Even though the coffin was closed, I couldn’t bring myself to walk in front of it and greet the Goldin family in condolence. I thought about it on the drive over to the Piser Funeral Home, but given the circumstances of Buddy Goldin’s death, I could think of nothing condoling to say. I signed the visitors’ book on my way in, so that, in a week or so, the family would see that Dr. Philip Hirsh had been among the mourners, but that was the best I could do.
I took a seat twenty or so rows behind the family—Buddy’s parents, his wife who was still in her thirties, his two young daughters. Staring at their backs, I considered how sorrow destroyed posture. Sid Goldin wore his yarmulke at an odd angle at the back of his head, and his expensive suit seemed, in his grief, a poor fit, riding up on his shoulders. Jean Goldin seemed to have shrunk with age and the year-round suntan that she always had now gave her a leathery look that came across as hard and unsympathetic. Sid and Jean Goldin, whom life seemed so singularly to have favored, now drew this most bitter of life’s cards: the death of a son as they were approaching old age.
The rabbi, a small man a little too pleased with his powers of enunciation, was sermonizing not very convincingly upon the mercifulness of death. He referred to Buddy, whom he had pretty clearly never met, as Bernard, with a strong accent on the second syllable, which made it feel as if those of us who were Buddy’s old friends had never met the man the rabbi was talking about, either. Of course, at no point during this sermon, or during the entire service, did he mention that Buddy Goldin was a suicide.
The other item that went unmentioned in the rabbi’s sermon was the absence of Buddy’s twin brother Eddie. Twins though they were, Buddy and Eddie Goldin were very different in temperament and, even though unmistakably brothers, also in looks. Both were dark, but Buddy’s hair was straight and Eddie’s curly. Buddy, at 6′2″, grew to be two inches taller than Eddie, who was stockier, more muscular than his brother. As kids, Buddy had had bad skin and Eddie a chipped front tooth (later capped). Buddy always seemed cool and a little detached, while Eddie was hot-tempered, a battler. Yet they always got on well together, at least as far as anyone knew. I never saw them argue, or heard either brother ever say anything against the other—and I used to see a lot of them. Their junior year in high school their father bought them a two-tone Oldsmobile convertible—a Starfire, I think it was called—with a dramatic red and white paint job and leather seats, and they shared the car without argument or any kind of quibbling whatsoever.
I knew that there had been a serious falling out between Eddie Goldin and his parents, and that Eddie had broken with them. He was variously reported as teaching in Thailand, Taiwan, or Zimbabwe—nobody seemed to know for sure. Nor was it clear if he even knew about Buddy’s leap from his twenty-third-floor law office at One North LaSalle two days before, late on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. My own guess is that, had he known, despite his trouble with his parents, Eddie would have managed to be here.
I went to grammar school with the Goldin boys at Daniel Boone School, in West Rogers Park, and afterward the three of us were the only kids from Boone to cross the line at Howard Street separating Chicago from Evanston and go to Evanston Township High School. Buddy and Eddie Goldin were sent to Evanston because they had already established themselves as extraordinary athletes and E.T.H.S. offered coaching of a kind not available in the Chicago public high schools. My father, who was a pharmacist, sent me to E.T.H.S. because he was intent on my becoming the physician—which I am today, an internist—that he would have been had the Depression not intervened. It cost six hundred bucks a year in those days to send a kid from Chicago to E.T.H.S. I knew this represented a serious expenditure for my father, who ran his drugstore on Devon Avenue with a careful eye for small economies. Even now I can remember him carting the bundles of newspapers into the store at seven on deathly cold Chicago winter mornings. For the Goldins the extra twelve hundred to send both their sons to high school was of no real concern. Money, for them, was never a problem.
We lived in a six-flat building on Washtenaw Avenue, less than a block from the drugstore, which made it easier for my father to open at seven o’clock seven mornings a week and close at nine-thirty every night but Sunday, when he closed at five, and still be able to slip home for a half-hour at lunch and a full hour or so at dinner. We ate in the kitchen, except for Friday night and Jewish holidays. I had my own bedroom and so did my sister Sheila, who is two years older than I, and so of course did our parents. We all shared one bathroom. We had in our living room, among other furniture, a white couch covered in plastic; we went into the living room only when we had company, which, given my father’s work schedule, was rarely.
The Goldins lived only six or seven blocks away, on Lunt, between Francisco and Sacramento, but in what seemed to me another world. Theirs was an eleven-room house, built since the war, red face brick all the way around, with two large bay windows and a connected garage, set out on a triple lot. A crew of Mexicans took care of the lawns and shrubbery. A black woman named Jessie, who lived in a maid’s room off the kitchen, did the cooking, and did it extremely well. The double garage held Sid Goldin’s blue Fleetwood and his wife’s cream-colored Chrysler Town & Country convertible with wood paneling on the sides. Along the inside walls of the garage were golf bags with pastel-colored covers for the woods, tennis and badminton racquets, an archery target, and other sports equipment, all of it of the best quality.
Inside, the Goldins’ house gave off a feeling of elegant, expensive, yet somehow casual comfort. Had it belonged to us, my mother, I am sure, would have had all the furniture in the house covered in plastic, or else had herself and her family laminated, and I know for a certainty that none of us would have been allowed to walk on the plush white carpeting with our shoes on. The largest portion of the basement, painted a cool white, was a den and trophy room. Green leather couches and chairs were set around the room. A bar was at one end, a large television set at the other; off in a corner was a slot machine. Glass cases were arranged around the walls at various points in the room. These contained athletic trophies. Some had been won by Sid Goldin, who lettered in both football and basketball at the University of Illinois in the 1930’s; above one of the cases there was a picture of him, posed with a football in one hand and with the other arm in what passed in such corny photos of the day for a stiff arm, and another photo of him, the lone Jewish face, seated among the members of the 1934 University of Illinois basketball team. Most of the trophies in the room, though, belonged to Jean Goldin, who was a serious amateur golfer—serious enough, I was told, to have had a national ranking when in her twenties. One glass case was given over to the athletic achievements of the boys, Buddy and Eddie, who were then only fourteen. Before they were through, they would need several more cases to hold all their trophies.
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The Goldin boys were not merely good but spectacularly good athletes. They had both come into their full growth fairly early, but even before that their athletic precocity was marked. By the age of thirteen they were already playing in the Sunday morning men’s softball games at the Boone schoolyard, and not just filling in, either, but playing significant positions: Eddie at shortstop, letting damn little get by him; Buddy in centerfield, racing back to catch fly balls over his shoulder or up to make shoestring catches, but somehow making it all look easy. Did they inherit their athletic ability from their parents? I don’t know what the best scientific opinion on the subject is, but if they didn’t I wish someone would explain how they came to be such wonderful athletes.
And yet they were very different kinds of athlete. Eddie Goldin seemed to come by his accomplishments through fierce hard work—unrelenting hustle, in the old sports cliché—and considerable courage. I have never known anyone physically more fearless. If the occasion called for it, Eddie would slide head first on a gravel field, would take a brutal charge on the basketball court, and cross-body block a man twice his size without the least hesitation. Questions of hustle or courage didn’t seem to come into play for Buddy Goldin. He was what we used to call in those days “unconscious.” On a court or a field everything seemed to come so naturally to him. Even when running very fast he appeared to lope. Like his brother, he had innate athletic intelligence; he seemed instinctively to know what to do and always made what he did look easy. Neither of the Goldin boys ever fumbled or bobbled or dropped the ball; neither seemed to be affected by pressure; neither ever made a mistake in a game, at least none that I ever saw. They were—how else describe it?—gifted, early and richly gifted.
But then there was something gifted and blessed about the entire Goldin family, or so it seemed to me when I was a kid. Food looked and tasted better at their table. Handsome cars seemed always to be backing out of their driveway on the way to immensely interesting places. Such surprises as their lives contained all seemed pleasant ones. What for the Goldins was an everyday matter often tended to knock me off my feet. One day I came home from school with Buddy, and followed him down to the cool white and green room of the basement, where his father was playing gin with three other men. Buddy quickly introduced me to the three men, one of whom was Sid Luckman, the recently retired quarterback of the Chicago Bears. “Nice to meetcha, Phillie,” he said in a high, slightly whiny voice with a New York accent, not looking up from his cards. Another time, glancing out from Eddie’s room down onto the driveway, I noticed Sid and Jean Goldin getting into the blue Fleetwood with a woman who looked very familiar. “Is that woman who I think she is?” I asked Eddie, who came over to the window. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s Myrna Loy. She’s a client of my Dad’s.”
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Sid Goldin was a lawyer, the senior partner in the firm of Goldin, O’Connor, and Corzinowski. But he was a lawyer of a particular kind. As I later learned, he scarcely ever entered a courtroom and he certainly didn’t waste his time or eyesight composing or studying legal documents. He was instead a fixer and a smoother, a man with connections and clout, who knew everyone and so was regularly called in to bring together otherwise distant parties for the mutual profit of all. He was the man who knew the man who knew the man who could do what was needed: get you points in a sure-hit Broadway play, have a large parcel of real estate rezoned, call off the unions from organizing your shop. His clientele was generously studded with celebrities, including many former athletes, show-business characters, and Chicago politicians. His own name would on occasion appear in the local columns as “powerhouse attorney Sidney Goldin.”
After the University of Illinois, Sid Goldin had gone to law school nights, at John Marshall, and worked days selling furniture for his mother’s brother, who had a store on the western rim of the Loop. While working for his uncle and going to law school, he met, courted, and married Jean Goldstein, the only child of Judge Irving Goldstein. It was the middle of the 1930’s, a time when local judges were powerful figures in Chicago. Sid remembered once getting caught in a traffic jam on the way to a Bears game with his then future father-in-law, who called over a motorcycle cop, announced that he was “Judge Goldstein, goddammit,” and demanded a police escort to Wrigley Field so that he wouldn’t be late for the game. Without any hesitation, the cop said, “Follow me, sir,” turned his siren on full blast, and Sid and the Judge, following the cop on the wrong side of the street, drove directly to the game without even stopping for red lights.
The Judge loved his daughter and approved of her choice of a husband. He liked having a son-in-law who had been a Big Ten athlete; he recognized that this young man was ambitious and no dope. Sid Goldin’s marriage enabled him to avoid the time-wasting error of starting at the bottom. Right out of law school, he was put on to a number of good things by his father-in-law. That he was connected with as powerful a man as the Judge brought him clients without any effort on his part. The Judge looked after his own. In 1942, with America in the war, he arranged to get his son-in-law a commission as a major and a job in the Judge Advocate’s office at Fort Sheridan, twenty miles north of Chicago. Sid Goldin slept at home every night and emerged from the war a full-bird colonel. The Judge, it sometimes seemed, could arrange anything, except to avoid choking to death, in his sixty-seventh year, on a piece of porterhouse steak at a restaurant in the Loop called Fritzel’s. A tough columnist on the Chicago Daily News, writing about the passing (and good riddance, he seemed to feel) of types like Judge Irving Goldstein remarked that he died of good living. A widower, he left his only daughter an estate estimated at roughly $1.5 million, and this was in 1957.
The Goldins were never money mad. As Judge Goldstein’s daughter, Jean Goldin had grown up with lots of money around. Sid Goldin, even though he came of age smack in the middle of the Depression, earned big money early enough in life not to be nervous about it. No, the Goldins assumed that they would always have enough money not to have to worry about the absence of it interfering with their going through life absolutely first-class. And this they did, with an ease and sportiness that flabbergasted me, a boy whose father worked seven days a week and worried about kids stealing gum and candy from him and a mother who was apparently attempting to save a white couch for eternity.
It was at the Goldins that I first ate a club sandwich, rare roast beef, a salad served after the main course, strawberry shortcake. I don’t think they ever had a bad, or even a mediocre, meal, at least not in their own home. It was through being around Jean Goldin that I, then a boy of fifteen, first arrived at the extraordinary insight that someone’s mother could be sexy. All other mothers I knew seemed to be receptacles for anxiety who went about for the better part of the day in something called housecoats. Jean Goldin was not a beautiful woman; her teeth were rather too prominent and her features were neither delicate nor refined. But she wore her straight black hair short, in a European cut, always had a deep tan, and dressed in expensive clothes of dazzling colors. She moved wonderfully well and had the shapely, slightly muscular body of a woman who had spent vast amounts of time on golf courses and tennis courts at the best clubs. As their sons’ guest at the Royal Oaks Country Club in Winnetka, I recall once watching her in her one-piece black bathing suit poised in concentration on the diving board at the club pool about to execute a complicated dive; Sid Goldin was at the same time applying suntan oil to his large former athlete’s body while stretched out on a chaise longue listening to a Cubs game on a portable radio. At that moment the thought struck me, as it had never before struck me about any other parents I knew, that, my God, these two people must have terrific sex together.
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I may have gone with the Goldins to Royal Oaks five, maybe six times during the four years I went to high school with Buddy and Eddie, but those times remain among the most vivid memories of my adolescence. I recall the ride down Sheridan Road, Buddy and Eddie sitting up front and I alone in the back, the top down on the Olds Starfire, the leaf-heavy elm trees meeting to form a high tunnel across Sheridan, the mansions along the lake whirling by, the power of the Olds’s engine humming, the breeze in my hair. The easy opulence of the country club freshly astonished me each time we drove into the large parking lot with not an old or modest car in sight. I recall the thickness and fine smell of the towels in the locker room; the young Filipino men in white shirts and blue trousers with two thin gold stripes running down the outer leg whose job it was to fetch drinks, cards, fruit, or sherbert, and anything else members might desire, and to shine the members’ shoes while they were out on the golf course or having a swim or in the steam bath; the whap-whap-whap of balls being hit off the practice tees mingling with the slower tempi of the pock, pock, pock of balls being hit on the tennis courts; the slender gray-haired mulatto maître d’ whose excellent posture lent him an impressive dignity and a slight distance that always made me a touch nervous; and the food, the largeness of the shrimps and the crispness of the beautiful vegetables and the perfection with which the roast beef (which I always ordered) was cooked and the lusciousness of the desserts, the ice creams and raspberries and rich yet somehow delicate cakes and custards. The Goldins usually dined at seven-thirty—everyone I knew in West Rogers Park had supper at six—and I remember once rising from the table at Royal Oaks with them at nine-thirty and thinking, with a vague sense of betrayal, that my Dad was just then checking the back door and getting ready to lock up the drugstore.
Neither Buddy nor Eddie Goldin played golf in those days, though Buddy, I learned, would later in life play in high-stakes match games. (Someone was always organizing a “Nassau” or “skins” game at Royal Oaks in which thousands of dollars changed hands, and dollar-a-point gin games were available in the card rooms for those with a taste for serious indoor action.) When they took me to the club, we swam, sunned ourselves, ate, and played half-court basketball, three on a side, against the caddies who had come in after finishing a round or were waiting to go out on a second round. When your team lost, you gave up the court, which we three, since we always won, never had to do. I was the least of the reasons for our never having to relinquish the court. Eddie Goldin, though not that tall, was well-built, a rugged defender, an intelligent rebounder, and a tireless hustler all over the court. And Buddy, Buddy could do everything. He was beautiful to watch. His performance on the court was pure, sure instinct, he didn’t have to think about what he did; his body knew what was required and seemed automatically to supply the fakes, the cuts, the quick swoops to the basket, the effortless, perfectly timed leaps, the pull-up dead-on jump shots. “Next,” Buddy would call out, after having scored the eleventh basket for our side and thus eliminated yet another threesome of caddies.
In basketball, Buddy Goldin, that great natural athlete, had found his natural sport. At Evanston Township High School he was second-team all-state in his senior year, and later started as a guard at the University of Iowa. Eddie played baseball at E.T.H.S.—he was a ninth-round draft pick of the St. Louis Cardinals as a shortstop—and junior and senior years started at quarterback on the football team. In those years—the middle 1950’s—E.T.H.S. was regularly featured in polls as among the top ten schools in the country, often as the very top school. My father read and believed in such polls; they must have comforted him, for he had to sell a lot of newspapers and gum and fill a lot of prescriptions to send his son there. Insofar as one can tell about these things, I guess it was a pretty good school: it gave me a solid grounding in math and chemistry that was later useful in helping me get into medical school. It was a large and competitive place, E.T.H.S., full of bright kids and with a serious atmosphere.
In its sports program, though, the school was really impressive. Its athletic department resembled that of a middle-sized college and one with a winning tradition. All equipment, no matter how minor the sport, was superior; great expense was lavished on facilities, and a modern new fieldhouse was built during my last year there. The contracts of losing coaches were not renewed. Basketball and football games drew thousands; a few college scouts were always in the stands. I remember one afternoon after school watching Eddie Goldin being taught how to execute the bootleg play under the eye of the backfield coach and three assistants who were physical-education majors from Big Ten schools doing their practice teaching at E.T.H.S. (The last E.T.H.S. quarterback before Eddie was now starting at the University of Michigan, where Eddie himself would go on a football scholarship.) Over and over they ran Eddie through this relatively simple play, each time making some small refinement in their instruction. (I never had such careful teaching in med school.) Buddy Goldin told me that the basketball coach would shrink the nets on the game baskets to slow down visiting teams with effective fast breaks. The Goldin boys not only came through the intense pressure of such competition intact; they took it all in easy stride, flourishing under it, starring in it.
I admired Buddy and Eddie Goldin and was proud to be thought of around school as their friend. What they saw in me, I really don’t know. I don’t think they ever gave much thought to other people’s standing, so secure were they in their own, but instead took people as they found them. I was a neighborhood guy; we were all growing up together, however wildly different the circumstances. I was, by the standard of the day, “a good guy,” which is to say not a liar or a prig or vicious or mean. That I wasn’t in any other way outstanding wasn’t a problem for the Goldins or their parents. They weren’t, in any sense, snobs. If they had been in the least snobbish, they would have excluded me.
For my own part, I don’t think I hung around the Goldins for snobbish reasons, though God knows I was excited by the luxury of their lives and the ease with which everything seemed to be taken care of for them. Then there was the glamor. I never saw Sid Luckman, not to mention Myrna Loy, emerge from a six-flat, or any other building on Washtenaw Avenue. But beyond all this I know I was in awe of the Goldins, all of them, but especially Buddy and Eddie, for their talent. Despite my father’s best efforts—he was always supplying me with information about Albert Einstein and other great Jewish scientists—I grew up with no real appreciation for intellectual talent; and among the crowd of kids I ran around with, artistic talent, if any existed, hadn’t shown up and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have recognized it if it had. But athletic talent of the kind the Goldin boys had was not only unmistakable but admired by nearly everyone. I know I admired it. A part of me, even though I am now in my middle forties, still does.
Buddy and Eddie Goldin may have inherited much of the means of their prowess—their coordination, their reflexes, their musculature—from their athletic parents. But where did Buddy come by the ability, which he possessed at sixteen, to pop in two free throws in the last seconds of an overtime to win a game in a state tournament with some 12,000 people screaming at him to miss—and pop them in authoritatively, with no doubt or hesitation about it? Where did Eddie acquire the knack for throwing a football with perfect accuracy into the hands of a receiver forty yards away while freezing rain was blowing in his face and six or seven bruisers going at full speed were trying to crush him? The Goldin boys could do such things because they had talent, and it’s called that because few people have it, and if you don’t have it to begin with you aren’t likely to get it. I knew I didn’t have it, and I knew that I never would—I knew that everything I would get in life would come from plodding and from hard work, which was fair enough. But this put me in a different category from the Goldins, who were, for me, extraordinary characters.
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Christmas vacation of our senior year in high school, Sid Goldin took his family off for a week’s holiday in Barbados, and Jean Goldin asked if I would mind coming in twice a day to walk and feed her dog, a white standard poodle named Francesca, whom she didn’t want to put in a kennel. Jessie, the cook, had been given the week off and I let myself in at eight in the morning and then returned at seven at night to walk and feed Francesca again. Under the pretense of keeping the dog company, I would remain in that wondrous house for an hour or so in the evening, feeling the thick carpeting under my feet, drinking in the soft and subtle coloring of the furniture and the draperies. Sometimes I would sit in the white basement, with its green leather furniture and glass trophy cases, turn on the television, pour myself a ginger ale from the bar, and wish I had a room of my own here—wish, guiltily, that my own last name was Goldin and that I was a member of this family.
After they returned from Barbados, Jean Goldin called my mother to tell her that she had a fine and responsible young man for a son. When I next came over, Sid Goldin said, “Good job with the dog, Phillie. We’re grateful.” He shook my hand, and when he had removed his hand, a crisp new fifty-dollar bill was in my own.
Senior year was a good one for us all. Eddie got his offer from the Cardinals and a football scholarship from the University of Michigan; Buddy made all-state and had some thirty-odd offers of basketball scholarships, from which he chose the University of Iowa; and I was accepted by Yale, though because of the tight money situation at home (my sister was going into her junior year at Wisconsin), I decided instead to do my pre-med at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
The Saturday night after graduation, Sid and Jean Goldin threw a party in honor of their sons. An enormous yellow-and-white striped tent went up on their ample back lawn. In one corner of the tent the Ramsey Lewis trio played; in the corner across the way, a black man in a white jacket and a chef’s hat stood with a large carving knife and fork before a huge prime-rib roast, a turkey, and a ham. Three small bars were working, two in the tent and a third in the basement of the house. I noticed Sid Luckman in the crowd and, later, Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ shortstop, showed up. There were a few local columnists, the guy who did the evening news on Channel 5, and the wife of the man who was the head of Standard Oil of Indiana. Buddy Goldin pointed out a somewhat withdrawn looking man who turned out to be Burr Tilstrom, the puppeteer; he was talking to a man who had been in prison for allegedly kidnapping a syndicate figure named Jake (The Barber) Factor. Waiters brought around trays of canapés and others trays of champagne in wide-mouthed glasses. The women seemed light and dazzling in their summer dresses. I found myself at one point talking to one of them, a beautiful young woman who asked me who the Goldins were. She was with a touring company playing My Fair Lady at the Blackstone Theater and had been brought here by a man who the year before had won twenty games for the Chicago White Sox.
Whether any speeches were made, or gifts given, or how or at what time the evening ended, I have no idea. For me it was over around ten o’clock, when, I was later told by Eddie Goldin, I passed out after what must have been eleven or twelve glasses of champagne, while singing the Whiffenpoof song to Jean Goldin and a man named Grolnik who was a big real-estate operator on the Near North Side. At their mother’s bidding, Eddie and Buddy carried me to the guest room upstairs, where I slept in my clothes until six-thirty the next morning. Rumpled, grubby, foggy-brained, walking up the stairs to our apartment, I met my Dad coming down, on his way to open the store. “You okay, Phillie?” he asked, placing the back of his hand lightly across my forehead. I mumbled something about its having been a long night. In my small dark bedroom, standing over the beige chenille spread on my bed, I peeled off my clothes, letting them fall to the floor, thinking, sadly, that a crucial chapter in my life was finished.
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That summer marked the beginning of the end of my friendship with the Goldin boys. Nothing went wrong; there was no falling out. It was just the natural drifting apart that takes place when boys turn eighteen and must act on the pretense that they are now young men. Two days after graduation, Eddie Goldin reported to a Cardinals’ farm club in Sarasota, Florida, where he learned the hard but undeniable lesson that he couldn’t hit curve balls, which forced him to decide that he had to put his energies into football in the fall at the University of Michigan. Buddy Goldin became a counselor at Ray Meyer’s summer basketball camp, where he was able to work out with the guys who played for DePaul, Loyola, Illinois, and other major Midwest basketball schools before he went off to Iowa in the fall. As for me, I worked a forty-hour week at the drugstore, handling the front register, doing stock work, making deliveries, and listening to my father tell me how good life was going to be once I became a physician.
Looking back on my friendship with Eddie and Buddy Goldin, I am a bit amazed at how little intimacy there was in it. For three of the four years we went to high school, we drove there together every morning. What did we talk about? About sports we talked a good deal. About girls a certain amount. Friday nights we often went to the movies together. Sometimes they would take me along with them to some major sports event, for tickets were never a problem for Sid Goldin. None of us dated much. As Jews we were a minority at E.T.H.S., which we wouldn’t have been had we gone either to Senn or Sullivan high schools in Chicago. Neither of the Goldin boys talked much about his parents, and I’m not at all sure that they did when they were alone. What I took to be the glamor of their life at home, they took as perfectly natural, and why not, since they hadn’t ever known anything else. I thought they were the luckiest kids in the world, and I felt a little lucky myself—maybe “privileged” is the better word—to be hanging around with them.
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Eddie was second-string quarterback his freshman year at Michigan, and he ran back punts and kickoffs and did both very well. Buddy started as a freshman on die Iowa basketball team. He was not yet the star he showed signs of becoming in his sophomore year, but from the beginning he made his presence felt—he averaged something like fourteen points a game—and was completely at ease playing Big Ten basketball. I went to the Iowa-Illinois game at Champaign that year and felt real pride at Buddy’s poise on the floor. He looked to have put on ten or so pounds, all of it muscle, which made him seem sleek and more in possession of himself than ever. Both he and Eddie always looked born for the athletic uniforms they wore, so much so that, like certain high-ranking military officers, they sometimes seemed a little disppointing out of uniform. Iowa beat Illinois that night when, at the buzzer, Buddy popped in an eighteen-foot jump shot from the top of the key. All that was missing, I thought at the time, was for him to call out “Next,” as he used to do with the caddies. I had hoped to spend an hour or so after the game with him, but it turned out that the Iowa team was getting back on its bus to Iowa City that night and that there would be no spare time. I was sorry to have missed him. Michigan went to the Rose Bowl that year and the Iowa basketball team was playing in a holiday tournament in North Carolina, so I didn’t get to see either Eddie or Buddy that Christmas vacation.
Games and glory and expensive travel somehow seemed natural to the Goldins. It was what Buddy and Eddie were born into and grew up with. I always assumed that once spikes and cleats, helmets and balls were set aside, they would settle into a life of easy comfort, with powerful contacts and beautiful wives and children who were themselves splendid athletes. Short of a major illness or some inconceivable financial reversal, how could it ever be otherwise? Or so I believed, until one day in my sophomore year—I recall I was studying for a big midterm exam in organic chemistry—when I called home and my father asked if I had read about the fix my friends Eddie and Buddy Goldin’s dad had gotten himself into. I never read the newspapers in Champaign, and told my father I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Apparently Sidney Goldin is connected with some kind of black-market baby ring,” my father said. “It looks like pretty serious stuff.”
Is it getting a big play in the press, Dad?
“Front-page headlines in both the Trib and the Sun-Times,” my father said, “with photos of Mrs. Goldin and your friends Buddy and Eddie. It’s also the lead story on the evening television news.”
My father went on to ask if I was prepared for my organic chemistry exam, and my mother got on the phone to give me some bits of family and neighborhood news, but my mind was elsewhere and I couldn’t wait to get hold of that day’s Chicago newspapers. When I did, I found that it was every bit as bad as my father had suggested. The Sun-Times headline read, “CELEB ATTORNEY SELLS INFANTS”; the Chicago Tribune ran, “POWERFUL LAWYER BABY BLACK MARKETEER” and beneath that, “Sidney Goldin, Former Illinois Athlete, Counselor to Famous, Linked to Baby Ranch.” On page three, the Sun-Times had photos of Sid and Jean Goldin in evening clothes at a fund-raising dinner for Adlai Stevenson; lower down on the page were blurry photos of the Goldin boys, Buddy in his University of Iowa jersey, Eddie in his Michigan football helmet. The Trib ran a smaller picture of Sid Goldin alone, a head shot in which he looked dark and prosperous and rather beaky. Staring at this photograph, which appeared on the front page, I found myself muttering a line I had often heard my father use, “This doesn’t look good for the Jews.”
What I was able to gather from the newspaper stories—which held the front page for three days—was that Sid Goldin had operated here in his familiar role of middleman. An OB-GYN man on the Northwest Side named Dr. Howard Peterson was really the main figure. Peterson placed unmarried pregnant girls in homes during their pregnancies, paying their room and board and giving them an additional $3,000 at the termination of their pregnancy, for which they signed their child over to him—or at least they believed they did, since the deal was obviously illegal. Working through lawyers around the city, Peterson turned infants over to couples wishing to adopt children but unable to do so through the ordinary, and in those days extremely rigorous, child-adoption procedures. To obtain a baby in this way cost $20,000, with $15,000 going to Peterson and the remainder to the lawyer.
Sid Goldin had evidently brokered at least seven of these illegal adoptions. The last of them was arranged for a prominent Irish politician, an alderman married to a Jewish woman who was unable to have children. The politician had enemies, and one of them turned the press loose on the story of how the politician, with his mixed marriage, was able to adopt a child when state-run agencies at the time all but categorically refused children to homes where parents did not share the same religion. One thing led to another—or perhaps it would be better to say that one thing led to another which led to Sidney Goldin which led to scandal.
Why did Sid Goldin get mixed up in such stuff? He couldn’t have needed the money—though, true enough, lots of people who don’t need it will still pick up an easy five grand if they don’t have to do much work for it. Apart from the money, my guess is that it gave Sid Goldin pleasure to be the swing man on something so crucial to important people—and all of his clients in these adoptions were important people—as their getting a child. Arranging, after all, is what Sid Goldin did—was what he was famous for—and arranging to get someone a child, a live human being, was in some sense the ultimate arrangement. I’m not sure that Sid Goldin thought about it in this way. He probably viewed it more simply. Some couples needed a child; he knew a man who had children; the people who got the child would be happy; the children would go to prosperous and, as far as anyone could tell, good homes; he, Sidney Goldin, would be the man who made it all possible; and there was an easy five grand in it besides. What was so wrong?
The Illinois Bar Association felt there was enough wrong to disbar Sidney Goldin for a minimum of ten years; and since he was in his late forties at the time, this just about finished him as a lawyer. His law partners bought him out and removed his name from the firm. His rich and famous clients almost uniformly deserted him as a friend. He didn’t have to go on trial, and thus risk jail, and he still had all the money he would need to get him through the rest of his life, but the humiliations, small and large, continued for some time. In neighborhood gossip, he was known as the man who sold babies. When it came time to pay his annual dues at the Royal Oaks Country Club, where he and Jean Goldin chose not to show their faces for nearly a year, his check was returned to him by the executive secretary with a curt note saying that the club was cutting back its membership, especially among people who hadn’t been making much use of the facilities in recent months, and therefore could not accept his dues; a second check, this one for his original membership fee, was included in the envelope. I currently belong to Royal Oaks, am in fact on the club’s board of directors, and I pulled the old Goldin file where I found this letter. I don’t like to think about his wife’s reaction when Sid Goldin showed it to her.
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As for the Goldin boys, both of them soon developed troubles of their own. Buddy was having a brilliant season at Iowa, averaging twenty-one points a game and leading the Big Ten in assists, when in a game at Purdue, he felt the ball getting away from him and the floor rushing up to meet him, and the next thing he knew he was on a stretcher on the way to the hospital in West Lafayette. His left knee had given out, ligaments had been torn, and, more significant, cartilage had been destroyed. Buddy was through for the season. When he came back for his junior year, he played with his left leg in an awkward harness of tape and plastic braces. He was never again the same athlete. His former quickness was gone; his instincts, built upon absolute confidence in that quickness, were shot. He lost his place as a starter; and sensing that he would never regain his old form, which meant that he would never again play big-time basketball, he chose not to return to the University of Iowa for his senior year. He went back to Chicago, finishing his schooling at Loyola University and after that at the Loyola Law School.
Buddy lived at home when he returned from Iowa, and continued to live there until his last year of law school. He took up golf, at which—no surprise—he was marvelous right off, shooting in the middle seventies by the second year he played. He and Sid Goldin played together at public courses. A few years later, when the scandal had been pretty much forgotten, the Goldins joined another country club, Twin Orchards, whose pro told Sid Goldin that, if Buddy really gave golf his full attention, he could be good enough to play on the pro tour. If his father’s scandal threw Buddy in any serious way, there was no obvious evidence of it.
As for Eddie Goldin, I heard that, though he stayed at the University of Michigan, he had dropped off the football team, giving no other explanation than that the sport now bored him. I also heard that he had become very earnest about his studies. Eddie was always a better student in high school than Buddy; I don’t recall his being in any way exceptional, but then their athletic ability cast everything else about Eddie and Buddy Goldin into the shade. In any case, Eddie, I heard, was no longer a business but now a philosophy major.
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When I ran into Eddie on Devon Avenue in the summer between our junior and senior years, I’m not sure I would have recognized him if he hadn’t spoken to me first. His dark, curly hair, usually cut short, had grown out and was uncombed. Where before he had been a tidy dresser, there was now something fundamentally rumpled about him: his flannel shirt was unironed, his Levis soiled, his Frye boots caked with mud. In later years he would top off some variant of this standard outfit with a parrot named Crackers who, from his perch on Eddie’s shoulder, croaked out political slogans mixed with rich obscenities. Just now he was accompanied by a thin, rather drab-looking girl whom he introduced to me as “Reb.” When she shyly said she was pleased to meet me, I thought I detected an Appalachian accent. The three of us walked up the block to a corner restaurant, run by Greeks, called Kofield’s.
“My mother’s fine,” Eddie answered, when I asked about his parents, “and my dad is the same asshole he has always been.”
The use of that word rocked me. I used my share of profanity as a kid, and I find enough occasions to use it nowadays, but the word Eddie used to describe his father is one I have always hated. The shock of hearing it from Eddie was compounded by the fact that, among their other qualities as Ail-American kid athletes, the Goldin boys, neither one of them, ever swore. Meanwhile, that word lay there between us.
“What’s the problem with your dad?” I asked.
“There’s no big problem,” Eddie said, “except that he’s a phony, a complete fraud.”
Are you referring to his troubles of a few years ago?
“Tip of the fuckin’ iceberg,” he said. “The way we live, they way Buddy and I were brought up, the whole thing through and through is rotten. And of course the fuckin’ joke is my old man hasn’t any notion how rotten it all is. Like all real immoralists, he hasn’t a clue that there’s anything wrong with the way he lives.”
Nor could Eddie’s friend Reb have had the least clue about what he was saying. I noticed she had a small, homemade heart tattooed on her thin upper-arm. She said nothing, but sipped a coke through her small, gray, somehow immensely sad teeth. I was sure that Eddie had already brought her home to meet Sid and Jean Goldin—just to let them know that his days of adding to the trophy cases were over for good.
What do you do when an old friend sitting across the table from you attacks his own father? I mumbled something about Sid Goldin’s always having been nice to me, but it was pointless. Eddie wasn’t really interested in hearing any defense of his father. He was still in the early stages of formulating his own distaste for him, convincing himself of the righteousness of his anger, building his case. When it was completed it must have been some case, for more than twenty-five years later Eddie was still relentless in his hatred of his father.
We graduated in the summer of 1961, and that autumn I began medical school at the University of Illinois in Chicago; Buddy started law school at Loyola; and Eddie, who was among the first round of people accepted for the Peace Corps, went off to teach rudimentary construction techniques to villagers in Central Africa. It was in Africa that he acquired the parrot. He liked Africa, for all its heat and insects and desolation, and when his Peace Corps tour was finished he visited Albert Schweitzer, in the hope of staying on and working for him at his hospital mission at Lambaréné on the forested banks of the Ogooué River. Eddie was apparently able to get a personal interview with Dr. Schweitzer, though he was not offered a job. I later heard that, when someone asked him what Dr. Schweitzer was like, Eddie answered that he was an “asshole.” At least no one could say that Albert Schweitzer and Sidney Goldin had nothing in common.
After his return from Africa, Eddie went back to Ann Arbor to begin work on a doctorate in philosophy. It took him eleven years to get it. The 60’s intervened. Ann Arbor in those days was Berkeley Midwest, and Eddie Goldin was in the thick of it. The boy athlete who had been so fearless at ten and twelve wasn’t likely to go in for halfway measures at twenty-five. He was SDS; there was talk of his leaving the United States for Sweden in support of those who fled the country to avoid the draft. As Eddie’s friend, even though I scarcely saw him, I was glad it never came to that.
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“My son Eddie,” said Sid Goldin, seated across from me on the green leather couch in my office in Wilmette at the Plaza del Lago, “has wasted his entire life hating his father. It makes me sick to think about it.”
Perhaps Sid Goldin was so openly dour because I had just given him the depressing if far from disastrous news that he would need a gall-bladder operation. He had come into my office for a second opinion, which all the insurance companies nowadays require before they will pay for major surgery. My name had been recommended to him by his regular internist, Howie Levine—with whom I had gone to medical school and whom I see socially—chiefly because my office is located close to the Goldins’ current home in Winnetka. (Once they turned sixty, Jean and Sid Goldin began to spend their winters near Palm Springs, in a condominium they owned at Rancho Mirage.) I was a bit disappointed but not surprised to discover that he didn’t remember, until I reminded him of it, that I was the same Philip Hirsh who had run around with his sons in high school. Why, after all, should a man who had had movie stars and professional athletes for clients, who had played in the fast track long before that phrase was even coined, remember a not very interesting boy of sixteen whom he hadn’t seen for more than twenty-five years?
I, on the other hand, would have recognized Sid Goldin anywhere. He still had the look of the high roller: the deep sun tan, the expensive clothes comfortably worn, the general air of a man for whom all the more trivial details and little bothers of life—from shoeshines to shopping and tax worries—have always been looked after by hired hands. He had kept his satiny black wavy hair, which now had only touches of gray at the temples. Apart from his gall-bladder problem, his health was good. At sixty-four, he wasn’t carrying around any extra weight, his heart was sound, his muscle tone was extraordinary.
“Eddie never really took hold,” he continued. “By the time he got his Ph.D. degree, he was in his middle thirties. His meshuggene politics took up most of his time and energy, at least as far as his mother and I could tell. Anyhow, he never got a permanent teaching post. One year, he’s teaching at Geneseo, New York, the next year he’s at Irvine, California, one year his brother gets a card from him in Taiwan. The kind of life he leads, he might as well have stayed in minor-league baseball. He never married, you know, and my guess is that he never will.”
I wondered if Eddie ever thought of himself as locked forever into the academic equivalent of minor-league baseball. Having once been a first-rate athlete, he could not have found it easy to reconcile himself to being a fourth-rate philosophy teacher. At least I don’t think such a thing would have been easy for me. But then I wasn’t Eddie Goldin.
“We never hear from Eddie directly,” Sid Goldin said. “All we know of his whereabouts is from his brother, whom he calls once or twice a year. The last time Eddie and I were together—it’s almost twenty years now—he told me off. Called me a phony and a four-flusher and living a lie. Said that everything I had was built on cheating and deceit. His mother, he said, was no better, since she lived so comfortably with my corruption. But he was damned if he was going to. He wasn’t going to take another penny from me, and some day he hoped to pay back every cent I had ever spent on him so that he would be free from any contamination from my crummy life. That’s what he called it, you know, ‘my crummy life.’ My own son.”
There was an unbearable silence. “How are things going with Buddy?” I asked, hoping to get the conversation on to a less painful subject.
“Buddy’s got his own troubles,” Sid Goldin said. He shifted his weight, resting an arm along the back of the green couch. I noticed dangling from his wrist, beyond his cashmere sport jacket and the monogram that showed on the cuff of his shirt, a thin gold chain bracelet. Odd little touch of foppery, I thought, in a man his age. “Your old friend Buddy has a serious gambling problem. It started about fifteen years ago. He wasn’t making his nut as a lawyer, so he tried to make up his personal and business expenses through betting on ball games, cards, his own golf games. Twice now he’s enrolled himself in Gamblers’ Anonymous. His wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t go into therapy, which he’s in currently. It’s a damn mess.”
“How bad does it get?”
“All I know is what he’s come to me for to bail him out. Whether he’s into other people also, I don’t know. At first he came for small dips—five and ten grand. Then he jumped it up to twenty, twenty-five, once forty. ‘Buddy boy,’ I said to him, ‘you’re going through your inheritance mighty quick.’ After each time he comes to me, there is a quiet period, lasting maybe three or four months. But it’s waiting for a bomb to go off. The last time he came to me it was for ninety grand. He was into heavy juice with the boys, if you know what I mean. He told me they would kill him if he didn’t come up with the money. He wept, my beautiful All-State son, he put his head on my shoulder and clung to me and said, ‘Dad, you got to help me, you got to.’ Of course I did. I’m his father.”
I don’t know why Sid Goldin chose to talk so openly about his sons with me. Maybe it was because I was a stranger who nonetheless had known him and his sons in their glory days. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he couldn’t talk to old friends with the same candor that he used in talking to me that afternoon, sitting on my green leather couch—a couch that, when I came to pick furniture for my office, I chose because it reminded me of the green leather furniture from his own house on Lunt.
“Dr. Hirsh,” he said (and to have him, at whose home I was once introduced to Sid Luckman, address me as doctor seemed very strange), “were my sons once really extraordinary boys, or have I just dreamed it? Wasn’t there a time, Doc, when the world seemed to belong to Eddie and Buddy? Or is it all something I imagined? They were such wonderful kids. Respectful. Disciplined. Never in trouble.”
“Mr. Goldin,” I said, “your sons were the best. They were great kids, gifted and decent and without any meanness of any kind. Being their friend was one of the nicest things about my boyhood.”
“What do you suppose went wrong, Doc? Was it my fault? Was it the way we brought the boys up? To this day my wife and I, when we talk about it together, don’t really know how to account for what happened. Did we spoil them? You probably don’t remember, but I had a little trouble with the press when they were in college, a little scandal—could that have been the problem? What has to happen, Doc, to turn two swell kids into a rebel and a weakling? The more my wife and I talk about it, the less we understand. Beats me,” he said with a sigh and rose from the couch.
It beat me, too, and I had no solacing platitudes to offer. I could provide a clear second opinion on Sid Goldin’s gall bladder but not on what had happened to his sons. Instead I told him that I would send along my report to the Blue Cross and that a man in his general good health really had little to worry about from this operation. I asked to be remembered to Mrs. Goldin. He thanked me, we shook hands, and the next time I saw him was at Buddy’s funeral service in the Piser chapel in Skokie.
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That was roughly six months after Sid Goldin had sat in my office. Buddy, I learned from his friend Lloyd Brodsky in the Piser parking lot after the service, had gone into the tank for more than a hundred grand and was being threatened by syndicate collection men. In the suicide note he left in his office, he wrote that he was too ashamed of himself to go back to his father for more money and too ashamed to go on living. He thanked his parents for standing by him as long and as well as they had, and asked that they look after his wife and young daughters, to whom he apologized for what he was about to do—which was to hurl himself from his office window twenty-three floors above LaSalle Street—and whom he asked to try always to remember that he loved them dearly.
I had appointments lined up in the office that afternoon, and so didn’t drive out to the Waldheim Cemetery on the West Side. On the fifteen-minute drive back to Wilmette I thought further about the Goldin boys, but with no better results than Sid and Jean Goldin. Buddy and Eddie were blessed with talent—of a small and limited kind, agreed, but real talent nonetheless—and it set them apart, made them different. At least to me, who was without talent, it made them seem radiant and even a little magical. Were their sad endings—Buddy’s on the pavement in downtown Chicago, Eddie’s to wander all his life unattached and without consequence—somehow connected to their brilliant beginnings? Did the blessing of talent always carry its own inexplicable curse? These were deeper waters than I was accustomed to sail, and it was probably best that I clear my mind, for awaiting me in my office were people who wanted my authoritative assurance that they need not fear death by stroke, heart attack, or cancer, at least not for the present, and from every indication could go on living for years to come, which all of them would be perfectly happy to do without any thought of talent whatsoever. The Goldin boys, my old friends Buddy and Eddie, weren’t so lucky.
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