A Secret Gift (11 page)

Such dark thoughts were not his alone. But the outpouring of letters that greeted the B. Virdot offer—J. L. White’s among them—signaled that its power and appeal had less to do with the prospect of receiving a check than with the affirmation it offered that others cared and were concerned for them. Despite widespread unemployment and block after block of poverty, those suffering often felt profoundly isolated and abandoned by government and society at large. Washington had not yet demonstrated its commitment to address the suffering. The New Deal had not yet made itself felt upon the land, and the poor were desperate for some evidence that their plight mattered to anyone other than themselves. B. Virdot’s gift was modest, but the gesture behind it was not. To those like J. L. White, who momentarily lost their way, overcome by the gloom all around them, B. Virdot’s offer was seen as a small beacon, but enough to help them find their way back from the precipice.

T
here is nothing to prove that any of these men—George Monnot, Frank Dick, Bill Gray, Charles Stewart, or J. L.

White—were personal friends of the real B. Virdot, Sam Stone, though in a town of Canton’s size, it would be hard to imagine that their lives would not have intersected. Sam’s store, Stone’s Clothes, was located in the heart of the downtown on the busy corner of Tuscarawas Street and Market Avenue, a minute’s walk from the courthouse, the banks, Bender’s, the First Presbyterian Church, and the
Repository
’s newsroom. All those who benefited from this gift would have walked by his shop countless times and at least known of him. But whether he knew them on a personal level or not, it was not mere affection or commercial connections that moved him to do what he did. The Sam Stone I knew always identified with the struggles of workingmen and -women.

And Sam’s own financial troubles neither began with the Depression nor ended in 1933. Today many Americans think the Depression extended a few miserable years, starting with the crash in 1929 and ending in the midthirties. But as the men and women of Canton could attest—as Sam himself knew well—the Hard Times arced across the entire decade and, but for a brief respite in the middle, never loosened their grip. There was just enough time in the midthirties for the exhausted to drop their guard and catch their breath before the second blow landed.

In Sam’s life and so many others, prosperity was that dollar bill lying on the floor that a hidden hand might snatch away. Just when Canton seemed to emerge from the Depression, as factories began to rehire and the pile of bills began to shrink, the town and the nation were hit by a devastating second wave of Hard Times that again drove unemployment skyward. In 1937, Canton’s misery was exacerbated by a series of bitter and sometimes violent strikes that disabled some of its most prominent employers—Republic Steel, Timken, and Hercules Motor Corporation—tossing additional thousands out of work. The headlines of riots, National Guardsmen, rock throwers, dynamite, and injured strikers were not Canton’s alone.

Caught in this economic downdraft were many of the town’s leading merchants, Sam Stone among them. He was forced to move the family from their stately Ridgewood Tudor into a cramped bungalow in one of the town’s modest working-class neighborhoods. My mother, then in her last years of elementary school, remembers her life being upended—twice changing schools, saying good-bye to friends, parting with some of the comforts she’d grown accustomed to, and sensing the tensions that come with such reversals. Like George and Alice Monnot before them, the Stones discovered how quickly some society friends could turn their backs on them. Short of cash, they lived for a time on traveler’s checks left over from an earlier cruise to Central America and the Panama Canal.

By September 1938, Sam Stone found himself in bankruptcy court with suppliers clamoring for the $205,000 owed them. Under a court agreement he pledged to pay his creditors thirty-five cents on the dollar. But in the years thereafter, despite the agreement, he insisted on paying off each debt in full and did, as noted in a later Dun & Bradstreet report. (That same report suggested that Sam was getting younger and younger, as it pushed his date of birth forward five years, to 1893.)

Periodic reversals were as much a part of Sam’s life and outlook as the good times, and continually chastened him to remember that the line between the down-and-out and himself was not drawn in indelible ink. I heard him say as much many times, especially in those moments when he was about to enjoy his own good fortune. A cracker with caviar would trigger a memory of a tougher time, to which he would refer, but only obliquely.

That Christmas of 1933, he knew how lucky he was and that he could just as easily have been one of the many supplicants to B. Virdot, a role he invented, I believe, in part to pay homage to the fickle nature of fortune. He always saw himself in the sunken eyes and hard-luck faces of those around him, particularly those who had fallen so far and so fast. Even decades later, he would speak of them as one might speak of a lost sibling. But unlike others in a position to help who merely said, “There but for the Grace of God, go I,” or dashed off checks to local charities, Sam Stone was driven to do something more. I am convinced that he felt the need to actually connect with them, to reach out in a human way that would provide not only momentary financial relief but some measure of spiritual comfort as well. His was an elaborate scheme whose true benefits were intended to be a multiple many times over the actual dollars that went out across the city. In 1933, when so many suffered in silence and isolation, such a release was as close to therapy as most would experience.

From the beginning, I sensed that the gift was uniquely rooted in Sam’s life, a life about which I knew next to nothing. The key was the anonymity of his gift. Promising the needy that their names would never be known was an insightful and compassionate way to persuade the souls of a beaten-down community that their candor would pose no threat to them, that they could safely express their financial and emotional needs free of the threat of exposure or humiliation. As for the donor’s anonymity, at first blush, it seemed to be a reassurance to the needy that even if they should know the giver or encounter him thereafter, they need feel no embarrassment. And it offered the donor a buffer against the potential barrage of desperate appeals and knocks at his front door.

But I suspected that behind the veil of anonymity that cloaked the donor was something more than pragmatism, more perhaps even than humility and selflessness. For my grandfather, it was also a way of concealing himself from further public inquiry, as if such scrutiny might produce more information than he wanted to disclose. For a man who loved to be the center of attention at a party but who deftly dodged any questions asked of his early years, the gift was not only an act of charity but something of a risk. No matter how slight, it raised the possibility that his true identity might be discovered, that such attention could undo the life he had so carefully stitched together, a life I would discover was rife with falsehoods and documentary fabrications. If that was his concern, it was ultimately borne out—but seventy-five years later, when the gift and the suitcase that held it found their way into the hands of his grandson.

I was determined to shine a light on those early chapters of his life that had long been denied me and all those who loved him, and to discover the link between what I came to think of as “the missing years” and the gift. This was not my first foray into Sam’s past. That had come in 1982, twenty-six years before I ever heard of B. Virdot. I had begun to research my family history for an article for the
Washington Post Sunday Magazine
. I was getting married and thinking more about my forebears—who they were and how their lives might have shaped my own. I applied my investigative skills to fleshing out the lives of my ancestors, relying on birth records, death certificates, city directories, census reports, wills, passenger lists, deeds, and other documentary evidence.

It was easy work piecing together the lives of my grandparents—all except for the branch that ended with my grandfather Sam Stone. Of his early life I knew little and could find even less. The records that had effortlessly revealed themselves to me for the other three grandparents were a cul de sac when it came to Sam. Even Pittsburgh proved to be a dead end. I tried every possible permutation of his name—Sam, Samuel, S.J
.
, Samuel John. I enlisted the help of locals and city clerks, searched old newspapers and genealogical archives. I grilled relatives. Nothing.

I had more than a passing interest in Sam. He had always been a favorite, a bad boy whose wanderlust, roving eye, and sleight of hand hinted at a life led outside the margins. From Kenya, he had returned with a zebra-skin drum for me. From Lagos, Nigeria, he came back with the name of a pen pal. I had a drawer filled with postcards and letters he’d sent from Zanzibar, Madagascar, Uganda, and other far-off lands. Both of my grandfathers were named Samuel, but I always preferred to believe that my middle name—Theodore Samuel Gup—was for him, not my father’s father, a scholarly but starched rabbi. As an investigative reporter who had spent years under the
Washington Post
’s Bob Woodward, I knew how to work the records, and yet I could find nothing of my own grandfather’s past.

Like Superman, Sam seemed to have suddenly popped up on the planet in the late 1920s, leaving a full thirty years unaccounted for. Once or twice I had asked my mother, but she too had no answers. Somehow she and everyone else had grown comfortable with the idea that Sam had no past—or that if he did, he must have had good reason to bury it.

So I turned to Minna, Sam’s widow. Earlier inquiries had gotten me nowhere, which was strange given that she and I were so close. She was my confidante, and I, hers. I told her of my frustration trying to retrace Sam’s life. She had generously walked me through her own family’s lineage, but, after fifty-four years of marriage, she seemed to know nothing of Sam’s. I pressed the case.

That’s when she dropped all pretense of ignorance and made me promise—actually swear an oath—that as long as she was alive I would not ask anything more of Sam’s past. The reporter in me tried to get at the reason for her resistance. I got nowhere. Finally, I surrendered and gave her my word. I would not delve into Sam’s life as long as she was alive. That was that. But it did not stop me from wondering what could possibly be so sensitive. Sam was dead. As a devoted grandson, I dropped the matter completely. But as an investigative reporter I could not resist running the universe of possible scenarios that might explain her demands of me. Was Sam a bigamist? Did he have another family that might come forward and claim his estate? Had he been a wanted man? Was Sam Stone even his real name? And finally, did Minna have the answers, or merely fear them?

Long before, there had been signs that something was amiss; I just didn’t see them. I had some vague knowledge growing up in Canton that several of his relatives—my relatives—lived around us, but I didn’t know their names or of what relation they were to me. In fact, I was never allowed to mention them. Doing so brought a sharp rebuke from my mother. It hadn’t occurred to me that she could be protecting me from something.

We lived on Twenty-second Street Northeast. Just up the street was a small house that I passed each weekday on my walks to and from Belle Stone Elementary School. I was forbidden from stopping there or talking to the people who lived there. I had come to look upon the house as a kind of Hansel and Gretel cottage where I might be taken captive or transformed. Many years later, as an adult, I learned that it was the home of one of Sam’s brothers. In my mind, it had some vague association with murder and mayhem. When I was seven I had overheard something, snippets of conversation about “murders,” the details of which would not make themselves known to me for years to come.

There were other hints that not all was as it appeared in Sam’s life. In 2005, when my grandmother Minna’s health was failing, I discovered an ancient strip of film, from which I had prints made. They were taken the day of Minna and Sam’s wedding in 1927. In the black-and-white photo, Sam and Minna are embracing in the backyard of my great-grandmother’s home. I noticed that no one else was in the photos. I had two of the pictures framed and sent to Minna. Later, when I visited her at the nursing home, I saw them by her bedside. I asked what had become of the wedding party. There wasn’t one, she said.

On January 13, 2005, my grandmother Minna left us. Her ashes were buried beside Sam’s remains in Canton’s Westlawn Cemetery. It didn’t occur to me then, indeed not until three years later, when my mother gave me the suitcase, that I was now free to follow the path of Sam’s life wherever it might lead.