BIRTHRIGHT BAY: A Novel

Chapter One

T

o echo Herman Melville’s famed words, call me Ishmael. That has been my name since I was six months old, when my parents, Edgar and Joan Dreyer, adopted me through Louise Wise Services, a Jewish adoption agency in New York City, and selected Ishmael Dryer as my legal appellation. Before that, my name was Michael.

Growing up, I wasn’t keen on the name Ishmael but never thought to ask my parents how in the world they came up with it. Perhaps it emanated directly from Melville, as my father considered himself erudite and talked a lot about the literary masterpieces he had read as a kid, including Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick, the poem If by Rudyard Kipling, and the novels Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Growing up, my mother had taught Sunday school at her synagogue (that was before her rejection of Judaism as too in-your-face culturally, to the horror of her childhood friends), so perhaps my name held biblical appeal. I certainly prefer Ishmael to Rudyard (for Kipling) or Ichabod, from Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, another of my father’s favorites.

As I was thinking about this not long ago, a light bulb in my head started blinking. Hardly a biblical scholar, I discovered that in the Old Testament Ishmael was an outcast, banished by Abraham (along with Hagar, Ishmael’s mother) after Sarah gave birth to Isaac, who then became Abraham’s designated heir. Could my parents have selected the name Ishmael because they thought of me as an outcast, which I suppose I was in the literal sense? I strongly doubt it. Or perhaps the name Ishmael embodied their desire to save me from growing up as a societal outcast in an orphanage. Under that postulate, my parents would have whisked me away from one extreme (being a castaway) directly to another (living in a loving home). Those possibilities, of course, are theoretical. I do not know why my parents chose my name.

What I know with certainty is that my parents loved me to a fault and created the idyllic environment intended by Louise Wise Services. When I was four, we moved from a one-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, to a new split-level in a Long Island bedroom community. I had a large yard and woods in which to play, a maze of streets through which to ride my bike, and eventually, a Dalmatian we called Puppy. She was named after the poor dog my parents had had during the war, who died after eating rat poison that a neighbor had placed in his yard. When I was six, my parents decided to buy a small sailboat, which they named Lady Joan. I learned to sail and acquired a lifelong love of the water and everything nautical. Years later, I learned from my grandmother that, when I was three or four years old, my parents had planned to adopt another child, a girl they planned to name Susan. However, they backed out after I asked if we could return her if we didn’t like her.

I was a nervous kid, and my parents were happy to provide the protective shell it felt calming to visualize. Having assessed my upbringing, I now think they also seemed overly protective. When I was six or seven, I slid off the bow of our sailboat into the water. Even though I had a life jacket on and knew how to swim, my father immediately jumped into the water to save me. I was fine, but my mother was not because she didn’t know how to sail. The boat was moving in circles on its own, and my mother was screaming as she tried to control it. Fortunately, my father was able to grab hold of the boat and climb on board, saving the day. I followed him on board, happy to have had the new experience.

My friends called me Ishmael because my parents always used my full name. I never imagined I could have a nickname. In eighth grade, I had a truly cool English teacher named Mr. Cornell, who was only in his late twenties but seemed extremely sophisticated. Mr. Cornell had a light blue Corvette convertible, which, reportedly, his father had bought for him so he could establish himself as a chick magnet. Rumor had it that he was dating a high school girl who lived in my neighborhood. I am not certain that was accurate, but I do know for a fact that the two of them married several years later. Mr. Cornell changed my life by lightheartedly calling me Ish, Little Ish Dreyer, sometimes Ish the Knish, and occasionally Itch, which I thought was especially funny. I started to call myself Ish whenever I could. The nickname stuck, in school at least. It felt liberating.

I always knew that I was adopted, and that Louise Wise Services was my adoption agency, but I never felt comfortable talking about it at home. Presumably, someone from Louise Wise did at least one home visit early on, but I have no memory of that. My parents never talked about the process with me or told me why they had adopted a child. I guessed my mother had been unable to conceive and that my birth mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and been too young to keep me. I was not certain because the unspoken premise at home was that asking questions would show a lack of love and respect for my parents.

I never thought about, or fully appreciated, the commitment my parents made to me by paying for 100 percent of my higher education. They could have insisted that I earn and contribute money for expenses, but that was not once a topic of conversation. I did well in school, went to college in northwestern Massachusetts, and graduated from law school in Boston. Getting a law degree seemed like a smart option and elegant choice for someone like me who had no real clue what to do in life. I figured eventually I would have an aha moment, when lights would begin to flash, revealing my life’s true calling. My parents wanted me to return to New York, work in a top-tier law firm, and marry the girl of their dreams. Instead, I stayed in Boston, found a job at a firm specializing in maritime law, and married Rachel, whom I had met on the Eastern Airlines Shuttle. Rachel had strong ideas about a great many matters and challenged my parents’ belief that a daughter-in-law should be respectful and compliant. During the early years of our marriage, I tried to shoulder the role of peacemaker. This was my first abject failure. I should have known it would be such because, as before, my parents tried to set the rules and expected Rachel to comply. They wanted me to compel Rachel to be a good wife by bending to their will. It would never happen, I knew. As the pressure from my parents mounted, I felt as though I were stuck in the formidable maze of hedges at England’s Hampton Court, with no ability to escape.

That, fortunately, was a long time ago. After my parents died, a family friend told me that my bad memories would eventually fade, leaving me to remember only the good times. That did not happen, but I did figure out strategies to avoid looking back and instead to move forward.

During the good years, I heard multiple stories about relatives on both sides of the family. I listened politely and never had an overarching desire to pursue them. I knew that my parents were both New Yorkers, with my mother having grown up in Queens and my father on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Probably the most disquieting fact was that my father’s parents refused to attend my parents’ wedding because my mother was not of high enough social status. I was not particularly interested in the information that my mother’s father had grown up in Savannah, Georgia, where there had been a robust Jewish community since the 1600s, or that my mother’s mother had to flee her San Francisco childhood home, along with the rest of her family, during the 1906 earthquake. I took in the information but never considered what it must have been like for my maternal grandfather’s own grandfather to be a drummer in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Even my father’s service in England as a B-17 navigator in the Eighth Air Force during World War II seemed unremarkable. He won both the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying into Germany but kept them under his pile of white handkerchiefs in his top dresser drawer. Like many World War II veterans, my father never wanted to talk about the war.

I was as close to my parents as they were to me, but we were never especially close to my living relatives. My father’s mother’s sister, Tess, ten years older than his mother, was a working woman in the 1950s and early 1960s, with a high-level position at Emerson Radio Corp. That fact alone made her stand out from many other women who, like my grandmother, seemed content in their housewife roles. A stout woman, Tess lived out of wedlock with her gentleman friend, Mort, a man twenty years her junior. Together they owned a twenty-acre farm in New Jersey, where they rode horses, boarded their Dalmatians, and grew vegetables. When I was a small kid, a preteen, and eventually a teenager, that seemed idyllic to me. Occasionally we drove to New Jersey so I could ride the horses, which I loved. We regularly spent holidays with my mother’s brother and his family at our house or theirs on Long Island. These were not fun times, notable mostly for raised voices between my father and my uncle about things neither should have been so passionate about. Because my uncle changed jobs frequently, my father thought he lacked the requisite commitment to provide for his family. My uncle thought my father was boorish and stuck-up. Watching them verbally spar over the holiday turkey afforded me a valuable lesson. I realized that no matter what epithets you call another person or how loudly you speak, you are not going to change someone else’s mind. That led to my belief that it is better to listen to the views of other people and respectfully disagree than to flog others with epithets until they relent.

Chapter Two

A

s I would learn years later, Artem Finberg was born in February 1930 into a typical Jewish family in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He had three older brothers, the eldest of whom had been born in Ukraine before their parents, Leonard and Iryna, emigrated in 1924. Perhaps because of the age difference, Artem was not close to any of his brothers. The house in which they lived was not large or grand, but it was all the family needed. Leonard worked as a cutter in the garment business, and Iryna was the consummate homemaker, making blintzes and baking rugelach for the family each week. As a kid, Artem especially loved to play stickball in the neighborhood. After many games, he and his friends would congregate at Rosie’s Diner on Remsen Avenue, munching on french fries, slurping on black-and-white shakes, and whistling at the cute girls who regularly walked by.

A tough kid with street smarts, Artem also had brains. His brothers were smart enough to attend Townsend Harris High School, a New York public school for gifted students that fed into the City College of New York. It was almost ordained that Artem would attend Townsend Harris like his brothers, but in 1942 Mayor La Guardia closed the school. Although the mayor cited budgetary reasons, Iryna thought something more nefarious was going on and vowed never to vote for another Republican. Throughout her life she kept her word.

At his mother’s urging, Artem reluctantly took the entrance exam to attend Stuyvesant High, a public school with deep roots in mathematics, science, and technology. He had always been more of a free spirit than a scientific nerd. Not surprisingly, to himself, at least, Artem flunked the entrance exam. The fallback was to matriculate at Canarsie High School, near the family home, which Artem did in September. Canarsie High was known for its high dropout rate and fractious student body.

On a fateful night in June 1948, Artem tagged along with one of his friends, Sal DeLuca, to a graduation party at the apartment of a classmate, Stella Rossini, in nearby Canarsie. With the help of his older brother, Benny, Artem acquired and brought the obligatory bottle of whiskey. This unchaperoned gathering was supposed to be the party of all high school parties. Girls came smeared with lipstick and sporting highly coiffed hair, eager to have both messed up quickly by an alpha male. Unlimited servings of well-spiked punch would spur this along by easing inhibitions and wiping away unwelcome flashbacks of overstepped moral bounds.

Hi, Sal, Stella said as she opened the door to Apartment 604. Who is this cutie you brought with you?

This is my friend Artem, replied Sal. He’s the neighborhood fixer-in-training, in all senses of the word. You want to persuade a bully in the neighborhood to leave you alone, he knows how to find the right guy to underscore the point. He can get you a fine watch on the cheap. You need someone to vouch for your whereabouts when you don’t want your nonna to know where you’ve been, he’s your guy—a real mensch in his neck of the woods, and polite to the elders. Artem also happens to be a good carpenter. Like his older brothers, he can build a new kitchen table or a backyard fence.

Nice to meet you, Artem, said Stella. Come on in, boys, and help yourself to some scrumptious punch.

Don’t mind if we do, said Sal as he and Artem sauntered into the dining room, where an elaborately cut crystal punch bowl was filled not with Christmas eggnog but with an innocent-looking concoction of orange juice, other juice blends, whiskey, and any number of unknown stronger substances.

While seemingly harmless, that was the start of a night to remember. Two girls near the punch bowl handed Artem and Sal their drinks and asked if they wanted to skedaddle to someplace more comfortable. Of course, the boys said yes. Maria, the buxom brunette, winked at Sal, who followed her into a bedroom. Lucille, the skinnier of the two and with auburn hair, took Artem’s hand as she and Artem walked behind. Artem had brought a few roofies, which he promptly dropped into the girls’ drinks. I’ve got dibs on Maria, Sal whispered to Artem.

If you must, Artem mouthed back.

Soon things were in full swing in the bedroom, with lots of noise coming from all the participants. It was drowned out, however, by the increasing pitch in the living room, where there were now at least twenty other students, who were drinking up a storm while Peggy Lee’s Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me) blared on the Victrola. Suddenly there was a pounding on the front door. Stella opened it a crack and saw Officer O’Toole from the apartment down the hall.

What’s going on in there? Officer O’Toole asked.

Just some friends getting together, said Stella.

Where are your parents?

Away until tomorrow.

In that case, I’m coming in, Officer O’Toole said.

He entered, turned off the Victrola in the living room, and said, to no one in particular, I see you kids are having a blast.

You wouldn’t know, Daddy-O, murmured one nerdy-looking boy, probably too quickly.

Officer O’Toole then pointed at the boy and said, YOU—do you want a knuckle sandwich?

No sir, the boy answered.

Then keep your fat trap shut, Officer O’Toole admonished. He instructed all the kids in the living room to sign their names in his black book. As they were doing so, Officer O’Toole heard the noise in the bedroom. His ears perked up, and he burst in, catching Sal, Artem, and the girls naked and the girls almost comatose. Well, look who’s here—the son of my friend Leonard from the Rotary, Officer O’Toole said to Artem. I’ll let you off easy this one time by only telling your father, he added.

That was the end of Artem’s youth. Artem’s mother was far angrier than his father when he told her. I failed as a mother, she said. I never should have let you go to Canarsie High, where the big men on campus are the boys who like to get drunk and are going nowhere in life. If only you could have gone to Townsend Harris, like Jonas Salk and that songwriter—what’s his name? Oh yes, Ira Gershwin—you might have been able to make something of yourself.

After graduation, Artem continued to live at home. He paid rent and tried to bend to his mother’s wishes a bit. He would shower immediately after work, removing all the sawdust collected through odd jobs as a carpenter, usually arranged by one of his older brothers. If Artem was home for dinner, he would take the dishes to the sink and sometimes even wash them. If he went out with friends or on a date, he would promise to be home by 11:30 p.m., except on weekends. He started to remember special occasions and would bring his mother flowers, sometimes for no reason. And perhaps of most impact, he would try to be home for Shabbat dinner, when his mother would light the candles in the sterling silver candlesticks brought over to America from Kiev by her own mother.

In the late 1940s, New York City began its inexorable rebirth from the Depression and World War II. Construction of the United Nations headquarters began. Modern skyscrapers were planned. Robert Moses began his quest to link boroughs by tunnels and highways. And the big band jazz scene welcomed everyone. Artem loved to go into Manhattan with friends to hear Cab Calloway at Café Zanzibar and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at the Royal Roost. Taking advantage of these offerings, of course, took money. Artem supplemented his income with occasional off-the-book sales of booze and cigarettes.

At private parties, Artem and his friends would drink heavily, listen to jazz on the Victrola, and, of course, score with women if they could. Artem never had a steady girlfriend.

Things changed abruptly in June 1950, when Artem was called up to serve in the army in the first wave of Korean War draftees. His mother was scared but looked at this as a blessing—perhaps serving the country would force him to assume some responsibility. Artem viewed the military as an opportunity to see new places and have fun with his buddies.

Chapter Three

W

hen launched in 1952, SS Andrea Doria was referred to as the most magnificent passenger ship in the world. The Italian government had commissioned her and her sister ship, the SS Cristoforo Colombo, after World War II to restore Italy’s reputation as a leader in world commerce, especially in the maritime area. The ship was named after Admiral Andrea Doria, a Genoese prince and statesman who in 1528 had led an amphibious assault that drove the French out of Genoa and reestablished the Republic of Genoa after more than a