The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

John Angel

Robert Rodman
frrodman@aol.com

            1942.   The three-year old market is shaped to fit into the lot created by the convergence of Harvard and Washington at an acute angle, transected by a short street that leaves an empty space in front of the store.  This little triangular area is grandly called Harvard Square, and the address of the market is 10 Harvard Square.  Large windows from 10 Harvard Square face down a broad street lined with shops, called Brookline Village.  The store is like a manor house, the most powerful commercial presence among a host of small businesses, many thriving.  Looking up toward the market from The Village, the main entrance to 10 Harvard Square appears to the right, at the corner.  Above the entrance is a large shield-shaped sign, neon-lit at night, in red, white, and blue.  On it are emblazoned the words "The Food Center." 

            It is nearly a supermarket in the days before the term has been coined.  The meat is still sold by men who stand behind cool white showcases from which customers make their choices.  Eddie Hill, for one, reaches into the case, weighs the selection, wraps it up so that it does not leak through the white slick paper, closes it with paper tape and writes the price on the package with a red wax crayon.   He lays the package on the counter. "Anything else today, Mrs. McGillicuddy?"  He is a tall, barrel-shaped man with a bright red shining face.  His wife's name is Belle.

           "Not today, Eddie." 

            The customer moves to the produce section, picks what he or she wants, and it too is packaged, put in a brown bag by someone like bushy-haired Harold Gussman, gruffer and rougher than the meat salesman.  The produce men, moving around sacks of onions and potatoes, arranging displays of carrots and beets, celery, and tomatoes, could be working in the fields at that very moment, whereas the meat salesmen are insulated by white coats and orderly demeanor from the slaughter that yields their goods. 

            Only in the grocery section, where the cans are displayed on shelves to be removed by customers who place them in a shopping cart, is there no need for a salesman.  A young blonde man with a club foot wheels boxes of items out from the warehouse, removes the lids with a razor blade, stamps a price on one end of each can or package, and makes sure the displays are neat.  The refrigerated cases that houses eggs and dairy products may also allow for direct removal by customers, and these are a portent of the future of the meat department.  One day it too will consist of such open cases full of pre-packaged meats, and when that day comes the salesmen will appear awkward and exposed in front of the cases, and in a sense suddenly jobless, naked of purpose, for all they will have to do is arrange and rearrange, no longer choosing, trimming, weighing, packaging.  

            Customers pay at one of three check-out booths, still without conveyor belts.  The big cast-iron pre-electronic cash registers jink and rumble as each item is punched in.  And when everything has been bagged, a customer may notice the bakery cases just beyond, and be attended to by attractive young women who tie cake boxes with string, or purchase liquor from salesmen at another counter, in what would be known as a package store if it existed apart from a market, on its own.  A package store, New England euphemism, the shame of liquor, of alcohol, in Boston, where a good percentage of the population are drunks.  Right across the street there are two taverns.  You can smell the heavy humid odor of beer as you pass them by. 

            The Food Center is a profitable store.  The owner has found a way to get hold of large supplies of meat.  It is rationed of course, just as butter is, and tires and gasoline.  People bring in their coupon books, and they also bring in coffee tins full of solidified fat drippings, bacon grease, lard, the leftovers, for which they receive 3 cents a pound at the meat counter.  The customers are older men and women, particularly women, with their children, and the occasional 4-F who isn't in uniform.  It is a colorful store, well-maintained, efficient, and the large windows are covered with hand-painted signs announcing the weekend's buys. "Ten lbs. potatoes, 89 cents."  "Top round steak, 59 cents/ lb."  The full-time sign painter, Karl, has a little studio up an iron spiral staircase behind the meat department.  Inside there are heavy rolls of paper, jarsful of brushes, cans of paint, a spray gun from which little clouds of aromatic-smelling pink and blue and yellow emanate when he is at work.  He leans over his large plywood table with his brush poised, carefully producing the lettering.  He smokes incessantly and is an alcoholic, good-natured, face scarred by acne.  His work increases as the week heads toward Thursday, when the ad in the local newspaper, the Citizen, is placed, full back-page with all the items on sale.  The paper comes out on Friday and on Thursday night his signs are pasted high up on the windows that face Harvard Square.  The weekend business will be big, as usual.  This is a good store to get whatever you need.  It is a thriving store.  The owner is getting rich.  On a Saturday, or a Friday night, it is full of customers. 

            On Friday, business in the fish department is good.  Friday is still fish day.  The small ice-filled case is packed with defrosting fillet (the "t" is pronounced) of sole and cod, pieces of halibut, swordfish, and ranks of fresh haddock, with their dilated target eyes, rainbow-colored mackerel, tubs of scallops, and lobsters twisting and turning on their icy beds, from Maine, at 49 cents a pound.  If a customer wants one halved, the fish man, Harry Chimitz, will take his cleaver and split him alive.  He is a humorous man, short, with a graying mustache, smart, a man who never lived up to his intelligence.  The fish smells are rich and good if you can stand them and even the guts he removes with crafted blade movements, are clean, cold, organic, into the bucket with the rest.  He keeps things clean.  Codfish cakes are another item on a Friday.  Brown, breaded, cold, ready for the oven.   And shiny smelts by the hundreds, fresh from the sea; yellow slabs of smoked finnan haddie, a strange name which could be Gaelic; stainless steel containers of pink curled shrimp.  The Irish crowd Harry's counter to obey the Friday rule.  The boss is getting rich.  Ten or fifteen other people are waiting in front of the meat cases, five salesmen waiting on them, the swinging doors which lead into the meat-cutting area behind the wall in constant motion. 

            Back there, a man at a block, short, Sicilian Dominic Maiocca is preparing chickens.  With swift movements of the cleaver, he cuts off the head and feet, pulls out the guts, deftly cuts the green gall bladder off the liver, removes the gizzard, slits it open to wash away the sandy particles, wraps it up with the liver and the heart in a piece of tissue paper and places it in the hole left by the removed guts.  The chicken is cold, the work done quickly.  They accumulate on the wooden table in front of his block.

            Nearby is the old, smallish refrigerator, with rusting metal shelves, home to poultry, fish, and barrels of corned beef and pickles slowly aging in the ice-cold brine, hoisted out with a hook as needed.

            Beyond Dominic and up a short ramp is the recently added-on large cutting room and refrigerator, where Pete DiGiorgio and his assistants break down sides of beef, cuts up whole lambs and pork loins, to produce excellent cuts for roasting, broiling, boiling, all sorts of chops and steaks and roasts for placement in the cold trays to go into the meat case.  The refrigerator in the back is quite large and inside it is refreshingly cold, especially in those pre-air conditioning days, especially when, in the summer, a Biblically humid heat wave descends on Boston and vicinity.   Everything is in order on the shelves and the unbutchered meat hangs on hooks in the right places.  The surface of sides of beef is fat and dry with blue stencils which display its quality: prime, choice, good, utility, commercial.  Whole lambs, headless, gutless, footless, left with a pair of kidneys still attached, are also dry.  Even though the living animal can easily be imagined, they too are already meat, and still called what they have been, unlike beef and pork and veal.  There is always a tray of ground beef, the highest quality, and once in a while someone reaches in and eats a raw clod of it.  In the little office near the door through which new shipments of meat are unloaded there are first-aid materials for those cuts that are an inevitable part of wielding such sharp instruments.  The blood runs, the white gauze and tape are applied, the wound heals, though it is also true that on a rare occasion someone cuts off a finger joint and this is not yet the age when they can be sewn back on.  The floors are covered with sawdust.

            The men wear white coats which reach the knees, and over these, stained white aprons, tied in front.  They are intent on what they are doing but also given to a joke, a sexual innuendo.   Pete is an ugly man in his forties.  He has a small moustache and a slight leer when in conversation.  He is toothless and his plates click as he talks and sucks on the cigar stub which he carries in his mouth at all times, as he works away at his block, tossing this or that piece of trim into the corner of a stainless steel shelf at the same level as his block.  The pile grows until there is enough to grind into the cheap meat called hamburg that will be presented in a tray, with a cold, thick metal spatula for dividing off what a customer wants, onto a sheet of paper to be weighed and wrapped.   The bright fluorescent ceiling tubes illuminate every corner of the workroom.

            The manager of the meat department is Bill Rodman, the brother of the boss, Ben, and of the general manager, Joe.  Bill is not himself a butcher, but a manager.  Four men work for him out front, but the butchers who work out of sight, while responding to his requests, do not exactly work for him.  They are independent.  They answer to Ben or to Joe.  Bill is about five foot eleven, has a large head with black hair that is beginning to turn gray, and is slicked back.  He smiles easily, wears rimless glasses, has big calloused hands, and is the favorite of customers.  He will find exactly what they need and some of the women flirt with him.  Mrs. Ogilvie and Mrs. Donovan, best friends, often stand and smile and laugh in his presence.  He is devoted to his work because he is a Rodman, loyal to his brother, and he charges extra for exceptional service and exceptionally good meat.  Professors at Harvard Medical School and their wives wait for him.  But the woman who comes every day at 5 o'clock for a pig kidney to serve her cat will accept service from anyone.  Bill is frustrated because he has not been promoted by his brother to a higher managerial position.  Instead, Ben has found someone else to supervise the store.  He has found a man named John Angel.

            John Angel is slightly taller than Bill, white-haired and always well-barbered.  You can smell his cologne when he walks by.  He wears the same long white coat as Bill, but without an apron, and he moves about the store at a measured pace with his hands grasped behind his back.  He does not tell Bill what to do.  He observes, but he does not speak, to Bill at any rate.  Probably he speaks to Ben directly.  But the time has not come to challenge Bill's lowly position.  Ben is not ready to get rid of his brother.  There is still an ongoing conflict, and Ben feels that he owes something to Bill, even if he does not want to elevate him.  What he owes is something of a question, and whether it is the loyalty of one brother to another or some sense of having stolen something from Bill that Bill deserves, is an unknown.  There is talk of shares inherited from their father, who has just died, shares which were signed over to Ben in the confidence that Ben would do what was right.  Ben is a ferocious, self-centered, drinking man, hell-bent on success at any cost.  He is a large, broad man, who speaks with such force that he frightens people.  He wears a fresh white shirt and tie and has a round face with heavy lids that narrow his eyes.  Many of his employees refer to him as Papa.  Even Bill, in conversation with others, might use that term, even though Ben is his brother.  It is a measure of the degree to which they are intimidated, they have become children.  They worship his power and make obeisance in order to stay in his good graces and keep their jobs.  But it is more than the practical wish, it is the personal fear that makes them speak of Papa.  They have a union, which meets every so often.  Bill has to belong to the union but does not attend its meetings, either because others would be uncomfortable in the presence of a man whose loyalty is to his brother, or because Bill himself always wants to maintain that loyalty, and to attend a union meeting would place him on the other side.  If he overhears anything of interest, he quickly tells Ben about it, which shows his loyalty.

            Ben has married into money and is on the rise.  He has an office above the triangular market.  In order to get to him, a person has to traverse the length of a thirty foot room with five ranks of desks, past the loyal accountant, Harry Sacks, a stubby bald man with stubby fingers and greasy skin, who is constantly counting money at a very small desk, and is utterly loyal to Ben.  Harry helps Ben steal money from the corporation, though only the two of them know.  Past Harry, a visitor goes on into the office of the owner, who sits behind a desk at the far end, with a small window to his right, a window with a venetian blind on it.  That window overlooks the market from just below its twenty-five foot ceiling.  If he chose to look out he could see all but the grocery department.  People who work in the store are constantly aware of the presence of the boss, though no one has ever seen his face peering down.  The venetian blind is always in the closed position, but there is the sense of potential observation at all times.  And always in Ben's mind is the question of stealing, always the supicion that people are pilfering food.  John Angel's job includes continuous observation of the flow of goods.  He is a silent man, one who paces, and hardly ever speaks.  He does not have to belong to the union.  Bill Rodman's pride is injured every time he sees him, for he represents the threat that one day even his little fiefdom, the meat department, will be taken away and he will work not just for his older brother, and even his brother who is ten years younger, both Rodmans at least, but a complete outsider, John Angel.  He will have to obey John Angel.

            I used to hear the name John Angel, not knowing what it could mean. I did not understand the nature of the struggle and conflict, my father's hurt pride, except that, as children do, I did feel something of fear and resentment, partly because John Angel was a topic of discussion far more often than he seemed to warrant.  Who was this John Angel? 

            Children can sense class distinctions early and easily because they are not encumbered by social pretense.   They have not yet learned to lie to themselves.  Gradually I came to know that my family was not related in a social way to the families of his brothers, or almost not.  It was true that the rare Bar-Mitzvah brought them to the temple, or the rented hall for a reception, and the amount Ben gave was always a matter of interest and somewhat more than the others did, the others being mainly my mother's family of eleven brothers and sisters and their children.  We had slightly more to do with my father's sister Lily.  At Christmas time there was always the question of how much the bonus would be, and I would catch snippets of conversation that gave me the answer.  Five hundred dollars sticks in my mind and seemed an immense amount, but it was probably already discounted and spent by the time it arrived.  That was the moment at which there was a hint of compensation to my father.

            I was 8 years old in 1942 when I started to go to Hebrew School and when I heard discussions of John Angel I naturally tended to visualize an angel, but a mean one, a dangerous one, with the white coat and the hands behind his back suggesting wings.  Shoulder blades seemed like vestigial wings.  When I ran with a towel streaming from my neck, thinking for a few seconds that I was Superman, the dream seemed possible.  I was once introduced to John Angel and what I chiefly remember is smooth skin and a balding head and very blue eyes, a smile, the tall man bending over to shake my hand, and my father beaming with pride.  I think that if he were alive today, John Angel might wear a short pony-tail, a touch of conceit for the completely composed and self-assured person that he appeared to be.  Perhaps I am thinking of the angels in a movie called "On The Wings of Desire."  In a certain sense, I was the real Rodman thing, a smart boy who was going to be a doctor, and I gave, even in the condition of mere potential, a kind of cachet to my father, as if he had already succeeded in demonstrating that from him came something better, that people such as Ben would have to take notice of his value.  I say "a real Rodman thing," but it isn't exactly true, since I was not an aggressive child, or not an openly aggressive one, but more of a shy, introverted child without any interest in being a businessman, and without any ambition to make lots of money.  But all of this was deeply discouraging as, day by day, I absorbed the knowledge of my father's  frustration, his sense of being dependent on the whim of his brother, the degradation that he chose to absorb rather than to dismiss him completely and set out on his own.  During World War II, when my father was between thirty-five and forty, he had not yet arrived at the kind of discouragement that is unaccompanied by hope.  He thought perhaps his chance would come.  There was talk of another market, a huge one, the first real supermarket of the new era which was going to dawn once the war was over, and perhaps then he would be regarded as loyal enough and good enough to be promoted into another category, not just a meat manager anymore.  Meanwhile, he got up early, put on his brown plaid lumberman's jacket and misshapen felt hat and drove his 1939 Chevrolet, the gift of Ben, from Dorchester to Brookline, getting through the days, with an afternoon off a week, though he worked until 9:30 Friday nights, and, of course, all day Saturday.  He came home with the Boston Traveler or The tabloid Record.  When, on a Saturday night, we all drove up Blue Hill Avenue to get some bagels from the factory, and an early copy of the Sunday  Advertiser, I would see what was called the paperboy, an older man with a deformed face, who had a big cloth pocket on his belt darkened by the coins which weighed it down like a metallic paunch.  The Traveler was three cents, The Record two, The Advertiser ten.  Its masthead bore an engraving of a Shakespearean character, Puck, and the motto: What Fools These Mortals Be.

            My father had two jobs during the war.  The other one was driving a cab at night.  He worked for the Town Taxi.  Once in a while he parked his cab in front of our house.  I heard him argue with my mother late at night when he would come home to tell her that he was going to drive someone to Providence, or Portland, Maine, and she would protest and he would fly into a rage and sometimes hit the wall with his fist.  He stood to make extra money with a flat rate for such a long trip.  Or perhaps there were other women involved.  I never thought of it at the time.  But I argued with myself, lying in bed and frightened, trying to figure out whose side I was on, his or hers, and I never could arrive at a definitive answer, because while I sympathized with her as the victim of his rage, I also sympathized with his frustration as he tried to deal with a whiny voice, a pleading voice, saying "Bill, Bill," as if he wanted more than anything to burst out into the open with the full strength of his enormous aggression, to find a proper target, a proper vehicle for his potential, so that he could exist in a roomier world.  It was as if he had become confined, and was becoming ever more confined, by his dependency on his brother, and probably as well by his dependency on his wife, who was herself confined to the home, her horizons narrowed by agoraphobia.  How she became agoraphobic I do not know.  I know that it worsened during my childhood, that in the beginning she could take me downtown on the subway or to Farragut Beach in South Boston on the streetcars, but that years later she could not leave the house unaccompanied by an adult.  Mrs. Hirsch brought dresses to the house for her to choose from and by then she had gained considerable weight.  She had Parkinson's Disease, which showed up in the form of a continuous tremor on her left side, especially in her hand.  This tremor disappeared when she was in a state of action, as when playing ragtime piano, which showed her deeper spirit.  She tended to sweat profusely on occasion - it seems to have been a family trait.  She was a bright woman, but jealous of her husband, and she discouraged him from working late.  She wanted him home with her and I'm sure he wanted to be away from her.  They made a pair.  They lost their first son to appendicitis when the boy was just under three and they never did recover from that loss, the focus of unhappiness as they had two more children, boys, and went forward in life, groping in the dark for good times the way most people seem to do. 

            So my father struggled to get hold of more money than his brother paid him (thirty-five dollars a week during The War) by driving a cab.  He did without sleep to accumulate enough to buy a house.  On two occasions he went to Ben for a down payment and was turned down, so he tried to do it alone.  And they did buy a three-decker right after the war, 14 Evelyn Street, Mattapan, lived in the middle floor flat, and sold it a year or so later to break even, I don't know why.  It was a tree-lined street, rather well-kept, and there was a park at the foot of the street, Norfolk Street, where my brother and cousin and I played baseball in the double tennis court and I broke Babe Ruth's record one season by hitting 66 balls over the fence.

            John Angel was white, he wore white, but he was the Angel of Death.  There was no sense of the cherubic beneficence and innocence of Catholic angels.  But Catholics were a scary group, Catholic kids like the twin boys named McKay who lived across the street and "went to" something called "Confession."  Someone told me that they went into a dark place and told a priest what they did wrong, though they were only 7 years old, and it frightened me.  How could they have done anything wrong?  Yet it suggested a subterranean world in which even a child is held responsible for doing wrong, even a child can be brought before a court to be punished.  It was black, this side of Catholicism, even though the white, white dresses of young girls on the porch of St. Brendan's on a Sunday morning suggested to me, if I could have put into words what I felt, a kind of cheapness, flimsiness that was the very opposite of the substantial dress of Jews, even poor, broken-down embarrassingly voluble and emotional Jews.  To wear white was a psychological shortcut that expressed profound denial, a way to glibly dwell in a world removed from the one we all seemed to be in.  It was a repudiation of reality, which was something like a sin, juxtaposed with all the talk of sinning and confessing, doing penance and being forgiven.  It suggested to me statuary in churches and pictures of Jesus, as if the primitive hunger for pictorialization, to concretize religious ideas, were sanctioned as good.  This was clearly a trangression of the second commandment against the worship of graven images and I was beginning to know about the worship of the golden calf.  Catholics dwelt in a black-and-white frightening world and John Angel, even if white, or perhaps off-white, was himself a moving piece of sculpture, nearly dead in my mind, an embalmed figure that could move about the Food Center (or perhaps it was Food Centre), practically float from Produce to Bakery to Grocery to Liquor, a symbolic figure and presence that frightened my father too, made him get ready to fight for his little place, put him in touch with a sense of either complying once and for all with his brother's willingness to insult him publicly, in front of all the employees that knew he was a Rodman but witnessed the limits of being one, or coming out into the open with his suffering and discouragement and fear in such a way that it might lead to the end of that part of his life.  He might be on his own then and there was no assurance that with an eighth grade education, on his own, he could get anywhere at all.  Perhaps we would become poverty-stricken then, be like the people in the slums, those who had been cast down in the Depression, and have no family recourse in the event of an emergency.  He might not be able to support us if he gave up the dream of being rewarded one day.  Or perhaps Ben was the last childish vestige of his mother's love, lost to him around the age of 17, when she died.  He took off with a friend after that and got as far as Atlantic City, working his way through Harlem first, and writing an occasional card to his sister Lily asking for money to buy food.  He was a frightened boy, adventurous but frightened, and Ben had the power to run a business, to take over his father's little South End market and make it work, build it into something bigger and better.  He hitched his star to Ben's and swung way below, untouched except for Bar-Mitzvahs, waiting for a chance to get a piece of the action.

            As an adult I was and am revolted by the cult of angels, good-luck kitsch in the so-called New Age.  These putative symbols of goodness suggest a profound denial, and even undercut the kind of religion that can deepen our lives, if religion is the means by which we remind ourselves that there are sacred moments in this earth-bound life.  But I didn't come to it until late.   I learned about the Angel of Death from Passover stories, how it came over the houses in Egypt and killed the first-born son of every family, except for the forewarned Jews who slaughtered a lamb and rubbed its blood on their doorposts.  But in my family the first-born son had actually died, and I attributed his death to some failure in the family, something defective which showed up this way.  We had not received the word in time, there was something wrong.  Nowadays we would have been called dysfunctional, what with my father's dilemmas and my mother's illnesses.  I took the story of the Angel of Death seriously and in that fateful year, 1943, when we were between defeat and victory in World War II and my older sister's boyfriends were getting killed in Europe, lively kids like Lenny Sibley who drummed his sticks on any available surface, I saw a small white dog dead in the rain between two large temples on Woodrow Avenue.  It's sticky crimson blood clung half-clotted to its white fur and washed into the gutter, anemic and diluted, while the fur stirred in the wind.  I thought at first that it was a dog named Winky who lived on our street, but this was too far away from home.  It must have been another.  I remembered to tell the rabbi, Rabbi Miller the next time I went to Hebrew School.  I asked him if this could have been the work of the Angel of Death.  I looked up at his black-bearded face for an answer but instead, he started to scowl at me and yell and I could not tell what he was saying and immediately he lifted up one of the wooden folding chairs on which we students sat two afternoons a week, in a large alcove in the back of the temple and he threw the chair into the temple itself and broke it.  I ran out the door in terror, not understanding what I had said that made him angry.  Only later could I speculate, only after the war was over and the pictures of the death camps were published, that he knew that the Jews were being destroyed and I might have been hinting that in some way they had not got the word either, just like my family, and God had not saved them, God had abandoned them to the Nazis.  But that was only a theory.  I do not know why he threw the chair, unless perhaps I was just an annoying child who thought too much.  I did not have self-esteem in great quantity, only what went with being smart.  I thought actually that I was an annoying child, a resentful child, angry at my younger brother for breaking his way by birth into my prior and privileged condition as the only replacement for the lost brother, and unhappy with my mother and father, unhappy to find myself a part of the totality of conflict in which we all dwelt.

            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