WHERE MY GRANDFATHER WENT

by Bridget Goldschmidt

By the time I knew my grandfather, he never wanted to go anywhere fun. His destinations rarely deviated from the liquor store or the bank, in that order.

“Why should I go to the movies when I have a TV at home?” he’d say.

This was the RCA color television set that he bought in the 1960s and refused to get rid of, even though it went on the fritz with clockwork regularity, because it had a warranty. The company would send someone to prolong its life for a few more months, until they stopped making that model.

When he was a young man, though, my grandfather used to go to all sorts of interesting places. I learned this from family lore, anecdotes gleaned from older relatives, and even stray remarks from my grandfather himself. It was hard to connect this footloose young man with the unadventurous grandfather I knew.

For one thing, back in the day, he used to work for the mob. This lasted only a few years, and he was never an inducted member, just a low-level punk looking to earn a buck. It started with his taking messages to people, running errands, that sort of thing, and then moved on to bigger jobs. They even set him up as a boxer, under the name of Kid Wallace, but he got the stuffing beaten out of him early on, and his mother begged him to stop. The mob was surprisingly cool with his retirement from the ring—maybe they figured he’d never make it as a boxer.

They also sent him on trips to carry out their business. One time, he went to Prince Edward Island to arrange a liquor shipment during Prohibition, and he fell in love with the area’s quaint Victorian charm and lack of automobiles. He never said what the islanders made of him, a swarthy big-city type whose friends called him “Sheikhy,” after the “Sheikh of Araby”—a nickname acquired during his days as a golf caddy in Long Branch, New Jersey—but it might have been a case of mutual fascination.

Later, he traveled to Chicago, a place he would describe with a smile as “a wide-open town,” providing no details. Since it was left to me to fill in the blanks, I decided that he must have lodged in one of the South Side’s notorious whorehouses during his time in the city. After the illicit labors of the day, he could unwind with a glass of bootleg whiskey while his girlfriend du jour, fetching in a silk wrapper, whispered enticements in his ear, the two of them reclining on the overstuffed settee as one of the other girls fired up the player piano. Then my grandfather would let Dolly/Bertha/Whoever lead him up to her room.

He must have sown a lot of wild oats in those days, I gathered, to the point of utter satiety. Maybe that’s why he became the sort of person who, whenever my sister and I accompanied him on his neighborhood walks, would take us by the local amusement park so we could watch all of the other kids have a good time on the rides.