Manuscript
The House on Hegeman Avenue
The house on Hegeman Avenue you will remember was bought by mother as a home for her family. Out in the very outskirts of Brooklyn is an area called the New Lots area, new because the lots were new, I guess! A company named Lint, Butcher and Ross built some attached houses–little houses, little homes. The selling partner, Mr. Lint, was a builder of houses. But Mama knew him and she knew that he had built these houses. And she wanted one of them. What to do? Remember she wasn’t poor, but she had no money. She only knew of one thing of value that my father had–that was his gold watch.
He had a great big, gold watch. It was a good watch. But the most important part of it was the gold frame. His father, possibly thinking he was going to dominate the world, had sent each of his daughters with a dowry, one to Washington and two of them to Detroit, which was considered a metropolis of the world at that time. Possibly it still is.
My father, he had a great education. My father was a graduate of the Gymnasium. Gymnasium was the college of the time in Riga, Latvia. Riga was the cultural center of the European world. The Gymnasium there was the best! And Pop had gone there and graduated. And when he was graduated, my grandfather sent him to New York. I know he didn’t give him a dowry. Possibly my father didn’t want it. Course only girls got dowries. But what my father did have was the watch his father had given him. That great, big gold framed watch.
My mother had eyed it many times with avarice. To her it meant value. And so wanting the house and not having any money, in the middle of the night one night, she purloined that watch! By purloined, I mean she took it! In the morning she hurried to a pawnbroker. She asked him how much he could give her. Maybe with disappointment, maybe with glee, he said forty dollars. Well forty dollars was a lot of money in those days.
And so she went to Mr. Lint with the forty dollars and said, “Mr. Lint, I want to buy one of your houses.” And Mr. Lint said, “Good, I’ll be glad to let you have it.” He knew who she was. He knew who my father was. He, himself, may have been a Socialist, although that would be rather an anomaly–a Socialist and a builder of houses? Well, in any event, he had the power–the ability to sell one of those newly built houses to my mother. And he said, “I’ll sell you one. How much have you got? How much can you give me?” She said, “Well, I have forty dollars and I have also saved for a long time ten additional dollars. So I have fifty dollars.”
He looked at Mama, probably with tears in his eyes, and he said, “Mrs. Gerber, you can’t buy a house with fifty dollars.” She was crestfallen. She had counted on getting that house for her family, her eight children, and that’s why she had taken my father’s gold watch and pawned it. But all she had was fifty dollars. Remember she wasn’t poor: she just didn’t have any money.
Well, Mr. Lint was not only a good businessman, but he was a friend. He said, “Mrs. Gerber, if that’s all you have, I’ll let you have one of the houses. But we’ll have to finance it and you’ll have to make monthly payments for a long time, mostly of interest, with some part of the payments going for the capital payments. So Mama had bought a house! Mr. Lint gave her papers for the house.
At that time, it was a payment book. She didn’t really own the house. She owned the right to make payments on the house. She made them religiously. I don’t know how she got the money, but she managed. She forwent everything. I don’t remember Mama buying fur coats, any coats. I don’t remember Mama buying anything. But each month she made her payments. And many years later, I remember that she very, very happily announced that the house was hers. The family had a home! And as was her wont on holidays, she baked a goose and had a big dinner and showed us all the new paper that she had–title to the house on Hegeman Avenue! 979 Hegeman Avenue.
Remember it was a humble abode. This had been the house that she lived in–that she gave birth to her eighth child–for many months before I was born, and now it was her house. During all that time, she had never improved it because she had no money. There was no paint on the walls. There was just brick outside. Walls, floors, no paint on the walls. But it was a house–it was a building–there were walls that kept the wind out. They didn’t do too good, but they kept it out–more or less.
Now again, Mama wasn’t poor. She just didn’t have any money. And not having any money, she had to cook and provide, as best she could, meals for her children. And remember, I was the youngest of eight. So there were many mouths to be fed. How to do it? In addition, how to keep warm? There was no central heat. But there was a large, coal cook-stove in the kitchen and a little stove in the living room. Yes, it was coal. There was no central heating.
But Mama, Lena Schacht Gerber, had title to the house on Hegeman Avenue. It was in her name. It was not in Julius’ name. It was in her name–the house on Hegeman Avenue. Yes, we all grew up in that house. Mama died in that house. Fifty-five years later, she died in that house. It had been her home. The home of her family–the home of her children.
I later made the mistake of going back to look at it. It was still there. I had been in to New York and I was on my way back home, home then was in California. I had rented a car, when I had arrived at the airport and I now had to return the car. I was early and so I decided I’d go look at the house on Hegeman Avenue. Never go back! Never, never, never! The house on Hegeman Avenue was now run down. Perhaps could even be considered a slum. There was a drunken bum lying on the street. In the fifty-five years of Mama owning that house, the whole area had changed.