A Man of Contradictions

Struggling for a title -- and a theme -- I snatched the one above from the spy-thriller, Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva, the eighth in his series recounting the exploits of the invincible, resolute art-restorer-turned-Israeli-agent, Gabriel Allon. It refers not to Allon, however, but to his adversary, a ruthless Russian arms trader engaged in the nasty business of selling anti-aircraft weapons to terrorists and whose lack of any redeeming personality trait renders the epithet wholly misleading, a tiny blemish in an otherwise perfect read.

I beg my readers' indulgence for drawing a rhetorical analogy between the novel's villain and the subject of this posting, my paternal grandfather, Ben Schewel. For while he was "a man of contradictions," certainly his "angelic" qualities -- reflecting our hero's proper name, "Gabriel" -- far outweighed any devilish ones. Incidentally, he would have enjoyed Moscow Rules, as tasty a treat as the other nuggets of pulp fiction he voraciously consumed in the last sedentary years of his life.

The unlikely convergence of three serendipitous events has prompted my meditation on this legendary figure from my past, whose strangely placid visage -- bearing a striking resemblance to the debonair 1930's and 40's movie star, Adolphe Menjou -- scrutinizes my activities every day from the tinted photograph decorating the wall behind my desk.

First, my milestone birthday, five months ago, catapulted me to the same age, sixty, that he would have been when I, a four-year-old, probably became conscious of him. But there the similarity ends. Because, not only am I not a grandfather -- each of my five children (including two inherited from my wife), ranging in age from thirty-three to twenty-four, having witnessed a spate of divorces in their immediate families, is choosing to wade carefully into the blissful waters of holy matrimony -- I don't feel like one either. While I imagine Ben Schewel felt no differently, in my mind's eye he surely was -- and looked -- old. Whether that pejorative applies to me, others will have to judge.

If age is reputedly a state of mind, it is, more accurately, I believe, a state of one's health. A chronic, debilitating, or terminal illness surely ages one more rapidly than artificial notations on the calendar. And -- at least up to now -- I have been blessed with good health, which I try to maintain through regular exercise--running, swimming, and (light) weight-lifting -- and a sensible diet, in which the absence of fatty meat, chicken, and processed sugar hopefully more than compensates for occasional binges on Nabisco Wheat Thins, Kroger Tortilla Chips, and Cabernet Sauvignon.

I know only a little of what Ben Schewel liked to eat: potato soup with ketchup and $1.95 plate lunches -- like corned beef and cabbage, baked chicken with mashed potatoes and turnip greens, and thin-sliced roast beef with gravy -- at Johnny Hudson's Sport Shoppe on Main Street one block from Schewels, where he used to take me every morning at 11:00 AM when I was working there as a teenager. At that barbaric hour, I had hardly digested breakfast, before this second meal of the day was whisked from the noisy kitchen to our snug red vinyl booth and inhaled in a matter of minutes, presumably so Ben (and I) could get back to the store.

When I was six and learned to swim, some quirky competitive itch drove Ben to the YMCA for his own lessons, but I doubt that he ever became proficient or that he exercised in any formal way. (Admittedly, his opportunities were limited; one didn't see many joggers on the Avenue back in the fifties -- and he lacked the patience and coordination for golf, tennis, or pick-up basketball, if he even knew the rules for any of them.) Instead, he speed-walked the four expansive floors of his furniture store -- looking for customers, making sales, checking price tags, barking orders, changing the displays, all at a dazzling non-stop pace that left those trailing in his wake breathless.

He may have seemed old to me because of his notorious hearing difficulties, which some family members, including his wife, contended were bogus and an excellent excuse to ignore her idle chatter. Nevertheless, he experimented with an endless assortment of dime-store hearing aids, including his piece de resistance, one with an adjustable dial attached to the earpiece of his eyeglasses that could be turned up or down like the volume control on a radio -- all to little avail.

Although he had a receding hairline and eventually lost most of his hair, it never turned gray like mine has -- a stark refutation of my more youthful sixtyish self-image. Maybe it was his thin immaculately-trimmed mustache, which he wore at least as far back as my parents' wedding pictures, or his luminous silk suits which aged him prematurely. Certainly it wasn't his oversized, round black-framed eyeglasses; they were the style then, and eerily similar to the ones showing up in gawky pictures of me from the same period.

He didn't always have that mustache, or those eyeglasses, as I discovered a week ago, when, in the process of having the master bedroom repainted -- which requires the temporary dislocation of every piece of furniture and knick-knack blanketing every exposed surface, including, but not limited to, jewelry, photographs, decorative containers, CD's, DVD's, books, magazines, clocks, and useless Jefferson Cups -- I unearthed a buried treasure.

It was indeed a photograph, in grainy black-and-white, 7 1/2 by 9 1/2, and it portrays eight adults and one child, all dressed up for a Sunday outing in a primitive automobile. The child -- six or seven years old, sporting a fancy sailor's suit, his left hand reaching out to rest upon the car's rear door -- could be my father, but I doubt it, even though his forearm is firmly grasped in the muscular grip of a lithe, leathery Ben Schewel, who, sans mustache and eyeglasses, is looking far younger than the thirty-five years of age he would have been when his son was six. He exudes a handsome, casual elegance, modeling a striped shirt, wing collar, half-length necktie, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his unruly black hair crowning his broad forehead, prominent nose, slightly protruding ears, and tight-lipped grin.

Seated in the back seat, peeking between two heavy-set men, is Rae Nachman Schewel, my twenty-something grandmother, a blond bombshell, pert, petite, plucky, precocious, orphaned as a child and farmed out to an aunt and uncle, in whose crowded, Portsmouth, Virginia, household she chaperoned five younger cousins.

Their six anonymous companions -- two men, four women, friends, relatives, perhaps a sister of Ben and his brother-in-law -- remain as shrouded in mystery as the site of the three-story wood-frame building rising in the background, although two good guesses would be either the Daniel's Hill neighborhood, since Ben Schewel and his eight siblings grew up on Harrison Street, or lower Rivermont Avenue, where, according to my mother, Ben and Rae rented an apartment in the early years of their marriage.

In 1922, one year after my father was born, and sometime after this picture was taken, when Ben was thirty and Rae twenty-nine, they apparently accumulated enough capital (or credit) to purchase a piece of property and build a house at 2247 Rivermont Avenue, thus joining the burgeoning ranks of the nouveau riche migrating to the suburbs.

A large Spanish stucco two-story duplex on the corner of Columbia Avenue across from Garland-Rodes School, it was symbolic of my grandmother's shrewd frugality, since one-half of it -- when rented out to some secret sharers -- was a lucrative source of income. Growing up, I saw it not as a dual residence but merely one with dual columned porticoes, and never imagined that its shadowy interior boasted an identical twin.

I visited there frequently, but all I remember of that old house -- even though I pass by it twice a day going to and from my office -- are its hardwood floors, maroon carpeting, a gas range tucked away in the first floor kitchen where my grandmother perfected her renowned culinary skills, and an upstairs family room that overlooked the railroad trestle from which my father reportedly tossed a cat into the path of an oncoming train. It was also in that room that, at the age of nine or ten, I played my own dastardly practical joke, abruptly jerking a chair out from under my grandmother just as she was sitting down -- one of those thoughtless acts one regrets as soon as it is done, and not just because of the impending punishment, but because one realizes it was just terribly wrong.

By 1922, in spite of his youth and his humble origins, Ben Schewel had not only achieved remarkable success; he had also established himself as a philanthropist of note. Coincident with my birthday musings and my discovery of that ancient photograph was an inquiry I received from a journalist who was doing some research on the Virginia Colony for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. In the Colony's 1917 Annual Report appears an acknowledgment: To Mr. Ben Schewel, on behalf of the Jewish Sunday School of Lynchburg, Christmas gifts for patients. In 1917, Ben Schewel was only twenty-five; yet he was already sending gifts to the "Colony" -- later the Lynchburg Training School and Hospital in Madison Heights -- a practice he was to continue for almost fifty years.

Legend has it that Ben Schewel never graduated from high school, that he left Lynchburg as a teenager and moved to Chicago, where he may have reunited with an older brother Jake, whose own associates, it was whispered, were not of the most reputable character in a city known for its organized criminal element. Ben, steering clear of these nefarious influences, found employment in a furniture or a department store, probably as a salesman -- he was always a good salesman -- and earned a speedy promotion when he picked up a stray piece of trash just as the boss was passing by.

Something drew him back east, however -- perhaps the young beauty in the photograph, or a summons from his brothers, Abe and Ike, who had recently purchased a nascent furniture business from their father, enabling him to retire comfortably at the ripe old age of fifty. My perception of the fledgling Schewel Furniture Company as a struggling enterprise -- it wasn't incorporated until 1917 -- is obviously erroneous; by that year, Ben Schewel was a man of means and had made a name for himself.

One wonders what spark kindled the flame of philanthropy in his youthful soul. While I learned the importance of giving from my father (and, from a distance, my grandfather), Ben Schewel's father was no comparable role model; by most accounts, he was harsh, unforgiving, and tyrannical. Ben's generous heart sprang from a different source: his rocky turn-of-the-century childhood as the son of a Jewish immigrant in a household of eleven, or a helping hand extended to him in some troubling situation, or the sobering revelation that too many lacked what came to him so naturally -- the brainpower, the fortitude, and the motivation to claw their way to prosperity.

And why did he target the "Colony" residents as particular recipients of his benevolence -- although I am sure there were many others? Ninety years ago there hardly existed the spate of organizations that dot the social service landscape today; perhaps the "Colony" was merely the most visible, and its patients, because of their deficiencies, the most needy.

But Ben Schewel didn't just send gifts to the "Colony." He took them himself, made regular visitations, and gave parties. Many people, including me, find it very unpleasant to be in the company of the mentally retarded and physically deformed. We find it difficult to engage and communicate with these individuals. Ben Schewel was as comfortable with the residents of the "Colony" as he was with Lynchburg's most elite citizens -- perhaps moreso -- and I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it was because, in some mysterious way, he loved them all.

I remember a short, doughy, moon-faced man from the "Colony" named Joe Berlin, whom Ben befriended in mid-life. He used to take Joe for glorious Sunday drives and transport him to and from the synagogue on Friday nights and holidays. When Ben suffered a stroke in the early 1970's, Joe, having lost his best friend, was the saddest man on earth.

I have already recorded ("Scrooge," December 23rd) how Ben, having been raised in an environment where toys were a rarity, pledged that, if it were up to him, no child would be similarly deprived and consequently established Schewels Toyland in the basement of the Schewel store on Eleventh and Main in Downtown Lynchburg. He didn't exactly give away toys, but he did offer cash-strapped customers the opportunity to puchase them on credit and thus to stuff Christmas stockings which might otherwise go empty.

A few years ago I received a letter from a woman who was writing stories for her grandchildren. She enclosed the following one about Ben Schewel:

"Around the time my mother died, Mr. Ben had a serious stroke and did not know about my mother. One day Inez and I were walking by Schewels and saw Mr. Ben sitting in a chair near the front door. We went in. He could hardly talk, and could not get up, but we knew he was happy to see us. He finally got out the words, 'How is Effie?' We told him she had died. You could see the sadness in his face. He motioned a clerk over and told him what to do. When the clerk returned, he had a check with the request that we buy something for the church in my mother's memory. We bought a number of new hymnals with the money.

"I knew a high school girl with cancer who had no hope of recovery. Mr. Ben sent that family everything he could think of to make that child happy for the short time she had left: a hospital bed, a record player, a radio, and I don't know what else. Yes, Mr. Ben was quite a man."

But there was another, darker side to Ben Schewel. The same man who showered gifts on perfect strangers, who radiated charm like heat from a fireplace, whose soothing words flowed like honey from his lips, would suddenly and inexplicably explode like a thundercloud into paroxysms of rage. These wrathful torrents would be directed at employees, his son, his wife, manufacturer's representatives -- but never, of course, at customers, in whose presence he would pirouette as gracefully as a ballet dancer.

His outbursts were, of course, fearful and intimidating, but I wouldn't characterize them as vulgar; although expostulated with numbing frequency, his most baneful expletive was a relatively mild "Got dammit." After a time, I believe, most of his victims accepted his behavior as a necessary evil, having witnessed, or been told of, a kinder, gentler Ben lurking beneath that gruff exterior.

According to my mother, Ben ramped up his anger during the Jewish High Holy Days -- probably because of the inevitable family gatherings that ensued, or because he was required to close his furniture store for two business days at the behest of his partners.

He had five business partners -- two brothers, two nephews, and a son -- a sure-fire formula for dissension for a man with a short temper and a mercurial personality. One brother and nephew were bought out by the other family members in the late 1950's after a dispute which I do not believe he was involved in. But of the remaining three, he barely tolerated his brother and nephew and rarely interacted with them. When that brother Abe -- who had served as President of the Agudath Sholom Synagogue intermittently for twenty years -- was honored at a testimonial dinner and presented with a citation, Ben Schewel was the only member of the Congregation who refused to sign it, compelling my father to forge his signature.

His relationship with my father, who was no less temperamental, was punctuated by a series of petty business disputes, the most memorable of which was Ben's vociferous opposition to an "off-premises" sale my father organized at the City Armory. So incensed was Ben that he planned his own sale at the Main Street store in to compete with my father's. Alas, the mighty duel was foiled when a freakish snowstorm blanketed the city and ignominiously smothered both promotions.

I'm not sure if Ben was a happily married man. Besides the embarrassing shouting matches I witnessed between him and Rae (and I was just a child), I can recall numerous occasions when each would bitterly disparage the other in his or her absence. When I was ten years old, they took me to Virginia Beach for a week; all I remember of that trip (besides the old Gay Vacationer Motel -- a name thankfully consigned to history) are the barbs and insults that flew back and forth like wicked tennis serves during the course of ten hours in the car.

There was a plethora of other evidence. From a third party I heard the tale told by my father about a buying trip he and Ben took to the Chicago Furniture Market, where Ben insisted they stay in separate rooms. Ben went his own way for dinner -- and my father was rudely surprised the next morning when a furniture salesman accosted him and announced how pleased he was to have met his very attractive mother the previous evening -- who, of course, was one thousand miles away in Lynchburg. Perhaps Ben may be forgiven for indiscretions committed on his former stomping ground.

My mother has her own revealing story about Ben's wandering eye. "He and I were sitting in the den alone one afternoon when he looked at me with deep sincerity and said, 'My wife Rae just doesn't understand me'" -- hardly the type of remark a young wife would expect to hear from her father-in-law, except in the most salacious soap opera.

Ben's preferred vacation destination was Mexico, to which he made an annual pilgrimmage -- usually alone, which hardly registered on my radar, since he always returned deeply tanned and bearing all sorts of toys and trinkets for grandchildren and friends and outlandish photographs of himself all decked out in native regalia. No one ever questioned his Lindberghian adventures.

My earliest memory of him is a variation of "patty-cake" which he used to play with me; its mischievous blend of tenderness and violence expressed the contradictory elements of his character. I would sit on a chair or on his lap facing him; he would grasp my tiny wrists (which are not much bigger now) and clap them together, slowly at first, and then faster, exclaiming with each clap the unspellable sound "Pachy." As the claps got faster, he would move my hands first to his cheeks and then to mine. I never knew when I was going to end up slapping my own cheeks, and, when it finally happened, if it wasn't too hard, I would burst out laughing.

After I outgrew such childish games, he would take me -- just me, no obtrusive sister to compete for his attention and no grandmother to spoil the comraderie -- to the airport to watch the planes -- Piedmont DC-3's, no doubt -- take off and land, and later to the "picture show." Our favorite was one that deserves resurgent popularity in light of recent events: "The Buccaneer," starring Yul Brynner as Jean Lafitte, the pirate who helped Andrew Jackson (Charlton Heston) defeat the British in the Battle of New Orleans.

Not only was Ben Schewel an astute retailer -- the driving force, he believed, rightly or wrongly, behind the growth of his furniture business, which further fueled his resentment of his partners -- he was a savvy investor, and managed to accumulate a modest estate at the time of his death. He shunned real estate -- an aversion he passed on to his son, my father -- but was quite perspicacious about the stock market. Sitting at his desk near the front of the store one day, weakened by a stroke, hardly able to walk or talk, reading the newspaper, he pointed to a stock (Union Pacific, maybe) which had reached a new high and informed me that it was time to sell. Which I am sure he did just before it fell off a cliff.

Other than his custom suits, a diamond-encrusted ring, those mysterious vacations, and doing what was necessary to pacify his wife -- including, at the age of sixty-five, building a dreamy ranch house for her at 4002 Peakland Place, the most notable feature of which was its two grandiose master bedroooms, one for each of them -- Ben was never really interested in what his money could buy. For many years he drove a stodgy Chevrolet Bel Air -- and not very well, by most reports. He kept the column shift in one gear, thereby anticipating by decades the invention of the automatic transmission. He demonstrated the unique ability to locate the only other vehicle in the parking lot behind the Schewel store on Main Street -- by backing into it -- a feat which prompted perpetual jocularity among those who knew him and which was fated to be replicated by his grandson years later.

Sports, television, alcohol -- none of these had any allure for him. His only avocation was playing cards -- small stakes poker, I assume. He took great pleasure in teaching me -- and then defeating me at -- "Casino," a fast-paced game in which he could flaunt his mathematical dexterity.

His real passion was selling -- and he didn't waste much time on details. He remembered people's names; he asked about their children; his interest was genuine because he cared. He loved to make deals -- to give a discount or a lamp or picture with the purchase of a new living room suite. Families were proud to have had their homes furnished by Mr. Ben.

Unlike the executives of today (including this one), he personally investigated customer complaints, and I remember accompanying him to a house in Madison Heights. Instinctively, he realized how much it meant to that customer -- and how much easier it was to resolve the problem -- if Ben Schewel himself was inspecting the furniture. In fact, he was on his way to a customer's home when tragedy struck him down.

None of us knows how our days will end. The choices are equally unsettling: instantaneous death through a massive heart attack; a terminal cancer diagnosis, followed by palliative treatments, a brief period of relative comfort, and a precipitous deterioration; or a long, slow, painful decline, the result of the onset of an insidious disease like Alzheimer's, congestive heart failure, emphysema, or a stroke. My grandfather suffered the latter and lingered for several years a changed man.

It is impossible to imagine the state of mind of an active, confident, energetic, and productive individual who without warning is reduced to a shell of his former self -- immobile, weak, dependent. What other alternative is there but to retreat from the society in which he had played such a dominant role?

Pulp fiction became Ben Schewel's escape from a world he could no longer confront on his own terms. A Schewel employee would bring him a fresh supply of mysteries and thrillers from the library every two or three days, which he would pluck and devour like grapes on a vine, every so often throwing back a sour one with a disgusted expression that said, "I've read that one."

As a cerebral child who never had enough time for all the books he wanted to read, I never envisioned my vigorous grandfather -- who never sat still long enough to absorb a newspaper or magazine -- frantically pouring through volume after volume of Erle Stanley Gardner, Ross MacDonald, Mickey Spillane and whomever else topped the 1960's best seller lists. For a man of contradictions, this final one, borne of necessity, serves as a fitting, if mournful, epitaph.