A Book of Great Worth Read Online Free PDF Page A

ruddy cheeks grew even redder and a vein in his thick neck jumped.
    My father frowned but said nothing. Dealing with the children was child’s play compared to keeping this man satisfied. Any barnyard error committed by my father was met by a display of temper and curses in German by Schmidt, who seemed to be testing him, and gradually it dawned on my father that sooner or later the older man would no longer be satisfied with apologies and acquiescence, that Schmidt was seeking an opportunity to knock him to the ground in a display of masculine superiority. My father was not afraid of a fight – even before leaving school at thirteen he’d had his share of schoolyard tussles, and could usually hold his own – but was fond of a quote he’d come across in his reading of Shakespeare, that the better part of valour was discretion. My father had no doubt Schmidt could easily trounce him, and he’d resolved to avoid provoking the farm manager. He gritted his teeth, held his tongue.
    The Pearlman country estate, my father had quickly learned, was a working farm of nearly sixty acres. In the large red barns, there were stanchions for twenty milk cows, which grazed in a meadow along the stream he’d noticed on his arrival. There were also chickens, a black and white border collie and an aging horse named Yarmulke. On the other side were fields of hay, soybeans and corn. The farm was operated by this disagreeable fellow Schmidt, a Prussian Jew who struck my father as more the former than the latter. He was tall and thickset and wore jodhpurs and shiny boots, in which he walked with a slight limp. My father took an immediate dislike to him, although he became fond of Betty, the young housekeeper, who was his wife. Schmidt, a veteran of the Prussian army, had been farm manager for several years; the Pearlmans inherited him when they bought the place the year before. He ran the farm as if it were a battalion, but his wife, a shiksa who’d grown up in a small nearby town, was sweet-natured, patient and flirtatious. She made it her business to inquire of my father about his favourite dishes, and things he disliked.
    “If you are cooking it, I’m sure I’ll like anything set before me,” he assured her.
    The farmyard formed a triangle, with the barn at one corner, the small white house the Schmidts lived in, the original farmhouse, at the second and the Pearlmans’ large new house at the third.
    The Pearlmans owned an apartment in the city, two floors in a large brownstone on upper Central Park West, but were spending the summer at the farm. Robert Pearlman took the train to Peekskill on Friday afternoons, always immaculately dressed despite the heat of the ride, and spent the weekend with his family. Monday mornings, he went back to the city, where he was looked after during the week by the black woman they employed. To the amusement of the family, this good woman, who had been raised on a sharecrop farm in Alabama, had no interest in going to the country, not for the summer, not even for a weekend, so my father never met her.
    My father had heard about people so rich they could have two homes, but he’d never met any before, and he found the situation he was in – the elegant Pearlmans, the blustery Schmidt, the demanding children, not to mention the task he’d been set – formidable and inhibiting. But he quickly found that it was easy for him to fit in, though he doubted he would ever reach the point where he would be comfortable.
    Within the confines of the farmyard triangle, it seemed to my father, was an artificial, idyllic world. The Pearlmans, despite their wealth, were Socialists and be lieved, to the extent possible, in equality. Everyone was part of one large family, himself included, and racial and class distinctions disappeared. Although the Schmidts had their own house, everyone ate Betty’s wonderful meals together in the Pearlman dining room, the hired staff sharing the same food as the employers, and side