than sharing childhood reminiscences. The two girls he did get further with were red diaper babies themselves. For them, away from home for the first time, Ira was comfortingly familiar. They were happy to go to bed with him.
The Stonelakes were union all the way. David had started out as a sweeper and was now a foreman at a ladies undergarment factory on 28th St., Gellert-Soft. He’d been in the ILGWU since he was fourteen. Ruth joined the union when she worked as a secretary at a furrier’s. David Stonelake was on a first-name basis with David Dubinsky, who ran the union, although he never let on how that had come about. Dubinsky called David, “David,” and David called Dubinsky, “Dave.”
For a while, Ira was just as gung-ho as his parents about labor unions and socialism and Negro rights, but he lost some of that enthusiasm when he was at Syracuse and found out, in a sociology class, that no one had been killed in the Peekskill Massacre of 1949, which his textbook referred to as the Peekskill Riot. In the Stonelake household, the Peekskill Massacre was considered an atrocity as bad as the Ludlow Massacre or the Holocaust.
The next time Ira was home he mentioned these new facts to his father. It was before dinner and David was lounging in his recliner, reading the New York Post.
“Who told you that, some professor?” asked David.
“Dad, it was only ten years ago. It’s in newspapers in the library,” said Ira.
“Lies. Twenty-eight people, five women, shot, stomped to death. Just fifty miles from here. The cops were involved, so naturally it was covered up. They hauled their bodies away like trash. We would have been there, but it was Tanta Sophie’s birthday. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
It was obvious that Ira wasn’t going to become a doctor or a lawyer. David and Ruth decided he should go into teaching. They thought he might be good with children. They both also felt, although they never talked about it, that Ira would not be happy in the rag trade. (The Stonelakes called it “the rag trade” when they were among friends.) David could get him started at Gellert-Soft somewhere above the ground floor, but Ira seemed uncomfortable in groups and they couldn’t see him fitting in with the rough and tumble of the garment district.
The Stonelakes couldn’t afford teachers college so, after Syracuse, Ira went to work on a roller at Gellert-Soft until he could save enough for tuition. Then, in 1966, with Vietnam heating up, Ira was drafted. “Don’t worry,” his father said, “the army’s not bad if you don’t have to fight. I’ll call Dave. He knows people in Washington.”
Whether it was thanks to Dubinsky or just pure luck, Ira ended up in Thailand in the Quartermaster Corps. He still had to go through basic training, which he would always consider the worst eight weeks of his life, but after that he enjoyed the Army. In U-Tapao he lived in a large cement barracks and played a lot of cards. He made some good friends there, something which hadn’t happened since he’d been a summer camper at Camp Kinderland.
He also found a girl in town. She worked in a Thai version of a drugstore and had a bed in a room in the back. She was a nice girl, poor, with a job – David and Ruth would have approved. Ira knew he could believe her when she said she didn’t fuck anyone else. Her name was Kamala.
“Always one,” said Kamala. “One, then one, then one.” With the last “one” she made a graceful wave-like motion toward him with her hand, like a fish swimming. This lovely gesture reminded Ira that he was in a foreign country, where a guy could behave differently from the way he behaved at home. Whatever he wanted, Kamala never put up a fuss. This gave Ira a new self-assurance.
“I told you the Army would be good for him,” said David, when Ira was home on leave.
“I told you,” said Ruth.
When Ira left the Army, David decided, now that Ira seemed more confident of himself, that he might do well in sales at Gellert-Soft. However, he didn’t. He wasn’t cut out to be a buyer, either. Ira couldn’t seem to tell the difference between good fabric and crap. When Manny Levine, the Shipping, Receiving and Stock Manager retired, David went to Sam Gellert hat in hand, as they say.
Ordinarily, the Stonelakes would have been happy about Ira’s new job. He wasn’t the first red diaper baby to join management. But David felt uneasy about it. “I feel like I’ve taken advantage,” he said. Ruth did not remind David that he had not felt that way about pulling strings to get Ira posted somewhere other than Viet Nam and when he’d pressured Paul Gellert, Sam’s son, into giving Ira job in sales. She knew what the difference was. This was a featherbed job. It was what you did when you weren’t good at anything else.
“It wasn’t taking advantage,” Ruth said. “You’ve been there forty years and you’ve done some favors.” She was referring, in particular, to David’s part in averting a strike in 1962, an episode that the Stonelakes never explicitly talked about.
In 1973, the AFL-CIO asked the ILGWU to send an observer to secret merger talks between the ACWA and the TWU at the New Yorker Hotel and David Dubinsky chose David Stonelake to go. During the meetings, David hit it off with a man from the TWU named J. W. Turner, who was also a foreman, at a cloth cap factory in North Carolina. Turner’s daughter, Eleanor, lived in New York and went to Hunter Teachers College, so his wife had come north with him. David invited them all out to Flushing for a barbecue, during which David and Ruth had a hard time behaving as if everything were normal since they were bursting with pride at being the first ones in the neighborhood to have a black family over for a backyard barbecue.
Ira began to go out with Eleanor Turner. Eleanor teased him in a way that reminded him of his friends back at U-Tapao, and it felt good, intimate. For example, after Ira gave his opinion about something, Eleanor would say, “Now that we have heard from the capitalist. . .” Ira had his own apartment by then, in Co-Op City, and soon Eleanor was practically living there.
Both sets of parents were aware of the affair, and pleased. In fact, they were just waiting for Ira to pop the question. He finally did, on Rosh Hashanah, as he and Eleanor were walking back to the subway after dinner at the Stonelakes’. The wedding was set for after the holiday season had quieted down, mid-January. Nothing fancy. They would go to City Hall, a dozen or so family and friends would tag along and David would reserve a table at Sam Wo’s, in Chinatown.
After the engagement, though, Eleanor changed. Her teasing didn’t seem as friendly anymore, there was something mean about it. That may be why Ira’s heart leapt, a week before the wedding, when Ruth phoned and said that a letter had come for him from Thailand. “Should I open it?” asked Ruth.
“No, Mom, I’ll come get it.”
It was a letter from Kamala, with a Polaroid. The Polaroid was of a boy sitting on a small white elephant. The boy was skinny, with a long neck. He looked a lot like Ira had at that age.
“Dear Ira,” the letter said, “I hope you are well. I am well. I work in kitchen in Hospital in Pattaya. Now floorlady. For 7 years I have a very good friend, but he catched liver cancer and he died. An empty place leaving my own and my son. Very good thoughts marinate this letter, for you and for your wife, unless you do not have a wife by now. Affection lately, Kamala.”
Ira took the letter and the picture up to the spare bathroom, which used to be his bathroom. He locked the door, knelt on the floor, and placed the letter and the picture on the feathery toilet bowl cover. The letter brought back Kamala’s softly singing way of talking. The memory was so intense that he picked up the letter and sniffed it, thinking that it might be infused with the old scent of her room and her bed. And that was his son on the elephant, there in Thailand. Of that he had no doubt.
What he really wanted to do was to drop everything and get on a plane, but he spent fifteen minutes on the bathroom floor, not trying to summon up the courage to abandon everything for the family he just discovered he had, but to summon up a stoical attitude that would get him through what he had known from the start he would do, which was stay and get married. It wasn’t Eleanor that made leaving impossible. Ira had seen enough movies to know that people got over things like that. It was what it would do to his parents if he called off the wedding. David and Ruth’s greatest pleasure lately seemed to be speculating about what color their grandchild would be.
Finally, Ira stood up, opened the toilet, and tore up the letter and the picture into it. He had to flush a few times before all the pieces went down.
Ira and Eleanor bought a house in a nice part of Newark. Eleanor taught school and Ira took PATH to Gellert-Soft every day. They had a precocious son, Dylan, who became an entertainment lawyer and lived in Los Angeles and stayed in touch with a phone call once in a while. In 1999 Eleanor discovered that she really was a lesbian and went to live with a woman who owned a bookstore in Montclair.
By then, Gellert-Soft wasn’t a factory any more, just a warehouse with some offices. Ira’s job had become stressful, since it involved keeping track of finished goods coming in from a half-dozen exotic and confusing countries. He was glad when, in 2008, he was able to retire.
Ira moved to a condo in Lake Wales, Florida. Without anything to occupy his mind, Ira began to brood over Kamala’s letter. He kept seeing the pieces of it and the Polaroid of the boy on the elephant swirling down the toilet bowl. Eventually, this vision started popping into his head when he wasn’t even thinking about Thailand, or Kamala, or the son whose name he didn’t know, or Eleanor, or anything like that, so he went to a shrink.
The shrink prescribed Elavil. Once it kicked in, the disturbing memory maybe occurred less often, Ira wasn’t sure, but at least when it did suddenly come out of nowhere, the image of the bits of letter and Polaroid being sucked into the sewers, it was not as painful as it had been.