In His Father's Footsteps Page 8

  They stayed until nearly midnight while the two men talked quietly, and Emmanuelle held the baby while he slept, and then they went home. The service was to be at noon the next day at the temple, so people could come from work at lunchtime, and they were going to bury her at a Jewish cemetery on Long Island, where their son, David, was also buried. Mother and son would be together again, and it seemed unbearably sad as they went home that night and put the baby to bed in his crib. They lay in their bed holding each other, and Emmanuelle looked at her husband.

  “If you die, it would kill me,” she said in a strangled voice and he held her tighter to reassure her.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, not for a very long time,” Jakob said quietly, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms, and woke to a bright winter sun the next day, the day of the funeral.

  The service for Naomi was beautiful, the cantor sang and the whole congregation was there. The Horowitzes had both been active in their temple, particularly before their son’s death. And many people came to the cemetery for the burial ceremony. They each threw a small shovelful of earth into the grave. They rode back to the city with Izzie, who was devastated. Their friends returned to the Horowitz apartment after the burial. And it was many hours before Jakob and Emmanuelle left. Izzie had the limousine he had hired take them home. It was a relief to get out of their black clothes and play with their baby before they put him to bed. Emmanuelle always spoke and sang to him in French, and Jakob in English. They wanted him to be bilingual. The one language they weren’t planning to teach him was his father’s native German. Neither of them could bear hearing it anymore. And Jakob refused to speak it except when he had to in business.

  Jakob spent the rest of the week at home with them since the office was closed. They went on long walks together, and had quiet nights. Jakob wanted to go to a movie with her, but she didn’t want to leave Max with their neighbor since her baby was sick with a bad cough and she didn’t want Max to catch it. She always had some excuse not to leave him. Jakob played with him while she cooked dinner.

  It snowed again over the weekend, they made a snowman for Max in Washington Square and he loved it. He was a happy child with two adoring parents who loved him, and each other. It was a perfect life. And on Sunday, Izzie came for lunch, and it cheered him up to be with them. It had been a hard week, and now he had to get used to life without his wife. She had withdrawn from the world three years before, but now he was truly alone. He was grateful to have Jakob and Emmanuelle in his life, and their baby. Jakob said it would do Izzie good to get back to work the next day. Jakob was looking forward to it too. He was a diamond dealer now, and he liked it. He was glad they had come to the States two and a half years before. It had been the best decision he’d ever made, that and marrying Emmanuelle. He looked over at her and smiled after she put the baby down for his nap.

  “I love you, Mrs. Stein.”

  “I love you too,” she said and melted into his arms, and they wound up in bed making love a few minutes later, before the baby woke up. It was a confirmation of life, which they both needed. They were young and alive, and they loved each other. They had much to be grateful for. The past that had brought them together was slowly fading as they built new memories together. And Emmanuelle hadn’t had a nightmare in months. She smiled most of the time now, and Jakob loved her more than ever.

  Chapter 5

  It took Izzie time to get used to living alone, without Naomi. He made it a weekly ritual to come to lunch with Jakob and Emmanuelle on Sundays, and he had asked Max to call him Grampa as soon as he could talk. The young family and he filled a need for each other. They had created a family without a connection by blood, but their attachment to each other was deep and heartfelt.

  Jakob was doing well in the diamond business under Izzie’s tutelage. He had learned his lessons well and his knowledge of banking and finance helped too. He made sensible decisions and gave Izzie good advice, which he valued. And with the commissions he earned, his savings were growing.

  When Max was four, they moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the same building and felt as though they had moved into a palace compared to their tiny studio. They bought secondhand furniture and Emmanuelle upholstered it herself. The apartment they moved into became available when one of the older tenants died. Jakob and Emmanuelle painted it themselves.

  “Why don’t you move into a nicer building?” Izzie had suggested, but Emmanuelle didn’t want to.

  “She wants to stay where we are,” Jakob explained. The neighborhood had improved slightly in the five and a half years they’d been there. The building was no better, but they knew everyone in it, and it felt like home to them. The rents were incredibly cheap and what they could easily afford. Emmanuelle never liked spending too much money.

  Izzie was about to turn seventy by then, and had had some health issues, but nothing serious. He worked longer hours now that he had no one to go home to, and Jakob often stayed late with him. They discussed stones that Izzie was considering buying, and Jakob advised him to buy a particularly large stone on his own, without being part of a group of dealers for once. The profit he made on it was enormous when they sold it at auction, and it became part of a bidding war between Harry Winston and Van Cleef & Arpels. The stone went for four times what they had expected. It was a windfall for Izzie, and Jakob’s commission on the deal was huge. Izzie was always generous with him. He had been thinking of making Jakob a partner, since he had no son or other relatives to leave the business to. But even without a partnership, Jakob had a sizable amount in the bank now, and Izzie advised him to buy real estate. He had been doing that for years himself, and had made a great deal of money on it. “You can’t go wrong with apartment buildings,” Izzie had told him, and when Max turned five, Jakob started looking at buildings in their neighborhood, and found one he wanted. After he checked it out thoroughly, he told Emmanuelle about it.

  “Buy a building? Are you crazy?” She looked shocked.

  “We have money just sitting in the bank, earning interest, and Izzie says real estate is always a great investment,” Jakob said calmly.

  “He can afford to, he’s a rich man. We aren’t. What if you lose everything, or he fires you?” Jakob smiled at the familiar refrain. She had stopped predicting a war in New York a few years before, but she still imagined disaster at every turn whenever he tried to get her out of her comfort zone. Spending money terrified her. She liked knowing they had money in the bank and was afraid of investments she considered risky. If they lost what they had, what if they couldn’t buy food or pay for Max’s school? He was in kindergarten in the neighborhood but Jakob wanted to send him to college one day and had been saving for it since he was born.

  “Think of the money we’d make on rents, if we buy a building,” Jakob reminded her.

  “Or what we’d lose if everyone moves out, or they hate us and we have to put up with furious tenants all the time. Everyone hates their landlords,” she said, painting the usual bleak picture he was used to. He told Izzie about the building the next day and he heartily approved, except for the location.

  “Why don’t you buy a building uptown? It will be worth a lot more one day. No one wants to live on the Lower East Side, except the old Jewish people who live there now. You need younger tenants who can afford to pay higher rents, like you.”

  “One day, the neighborhood will improve. Look at Greenwich Village, it gets more popular every year.”

  “To the Bohemians. Go where the real money is. What about the Upper East Side?”

  “I’d have to pay too much for the building. The buildings in our neighborhood go for nothing,” Jakob said practically.

  “Do what your gut tells you to do,” his friend and mentor encouraged him. He had great faith in Jakob’s nose for business. He had an instinct for good deals.

  Jakob closed the deal for the building he wanted a few m
onths later, and saved the sunny three-bedroom apartment on the top floor for himself and his family. The building had an elevator which made it both more convenient and more valuable. And as he expected, Emmanuelle had a fit when he told her the news. It was always her initial reaction. Eventually she calmed down and saw the merits of the purchase, because she had faith in him too. But it always took time for her to get there.

  It took him six months to talk her into moving into the new apartment. She insisted it was much too big for them, they didn’t have enough furniture, they didn’t need a third bedroom since they weren’t going to have more children, and he didn’t need a home office, nor did she. It was wasteful and frivolous.

  “You can use it as a sewing room,” he said about the extra bedroom. She still made all her own clothes, and Max’s, even the corduroy pants he wore, and the little suits he wore to school that made him look more like a French child than an American. The only ties Jakob wore were the beautiful ones she made for him, from expensive silks she found in fabric remnant stores. She had made several for Izzie too as gifts, and he loved them. Jakob had tried to convince her to start a business selling them but she didn’t want to. She was a homemaker, a mother and wife, and didn’t want to be a businesswoman. She left that to him. But she finally, grudgingly, moved into the apartment, after she and Jakob painted it. She refused to hire a painter to do it. He bought her a beautiful new sewing machine and put it in the third bedroom as a gift the day they moved in. She loved it, and took over the room almost immediately, and all her objections to their new home were forgotten.

  It was a beautiful apartment, and the building was clean and in good condition, with tenants who were willing to pay higher rents than those in the building where they’d lived before, and it was four blocks closer to Max’s school. He went to a public school in the neighborhood and was a bright boy.

  “How did it go?” Izzie asked Jakob the Monday after they moved in.

  “She loves it. But it’ll probably take her ten years to admit it, and Max loves his new room. He’ll like it even better as he gets older and wants to have friends over. And at least Emmanuelle isn’t predicting a Holocaust in New York this time, or a war. She’s just worried that we’ll get rats in the building and all the tenants will move out, and we’ll go broke because of all the unrented apartments. That’s easier to deal with than world politics.” They both laughed at her predictable reaction. And six months later, she admitted to Jakob that she loved the apartment. It had southern exposure and was sunny all the time. It was a far cry from the dismal studio they’d moved into when they first arrived. Their new apartment was still a lifetime away from what Jakob had grown up with, but Emmanuelle said that it was twice the size of her mother’s apartment in Paris, the one that their neighbor had coveted enough to report them to the local police as Jews who had passed unnoticed until then.

  The building was a good investment, and Jakob was happy to own it, and continue building the security he was trying to amass for them, so he could stop worrying about money one day. He wondered if that day would ever come. The war had left him with his own fears about being poor, not being able to support his family, and not being able to do enough for Max or pay for a good college for him one day. He was still working on all of it. At thirty-two, he was providing for his family, earning substantial commissions, had bought government bonds, and owned a piece of income-producing real estate that he thought was a good investment. But he didn’t feel totally secure yet. He wanted to buy more buildings. He didn’t have the money to do it yet, but he was sure he would one day. He and Emmanuelle were both frugal, and careful how they spent their money. And with their joint decisions, Izzie’s business was growing too, and they had made some very important purchases and sales in the past two years.

  When Max turned seven, Izzie took him to the top of the Empire State Building, and showed him the view as far as the eye could see. They looked at Central Park, lower Manhattan where Max lived, New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island.

  “Do you see all that? One day, when you’re grown up, you can own as much of all that as you’d like. There’s no limit to what you can do. First you have to go to college, and then you can do business like your daddy. You can own anything you want. If you’re a smart businessman, and you save your money, you can have whatever you choose to. It’s up to you.”

  “Can I buy the Yankees?” Max looked at him in wonder.

  “You could, if you wanted to. You’d have to buy some other things first, and sell them for a lot of money, and then you could buy the Yankees,” Izzie said seriously.

  “Good. Then that’s what I’m going to do.” He looked determined as he said it. Other boys wanted to play baseball, but he wanted to own the team. Izzie smiled at him and ruffled his hair, and hoped Max would remember what he’d told him one day. The secret to life was not believing in limitations. If you believed in yourself, you could do whatever you wanted, and accomplish whatever you dreamed. He had said the same things to his own son when he was Max’s age. And David would have been a smart businessman too.

  As soon as they got home, Max exploded into the apartment and announced to his parents that he was going to buy the Yankees. “Grampa Izzie said I could,” he said, jutting out his chin with an intense look. “He said I can do whatever I want to do.”

  “If you go to college first,” Izzie reminded him, and Jakob grinned. He recognized the philosophy and didn’t disapprove. He believed in having big dreams too. When he’d arrived in New York he wouldn’t have believed that he’d own an apartment building one day, and now he was about to buy his second one, although he hadn’t said anything to Emmanuelle about it yet. And Izzie had teased him and called him a slumlord when he’d discussed it with him, but he approved too. Real estate investments were always a good thing, as long as the building was sound, and the neighborhood was decent and had the potential to improve, and Jakob was convinced that the Lower East Side did. He insisted that it would be gentrified one day, like Greenwich Village, where the rents had begun to climb steadily. The area around Washington Square had become a great investment, and so had lower Fifth Avenue. Izzie had even thought about buying an apartment there himself. He liked the idea of being closer to the Steins, and always spent time with them on weekends.

  But Emmanuelle looked annoyed when Izzie left. “He shouldn’t fill Max’s head with crazy dreams, like buying the Yankees one day. That’s not realistic, it would cost millions.”

  “How do you know he won’t make millions one day? He could,” Jakob said about their son.

  “Doing what?” She scowled at her husband. “Buying real estate on the Lower East Side, like you?” She still thought his wanting to buy buildings was risky and foolish, even if she loved the one they lived in.

  “Maybe he’ll buy and sell bigger real estate. It never hurts to dream big. Look how far we’ve come in the eight years we’ve been here. This is America. Anything is possible.”

  “And what if something happens to Izzie? You’ll be out of a job, and who knows what kind of job you’ll find afterward.”

  “Maybe I’d get a bigger job than I have now.” She gave him a dark look and disappeared into her sewing room. She always took refuge there when she disagreed with him, which she only did when they talked about his investments.

  He left work early the next day, to meet with the owner of the building and negotiate with him. They were still too far apart on the price, but Jakob was sure he could get him to lower it, and he told Izzie where he was going when he left. They were expecting a stone to be delivered that afternoon. They had hired a new runner several years before, but lately, they got most of their deliveries by armored car, and Izzie didn’t need Jakob to be there when it came in, and he wanted to check on their diamond cutters that afternoon. They had moved them off-site to a separate workshop the year before, and hired three more cutters, because they had so much business.

>   Jakob took the subway downtown to his neighborhood, and spent two hours with the owner of the building, discussing its weak points and its strengths. Jakob walked through it with him, and pointed out several issues that concerned him. He had done his due diligence thoroughly, and at the end of their inspection tour, the man came down in price to where Jakob wanted him, and with a handshake they concluded the deal. Both men were pleased. Jakob had an intelligent, gracious way of doing business, like his father and grandfather before him.

  He was feeling happy about the deal as he walked home, and was going to tell Emmanuelle that night, and he was startled to see her looking pale and flustered as soon as he walked in.

  “Where were you?” she asked him in a strained tone.

  “In a meeting, with a building owner down here. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Something happened to Izzie. Florence called about a dozen times.” She was the receptionist at the office who had replaced the older woman they’d had before, when Jakob started. The first one had retired and moved to Florida.

  “What do you mean something happened to Izzie?” Jakob was frowning and looked instantly concerned.

  “I don’t know. I thought it was his heart, but it isn’t. He’s at Lenox Hill Hospital. He’s been there for two hours. It sounds serious. Florence was crying when she called.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. She cries when she gets a cold.” Jakob picked up the phone and dialed the hospital, worried about him. And all the emergency room nurse would tell him was that Izzie was there, and they hadn’t determined his condition. The doctors were with him. As soon as he hung up, Jakob grabbed his coat and headed to the door.

  “Call me and tell me what’s happening,” she shouted as the door closed behind him, and she heard him clatter down the stairs. He didn’t wait for the elevator, which was always slow. He hailed a cab as soon as he reached the street, and the ride uptown seemed endless. He paid the fare when he got there, tipped the driver, jumped out of the cab, rushed into the emergency room, and asked for Izzie at the desk. They asked him his relationship to Mr. Horowitz, and after hesitating for only a fraction of an instant, he said he was his son. And with that, a nurse led the way to the cubicle where he was being examined. And as soon as Jakob saw him, he could see what had happened. His face was drooping severely on one side, his arm and leg hung limp on the same side, and he couldn’t speak. He’d had a massive stroke. Jakob strode to his bedside and took Izzie’s good hand in his own, and Izzie squeezed it tight.