The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
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John Angel
(continued)
Robert Rodman
frrodman@aol.com
My confused feeling about angels was elaborated when I sat in the back seat of my father's car with Brownie, my beagle of about a week's duration, on our way to the Angel (probably with two "l's) Memorial Hospital, where Brownie was going to be "put to sleep" for being so uncontrollable, running around our small rooms and dirtying the corners whenever he felt the urge. I do not know whether he was simply a hyperactive dog or whether my parents knew nothing about training a dog, probably both. Angels were supposed to be good, but they seemed to be associated with death, and my mother's oft-repeated comment about Sonny to the effect that "the good die young" only added to my stock of paradox which included the idea that "artists have to suffer." What sort of a world was this? Hadn't I better restrain my own capacity for pleasure if I wanted to go on living?
John Angel was the one who got the job my father desperately wanted in the Food Center. He had the attributes of a symbol and a portent, the embodiment of my uncle's decision to deny my father what would have made him happy, and the possible, or probable intent to subject him to further humiliation. Undoubtedly he regarded this as just another attempt to improve his business. John Angel was closely connected with God, Papa, Uncle Ben. He had an inside track with the boss.
Before the war was finished, he left the Food Center, for reasons I have never known. My father breathed a sigh of relief, thinking then that he might become store manager himself, the new John Angel, this time a real Rodman. But it was not to be. And when the big supermarket opened in 1947, called The Food Fair, a name borrowed from an already existing chain of stores that stretched from New York to Florida, my father was passed over again and remained at the Food Center, now known to insiders as "Number 10," to distinguish it from the new store on Harvard Street ("Five Twenty-Five"). A new man was brought in to operate that much larger meat department and the grocery manager there, Nate Raines, had the prestige of pacing back and forth in front of the fifteen state-of-the-art check-out counters, as if he were a ship's captain observing from the bridge, in his clean white coat, shirt and tie, smiling a PR smile. All my father could do was observe the construction process, and then pay a visit every so often to the thriving, brightly-lit market. He showed excitement as he took me through, a reflex enthusiasm and pride to be connected by blood to such a large undertaking, even though he remained on the outside. Every so often, he might have a little visit with his brother Ben, and perhaps this maintained some sense of a connection, a nascent brotherliness on which he might pin his hopes. I never heard directly from him exactly what he felt, but as time passed, I could begin to imagine.
Still, even before I turned 14, I was sent down to Five Twenty-Five to go to work as a box boy, to serve an initation into what was supposed to be a family business. Another Rodman on the scene. I had to interrupt my work for a month and a half until I actually turned fourteen and got my "working papers," which meant a social security number. My father took me to the local cooperative bank in Brookline, right up the street from The Food Center, where I bought shares which required monthly payment. How hard he tried to teach me the value of saving, with which he himself had unsuccessfully struggled for so long. I did not cease to work weekends at The Food Center for 10 years after. I worked for my father, as I grew taller than he, and even on weekends when, struggling to continue with the freshman crew at Harvard, I had to drive to Cambridge for a Saturday practice, and get back as quickly as I could. I worked for my father in the meat department until I was in the middle of medical school, but in the beginning of my work life, at thirteen and fourteen I did not feel comfortable at The Food Fair, even if I did have a kind of pride in my name, and I did not like sitting in a basement room with pipes on the walls eating my lunch in the half hour provided. As usual, I felt rather alone and awkward. It was strange that I would be placed there while my father had remained right where he was, a non-participant in the new post-war surge of prosperity. I knew I would not be competing for anything in that business anyway, and this gave me some amount of freedom. I was not even tempted to join the executive ranks. I knew I'd be a doctor, and I'd wear a long white coat too, without an apron, and the work I would do would be grounded in a different reality.
Published: December 15, 2002