The Secret Read Online Free

embracing and kissing one another. I don’t know if that was a French characteristic or just a family characteristic. My father probably would have called it French, since to him “the French they are a funny race.”
    He had grown up in a Jewish family in New York City, but their ways of expressing their love were not as exuberant as my mother’s.
    My father never spoke much about his parents. They were killed in an automobile accident when he was in high school. He talked a little about his Uncle Harry, who was apparently a cheap little crook who stole everything he could lay hands on, including my father’s modest inheritance.
    “One thing I learned from Uncle Harry,” he said more than once. “It’s always better to be the fuck er than the fuck ee. ”
    He struggled not to show me more affection than he showed M. Martin’s daughters, but he not could help favoring me. Even with me, though, something was always held in reserve. He was more likely to shake hands than hug, and remains that way to this day. I had to study him for a while before I came to understand that he had loved me as much as my mother did but had a different way of expressing it. I suppose I was in college, or maybe out of college, before I got that straight in my head.
    French was my first language. The Martin girls spoke French almost exclusively. They had begun their English studies, but they struggled to say anything more than “No, thank you,” or “Well, maybe a bit more.”
    When they were eight and seven, the decision was made to send them back to France for their education. The extended Martin family accepted that with enthusiasm. I have to wonder if the two girls did not leave the States with a sense of relief. I have rarely seen them since.
    Mother wanted me to continue to speak French. I worked with her on it. I do speak French.
    With only three of us now, my father sold the house in Scarsdale and we moved into an apartment on East Seventy-second Street. The apartment was comfortable. It was, in fact, luxurious.
    *   *   *
    “Seet down here, Lennie, on the edge of the bed.” She took my hand in hers. “Now your daddy is going to go on with what he was doing. You will see it does not hurt me. It is how your father shows me he loves me.”
    When I was old enough, I was enrolled in The Friends School, which was a distinguished secondary school, one of the best in New York, if not the best.
    I was an urban child. I knew the streets, though they were very different streets from the ones my father had known. There was another lesson I had to learn. When I was at Friends, I didn’t know the meaning of the term “mean streets,” and I never guessed that my father had grown up on them.
    My father—Let’s start with this: When the time came to send me to a boarding school, my father adamantly rejected the New England prep schools, though my mother thought they would be good for me. He consented to a boarding school, not to a prep school. Why? He grew up on the streets. To him, preppies were nauseating snobs. I think if he’d had his way absolutely, he would have wanted me to serve an apprenticeship with him and learn life as he had learned it. He had a sense that he knew more of life than one could ever learn in any school.
    My mother said school. And a good school.
    Hey! I don’t speak of my father in the past tense. He’s very much alive. He’s one shrewd, tough son of a …
    The more I know of him, the more I respect him.
    It’s been my ambition to be a son he can respect.
    I wonder if my mother would not have demanded of me a better ambition.

6
    I could write memoirs about the people I saw in our apartment in those all-too-few years before I went off to boarding school. They were lessons in life.
    To begin with, there was a black guy named Buddy. If he has a last name, I never heard it. His wife was named Ulla, and she was Norwegian.
    Buddy may be my father’s best friend. They go back a long way. Buddy’s weapon