10 Hope and I
It was only after I had been on television and begun receiving letters from viewers that I realized how seriously interested people are in the personal lives of others. Curiosity about one’s immediate neighbors is not intense in a large city. Often you do not see enough of them to get curious. You see more and know more of public figures than of the person in the next apartment. Curiosity about people in public life can become ridiculous when exploited by press agents. But wanting to know more about someone whom you have become interested in as a public personality is as sincere and natural as the wish to know more about the lives of those with whom you have become acquainted in a more personal way.
Still, it was a surprise to me when people wrote to ask who and what I was, where and how I lived, and all about my wife and children. A surprise, but not an affront, for when I receive such letters, I have exactly the same curiosity about those who write them. I really would like to know all about them.
My personal life began on the West Side of Chicago. We lived at 1639 South Central Park Avenue, a neighborhood of houses and trees and good back yards. In our back yard we even had a duck pond with a duck in it, not to mention the flowers and the grass that my father tended so lovingly. My father was a tool and die maker. He could speak and read several languages with ease, had a marvelous sense of humor, and revered greatness. He believed in two things: love and work. He mistrusted those who did not.
Although my father died several years ago, my mother is alive, and now in her late eighties. In the sixty-five years of her life in this country, she has seldom left the kitchen, yet she knows more about the human heart, about human weakness and suffering, and about human caring than I shall ever know. She is gentle and kind, and her adage to me since childhood has been: Keep out of mischief—as sound a bit of wisdom concerning conduct as you are likely to find anywhere, not excluding Spinoza.
It was an alive neighborhood, populated by people of mixed origin, although predominantly Jewish. There was plenty of activity on our street: kids practicing on horns, playing fiddles, playing games—mostly baseball and peg and stick. Peg and stick may require a bit of explanation for the present younger generation. To start the game, it is necessary to steal a broom. This is always done with the confident expectation that this article is something your mother will never miss. Cut off the handle, so you have a stick about twenty-two inches long. Also cut a seven inch peg. Now go out in the street and with your penknife make a hole in the asphalt. In summer the pitch is tacky, so this is no problem. Stand by the hole and, using the stick as a bat, knock the peg down the street. Then mark the hole by putting the stick in it. Your opponent must now take the peg, wherever it lies, and toss it toward the stick. The place it falls is marked, and, of course, as the turns go around, whoever gets the peg closest to the hole wins the point.
But most of all there was an awful lot of talking—on the streets, on the corner by the delicatessen, and among people sitting on their front porches. Talk... and lots of laughter. And there were great good times at home, especially in the evenings when my father told stories of his sojourn in Europe, or his adventures in America, or his day-to-day experiences at work.
I was the youngest child in a family of six children, and my life revolved around such matters as dogs, reading, and poetry. I had my own dog, but I also caught every stray dog in the neighborhood, washed and defleaed it, and anointed it with cologne (causing a great rumpus when discovered by one of my sisters from whom the cheap scent had been appropriated). My poetical labors were not properly appreciated by my sisters, either, who would collapse into gales of laughter when I interrupted their bathroom sessions of beauty culture to read them my latest verses.
My father built me a study in the basement and I set up a program of studies for myself: chemistry one week, physics the next, then mathematics, philosophy, etc. It was a wonderful thing until I blew the place up in the course of my chemical experiments. This ended my career in the physical sciences.
One summer I painted our house—a complete exterior paint job utilizing only a one and one-half inch brush. It took me from June to September, and finally the neighbors were complaining to my mother about the way she was working me. They didn’t know that I was in no hurry to finish the job. It was not only a labor of love so far as the painting went, but I was spending my time up there in a glory of memorizing poetry and delivering noble dissertations.
I was seldom seen without a book, and nobody regarded this as particularly odd, for the sight of young people reading on the streets, on their porches, on a favorite bench in Douglas Park was common. It is not common today. The only wonder is that I never toppled off a curb or got killed crossing a street—one read as he walked and paid little attention to the hazards of city living.
Furthermore, nobody told us, in school or elsewhere, what a child between the ages of nine and twelve should be reading and what he should read from twelve to fourteen, etc. We read everything that took our fancy, whether we understood it or not, from Nick Carter to Kant and Penrod and Sam to Joyce. And when we became infatuated with some writer, we stopped barely short of total impersonation. When I read that Shelley had carried crumbs in his pocket, I started to do likewise and practically lived on breadcrumbs for days.
All of us who grew up in the Depression years on the West Side remember vividly the men out of work and the soup kitchens going on Ogden Avenue; houses and apartments becoming crowded as married sons and daughters moved in with their families. People stayed home and listened to the radio: Wayne King playing sweet music from the Aragon Ballroom and Eddie Cantor singing that potatoes are cheaper, so now’s the time to fall in love.
I went to school with the heels worn off my shoes and sat in class with my overcoat on because there were two holes in the seat of my pants. When the teacher asked a question, I would reply with a sermon. I spent my days fuming... I hadn’t found myself. One day I encountered the works of Schopenhauer and felt I had at last arrived at an idea of life on a highly negative plane. A short time later I presented my whole schema to a friend, who blew it up completely.
My formal education was quite diverse. I never went to school without working to foot the bill and in the course of time did about everything, it seems, except selling shoes. I was an usher at the Chicago Theatre (a vast, gaudy temple of entertainment then featuring elaborate stage shows as well as the latest movies), where I eventually became Chief of Service. I was an errand boy and a newspaper boy (selling papers on the corner of Wabash and Van Buren for a dollar a night, seven o’clock to midnight). I worked in a grocery store, a hardware store, a department store. I was a bus boy and a dishwasher. I sold men’s clothing, worked at the University of Chicago, and wrote squibs for a neighborhood newspaper. I went to Crane Junior College, to the old Lewis Institute, and attended graduate courses at the University of Chicago. And during all this, I took courses in every field that captured my imagination or provoked my curiosity: neurology, philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, anthropology, languages (German, especially)... everything.
One day, while I was still an undergraduate, a professor whose heart I had captured through my ability to recite from memory the Ode to the West Wind, took me aside and assured me that if I were to be a teacher of literature, which he suspected would be my goal in life, a faculty position in a college or university English department was not likely to come easily to a man named Brodsky. Frankly, it was his suggestion that Stuart Brodsky find another last name—at least if he wanted to become an English teacher. “What name?” I said. “Any other name that seems to fit,” he replied.
I took the suggestion up with my sisters. We thought Brent might do nicely. Then I asked my father for his opinion. He told me that no matter what I did with my name, I would still be his son and be loved no less. It was settled. At the age of nineteen, my name was legally changed to Brent.
Brent or Brodsky, I taught incipient teachers at the Chicago Teachers College. Then I lectured on Literary Ideas at the University of Chicago’s downtown division. The world took a nasty turn and I left teaching to enter the Armed Forces. I spent twenty-seven months in the army, becoming a Master Sergeant in charge of military correspondence under Colonel Jack Van Meter. When a commission was offered me, I asked for OCS training and got it. But toward graduation time, the prospect of signing up for two more years as a commissioned officer was too much and I rejected it. The war was over. I was on my way to the vagaries of civil life and to becoming a bookseller.
The Seven Stairs was born, grew, died. I found myself a widower, endeavoring to maintain my sanity and my household and fighting for commercial survival on Michigan Avenue.
One day in 1956 a tall, pretty redhead named Daphne Hersey grew tired of her job in one of the dress shops on Michigan Avenue and came to work for me. She was a Junior League girl, but a lot else beside. Before I knew it, we had three Junior Leaguers working in the shop, and I was wondering whether the shop was going to be swept away in an aura of sophistication that was incomprehensible to me. But my respect for Daphne and her integrity remained limitless. And I had no notion of the improbable consequences in the offing.
Nothing is easier than saying hello. The day Hope walked in to chat with Daphne, the world seemed simple. She and Daphne had attended Westover together. They had grown up in the same milieu. Daphne introduced Hope to me. I was three years a widower, absorbed in my problems of family and business. Hope was a young girl struggling to stay really alive, teaching at North Shore Country Day School, living in the token independence of a Near North Side apartment shared with another girl. We chatted for a moment or two about books, and I sold her a copy of a more than respectable best-selling novel, By Love Possessed.
Summer was coming. I was intent upon taking my children up to Bark Point. I would spend a week or ten days with them, leave them there with the maid and return for two weeks in the city. Then back again to the Lake. This was my summer routine. But Daphne wanted a vacation, too, and we were short of help. While we were discussing this dilemma, in walked Hope. Daphne asked her what she was doing during her vacation from kindergarten teaching. Nothing. And would she like to work here for three weeks? Hope accepted. The next day I left for the Lake. When I returned, Daphne would leave, and by that time Hope would have learned her way around. Together with our other girl in the shop, we could hold the fort until Daphne came back. It was as simple as that.
When, in due time, I returned, Daphne left and Hope and I were thrown pretty much together. I loved working with her, and she seemed thrilled with the bookstore. It was a courtship almost unaware, then a falling in love with all our might. And the probability of a good outcome seemed almost negligible.
There is such a thing as “society.” It is not a clique or gilded salon of arts and letters such as a Lionel Blitzsten might assemble, but an ingrown family, far more tribal than what is left of Judaism. In point of fact, the old West Side no longer exists—its children, our family among them, are scattered to the winds. But the North Shore, beleaguered perhaps, is still an outpost of the fair families of early entrepreneurs, a progeny of much grace anchored to indescribable taboos.
The plain fact is, it calls for an act of consummate heroism to withstand real hostility from one’s family. It is not only a matter of the ties of love. It is a matter of who you are, finding and preserving this “who”... and you may lose it utterly if you deny your family, just as you may lose it also by failing to break the bonds of childhood.
Even when people try to be understanding and decent, they can be tripped by their vocabulary. In the protective and highly specialized environment in which Hope was raised, anti-Semitism was as much a matter of vocabulary as of practical experience. Even the mild jibes of pet names often involved reference to purported Jewish traits. This atmosphere is so total that those who breathe it scarcely think about it.
This beautiful and vital girl with whom my heart had become so deeply involved, brilliant and well-educated, loved and admired by family and friends, could not possibly make the break that our relationship would call for without the most terrible kind of struggle. Hope’s parents were dead, but she had an aunt and uncle and a sister and brother. Their reaction to my impending descent upon their world was one of violent shock and bitter protest.
Hope’s relatives were vitally concerned about what she was getting herself into. As if I wasn’t! I think if they had pointed out to her that, in addition to being Jewish, I had three small children, that there was an age difference involved, and that she herself might be running away from some nameless fear, they would have stood a better chance of prevailing. But the social impossibility of the case seemed to be the overwhelming obstacle.
If it were all really a dreadful error, I could only pray that Hope might be convinced of it. I was afraid of marriage. I couldn’t afford a love that was not meant to be. I had to think not only of Hope and me, but of the children—they couldn’t be subjected to another tragedy. There mustn’t be a mistake.
To me, it was a terrible thing to have to remain passive, to ask Hope to shoulder the whole burden of our relationship. We sought out a psychoanalyst to help us—one I had never met socially or in a business way (not easy; I knew nearly all of them on a first name basis) and who, if at all possible, was not Jewish. I did find such a man and Hope arranged to see him. He gave her the facts about the risks involved in marrying me. He also gave assurance that she was neither neurotic nor in need of analysis. And that threw the whole thing right back to Hope again.
Hope left the city to hold counsel with herself. I stayed and did likewise, on the crossroads of my own experience. We had a hard time of it... and love won through, feeding, obviously, on struggle, obstacles, impossibilities, and growing all the better for it.
I am sure God was beside me when I married Hope. Since then, everything I do seems right and good. We do everything together... my life is empty when she is gone even for a few days. Hope’s brother and sister have learned that the “impossible” thing, social acceptance, does not interest me, but that there are other areas of living equally important. We are friends.
Life with love is not without struggle. The struggle is continuous, but so is our love for each other and our family. With the addition of Amy Rebecca, Lisa Jane, and Joseph Peter, the Brent children now number six. It gives us much quiet amusement to hear parents complaining about the difficulties of raising two or three. Hope is responsible for naming Joseph Peter, our youngest. “He looks so much like you and your family,” she said, “I think it would be very wrong if we didn’t name him after your father.” And so we did.