Frog

18. Frog’s Mom

Weak, weak, it’s all so weak, and he rips it out and throws it into the trash pail. Done this before. Out it comes, into that or if bad aim onto the floor, tearing first, sometimes tearing up what’s been torn and throwing it back in, grabbing out pieces sometimes and tearing some more, often banging the table with his fist after, maybe stomping upstairs and pouring coffee from the thermos, or making fresh coffee even if there’s fairly fresh coffee in the thermos, yelling out to no one in particular “I’m going out for a few minutes,” taking a circular walk around the neighborhood, not looking at much because there isn’t much — bird in a tree, squirrel nibbling or digging up a nut, cat or dog in a window looking as if it wants to go out, someone jogging or opening a house or car door or walking a dog, letter carrier delivering mail, only occasionally something like a gardener transplanting pacysandra or a treeman fifty to a hundred feet up sawing off a limb or even some kids playing out front or swinging on a porch — drinking a half glass of wine, quarter glass, just a sip of sherry and maybe straight from the bottle, munching a celery stalk or carrot, peeling, without washing or peeling, even eating its thin tail string or the inch or so of the top, tearing off the skin of a navel, biting down hard on an apple, picking up a newspaper section and usually without reading or anything but a headline or caption putting it down. Now he just sits. Weak. That’s what it was. Piss, shit, fit for the trash. Bangs the table top. Just did it for fun. “What’s that?” Eva asks upstairs. “Daddy must have dropped something,” Denise says. “That’s Daddy mad,” Olivia says. “Daddy gets mad a lot.”

Writes: “There once was a man. Was once. He was a big man. Thick neck, puffed-up pecks, six-feet-sex, puissant-plus.” Weak. Pulls it out. Turns it over to stick back in to type on. Something’s on the other side from another work he stopped. “‘Mrs. Simchik stinks,’ a boy said, and got whacked. ‘Don’t ever say the word—’” That was it. Doesn’t know what he planned to follow it. Couldn’t come up with anything, probably, besides the prose. Doesn’t know when he wrote it: last month, year; just ended up in the scrap pile. Weak. Weak. Throws it into the pail. New scrap paper in. “There was a woman. She was my mother. She’s, is. My old mother, mother of young. He went upstairs. Phoned her. I did. Went, up, phone, reached, dialed. ‘Mom, how are you?’ ‘Not feeling that great today, thank you for calling.’ ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ he said, What’s the matter? What’s up?’ for he heard it almost every time before, similar words, same tone, minor complaining, nothing good. ‘Well actually, now that you asked me, I’m dying. That’s what the report came back from with my doctor.’ How was he reacting when she said this? Shock, that’s all: ‘What! What!’ ‘I’m saying, that’s what Dr. Gladman said the report confirmed that came back from the lab. I’m not saying it well because it so upsets me. I took extensive tests. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to bother you. Your children, job, home, you’ve your own troubles. I had to work it out of him. Worm it out. I had to ask and ask and finally I said “What is it, it isn’t good, we both know that, I can feel it and you can see it and the tests and reports all prove it, isn’t that right? So tell me, I’m a good listener.”’ ‘You said this?’ I said. ‘Surely he said “No, you’re all wrong, Mrs. T.”’ ‘Surely he said yes, I was right. “Listen, Mrs. T.,” he said — he called me Rachel, actually, just as I sometimes call him Bill. Though he always calls me Rachel now. He’s very nice, very friendly. He said “If you want the truth, it doesn’t look good.”’ “This is terrible,’ I said; ‘what does one say? For one thing, that you go to someone else for another opinion, of course,’ and she said ‘I have,’ and we talked some more, I said I was coming right up to see her, called my older brother, he also hadn’t known, we’d meet at my mother’s, I took the train, three hours, cabbed to it, subway to her place from it, total of four hours, when I got there my brother answered the door and said he’d found her dead.”

Weak, weak, but suggests what’s on his mind. Mother then. When? Long time ago, try; when he was a boy, start. “He throws something — a hammer — was aiming for the closet with the tool chest on the floor next to it, the closet next to the breakfront with the opened tool chest on the floor, the tool chest on the floor of the closet next to the breakfront, I threw a hammer at the tool chest on the floor of the opened foyer closet but it went through the breakfront next to it. My folks were away for the weekend in Old Saybrook. Gil Dobb’s the resort was called. Gil, they said, served two-pound lobsters for lunch, inch-and-a-half thick veal chops for dinner, grew and cut flowers which he put in vases on the dining room tables every meal, ironed the tablecloth himself sometimes so it was done right, sold antiques in his antique barn, was a fagele whose longtime companion was rarely seen on the grounds and never ate at Gil’s table in the dining room. They went there every fall for their anniversary and my mother always came back with some of Gil’s antiques (hand-painted plates to hang, converted kerosene lamps, chamber pots, soup tureens, creamers, something else she liked to collect whose name he forgets — Toby mugs), his father with a big basket each of apples and pears and a few dozen freshly laid eggs. I was scared they’d punish me, my mother especially (my father would probably just call me a stupid kid and say what I’d done was only to be expected), since the breakfront was originally her mother’s and had some prized objects in it, none broken and many bought from Gil. But when they got home around dinnertime Sunday night—” No, weak, but just see what comes out by finishing it. Shouldn’t take long. “They came home the next night. He was worried the whole day. He was told by his brothers to go straight up to her and say he broke it. He did. She still had her coat on, his father had just set down a basket of fruit and asked the boys to help him with the rest of the things in the car. But he quickly told her. ‘Mom, the breakfront, look at it, I broke it.’ She looked, got on one knee, put her hand through the place where the glass had been — a quarter-section of the breakfront, he doesn’t know who took the broken glass out before his parents got home — and waved and said ‘Yo-hoo, here I am, how’s my baby boy?’”

Weak, uninteresting, ends up well for her though, but what else from then? She once took him and his sister Vera to see Santa Claus. This one’s stayed around; see where it leads. “Carla and George walked through a dimly lit corridor with their mother to get to the elevator to see Santa. Elves greeted them from behind reindeer and trees, some littler than he but with high grownup voices, one handed them each a wrapped present. An elf ran the elevator. It went straight up to Santaland, he thinks it was called. Christmasland. Toyland, it had to be.” The present was handed them right after they saw Santa. “They were the only ones in the elevator. It was decorated like a snowed-in log cabin. The elf hummed a tune to himself as the car rose. Was he instructed to or maybe even not to? This wasn’t in George’s mind then. A carol was being sung from somewhere in the car, but a different tune than the elf’s. He remembers his mother said this wasn’t just any old Santa they were going to but one they had to pay for. Hence the present. The corridor upstairs was also dimly lit and ended with a long line of waiting kids and their parents. They’d passed two other Santas in their rooms but were directed by an elf to this one. He doesn’t remember sitting on Santa’s lap. Santa wasn’t old, seemed if he stood up he’d be as tall as a circus giant, had no belly. An elf wanted to take a photo of him with Santa and then Clara and him with Santa but both times his mother said too expensive. The exit door from Santa’s room opened onto the toy department. He remembers being surprised by that. A guard stood on the toy department side to keep people from sneaking in.” So what? Has little to do with anything. One time in the same store though…

“One time in the Thirty-fourth street Macy’s his mother told him to wait over here. What she did was buy a box of sanitary napkins. How’s he know? Because she had a shopping bag with something shaped like a box in it when she came back and he thought it was a surprise for him, just by the way she said ‘Wait for me here and don’t move from this spot no matter how long I’m away,’ as if she didn’t want him to see what she was buying for him, even if it wasn’t around Christmastime or his birthday and she said she was going to another counter on the first floor and there was nothing for children on that floor that he knew of or could see in that store. She was away a long time. He had nothing to do. He wanted to move to another spot, at least a few feet away — the perfume smells from the counter she put him next to were bothering him — but didn’t. A couple of times he thought maybe she forgot where she left him. It was the world’s biggest store he’d been told a few times, so she could have made a mistake in directions herself or come back to where she thought she’d left him and decided he was lost. Should he try to find her? Or maybe just yell out ‘Mommy’ till she came. She wouldn’t like that if she heard it and one of the guards they seemed to have all around on this floor might just grab him and throw him out of the store. Or just try to get home by himself? How would he do it? He didn’t have the fare for the subway or bus. He wouldn’t know how to get to his subway station or bus stop even if he did have the fare. But he knew the name of his station and it was in this borough, so maybe if he told someone it and was able to borrow the fare, he’d get there. Once out of the station he thinks he could find his way home, since it was only three blocks away along the avenue you come up into and then just a short walk down the street. Better to stay put though. If his mother thought he was lost she’d get the whole store to find him or call up his dad to have it done. But how he found out what was inside the box was that night he looked in the bag. It was still in the foyer coat closet. He couldn’t see any pictures or words on it that would make it seem like a present for him, so he asked his brother Alex what the box said. Alex looked at it, said ‘Kotex’ and that he thinks it’s something women use for their behinds or someplace but he doesn’t know what for. ‘Cleaning, probably.’” Nothing there either.

“She was born on the lower East Side. Her father from her descriptions of him was a benevolent tyrant.” Weak, weak. “A dictatorial benevolist.” Forget it, besides wrong. “A disapproving wretch, egotist, let’s face it: a mean bastard who spent more time trimming and waxing his Franz Josef mustache than with his kids.” She’d never. How does she describe him? “Everyone feared him.” “My mother sipped her drink, took a deep drag on her cigarette, said ‘Could you pour some more in it? I’ve been a good girl by nursing it for an hour, but now it’s all melted ice.’ Then ‘When my sisters and I saw him on the street we’d cross to the other side to avoid greeting him. Because whenever we did happen to meet him on the stairs coming up or turning a corner, he always criticized us. “Your hair’s uncombed, your button’s undone, retie your shoelaces and pull up your socks — you look like a slut.” He owned a liquor store-restaurant. Let’s face it — a gin mill. The Polish girls who worked for us — they all had names like Sophie and Anna and Christina — also cooked for the bar’s free-food counter. One time one of those big pots the food was cooking in…. One time a very big pot of stew, which when they were scoured and we were a little younger we also took baths in, fell off the stove on top of Aunt Rose. It scalded her whole body almost, till this day she won’t eat any hot meat dish like that or really any liquid that’s hot except tea. She had to be rushed to the hospital. What am I talking about? — the doctor came. I was the fastest one home at the time — I used to win all the athletic contests in grammar school, besides all the musical and intellectual ones too for girls — so I ran to get him.’” Weak, weak.

“His mother did very well in school. When she graduated high school she told her father she wanted to be a doctor. He said ‘One doctor in the family’s enough.’ Her eldest brother was an intern then. ‘Women worked as secretaries or assistants or nurses or stayed home.’ She then wanted to be a lawyer. Her father said ‘One lawyer in the family’s enough.’ Her next eldest brother was in law school. ‘How many ambulances you think there are to chase? Besides, women don’t become lawyers unless they don’t want to have children and want to live only with women and smoke cigars and be like that.’ Then an architect. ‘I don’t want any architects in the family, not for my sons or my girls. For one thing, it’s no profession for a Jew. It’s all run by Gentiles and they’ll keep you standing there for years before they give you even a tent to design. For another reason, because I won’t let you try to do something stupid and useless like that where as a woman you’ll have double no chance. Maybe you got the brains for it — that I can’t say. But get a job that can carry you till you make a good marriage — that’s all you need. You want to continue reading — to improve yourself or because you like books — do it while nursing your children or watching them in the playground.’ She got an office job; evenings and on matinee days she danced in a big Broadway review. Some man she knew, and without telling her, had sent her photo to a beauty contest sponsored by a newspaper. ‘I think it was the whole city I represented,’ she said about it recently, ‘or maybe just Manhattan. In fact, first I was Miss Rockaway, then from that I became Miss Brooklyn, though I’d never stepped in that borough except to go to its beaches sometimes, and then Miss New York, so it had to be for the whole city and maybe even for the state. It was so long ago. I can’t look in the mirror most times when I think what a pretty face and shape I had then.’ ‘You’re still quite beautiful and you’ve kept your weight down,’ he said. ‘For my age, perhaps, but that counts for next to nothing. Maybe less than that, for people look at me, when I’ve done my face and hair right and I don’t have these rags on and what I’m wearing is basically black, and think “She must have been very beautiful once — a hundred years ago.” Anyway, I kept lots of photos but never clippings of those contests and shows, since I didn’t want my dad finding them and learning about me. He thought all beauty contestants and show people were goats and tramps. In a way he was right, besides too much liquor and taking whatever drugs we had then and some of the men playing with boys. But I was nothing but a good girl right to the time I married your father.” Weak, weak.

“As a boy I loved looking at the albums and manila envelopes of photos from when my mother was a showgirl and beauty contest winner. None of the bathing beauty photos show her with a ribbon across her chest saying what Miss she was. ‘Because of my dad I only kept the ones that had nothing like that on them. Ones he might find, let him think I was girlishly posing for a boyfriend or a roving photographer on a boardwalk or beach.’ ‘But it was in the papers, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Good point; I didn’t think of that then. No, now I remember. It was in them but nowhere near as much then, and he only read the Yiddish and Polish dailies, which had nothing about it.’ ‘Then his customers could have told him.’ ‘That’s true. If they did, he never said. My feeling is none ever said anything because they knew he’d get so mad they’d be banned from his bar for life.’ She said she was Miss New York. Her sister Rose said it was Miss Coney Island. ‘I was her chaperon at it — Mama wouldn’t let her go otherwise — so I remember.’ ‘Then how’d she get to the Miss America contest?’ I said. ‘She became Miss Brooklyn or something — Coney Island being in that borough — but that part I know less of. It was your Aunt Bitty who chaperoned her to that one, though she wasn’t your aunt then because you weren’t alive yet, and she died a few years after that.’ My father said that whatever Miss my mother said she was is true. ‘She’s got a memory like a machine that never stops. And all that was a little before I met her. Only thing my mother and I were interested in was that she came to me a whole woman. You think that’s funny — go on, laugh, wise guy — but it should still be important to you, if you were smart. Of course, if she hadn’t been what we thought she was, I wouldn’t have tossed her back, though I might have asked her father for a larger dowry.’ ‘You would have told him?’ ‘Probably not, since he was already very generous. Gave me a gold watch, a big wedding — Cantor Rosenblatt sang, considered the best cantor in the world then — plus some cash to start the apartment with. I probably would have just lied to my mother and then done a lot of davening in shul because of it.’ ‘Because of what — lying to your mother, or the other?’ ‘What are you, a cop? Because of everything and nothing, you satisfied?’” Doesn’t work. Concentrate.

“His mother was almost Miss America. First or second runner-up — she was never sure, she said, even when it happened. One photo he especially liked of her then had her in a one-piece bathing suit, barefoot, holding a ball over her head. A beauty. He should borrow it to show his daughters, or just pull it out of the breakfront drawer next time they’re there. ‘This is Grandma can you believe it? When she was younger than your mother is now by almost twenty years, and thirty years younger than I.’ Short black hair, big dark eyes, radiant smile—” Not radiant. Beaming smile, bouncy smile, just a big beautiful mesmerizing smile. Checks the thesaurus. “Short dark hair, big black eyes, bright smile, brainy face, bathing beauty figure — for then. She was curvy but slim, with small breasts. ‘I wouldn’t win with those breasts today,’ she said. ‘But they were good enough to nurse four normal-sized babies and each for more than a year. Doing it so long probably kept you kids from getting fat like your father in later age, if you have his genes for that.’ Long perfect legs. Near perfect. Almost perfect. Athletic. ‘The woman who became Miss America—’”

“My mother was first runner-up in the Miss America pageant of 1922 or ‘23. Maybe even ‘24, since she later danced on the stage for two years till her father pulled her off it, got engaged to my father soon after, married in ‘27 and had my oldest brother at the end of that year. Or was he born in ‘28? He’s eight or nine years older than I almost to the day. ‘The woman who won the contest,’ she said, ‘was a Miss Sunshine. That was her last name. We all called her Sunny, though she was a real bitch. I don’t remember her first name or what state she was from. Pennsylvania, I think. Ohio. She looked typically Polish and most of the Poles came from Pennsylvania and Ohio then. She was a striking bleached blonde with that little upturned nose the real Poles have — much more so than mine, and squinched. I would have won the title — everyone said so — if they had counted talent and intelligence as qualifications then. Sunny couldn’t do anything but smile brightly and strut her behind, which were really no better than mine. While I danced, sang, knew something about manipulating marionettes, and played Bach and popular music on the violin. I also had graduated a good public high school with an academic diploma and very near the top of my class, and I don’t think Sunny or very many of the other contestants ever got past primary school.’ George White was one of the judges and all the runners-up were invited to dance in his Scandals that year. This famous woman mimic was a shikker. This famous male singer slept with boys. This one had twenty stray mutts in his dressing room and once a month one would be found dead in the alley outside. Several of the dancers ended up living off sugar daddies and one she especially got friendly with married a cattle baron in Argentina who beat her to death. ‘I avoided the stage-door Johnnies like the plague. Mr. White knew I was repulsed by them and gave me special permission to leave through the lobby.’ She was one of the six women to introduce the Charleston and one of the twelve to introduce the black bottom, ‘or maybe it was the other way. I know that for one of those dances six girls were on one side of the stage and six on the other. Some of the outfits we had to wear barely covered our bosoms and pubic areas. But I made sure, with skillful pinning or these pink beads I glued on, that my nipples were never exposed, though they were awfully painful to take off.’ She danced in two or three movies made in a studio in Long Island City. The Song and Dance Man one was called, ‘though it was also known as The George White Scandal Movie—maybe that was its title.’ Helen Morgan and Don Petricola were in it, she thinks. ‘There still wasn’t sound yet, but when I saw it I seem to remember songs sung and shoes tapping and brief applause. What I remember most is the work I put into it, after spending nine hours at the hospital every day, and the rotten pay.’”

“His mother, after graduating high school, got a job as a medical secretary in the x-ray department at Bellevue. ‘I worked personally for Dr. Katzburger, perhaps the foremost roentgenologist of his day. He wrote books and books on it and the governor and high officials of different states and presidents of countries and wealthy and important people like that came to him. I wanted to be a doctor and thought my father, who was totally against it, would change his mind when he saw how well I did at the hospital and was told by professionals there like Dr. Katzburger what a fine doctor I’d make. But he always said “Marry one, don’t become one, and you’re in the perfect place to meet one. It’ll be cheaper and faster, you won’t have to work so hard studying and later practicing, and you’ll wind up getting just as good medical treatment being married to a doctor as being one, and what would you do with your practice once your babies start to come?”’”

“His mother’s mother was a saint. Mine was. My mother’s mother was a saint. The whole Lower East Side thought so, my mother said, ‘or let me say “the Jewish part of it.” Crowded as our apartment was, with nine surviving children, two live-in Polish maids, my parents and an uncle who always lived with us but wasn’t really my uncle but my father’s boyhood friend from Dembitzer near Lemburg. Bei Lemburg, in German. Or maybe that’s where your dad’s folks came from and mine were from Christapolia bu Schmetz. I don’t know what the “bu” means, even if I was very good in German in school. Maybe it’s Polish. But really, we slept two and three to a bed then, though Uncle Leibush always had his own room. Still, she put total strangers up if she heard they had no place to sleep. And for days to weeks, whole families of landsmen who just came over on the boat with no place to stay, and on holidays she often took poor people off the street to feed, no matter what their origins or religion. Stern as my dad was about most things, he never said boo to this. Maybe because we had all kinds of food cooking nonstop anyway, what with the needs of his bar right downstairs, and the guests never slept anywhere but in the hallway on the floor.’ Photos of her mother were always on her dresser. Same with my father’s parents on his. She had blue hair in them—‘Gray turned blue because of some photographic tinting process,’ my mother said. And a big gawdy broach she said had been painted on the photos by the photographer because he thought she looked too plain. ‘She had her hair dyed blue for thirty years,’ my Aunt Rose said. ‘Then it wouldn’t go back to its natural color when she wanted it to, which by that time she couldn’t find out what it was. The broach was my father’s wedding gift, but was missing from her jewelry box after she died. We think my sister Bertha took it when the rest of us were in the funeral home. It was worth thousands even then.’ My mother’s mother worked full-time in her uncle’s bakery as a little girl, became a model for Milgrin’s when she was thirteen, ‘which even that time,’ my mother said, ‘was one of the fanciest women’s stores though not on Fifty-seventh yet,’ married at fifteen and had a dozen children, three dying before they were five. ‘Nine out of twelve was considered a pretty good ratio then, even for someone with a little money and local influence like my dad. So besides being generous to a fault, perhaps, she was also a great beauty—’”

“His grandmother worked as a fashion model for a fancy New York women’s store when she was fourteen. She told them she was older. His mother apparently inherited these looks, or maybe she got them from her father who was quite handsome, for she became a beauty contest winner and then a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies. ‘I was strictly a dancer, I want you to know — not a showgirl. They had to prance around stark naked at times, while we had enough covering our pubic area where we didn’t have to keep it shaved as they did. We also had at least one breast unexposed, if maybe just the nipple part of it with a single black or red or violet bead, depending on the costume color. My nipples were sore because of it for the two full years I was in the show. Your father, once he met me, went to it practically every night. He got front- or second-row seats and a lot of those times he went with his friends — The Filthy Four they were known on the lower East Side as, because of their carousing and womanizing and so forth. He kept doing one terrible thing to me then. He’d wink and wave at me to get my attention whenever I danced on his side of the audience. I got Flo — Mr. Ziegfield — to let me dance as much as possible on the other side of the stage whenever I saw your father there.’ ‘What happened when he sat in the center, if he ever did?’ ‘Then I’d keep my regular position and take the abuse. The other girls adjusted to my position switches easily, since we were a great crew, always looking out for one another, which we had to, for the men thought we were all whores. After the show he’d wait for me with the other stage-door Johnnies, but I avoided them like the plague. I got Mr. Flo — he knew I came from a strict family and was a good girl — to give me special permission to leave through the lobby.’ ‘So when did you really start going with Dad? Or why did you even continue to see him if he acted this way?’ ‘You should ask first how we met. It’s a good story, full of intrigues and laughs. Not romantic, though. Your father was never like that unless he was terribly guilty about something that he had no intention of telling me what. Then he’d just hand them to me — flowers, but a real big bouquet — and turn around and go straight to the dinner table or wash up.’”

“My folks met this way. My father’s aunt had a photo of my mother on her mantel. She was in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes and holding a parasol. The aunt had cut it out of a newspaper, framed it, and when anyone asked who the woman was she said she had it there to show that a beautiful girl with a terrific figure and what was obviously a sparkling personality and great intelligence on her face, could also be Jewish. My father saw it and said he’d love to meet a woman like that, and she told him a neighbor who saw the picture said the girl’s father owned a bar and grill on the corner of Delancey and Essex and that when business was really booming the girl worked as the cashier.”

“My father’s aunt had a photo of him on her mantel. He was on a horse, wore jodhpurs, dark shirt and tie, and held up a riding switch. A cousin of my mother’s mother, delivering a dress she made for my father’s aunt, asked who the man was and if he was single. There was an eligible young woman in her family and maybe a meeting could be arranged. If it ended in marriage, did she think the young man’s father would pay her a matchmaker’s fee? ‘He’s to give you for his boy? It’s the girl’s father who’s supposed to give.’ ‘But this girl is something out of the ordinary. She’s already a great beauty, and her face hasn’t even fully formed yet. She’s built like a Broadway showgirl, and in fact is one, but only as a lark — she’s thinking of becoming a doctor or something in science or law. And she has the intelligence of a genius and personality and liveliness that make you adore her in a flash, besides coming from such fine people that her father spends two months every summer in the most expensive German spas, but only to rest from his investments and business.’ ‘My nephew is also considered to be a good-looker, as this photo shows, though losing his hair and maybe getting too big a pot too early. He’s also the perfect brother and son, giving them anything they want, and is already a dentist with one of the best practices on the Lower East Side.’ ‘If he’s that good a catch and something works out between them, perhaps the girl’s father will want to give a matchmaker’s fee and we’ll split it, but without anybody knowing we did.’”

“My father rammed into my mother’s brother’s parked car outside the Masonic meeting hall they were both going to. He went into the hall, waited till the speaker finished, went to the podium, clinked on a water glass to get the audience’s attention and announced he’d banged into such and such car outside and wanted its owner to know he was ready to take care of all the damages and related expenses and even to drive the owner home, since that’s how bad a condition the car was in. My mother’s brother was so impressed by this, and also the commanding way my father had gone to the podium and spoken and joked in front of so many people, that during the drive home he said he wanted my father to meet his sister.”

“My father saw a beauty contest picture of my mother in a newspaper, said to himself ‘That’s the girl for me, and if I’ve got as much to offer as people tell me, no reason not to shoot for the best,’ thought her last name was familiar, asked around about her, found out who her father was and where she lived and worked. She was a medical secretary in the X-ray department of a big New York hospital. He went there, asked for her, said ‘Listen, miss, I could’ve done this through a friend — Benny Gernhart, the prizefighter, who says he grew up with you on Rivington and not a nicer girl did he ever know — but I decided to come here myself and say that I fell off my seat when I saw your news picture, am already falling off my feet talking to you for a minute, and if you’ll do me the pleasure of coming out to dinner with me any one of these nights, but preferably this one, I’d be extremely honored, and that’s no bull, excuse me,’ and from behind his back he produced a bouquet of flowers, gave it to her, kissed her other hand, said ‘That’s something I’ve never done before, so it must show something, even to me, how I feel about you,’ said he’d phone in an hour to see what her decision was, and left.”

“My father saw a photo of my mother in a newspaper. She was in a sedate suit and hat, legs crossed, sea and beach behind her. The article said she was the first Jewish girl to win an important New York beauty contest — perhaps the first American Jewess ever to win such a contest — was from the lower East Side, lived with her family, was one of a dozen children, worked as an X-ray technician in a large New York hospital and hoped to win the Miss America contest ‘less for myself than for the City.’ ‘I can’t say how beautiful I am — that’s for others to judge. But if performing talent is a consideration in the contest, I might have a chance.’ He thought ‘That’s the girl for me if there ever was one,’ asked around about her, no one knew who she was, called the X-ray departments of several New York hospitals, one person who answered said he’d get her to the phone. She got on, he said ‘Hello, Miss Cole?’ then got cold feet, as he put it, and hung up. Later he said to himself ‘Listen, if I’ve got as much to offer as a lot of people have told me — shrewd mind, decent looks, a good nature, a great practice — no reason why she shouldn’t be interested, but not over the phone. I don’t speak well over it and my voice comes out sounding too rough. I’m better at face-to-face meetings.’ Next day he went to the hospital’s X-ray department and was told it was her day off. He went back the next day and said ‘Listen, Miss Cole, I hear you’re a great X-ray technician — tops in the city, a good friend said. Benny Genhart, he’s a ranking lightweight and I think had his hand photographed by you after his last fight.’ ‘It had to be x-rayed by someone else, since that’s not my job.’ ‘Then maybe he only thought you were a great technician or even the doctor by the way you handled things, but he said you’re the person to see. For I’ve got a foot bone I think’s broke and since I’m a dentist who’s on his feet all day — my office is in the same neighborhood you’re from, Benny said.’ ‘I don’t know this Benny you’re speaking of.’ ‘Then maybe he only said he knows someone who knows you or what you do here, but I’m on Clinton, not far from where I think he said you live.’ ‘If your foot is broken or needs an X ray you should see a doctor about it first. Just as someone with a bad tooth would go to you first before thinking of having it x-rayed. Though you do your own x-raying, so the comparison doesn’t apply.’ ‘Look-it, why should I lie? Why start off on the wrong foot with you — and not the broken one — and I don’t even have a broken one or even a bad one? How’s that for not lying? So I’ll start off right. No feet. I saw your newspaper photo last week, went jitters over it, kept it under my pillow for several days — OK. That’s a fib too. I just folded it up and stuck it in my jacket pocket here. It says you live on the Lower East Side, which is where I’m from and now have my dental practice. I showed the photo to some friends — I do know Benny Genhart. We went to grammar school together and I fix his teeth for free. He always needs plenty of work on them too, in his line, but he wasn’t one of the ones I spoke to about you. I asked if anyone knew you or how I could arrange to personally meet you. This is the truth now, but cut my tongue out for the harm it’s going to do me with you for admitting it, and someone — Tommy Rosenblatt. No, no Tommy anything. No such name. Another fib. I just checked around. Called to different hospitals’ X-ray departments, is about it, and this one said you worked here. So I came over yesterday — maybe you heard. Came back today, obviously, and, to sum it up, I’m not at all disappointed in what I’m finding and I’d like very much to go out with you. This afternoon for lunch, even, which I’ll cancel all my appointments for, or anytime you like.’ She said ‘I don’t go out with strangers, especially ones who learned of me through a news article, and now I’ve got to return to work, so good-bye.’ He followed her down a hall, saying ‘Look-it, I know my approach was all wrong with you…. It’s not my usual way … I’m usually so quiet and polite…. Well, that’s not entirely the case…. But I was just so taken with you and now I want to do anything I can to make things right again, OK?’ She said ‘First of all, not that this is any of your business, but I’ve been seeing someone quite exclusively for the last few months. And secondly, do I have to ask the resident on this floor to get you to stop following me?’ He said he was sorry for disturbing her, even sorrier to hear there was already a man in her life, bowed and left. He wrote her several apologies that week. She didn’t answer. He phoned her at work and home and when he told her who it was she hung up. One time he gave a fake name to her mother who answered, and when she got on the phone and found out it was he, she hung up. He sent her flowers at work every day for a week. She sent a note to his office thanking him for the flowers and saying they cheered up a lot of patients in the men’s and women’s wards where she had taken them without ever unwrapping them, but would he now please not send any more? She couldn’t go out with him, she didn’t see any reason why there should ever be further contact between them, but if he persists then the next people she speaks to about him will be the police. He went to her father’s café for dinner every weekday night for a week, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. If he did and she saw him, and he’d try to make sure she did, he’d stand up, bow, pay the check — if she was the cashier and he’d managed to avoid looking at her till the end of the meal, he’d just bow and put the money on the table — and leave. He thought this might do something to make her a little curious about him. She came in the last night he thought he’d go there. The moment she saw him, and before he could stand up, she turned around, went over to her father, still with her back to him pointed in his direction and said something angrily, and left. Her father and several waiters gave him dirty looks for the rest of the dinner but never spoke to him about it and her father went into the kitchen when he got up to pay and leave. He wrote her a letter next day apologizing for his actions the past weeks, said they wouldn’t be repeated and offered to give free dental checkups and treatments to her and her family for as long as they liked. He didn’t hear from her, didn’t expect to, and started seeing other women. About a year later he parked his car the same time her brother parked his in front of the men’s social club they were both going to. Her brother’s license plate had MD on it, his had DDS, as they went into the club they talked about where their offices were and what kind of practices they had and later exchanged cards in case the patients of one might need the services of the other. My father asked if he was related to what must be a former Miss New York by now. The brother said the title wasn’t anything the family was proud of and his father still didn’t know and would probably throw her out of the house if he did. Worse, she was now dancing almost nude in the Scandals, which if his father knew he’d drag her by her hair off the stage he wouldn’t care in front of how many people. The brother had tried talking her out of it. Then tried keeping her from making some performances by locking her in the bedroom and bathroom. But she got out through the fire escape once and the other times banged the door so hard — their father worked in his bar and cafe downstairs and they were afraid he might hear — that their mother told him to let her go. My father told him what a fool he’d made of himself with her a year ago. The brother recalled it, was sure she never thought of it anymore, said she’d dropped the boyfriend she was so serious with then. They became friends—‘Because I liked him,’ my father said, ‘not to get to her; that I gave up on forever.’ The brother told her about him, said what a likable clever fellow he was, that he had a big booming practice, how ashamed he was of the way he’d acted toward her then, and advised her to go out with him if he asked, though he hadn’t mentioned her name or even alluded to her since that first time at the club. She said ‘Keep it that way. Don’t so much as suggest he contact me. For certain never invite him home.’ My father introduced the brother to a woman friend and they got engaged in a few months. My father was invited to the wedding. My mother said she wouldn’t go. But this was her favorite brother, the one she always looked up to. ‘People used to think,’ she’s said to me, ‘that we were girlfriend and boyfriend, we went to so many places together and were so close.’ My father nodded to her when she came down the aisle as one of the bridesmaids. ‘I ignored it.’ He asked her to dance at the reception. ‘I knew he would and had rehearsed what I’d say: a definitive and perhaps also a vociferous no. But I was sitting at the wedding table, everyone was laughing and very happy and I didn’t want to dampen things in any way, so I accepted. As I walked to the dance floor with him I told myself I’d let him know how I felt regarding any other dances or conversation or nodding of heads between us. But I’d also had a bit of champagne by that time and I wasn’t used to it. I rarely touched alcohol till I was around forty, when your father got into trouble. So maybe I was a little tipsy, but I don’t think that’s what made me change my mind about him so quickly. He danced very well and I had always loved to dance. His hands were very soft. They were always that way till he gave up dentistry. That came from the many washings of them with a special pink soap solution before he treated each patient. I don’t think he ever used any other. After he died I gave the last three gallons of it to a relief agency that was collecting old dental equipment for hospitals in Africa. He smelled nice too and his cheeks were very smooth. From a barber-shaving, I guess, but I never asked him, or if I did, I forgot what he said. He also looked very handsome in a tuxedo. His hair was cut perfectly, what he had of it. His skin was tanned from a weekend in Lakewood the previous week when he did nothing but ride horses and swim and sun. He was also extremely polite. Not at all pushy and brash as he was in the hospital and from that time on. Everyone there seemed to like him. ‘Hi, Simon, Hiya, Doc,’ other couples on the floor kept saying, and several people slapped his back as we danced past. We went to the bar for more champagne after our second or third dance and I could see right away, just in how he joked with the bartender and the people around us, that he got along with everyone and would be lots of fun. Maybe that was just the professional pose he’d developed — making the patient feel comfortable under stressful conditions and also to get new patients. But it was still nice, that night, to be with so popular a guy. Also what I liked, which came from what he said and Uncle Leonard had told me about him, was that he was a wonderful brother and son: generous and attentive. And someone, like me, who wanted a half-dozen children at least, so it turned out there were things and thoughts we had in common. After — during our first date, when he was wearing normal clothes again and maybe hadn’t just come from the barber’s. Even before that, when I opened the door of our apartment to let him in that first time — he seemed much too fat and bald and plain looking for me. And the thought of seeing a man who has his hands in people’s mouths all day was a little sickening, but I got over that after he told me how often he washed them. But there was still something powerful and warm about him that first night. Though we never had any experiences together before we got married, I always had the feeling he was a real man. Also, my brother getting married must have contributed to my change of mind that wedding night and for my quickly changing it again on our first date. So you can say it was a number of things that did it. Even that he had a flashy new car. He and Uncle Leonard were two of the few men on the Lower East Side to have one then. No, I’ve got it wrong. I’m talking of around 1917, when your father became a dentist and said he bought his first car.’”

“My father and my mother’s brother parked in the same lot near their offices. My father was a dentist, Uncle Leonard a doctor. This was in 1923 or ‘24. They got to know each other during their walks from the lot to their offices. They kept their cars in a private lot because they were often vandalized or stolen off the street in the neighborhood their offices were in. My father always had the matchmaker in him. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than bringing people together, he said, except making a bundle of money in one killing. ‘Through my practice I knew or knew of lots of single people, and because I felt I was a good judge of character, it was easy for me to hook them up. If it worked out and they happened to throw a new suit my way or a weekend in Lakewood for me because they were so happy, I didn’t refuse it.’ He introduced Uncle Leonard and Aunt Teddy. She was the daughter of a diamond dealer whose teeth he took care of and who’d told him he was looking for a professional man as a husband for his daughter and was prepared to give a huge cash dowry. ‘I knew he meant me. But when I saw her picture I knew she wasn’t my type, so I thought of Uncle Leonard, whose practice wasn’t doing too hot. He was a good G.P. but like the rest of your mother’s family, had no personality.’ My uncle was urging my mother to go out with my father who was attracted to her. She was a beauty contest winner, had been top of her class at Washington Irving, worked as a medical secretary days and danced in a Forty-second Street review nights and matinees, and wanted to be an architect or lawyer. Uncle Leonard brought my father over the house several times but she never took to him. ‘He was bald and fat and though he had a nice small nose he wasn’t that good looking, I told my brother. And he’ll only get balder and fatter and like everybody’s nose, it was sure to grow. I had an image of a slim elegant handsome man for a husband, with a head of hair. And because I wasn’t looking for one then and was considered quite pretty and intelligent and my father was reasonably well off, I didn’t say boo to him, though practically speaking I knew he was a good catch.’ My uncle continued to press her. ‘“Just for lunch once,” he said, “and if there’s no spark, I won’t nag you again.” There wasn’t for me. He was entertaining and personable enough but I felt he’d never be someone I’d be deeply interested in. His mother was everything to him, for one thing, so I knew his wife would always come up short. But he pushed and pushed. Phoned every day. Sent my mother and me expensive presents and flowers. Wined and dined me, few times I consented to go. And he made my dad laugh hysterically whenever he was around him, while no one else had ever got a rise out of him. And my brother, whom I worshiped — he used to say your father was a diamond in the rough who only needed a touch of polishing from me. But he kept insisting he was the most dependable good-natured well-heeled man any girl of my background and education and now “age,” since I was falling on twenty-two, could hope to find and that my dad would never let me go back to school. So, one thing led to another. I never did find him that attractive in all our years of marriage, except when we were dressing formal. He really put time and money on himself then, no handkerchiefs hanging out of his pants pockets, and the shiny black clothes hid his fatness and made him sort of more graceful. There was another beau though whom I was attracted to then. Henry Morton, who was as distinguished and proper as his name, which I think was something else shortly before I met him. Messer or Moscowitz. Maybe if he’d been a little more of a rough-and-tumble guy your father was I would have tried harder to land him. But he acted like a neuter and wanted to amass a fortune before be settled down, and he was only starting out then. He cried uncontrollably when I told him I was marrying your father, but made no counteroffer. If he had I think I would have run off with him, despite what it might have done to my family. He later had children, I understand, so it wasn’t as if he couldn’t do anything. After I’d had my first two and was very pregnant with you — no matter how hard I dieted you grew and grew and coming out nearly killed me — he came to Prospect Park right across where we lived to ask me to leave your father. As a joke I said “The kids?” and he said “We’ll have our own soon after you have that one.” I remember the afternoon clearly. It was bright, sunny and warm. The girl had her midweekly half day off, so it had to be Wednesday. Your brothers were in a sandbox. He popped out of nowhere, I was on a bench knitting, and said he was going to the zoo or just dawdling around taking in the meadows. Later he said he’d been coming out to spy on me for two weeks and had even peeked through the blinds to see me resting in bed. We lived on the first floor of an apartment house: Vera Court it was called, which is how I got the name for your sister. He said he hadn’t made his fortune yet but was getting there, and had never stopped loving me, and so on. Seeing how I saw myself as a big block of blubber then it was a nice feeling to be thought of so desirously, even if I didn’t like him asking me to give up my children for him. I wondered what he would have asked me to do with you once you were weaned. When I said I couldn’t go away with him, even if he agreed to taking along my two-and-a-half children, he cried like a faucet again and that was the last I saw of him, running screaming out of the park and across the avenue, with cars stopping and dodging all around him, or at least by the sounds of their tires and horns I thought they were. For a few days I read the obituary pages thinking he might have killed himself. Anyway, that night I told your father. He said the man must be crazy or was drunk but he’ll come out of it. Sometime after he pointed out a wedding announcement of Henry with a girl from high society. Her family — known anti-Semites — couldn’t have known he was Jewish. Even the last name of his deceased parents had been changed to his for the announcement. Your father wanted to send an anonymous note to the girl’s parents that Henry’s real first name was probably Chaim or Herschel — he didn’t like anyone but himself getting away with anything. In the end he spoke appreciatively of him as a swindler but not as a man who made it on his own as he had.’”

“My mother had a sweetheart when she got engaged to my father: Howard Morton. I was around forty when she told me this and I said ‘Howard, the same as mine? What was that all about?’ ‘Maybe it was Herbert, or Henry. No, it was Howard. I never thought of that before.’ ‘You mean you didn’t name me after him?’ ‘Of course not. Maybe deep down I remembered what a distinguished-sounding name it was. In fact, I can almost bet it helped get him where he got. For I’m sure without it or an equally distinguished first name, and a plain enough last one to go with it, he wouldn’t have passed as a Gentile and got into society and rich because of it. He ended up owning trains. I suppose I thought the same thing, in different ways, would happen to you. At the least that people would look up to you a bit more. Little did I know we were coming into an age where people got ridiculed for lofty first names or if they didn’t have one that could be shortened to a single syllable and that Jews with the most Jewish names and faces could get into Gentile society without passing.’”

“My mother liked to recall going to the silent movies as a kid. The tickets for anyone under ten were two for five cents. ‘I’d stand outside the theater holding up my two cents and say “I got two, anybody got three?” Then some girl or boy would say “I got three,” and we’d buy the double ticket and go in together.’” No, that was his father.

“His father kept calling, visiting, sent flowers, jewelry, offered to straighten or cap her and her sisters’ teeth free, took her to the best shows, restaurants and nightclubs, professed his love every way and any time he could, in taxis, on the street, during intermissions and over food, said he’d make an adoring idolizing husband, she said she’d rather have her spouse ignore or even take a swing at her than that, said ‘OK, no down-on-my-knees like a big jerk and painting your toenails: just solid soulmate loving and lionlike lovemaking or some tumultuous unbridled jungle or forest beast,’ she said ‘Please, where do you get these ideas? — not from me,’ said he wanted to have five children by her, girls and boys, and when she said she’d always wanted ten and the major majority of them boys but was definitely not thinking of them from him, said ‘Ten then — I can afford to. You won’t have to lift a finger. The best hospitals and docs and after-they’re-born care. The world? You got it. On a silver platter.’ She said that was an awful figure of speech. That heads belonged on silver platters. Cooked turkeys. Aspic molds. ‘No, you’re nice and bright and I admire what you’ve done with your life. From no-shoes-in-the-summer-to-save-on-the-shoe-leather to sending yourself through dental school while working at the post office ten hours a day and ending up with one of the biggest practices on the Lower East Side as you say, but we can only go so far at being good companions and friends. I know lots of pretty girls. I’ll introduce you.’ ‘Maybe I set my sights too high, but only you.’ Her father wouldn’t let her go to college to get a profession so she got work for little pay as a secretary. ‘You’re beautiful and you’re built well and you’re not as stupid as most girls your age,’ her father said, ‘but your looks won’t last forever and you haven’t got enough upstairs to only get along on your brains after. Marry him. He’s a smart guy and makes everybody laugh. All in all he’s the best of the fifty or so beaus you’ve had. And that he’s crazy for you means you’ll never have to do a stitch of laundering or sewing and looking after your children if you don’t want. You like to read books and go to shows? You’ll have all the time you want now, and stuff you buy from bookshops and not have to get from the library, plus two-month summer vacations in the mountains with your kids. Nannies. The boats these days are packed with them, most just wanting a few dollars a week plus room and board. Clean Irish and German girls who’ll bring up your children like princesses and chairmen of the board, but with an iron fist so they’re not crawling all over you when they’re sick or should be asleep.’ Finally she said yes. ‘I’m not sure why. He wasn’t that bad looking. He had very strong but at the same time delicate hands. He bathed a lot, never smelled. He was humorous and shrewd with money and had a certain animal something that I think as much as any man’s matched mine. Nine years older than I but he thought young and seemed in relative good health and didn’t drink that much. Deeply drawn to him? Everybody knew me. No man was ever good enough, but I have to admit some excited me a lot more. Maybe because nobody pursued me harder, so I just gave up. If that was it, I must have been nuts.’ They got engaged, broke up. He didn’t want her to return the ring but his mother sent his aunt to her house to get it. ‘I knew I could do better. And with someone who wasn’t as fat and bald and hadn’t such a sure-to-ruin-your-life mother. And who still didn’t have this thing about his poor past where he had to wipe his nose with coarse paper towels he took in big chunks from restaurants and public toilets and day after day refolded and used the same brown bag he packed his lunch in till it was practically in shreds. Her father said ‘You marry him or I’m throwing you into the street and never letting you back. I was never this dumb since I was a boy but I already gave his mother half the dowry money and now she’s calling it earnest gelt and won’t give any of it back.’ Engaged again. ‘I’m not sure why. My father and brother and that he came to where I worked and said he still wanted my hand and kept sniffling and drooling till I had to say yes so he’d stop. If I had learned later it was all a ruse, just to get a beautiful woman for a wife and as he said to up the odds that he’d have beautiful children, I would have killed him.’ Before she met him she’d won several beauty contests, almost became Miss America, danced in the Scandals and then the Follies on Broadway and in a few movies. Turned down a dinner invitation from the Prince of Wales. ‘The type I liked least: a rich roué and lush. He was very gracious when Flo introduced us, and I was told he’d singled me out of the line and then got even more excited when he heard I was well read, but his face was already so depraved that just shaking his hand I didn’t know what I’d catch from him. Now I wish I had accepted. Not for any ideas about being the First Wallis Simpson — he wasn’t ready for that for years and it’d be too far-fetched to think he’d choose Jewish — but to have had the story.’ Wealthy women and men sent her flowers and expensive presents backstage but she returned all the presents and devised ways not to even bump into them after the show, for she said they were hungry wolves out after just one thing. ‘Who wanted to be another pearl on an already lengthy strand? That’s what my mother told me she used to think when she modeled for Milgrin’s when she was fourteen and every man who came in with his mistress or wife tried to paw her behind. Creeps then, creeps in my time, no doubt creeps now and forever. As for women with women, lots of the other dancers did it and sometimes just for fun they said, but to me nothing could be more repulsive.’ His father sat in the front rows or overhanging front loges of the theater almost every night during the last weeks of her stage dancing which was around when he met her. ‘He came in with his cronies — all of them dentists — and said they waved and winked and occasionally whistled and clapped at me whenever I danced near. It never distracted me since I couldn’t see them because of the footlights. And I was deaf on my left side where they usually sat — their right — from when a grade-school teacher smacked me when I talked back. Oh, I was always a devil. I don’t know what happened to me.’ Her brother-in-law stole their car during the wedding reception. His father had bought it new that week, morning of the wedding parked it in front of the wedding hall, planned to drive it to Atlantic City with her after the reception, then back to Manhattan next day to board a ship for a two-week cruise to Cuba. ‘We had it at the Academy of Music, with their orchestra. My mother-in-law wanted Klezmer. That’s what her daughter had at hers and I guess it also brought back her blissful old village life filled with ignorance, beatings and poverty, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted couples to dance, maybe a tango or turkey trot or two but mostly civil waltzes. To him there was nobody in the world like Emperor Franz Josef. He had a neighbor do a needlepoint of him in parade dress on a horse, which hung in our living room, and wore his Franz Josef mustache and had many of his mannerisms for fifty years. So he said to her “If you insist they be there, have them come without their instruments. Just to drink and eat and dance and throw up in the lavatories,” which they did. He was a great sport with money and minced no words. The Academy was the swankiest place we could have had it at then, not being old-time Yankee Doodle Jews, and it was done completely kosher. That was against my father’s eating tastes and his beliefs and jacked up the price of the reception by more than half, but my mother-in-law, who loved pork and brains at our house, wouldn’t come to it if it was any other way. Your father even had to buy his brother a tux for the wedding, and the most expensive there was or he wouldn’t show, plus buy his mother a diamond watch exactly like mine and diamond earrings in place of my engagement ring. They had him under their palm, that family, except for his father who was a sweet schnook.’ Or his uncle got someone to steal the car, but to use it to transport bootleg whiskey. ‘He slipped out of the party and was gone for hours. Nobody missed him since we had more than two hundred people there, with Cantor Rosenblatt, perhaps the finest cantor of his day and still at the top of his voice, singing during the ceremony. It would be like having Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker both during their heyday. They were brothers-in-law, you know, but I forget which one married whose sister. This was all during Prohibition. In fact Uncle Lewis got my father all the liquor for the party — Dad had folded his bar long ago when he couldn’t get liquor legally — but weeks before. My sister was in on that car. Two connivers. She probably said “Go now, I’ll cover for you, it’s the fuchsia one right outside, anybody ask for you I’ll say you ran off with the bride.” She’s OK today, too blind and weak to joke or cheat at anything but getting a second shower at her nursing home, but he never stopped being in the rackets till he died. The Syndicate, then Murder Incorporated. For all we know he carried out the contracts or did the body disposing — one of those, or maybe you graduate. I forget what Brooklyn bay most of those bodies ended up in, but it was famous for a while. New York Jewish boys were very big in that then. My brother Robert used to say half his childhood friends ended up in prison and the other half in law school. Whenever he went to Sing Sing to see a client, ten other men in the halls there would yell out “Hiya, Bobby, remember me from Rivington or Cannon Street or P.S. 62?” Lewis once showed us his gun, trying to impress us — he was a little guy so it made him feel strong. But your father told him Lepke himself was a patient of his and that whenever he treated him he demanded he leave his guns in a locked cabinet just for them in his laboratory. Gurah’s teeth he’d never treat as he heard he stabbed his dentist from the chair once for no other reason but that the novocaine didn’t completely take. They found the car while we were in Cuba. It stunk so such from whiskey that we had to almost give it away. That was pre-vinyl and before fabric treatment, so the cloth just soaked it in. There was even blood on the seats, but probably from one of the bootleggers cutting himself from one of the many broken bottles in it. The homemade Prohibition whiskey was bottled in the cheapest glass. So we took the train to Atlantic City — Lewis and Ellie in front of the Academy throwing rice at us as we left — or borrowed someone’s car. Or someone drove us there that night and we took the train back to the ship the next day. Something about cars and trains sticks in my mind though.’”

“‘You won’t believe this,’ my mother told me. ‘No one would if I swore on a stack of bibles and had motion pictures with sound on them plus six of the most reputable witnesses. Your father called his mother on our wedding night to say I was a virgin. Right from the hotel room. It must have been 2:00 a.m., or maybe it was seven or eight, so the next day. He thought I was still asleep. He just sat at the edge of the bed, placed the call through the lobby desk and whispered in Yiddish to her “She’s all right, one piece.” Then I heard her say back in Yiddish “Good, for tragedy for you and me and everyone connected with your marriage if she was anything but.” Your father taught me Yiddish just so I could speak to her. I’d taken German in high school and did well at it so I had a head start. Every other day for an hour he sat down with me for conversation in it. First the curses: Gehn bud and so on. Then a few weeks before the marriage he asked me to have my father get me tutors for several hours a day because I wasn’t learning fast enough to be fluent by the time of the wedding. She was an ignorant woman. Let’s face it: a tough shrewd illiterate peasant who loved what she was and never wanted to be anything else. Who wouldn’t even learn our yes or please or thank you. His father, who got out in the world more as a darner and weaver, at least spoke some broken English and apologized for not knowing more. You of course know you’re named after her: Hinda — Howard. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but she died three months before you were born. I always hated to say this, but that was the happiest pregnancy I had. With Vera, which should have been the best since I had nine months free of my mother-in-law, your father was already in trouble.’”

“My mother talking: ‘My mother and mother-in-law were sitting at the main wedding table with me. “Let me see the nice jewelry Simon gave you,” my mother-in-law said. So I held my hands out to show her the diamond watch and engagement ring, both of which she’d seen ten times before, but never in front of my mother. I say “my mother,” since if my father were at the table at the time she never would have asked it. She knew he’d see right through her immediately and tell her off. Oh, my father was on to her from the start. He was born of peasants but moved himself to the city quickly and became a man of the world. Anyway, all this was in Yiddish, you understand. Not my mother. Besides English she spoke Polish and German, but never in front of us. That they only did when they got into fierce arguments. Then my mother-in-law said “Why don’t you take them off so I can really have a look at them?” So I took the ring and watch off and held them out. She took them and turned them over and over and said things like “Very nice, very expensive, my son has very good tastes and knows how to take care of a lady. Listen, my darling,” she said, “let me hold them for you while you’re on your honeymoon. I heard those Spanish islands can be very unsafe places for Americans,” and she started putting them in her bag. Did I let her? You must think I was crazy. She wanted to keep them to see if I was going to be a virgin that night. If your father told her I wasn’t, and he’d never lie to her on anything, she would make him leave me and she’d keep the jewelry. And if she was told I was a virgin, which I was but she never believed him because of my good looks and dancing in all those Broadway shows and with almost nothing on sometimes, she would have kept the jewelry anyway because she would have said he was lying to protect me. So I told her no, if I feel unsafe before we go I’ll let my mother hold them for me. And if I don’t feel unsafe till we’re on the cruise, I’ll leave them in a safe they must have on the ship. That way I kept my jewelry. And when he told her the next morning I was a virgin-called her just for that purpose, right from the hotel lobby phone before we went in for breakfast — she had no reason to argue with him about it. As it was, I had to sell all my good jewelry months after your father went on trial, as the lawyer costs and your father not working had made us almost dead broke. Good thing she was gone by then or she would have died during the trial or when he went to prison. What am I saying? — she’d never let anything hurt herself. She would have just pretended she got some kind of heart attack, and then he would have got very sick over it in prison and perhaps died. Maybe I’m being too hard on her, but for the first ten years of my marriage that woman ruined my life. If ever there was a real witch in this world…. Well, I could tell you stories’”

“A story his mother liked to tell. ‘Make what you want of this. I suppose it shows what a devil I was. I was playing hooky. First time too, and I walked around the neighborhood, feeling free but not really finding anything interesting to do — I always had to be stimulated — so I walked around my school a few times. Dumb of me when you think of it, but I was probably trying to make some point. I was pigheaded and a tomboy too. So I yelled up to Miss Brody’s window — the assistant principal and a real doll. She’d say “Your principal is your pal; that’s also how to spell it.” I loved her. Always very kind to me. I yelled “Miss Brody, Miss Brody, here I am”—she wasn’t Irish, you know. Brody could be a Jewish name. From a town in Poland where they congregated. They came over here. The immigration official would try to pronounce their names — Dyzik, Pytzik — and say “I can’t say it, how am I supposed to spell it?” So he’d look at their cards which had where they were from and what shots they got and say “Brody, you’re from Brody so your name’s now Brody, a good American one.” You didn’t fight it, if you could in English, since you were afraid of being detained another week or sent back. She was the first Jewish assistant principal in the system, it was said. The public schools were dominated by the Irish then. They probably thought she was one, with that name, but it’s surprising it first went to a woman. Maybe because there were so few Jewish men teachers because the pay was so bad. Worse than anyone’s. But if they didn’t know she was Jewish, then really no surprise, because they probably had about a dozen Irish women assistant principals by then, so what was one more? But I yelled “You can’t see me, Miss Brody, but I can see you.” I couldn’t, but that’s what I kept yelling to get her attention. “I’m playing hooky, Miss Brody, what do you think of that? I’m not going to school today or any other day, or if I do, only for a day a week and only the day I want.” I’m telling you, I was something. She finally came to the window and said “You come straight upstairs, dear, or you’ll be in deep trouble, I hate to say.” I said something like “Why should I? I’m having too much fun walking around free as a bird.” Just then she said “Watch out, dear, someone’s coming,” and slammed the window. Everyone knew my father and was afraid of him. He was out for his daily hour stroll from his café. Cane he didn’t need, for show, always the freshly blocked homburg. I thought it was the truant officer she meant and started to run. But he had already come up behind me and put the hook part of the cane around my neck, grabbed me by the scruff of it and marched me into the school right up to Miss Brody’s office. Then he threw me on the floor there and said “You’re too easy on her. She yells like that from the street at you or stays out of school without our permission, this is what you do,” and he lifted me up by my hair and slapped me hard on my left ear. Oh, I heard ringing and buzzing, besides all the pain, and when the noises stopped I heard him saying “And maybe even harder to her, maybe much harder. She’ll learn, and her parents will only thank you if you smack her like that. That’s a promise.” I was deaf in that ear for weeks, but he wouldn’t let my mother take me to a doctor for it. I still only have about ten to twenty percent of my hearing there. Maybe it was because of his slap. But maybe it was bad before that and his slap made it worse. I don’t want to apologize for him but I do want to be fair. Or maybe it was always that bad, from birth, or even before, and we only became aware of it after he slapped me and I started complaining I couldn’t hear in that ear, to take some of the blame of playing hooky off me. And then who knows? Maybe I was a hundred percent deaf in that ear before he hit me and his hitting me improved it by ten to twenty percent, but still made us realize my hearing problem. I don’t remember any hearing problems before, but that’s not saying there wasn’t. Probably not. But Miss Brody. She was a lovely person. The first to urge me to be a doctor or lawyer or something substantial. But she never so much as touched me after that when before she used to hug me whenever she saw me in the halls or so. And other times shove or nudge me gently when she thought I wasn’t doing things just right when she knew I had it in me to.’”

“His mother: ‘Something very eventful early in my life? Let me think. Anything — right? — but which stuck and not just remembered now. This one I’ve thought of a hundred times since. I was no more than thirteen. My mother sent me to Fourteenth Street to buy dresses for my sisters, both the older and younger ones. I took the trolley and went to Rothenburg’s and Hearn’s, the two big stores there. Off Broadway. They had a walkway a number of floors up connecting across the street two of the buildings of one of those stores. A very new thing for its time and I liked looking at it and imagining things.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘People walking across, looking down at me, wondering what I was looking up at. I think the walkway is still there. I went to both stores to comparison shop. Then after seeing what they had in dresses, I bought them, maybe stopped at some outside stand-up place for a tea and cake, for she also gave me money for that, and went home.’ ‘Yes. So?’ ‘That’s all. It was a pleasant day that I took the trolley and did all this. I don’t remember that but she wouldn’t have sent me in the snow or rain. I would have got wet, then a cold because I was so prone, and the trolley stop was three blocks from our building, so the boxes would have also got soaked.’ ‘You had to carry all this. Wasn’t it too much?’ ‘I was always very strong, and at thirteen, maybe near my strongest.’ ‘Did you resent doing all this while your sisters weren’t?’ ‘Why? It was probably only two or three boxes with the five dresses in them — four for my sisters and one for me. So with twine holding them both or two and one for each hand or all three together, it couldn’t have been too hard. Besides, the trip was interesting — the building bridge, the trolley rides — so something I’d say they missed out on.’ ‘Did anything happen on the trolley? It break down? Something you saw from it like a horse from a horsecar bolting or breaking loose and you got scared?’ ‘Not that I remember.’Did you get lost or anything like that?’ ‘Depends which time you meant. I did this every spring for about five years till I was eighteen.’ ‘Then the first time. For instance, maybe you forgot this but did a man make a pass at you on the trolley or streets or in a store because you were already so beautiful and filled out, according to your photos? Or someone molest you, even, let’s say, or just winked at you and you didn’t know what it meant and got scared?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then someone try to cheat you out of your money in or out of the stores?’ ‘I’m sure people didn’t do that as much then, at least to young and old people. I told you what happened on the street and then with the bank last month with my checkbook and a Ginnie Mae?’ ‘Unbelievable. I don’t know how it could have happened.’ ‘What don’t you know or believe?’ ‘I mean I know it happened and how. But that someone would try to take out, or whatever one does with a Ginnie Mae, though I’m not quite sure what a Ginnie Mae is, and not get caught when he was standing next to the banker at the time she called you to see if you had authorized that check? That’s what happened, right?’ ‘First he ripped the handbag off my arm. So fast I didn’t even see his face. I’ve no idea even how old he is, and nobody else did who saw him, or they wouldn’t say so. My shoulder ached from that wrenching for a week. Then the same day, maybe four hours later when I’m still shaking over it, he or one of his pals tries to open a Ginnie Mae with a check that was in my bag. The banker only called me because there’s a state or federal law — something — maybe that particular bank’s policy after seeing so many people like me swindled like this — saying any check five thousand and over has to be cleared with the account’s owner. Suppose he’d just made the check out for four thousand nine-hundred and nine-nine?’ ‘Maybe there’s a five thousand minimum on a Ginnie Mae.’ ‘Anyway, I said no, that I’d never written a cheek that high in my life and for her not to accept it,’ and hung up and only then realized it had to be from the checkbook in my stolen bag. And also that I hadn’t only not asked what her name was but what bank she was with, though she did give me all that when she first got on and say it was way out on Long Island. You know, me and memory, which with new things only get further apart. Maybe, because she said she’d get back to me in a day or so, I didn’t ask her name and bank again, but she never did. I’ve a strong feeling she was in on the whole thing.’ ‘Why?’ ‘That she never called back. That I never heard from the police. Five thousand. That’s major fraud. You read where the FBI comes in on things that high. Besides, as a banker she has ways of checking if I have five thousand and over in my account, which I do but shouldn’t. People say I should put most of it in Money Market or CDs.’ ‘Well, if you do have more in it than you need for your checks, sure. But if she was involved, why would she have first called you? And why would the check have been made out for five thousand instead of four thousand five-hundred, for instance?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘If banks only make these authorization calls for five-thousand-and-over checks, then she wouldn’t have had to call you if this one was for forty-five hundred.’ ‘That I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe she doesn’t have a bank way of finding out how much I have in my account and was only finding out this way.’ ‘How?’ ‘By saying “Did you make out a check for five thousand?” And if I had said “Five thousand? I’m lucky to have five hundred in my account,” she wouldn’t have bothered. No? Wrong? Anyway, that’s not what I said. And I never got back the check she mentioned or heard anything more about it from anyone. If they caught him, this check swindler, or even if he ran away when she was making that call to me, she still would have had the check he left, if he left it, and I should have got it back by now, right?’ ‘I’d think so but I don’t know.’ ‘So where is it then? She’s in on it, I’m telling you, and I’m worried for my money. For myself too, because just by talking to me she knows I’m an old muddleheaded cow and therefore vulnerable, and she also knows a lot about how much money I have. Not just the checking account but probably the savings, stocks, how much Social Security I have coming in. She could use her expertise and all those computer machines banks have and pull the wool over my eyes.’ ‘Really, I’m sure it’s nothing like that. But maybe I should phone all the banks on Long Island till I get one that knows what happened to your check.’ ‘Sure, call, run up a two hundred dollar phone bill for yourself. Suffolk and Nassau counties are long distance and unreasonably high compared to phone rates for places of much greater distances. And what’ll it get you? Even if you get the right bank, think you’ll get the right person? And if you do and it’s our Miss Possibility Bank Fraud, think she’ll give you the right information? You won’t even know you got her, is what I’m saying, and she’ll steer you around till you’re dizzy and lost and give up hope. The truth is, so you won’t be worried about me, I’m not that worried, as I closed the account right after her call and opened another one. So she couldn’t touch my money with the old check if she tried, and with the new checks I’m never going to carry the checkbook around. Just one or two checks from it in my wallet, which will be one less load to carry in my bag.’ ‘But if they get your bag they’ll get your wallet. Did you have your wallet in the bag that guy stole?’ ‘Sure, with everything — money, laundry tickets, library card, card to get me on the subways and buses for half price — but no credit cards. Those I keep in their own pouch that I’d forgotten at home.’ I was wondering, since you never spoke of it. But I just thought of something. Did you have your checkbook balanced on its transactions’ page?’ ‘Yes, always. I do it after I write each check. You know me: meticulous.’ ‘Then that’s how the thief knew how much you had in it. Believe me, take out three-month CDs with most of your money in it. Keep two thousand at the most in your check account. Then if you need cash suddenly, other than what your Social Security brings, use one of the CDs after it matures. And if it’s two months away from maturing and you don’t want to be penalized for cashing it in early, borrow from me till it matures. Or I’ll give you whatever you need when you need it — no borrowing. You were plenty generous with me when I was short or broke, so why not, when Denise and I can afford it? But you won’t go for that idea, so the best thing is to have several three-month CDs running in a way where one matures every month or semimonthly. That way you’ll always have cash available. And it won’t get complicated, as the bank lets you know a week or so before the CD matures and then rolls it over automatically if you don’t cash it in.’ ‘I’ll think about it.’ ‘Please. Or do something, if not that, with most of your checking money so it earns a good interest. But listen — about the other thing. I’m still not clear why the shopping-on-Fourteenth-Street story stands out in your mind so much.’ ‘When?’ ‘The one you gave me when I asked you to tell me something memorable — eventful — from your childhood. Your mother — the dresses and trolleys.’ ‘Maybe because she trusted me and liked my tastes. She always did.’ ‘That’s fine, and it must have made you feel very good that she did and not the others, your sisters, but is that really the only reason you remember so well the first time she asked you to do it?’ ‘That’s all. I think it’s enough.” OK, but I’m not going to use it. No disrespect to what you remember and how you value it and such, but nothing there or just not enough.’”

“She’s coming home from shopping. Two shopping bags — too much to carry — but it was a nice day so instead of ordering by phone and getting perhaps not their best produce and paying a five dollar service charge, she went to the supermarket and of course bought too much. A man comes up behind her as she starts down the steps to her brownstone. She turns around quickly, says ‘Yes?’ He says ‘Nothing, lady, what’s with you? I’m only going inside.’ ‘May I ask what your business is in this building? You don’t live here.’ ‘No, I’m visiting a friend.’ ‘Who?’ ‘A man — a guy I know.’ ‘What’s his name? I know all the tenants here.’ ‘This one just moved in,’ and he goes past her, into the vestibule and rings several bells. She puts down her bags, opens the vestibule door and keeps it open with one foot and says from the outside ‘You rang more than one bell. That doesn’t seem as if you’re ringing your friend.’ ‘He told me his bell’s not working so to ring a few others to get in.’ Someone on the intercom says ‘Hello?’ ‘I’m looking for Bob,’ the man says. ‘No Bob here,’ and the person cuts off. ‘I know he’s there,’ the man says to her. ‘Maybe he’s in the bathroom. I’ll go in with you and knock on his door.’ ‘What floor is he on?’ ‘I know what floor. The one above this one or the next. It has a little peephole in it, I think.’ He thinks a moment. That’s right, it has.’ ‘There’s a law in this city that every apartment’s front door has to have a peephole in it, not that every landlord complies with it. This one has though. And there isn’t any Bob in the building. No Robert, Rob, Bobby — no name like that. I even know the men who live with the single women in the building, and the names of the two sons of the married couple. No Bobs. I’m sorry but I’m afraid if you don’t leave I’ll have to summon the police.’ He punches her in the face, pulls her into the vestibule by her blouse and grabs her pocketbook as she’s going down. She goes down and holds on to her pocketbook and tries to pull it back while she’s screaming. He gets over her and punches her in the head and face and then kicks her in the stomach. She lets go of the pocketbook and he runs outside with it. She said she tried to scream again but started blacking out. She said she was afraid of blacking out for she thought the man, thinking she could identify him, might come running back and kick and punch her till she was dead. She said she knew, even while she was saying it, that she shouldn’t have said she’d summon the police. She also regretted mentioning there were single women in the building and that she had spoken sarcastically to him about the city law on peepholes. A delivery boy passing the building sees her in the vestibule, comes downstairs and opens the vestibule door and asks if anything’s wrong or maybe she’s just a homeless lady resting. She can’t answer, tries to lift a finger, just stares at him. ‘Are these your bags out here? That’s what made me see you. I knew no one would just leave them there like that. Something you want me to do for you like bring them in? Are you hurt? Now that I see you close, you look it. But I don’t have much time.’ She said he kept looking up to the sidewalk as if to make sure nobody was taking his shopping cart filled with orders. Her mouth’s full of blood and a tooth or two is broken and a temporary bottom bridge also broke loose and is in her mouth somewhere and she’s afraid of choking on it. She starts swallowing blood, spits it out and the boy runs upstairs and quickly pushes the cart past the building. She said he probably was revolted by the sight of such an ugly old woman spitting like that and what she was spitting and must now look like. She lies there. People pass on the sidewalk but none look her way. No sound comes out when she tries screaming. A tenant leaving the building opens the door into the vestibule. ‘Mrs. T?’ he says. He sits her up. She points to her mouth and starts choking. He says ‘Something inside your mouth?’ She nods. ‘Is it the blood,’ he says, wiping her mouth, ‘or you want me to take whatever it is out?’ She nods. ‘You can’t spit it out?’ She tries to, shakes her head. She said she felt the bridge was getting more lodged in her throat and she was starting to panic over it. She starts gagging. The man didn’t want to stick his hand in her mouth, he later told her. Not because he was squeamish but that he was afraid she might lose control of her reflexes and chomp down hard and bite off his fingers. He’d heard where that had happened. Or read it in a newspaper. “‘Good Samaritan Gets Fingers Chewed off by Person He Saved” or something,’ he joked about the headline saying, ‘if it was a paper where I’d learned of it.’ She later told her son the man probably gave that excuse to spare her feelings and that he really didn’t want his hand in her ugly broken mouth. He lies her flat on her front, slaps her back, raises her to her knees and forearms and slaps her back, when that doesn’t work he grabs her ankles and holds her upside down and keeps bouncing her on her head or in the air till the bridge and two teeth come out. ‘Is that it?’ he says, still holding her upside down. ‘Yes.’ ‘All there is? The isolated little teeth and the connected ones?’ moving them with his foot below her face so she could see them. ‘Please. I feel vomit coming.’ When she’s being wheeled on a stretcher to the ambulance she overhears him say to one of the medical crew ‘I still can’t believe I actually did it. I just took a chance, thought I might even be making things worse, but it worked. I’ve been in a position to but never helped anyone that way before or ever had such physical strength. I felt I could have held her up and bounced her up and down for hours, and it was such fucking ecstasy after her teeth came out.’ Later in the hospital one of her sons says she should think about moving. ‘The neighborhood’s getting too rough.’ The neighborhood’s never been better,’ she says. ‘The best boutiques, good restaurants, fancy bars and bookshops. Landlords are getting two thousand a month for one-bedroom apartments, fifteen hundred for studios. People are doubling and tripling up in studios just to afford living in them. It’s all fair-market value now, once a rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartment becomes vacant and the landlord puts in an air conditioner and splashes on a little paint, and those are the going fair market rents. It’s crazy to pay it, but the whole area’s been vastly upgraded with all these young hardworking people moving in and brownstones being converted almost everywhere you look.’ ‘But with all this so-called nicer clientele more and more druggies and ripoff artists are coming in to rob them. You’re elderly. They think you have money because you live around there. Or else they jump you for the few dollars they think you might have on you, if you happen to be wearing your knockaround clothes on the street, because you’re an easy target. There’s got to be some solution. No old age home or moving in with Jerry or me, since you’re much too independent for that and for your age still pretty healthy. Maybe a building with a doorman or guard always downstairs and elevators and that’s monitored in the laundry room and places and everything’s safe and well run and clean. If you want, in the same neighborhood but not in a small unprotected walkup where a thief can just lean on the front door to open it.’ ‘I’ve lived in that building — what are you, fifty-three?’ ‘Two.’ ‘Then for fifty-one years and I’ll never get the same space I need and like anywhere else for the rent I can pay. It happened once, this beating, and mostly because I had a big mouth, but it won’t happen again. I’ll get my locks changed at my own expense, walk the other way, as your dad used to say, from possible muggers, and only go out when I’m next to sure the streets are more crowded than yesterday.’ ‘And if, despite all these precautions of yours — an alarm system on your windows, for instance. That’s a must anywhere in New York on the ground and second floor. But if some nice-looking, well-dressed mugger or two, for that’s what I read how they often appear these days, to fool you, besides being well-spoken and with a couple of books under their arms too But if one does come up behind you as you’re going into your building, what’ll you do?’ ‘If I don’t recognize him, male or female, and there’s even an inkling he’s suspicious, I’ll say “Oop’s, wrong building — not you, me,” and walk back to the sidewalk and call the police from the callbox at the corner, not that it’ll work and if it does, that they’ll come in time to catch him. But please don’t think you’re going to keep me locked inside all day and turn me into a hermit only reading books and baking cookies and breads. My life’s empty enough.’”

“She’s on her way to shop when she sees, two buildings down from hers, something funny going on inside the vestibule. The door’s all glass, little iron grillwork on the front but no curtains or anything to stop her view, and a man’s on the floor with his pants half off and the top of his backside showing and going through what seems to be the sex motions. She doesn’t want to look hard, since in this neighborhood sometimes it can be anything you think it is and often much worse. But his hands are hidden so maybe he’s just doing it to himself, bad enough but not something threatening to her. Or maybe he’s having heart seizures on the floor or whatever they are like that. But then she sees another pair of hands — different, a woman’s or older girl’s — shoot up around him and one of them tears at his shirt and the other reaches for his hair as if to grab and pull it but never gets there, his head always backing away when her hand gets close. Maybe they’re both doing it together, high on drugs or something, not tenants there of course but from the outside, permanently or temporarily out of their right minds. No matter what it is someone should go to the door to see and possibly help, and she looks around but nobody is on the street up or down or if they’re far away she can’t see them, and if they’re in the windows looking at her she also can’t see them because of her bad long-distance eyes. She wants better to just get away. But then if the woman’s unwilling in all this, and that those hands aren’t part of the sex act but her fighting against it, she has to do something immediately like scream to attract attention or just to let the man know someone’s watching and maybe he’ll stop and get off her and go away. She walks down a step. He turns around — maybe he saw her shadow, because she thinks she walked too lightly for him to hear her — and sees her and pushes the door open a little with his foot and says ‘Mind your own business, lady, or you’ll get the same thing to you.’ Then he turns back to the woman he’s on and starts pumping harder as if to get the thing over with right away. The woman yells ‘Please, don’t go, stop him,’ and tears at his clothes. He punches her and she’s quiet and then he looks around again while he’s pumping on her and says ‘See this?’ and balancing himself on the door with one hand, picks up and holds out a knife. ‘I’ll cut your head off if you don’t get out of here. Go to your fucking place where you live and lock yourself inside it for the next ten hours and shut up forever about everything you saw.’ ‘But you’re on the street … doing it.’ ‘You heard me?’ and he swishes the knife in the air. She walks back to the sidewalk. The woman screams. The man’s still on top of her, doing it harder and holding her face down with his hand it seems. She hurries down the steps, bangs on the glass with her keys while she yells to the street ‘Help, someone, fire, fire,’ she heard she’s supposed to yell if she wants people to really take notice and come. ‘Help, please, fire, a woman’s getting raped, mauled, burned and raped. Fire, fire.’ He gets up, turns to her, penis erect, grabs it and jerks it back and forth a few times and then points to her and laughs, zips up, opens the door as she reaches the top step, woman’s on the ground pulling down her skirt and crying and clutching her neck, runs up the steps and grabs her from behind when she’s gone maybe five feet, hits her head and she goes down. Then he grabs her head by the hair and smashes it on the ground. All she remembers. He must have done it several times by the injuries she got but she only remembers it that once. Later in the hospital her son says ‘From what the police suggested the man had finished raping the woman and took her wallet. Then after he knocked you out he took your handbag and must have spit on your head because there was saliva all over it, or maybe you got it from the sidewalk when he knocked you down and beat your head against it. No one from any of the buildings around called the police.’ ‘That doesn’t mean they saw and didn’t call. It could mean nobody might have seen or heard anything.’ ‘Really doubtful, but OK. The woman who was raped was the first person to come to you. She sat you up so you wouldn’t choke from your bleeding and busted teeth and stopped a car to get the driver to call an ambulance and the police, both for you and her. Look, from now on no stepping in when you see something suspicious looking or terrible happening. Don’t even call the police from a street callbox or from your home or anywhere. The attacker might know where you live or go to great lengths to find out to get even with you. You did enough of that in your life. Let others take over. Now do you understand me? Just no more, and Jerry tells me to tell you the same thing.’ I can get a whistle,’ she says. ‘One that’s on a chain and looks like a nice pendant, so when I go out I can wear it around my neck without anybody much thinking about what it is. I’ve seen them advertised in the better jewelry stores — Fortunoff’s and Tiffany’s. If I don’t blow it immediately when I see something wrong going on, I’ll go down the street fifty feet to blow it. Every tenant on the block and maybe in the immediate neighborhood should have one or just carry a regular police whistle, but that I shouldn’t expect. But just think of it. Suppose I blew my whistle, someone heard it and blew hers. Then someone else heard that whistle and blew hers, till on and on this whistling went till the sound of it, altogether or just a few of them or one or two last ones, reached a policeman walking his beat or in a car. It might for now be one of the best ways to beat these crime things. And the rapist or mugger, or just a car thief, by hearing the whistles will have to know he’s a caught man if he stays. I’m going to bring it up at the next block association meeting. Or even contact the association’s president to call a meeting to talk about the growing crime on the block and my whistling idea.’”

“I open the door and immediately feel a breeze in their apartment. Something’s wrong. It’s winter and this wind and my mother always keeps the windows shut in weather like this and all the downstairs rooms are lit. From the foyer I see what seem like little pieces of paper floating to the kitchen floor. A burglar, must have been going through something, her handbag, and scattered them, tissues and loose things, when he heard me and ran off. I yell ‘You’re in fucking trouble with me, mugger,’ and run to the kitchen, not there and no sound of him, look around for something to hit him with, nothing really good in sight and I open a kitchen drawer. The candlesticks in the dining room! And I run to it. They’re on the table, I grab them, bang them on the table edge and yell ‘I’m going to pound the living shit out of you with these clubs I got so get the hell out, mugger, you better get the fuck out right away,’ and with a candlestick raised to clip him I walk into the next room. No one there. Window’s open, bars pried apart, so that’s how he got in. He go out? Probably has a crowbar himself unless he left it outside. He go upstairs? Should I shut the window and lock it to keep him from coming back or make it a few seconds tougher for him to leave? I shut but don’t lock it since nothing I do with the window will be better than anything else. I check the bathroom. Empty, same with the shower stall. Stairway and upstairs hallway lights are on. He can do something to me from the top of the stairs when I walk up, so I keep the candlesticks pointed out in front of me. If he has a gun I’m sunk. If there’s more than one of them I’m probably sunk too but I have to take a quick look around to see that my folks are OK. Ceiling light’s on and all the dresser drawers are out and one’s on the floor and closet door’s open in Vera’s old room. I look inside the empty closet, toilet, under the bed. I go down the hall to the boys’ room my father now sleeps in. Door’s shut, room’s dark, closet’s open, drawers all out, but he seems to be sleeping peacefully. I get close and he’s snoring softly. I kick around under the bed, poke inside the closet with a candlestick, other in my right hand always raised. He stirs, tries to turn over; I tiptoe out. Living room’s unlit. I go through it, then back to whack the almost ceiling-to-floor drapes with the candlesticks, circle the easy chair and card table and feel under the couch to see no one’s there, go to my mother’s room at the end of the front hall. Hallway light’s off, also the ones in her room. I stand by her door, don’t hear anything. Behind me’s the baby’s room. It’s always locked, when there’s no guest occupying it, an added protection for them she thinks in case someone climbs in from the street. I turn the knob, doesn’t open. I say ‘Mom, Mom.’ No sound, can’t hear her breathing. I’ve done this lots before, listened at her room after my nightly check of my father, and when I didn’t hear her breathing I often thought she might have died in her sleep. ‘Mom, Mom, you OK?’ I go in, come closer to her, listen but always looking around in case the thief springs out at me. Her bathroom. I go in it, shut the door, turn on the light, candlestick ready to clip him, open the shower door. I go back into her room, both closets are open, poke around inside them, kick under both beds, bend closer to her, still don‘t hear anything, put my ear near her mouth. She’s breathing and from the little light on her face coming through the venetian blind slats seems to be all right. I check the rest of the closets in the apartment, curtains, under the piano, anyplace he could hide. I unlock the backyard door and go outside, see no crowbar or anything like that, must have been a very thin small man to get through those bars or a kid, or maybe the bars were pried apart by a man and a kid went through them into the apartment. They had to have come over one of the fences of the neighboring backyards. Two have barbed wire on them and another has what looks like razor blades on wire but nothing it seems someone with thick gardening gloves couldn’t push aside to get over or through. I shout ‘Hello, hello. Tenants on West Seventy-fifth on the north side of the street and West Seventy-sixth on the south, or just the odd-numbered buildings on Seventy-fifth and the even-numbered ones on Seventy-sixth. This is Howard Tetch, son of the Tetches in number 37 on Seventy-fifth Street. A thief’s been in my parents’ apartment. Broke into it. Pried apart the bars of a backyard window and ransacked the place. Nobody’s been hurt but the thief’s out in one of these backyards now or on a roof, if he hasn’t gotten away from the area by now or God knows into somebody else’s place, so make sure all your windows and backyard doors are locked.’ I start giving it again. Someone opens his window and says ‘Stop shouting.’ I see the window but not the man. I say ‘Didn’t you hear what I was saying? Thief in the neighborhood. Broke into my parents’ apartment just ten minutes ago. The Tetches. He’s the former dentist in number 37—his shingle was outside for more than forty years till a few years ago — and she you always see around. You must have seen her from your window there if you can see me. When it’s nice out she has coffee and a cigarette out here a few times a day and in the summer waters these bushes and her plants. My father too-reading his newspaper and even in the cold weather when it’s not too cold, sitting here with a blanket around him.’ ‘Stop shouting, people are sleeping,’ and closes his window. Some lights have gone on or are going on in other apartments, a few windows open, but all behind shades or in the dark. I go back in, bolt and lock the door, go to my father’s room. Though I yelled almost right under his window, he’s still sleeping peacefully, or maybe he woke up and went back. I check his bag. Full. I empty it in the toilet and attach it back to the tube. I check his diapers. Empty. I hate doing it but when he’s shit I change them. Those two jobs are mostly what I come here for around this time every night and to see if there are any messages my mother’s left me in the kitchen about what I could do for her or Dad the next day or phone messages I might have got here because I have no phone. I go to her room. She’s sleeping. I get down on my knees by her bed and say ‘Mom, Mom, it’s me, wake up. It’s OK, Dad’s all right, but wake up, I have to tell you something.’ She stirs. ‘Can I turn on the light?’ I say. ‘Turn it on. Everything’s all right?’ ‘Fine, considering. Listen, don’t panic but a thief’s been in the apartment,’ I know. He was in this room. I first thought it was you. But to make sure because of what’s been happening in the neighborhood lately I kept my mouth shut. In fact it happened to Aunt Bertha and Irv where they live a year ago, so I knew what to do. You remember: Rose slept through it but Irv kept quiet when the burglar lifted his wallet off the night table and slid his hand under their pillows and got Irv’s watch. So, when I heard this man opening drawers and going through them and closets, I knew it wasn’t you. I figured if he thought I was asleep he wouldn’t bother me. At least the chances of it would be better than if he thought I was awake and could later identify him. Of course if he wanted more than he got, then wake or asleep he’d beat me up till he got it out of me. But I must have fallen asleep after he left the room. Don’t ask me how. I was scared to hell and planned to just lie there for fifteen minutes and then go to your father. It’s probably because I didn’t sleep all last night, your father got me up so much with his bad dreams and making ishy. But you say he’s OK?’ ‘Still sleeping; I emptied his bag. And the man only got into your pocketbook, it seems; presumably took all your cash and credit cards.’ ‘The cards I keep hidden elsewhere. But the money, good, let him. I always keep some in there and the pocketbook in a conspicuous spot on top of the kitchen radio, just in case for things like this. Thirty-one — three crisp tens and an old single — as if that’s all I have, plus change, which might be enough to satisfy a thief to think his break-in was worth it. He break anything?’ ‘Just this,’ and I show her a candlestick. I got those from my Uncle Leibush as a wedding present. Dad and I did.’ ‘The other one’s just as dented. I did it, I’m afraid. I was going to hit him with it. I bashed the table with them — I’d come in on him while he was going through your pocketbook — so he’d be afraid I was serious and had something really lethal to get him with and race the hell out of here.’ ‘Which table?’ ‘The dinning room one.’ ‘My good table? I bought it when we moved in here. You can’t get anyone to fix those anymore or get any silver candlestick like these without paying for an expensive antique. And it’s a soft silver; won’t go back. But you got excited for a good cause. Do I have to get dressed now? Police say they’re coming right over? Usually, if the thief’s gone, they take their time.’ ‘You know, I forgot to call them. I’ll do it right away.’ ‘Maybe my insurance covers the table and candlesticks. By all rights it should. But probably they’ll say the damage could have been avoided.’ ‘So say the thief did the bashing. That he saw me come in, grabbed the candlesticks and banged them on the table and said to me “One step, sucker, and I’ll smash your head in.” I’ll tell the police that’s what he did and said.’ ‘You’d be lying. And please don’t tell Dad what you said you’d say, for that’s just what he’d want you to do too, get the insurance. And listen. If he’s not up and doesn’t get up again tonight, we should let him sleep and not even disturb him with it later.’ ‘The police will probably want to see his room.’ ‘If we can’t stop them — for what are they really going to find? — let’s let him sleep till they come.’”

“Part of a police report my mother gave. ‘I was in my bank, doing my normal weekly depositing and wanting to withdraw a little cash. Suddenly behind me I hear “Nobody move, everybody get down, this is a robbery.” Really, in that order—“Don’t move, get down.” What did they think we should do? Because if you can get down without moving, you’re really doing something. It was stupid. Unfair too, for someone could get killed not doing the right thing because of these confusing orders. And if you didn’t speak English which a lot of people in this city don’t, or not well enough to understand that hurried garbled gibberish, what then? But that fits my theories about bank robbers. That they’re all stupid. If they were the least bit smarter they wouldn’t be robbing banks, for one thing. For I’m sure, what with bank guards and plainclothesmen and just armed storeowners bringing in their own money, they have more of a chance of getting shot in one than we do with so many of them robbing banks. But you don’t want my theories, so I’ll stick to as close an account as I can give. This man said “Don’t move, get down, robbery. Pull your coats over your heads or just keep your eyes shut and your face flat against the floor.” Finally we knew. We should get down — for how else can you put your face to the floor? — and not keep our coats over our heads standing up. It sometimes takes cunning to be an innocent bystander. And right after that he confirmed our hunches about what to do by shouting “Now down, down, nobody make a move. First one to pick his head up gets it blown off.” By this time I was already getting down to the floor. I didn’t fly to it. I couldn’t. I got down slowly, one knee, then the other, then spread myself flat on my stomach and chest. If I had tried to get down quicker I might have broken a hip. I knew that and hoped the robbers would know why I was getting down so slowly. They must have. For though I was, from what I saw, the last one to get down by almost a minute, they didn’t complain. And since I had no sweater or coat for my head, though they didn’t say sweater, they just said coat, but I’m sure a sweater would have been all right, I put my arms over it and kept my eyes shut tight for the rest of the time till they left. From what the tellers said later, there must have been six to seven of them. For each line had a man or woman with a handgun, they said, and one who could have been either. And there were five lines operating. I remember that, quickly observing which one was the shortest to get on, when I came in. And behind us were two different men’s voices ordering the customers on line and all around to get down and stay there. Though maybe it was just one man with a couple of different voices: high and low, excited and controlled. Anyway, that was all there was to it for me. They told us to stay put on the floor where we were for ten minutes after they left, but most of us got up the second a teller shouted they were gone. All this a bit hard to believe, wouldn’t you say? Happening in the middle of the city, fifty customers or so in the bank and maybe fifteen bank employees, two of them armed guards in uniforms, plus another five thousand people strolling and pushing strollers and selling umbrellas and things in the street right outside and going in and out of the subway entrance in front of the bank. And to top it off, two policemen from a double-parked police car right across Broadway having a snack in a café. They didn’t go through my pocket book or anybody else’s, the robbers. One man, after everybody got up, did stay on the floor weeping, and a whole bunch of us went over to comfort him. It seemed he’d been robbed something like this — guns, get to the floor! — just a few months before, but in that one he also was kicked when he didn’t unzip his jacket pocket fast enough to turn over his wallet. He was afraid they were the same gang and they’d rough him up and maybe even kill him because he recognized them, besides crying because it happened twice in so short a time. We told him not to worry. That this can’t be the only gang in the city robbing banks. And since this one did it differently than his last one — didn’t take our wallets and watches and things, and waved pistols instead of shotguns behind us — it almost had to be a different gang. He said that suppose it happens again? What’s he to think every time he goes to a bank? I told him that if I’ve been going to a bank about once a week for more than sixty years and this was the first time it happened to me, chances of it happening to him a third time in the next year were slight. Someone else said that the first fifty of those sixty years weren’t such violent ones in the city and so shouldn’t count, but anyway what I said seemed to calm the man. Only other thing I can remember now is how one customer started complaining, about ten minutes after the robbers left, if this meant there wasn’t going to be any bank service here for a few hours. No one else of us did. In fact a group of us said that once the police finished questioning us we’ll share a cab to the nearest Chase branch on Broadway and Sixty-third and maybe even have lunch together after to talk about all this.’”

“A photo of his mother. Mother’s photo. Mother photo. Photo of mother. Photo, just ‘Photo’: She’s on a boardwalk, is young, late teens, very early twenties, leaning against a railing, beach and water behind her, in a swimsuit, could be any beach, no cliffs to the side or boulders in the water, flat and endless sea and sky, holding an American flag on her shoulder, doesn’t seem to be cold, big patriotic smile as if it was a nice bright day to be saying ‘I’m proud to hail from the good old USA,’ while the strollers on either side of her have heavy coats and furry hats and caps on and seem to be shivering. He found it in a drawer of photographs in her apartment. Had gone through the drawer to find snapshots of her and his dad and one of them both, small enough to put in his wallet. Wanted to open the picturefold to show people his gorgeous mother and handsome rugged-looking dad, the two lovey-dovey or kittenish together, the era. Showed the photo to her and she couldn’t place it. ‘Maybe it was from my bathing-beauty days, but they were always in August or July. I did a little modeling then too and of course those chorus parts in dancing movies. But I can’t think of a movie or ad where I wasn’t in flapper clothing or skimpy or lavish costumes, some weighing a ton with a ten-foot train picking up spit and stuff from the floor, and I never did a bathing suit ad, if they even had them then. Maybe the models in the photo are the people in warm clothing. You know: being photographed in the summer for the fall or winter lines and they just happened to be walking on the boardwalk to their shoot when my photographer snapped me. But that wouldn’t account for their frozen appearances. But look at me there. I’m a hideous old hag now but I think you can say then, despite my funny plastered-down hair and overluxurious lipstick and rouge and the unflattering bathing costume that also fattens my thighs, that I might be considered beautiful. Men clamored after me, photographers were always stopping me on the street or at the beach asking me to pose, and I was forever getting pinched, propositioned and whistled at. And though I was only a chorus dancer I still got more love letters and hot poems and flowers and candies and cheap jewelry and other junk than the stars did and I had to devise all kinds of ways to avoid those lechers after the show. Most of them thought I was an ignorant city kid turned promiscuous hoofer and just wanted to butter me up before taking me to bed. But I was impossible to get as your father liked to attest. The hardest he ever met, which I think is why he married me. He could have had as a wife a number of well-to-do fairly good-looking women with not half bad bodies and from much finer families. But he invested so much money and effort into our courtship that he wanted to get some returns. I think he got the best of the deal. I’m sure he continued to play around now and then. He practically ruined us with his reckless investments and avoidable run-ins with the law. For the first dozen years of our marriage he saw a lot more of his mother and sister and cronies than he did me. And he was hardly there for you kids ever and with his indifferent to painful dental care to you all and refusal to let me send any of you to another dentist, helped deplete most of your teeth. While I was a virgin when I married him. Always stayed faithful and available. Never argued with his tyrannical momma or demanded more than the most necessary domestic things. Did what I could to clean up the messes he left and quarrels he started over money with shopkeepers and such and never got a nod of thanks for it. Threatened to leave him I don’t know how often. And even though he never said a word or slipped up a sign to suggest he’d mind much if I went, I never even stayed away a day. And then, while I was also playing nurse and nurse’s aide to your sister till she died, I took care of him as if he were an infant for the last ten years of his sick old age.’”

“Her father barges into the apartment, pushes her husband aside, tells her he’s going to pack all her things and take her and the kids to stay with him till he finds her her own place. She says she can’t leave him. It’ll be just what he wants. He’s at least an adequate provider though so niggardly at times, even if he’s always the big spender with his friends, that she has to steal from his wallet when he’s sleeping or showering or forge his signature on savings withdrawl slips. It isn’t that she still has a lot of feeling for him left. He’s too thoughtless and avaricious and there’s never any real lovingness or anything much there but self-centeredness and she expects he’ll one day give her syphilis if she ever gets back in his bed. He treats the children like distant relatives or better yet as if they’re the next-door neighbor’s or even better yet as if he’s their avuncular bachelor uncle who once every two years comes to visit them for a few days. He simply isn’t cut out to be a husband or father, but as a devoted brother and son he’s the best. They weren’t kidding, whoever told her, that they broke the mold when they made him. But it’s no joke. He’s going to be in serious trouble one day, not just some petty night-in-the-clink stuff, and that’s when she’ll pack up the kids and leave here. She’ll have to. He’ll wind up in prison and she won’t be able to afford this place. But to give him that pleasure now? He won’t moon for her or beat out his brains as to what he did wrong that she left and he’ll even be relieved to be on the loose again. Even? He’ll call it a red-letter day, whatever that is. Besides all that she’s sick of him needing her just to have someone handy to shut-up, keep the kids out of his hair, cook and serve him elaborate just-like-momma-made breakfasts and dinners every day when he wasn’t taking other people out to eat or mooching a meal, and to throw her weekly allowances across the dinner table at her as if she weren’t a low-priced chippy but a clean whore. None of these are really good-enough reasons and it isn’t that she feels the kids need at least a shadow of a father around till they’ve reached whatever’s that certain age, but for no known reason to herself she’s going to stay, and she takes out the few clothes he put into the valise, closes it, puts the clothes back in the drawers and asks him to put the valise back up in the closet.”

“For a few years he thought of himself as a serious painter and painted nothing for most of those years but large canvases based on photographs of his parents with his two older brothers. They were six and two then, seven and three, five and one, four and a few months, and in a few of them and especially in the ones he liked to paint most, she was pregnant with him. You couldn’t tell from the photographs but she told him she was when he showed her them. ‘That’s you,’ she said, pointing to her flat belly. ‘I carried small. People when they saw me in my eighth month would often say I never looked slimmer, am I on a special diet? My diet was that I didn’t eat much when I was pregnant because almost everything I ate I threw up. That meant you kids came out frail and diminutive, and two of the three boys were so unnourished they almost died from it, but I forget which ones. Anyway, the third was almost no better off. I was nauseous with all my boys from the day after conception till a minute before they put me out to deliver them. In fact with you that’s how I knew I was pregnant. But with Vera, don’t ask me why, I didn’t have a single sick minute with. And she came out twice the size of any of you, and rosy, exuberant, almost a movielike version of a lively newborn, and howling inside the birth canal during the last few seconds of travel before she shot out. People have always said that was impossible, but I heard her. All ironic, of course, since by the time she was three she was sick with the disease that would gradually ravage her till she became half her natural weight and greatly shrunken, all feathers and empty bones. But the sickest I ever got was with you. I often couldn’t leave my bed for days. If I look happy in this photo with you it was because I was a good poser, having had a little experience as a dancer and model, since at no time did I feel any cause to smile. I literally cursed you daily for being inside me and I think a few times I consciously tried to abort you and swore over and over never another. But while I was so sick, tossing around all night and not permitted any more complex medicine than a spoonful or two of simple pink antacid for fear it’d harm the baby — doctors knew so little about it then — your father slept like a log and groused when I didn’t, since in bed I sometimes kicked him in the belly for being so healthy and sleeping so well. But for all those nine miserable months, I had nine wonderful ones nursing each of you. It was a pleasure in every way. Your father loved the way I’d filled out and, let’s face it, got all hepped up when he saw my breasts spread and the baby being fed, and became for the only time sort of solicitous and very affectionate to me and I also never felt hungrier or physically better. But nothing was worth so much nausea and I cursed you boys so much when I was carrying you that I’m surprised none of you came out with the plague. Maybe Vera’s illness came from all those accumulated curses against her brothers finally heard. A backlog of them and really only one higher being to answer them, so it took a while and because of the delay got misdirected. Odd how it turned out, with you the worst to me ending up the healthiest child. But who knows what Alex’s health would have been if he hadn’t drowned when he was twenty-six — maybe a lot better than yours. But if there’s one thing I really know it’s that I would have, if given half the chance, died right then and there or just a slow death but with her pain and disfiguring illness, simply to give her a completely-free-of-it healthy or just normal few years. But who’s to say what I’m saying has any sincerity behind it when I know even when I’m saying it that wishes aren’t granted and prayers are never answered nor curses ever heard.’ ‘Well, I think we should at least leave a little of it open,’ he said and she said ‘If you want.’”

“She visits her husband in prison. It’s a long train ride up, or seemed that way, but now looking back she sees it couldn’t have been more than an hour and a half, maybe two. The trains were very old, the windows were still open in the hot weather then; the passenger cars were more like very long subway cars going aboveground, but between stations not as fast. All that, plus stopping at every stop, probably had something to do with making the trip seem longer. Also that she had to take the subway to Times Square and then the Forty-second Street shuttle to Grand Central to get the train. If it had had a shiny high-speed look to it she might have remembered it as going faster. It also could have been her mood. She never felt good going, always felt worse returning, so she was never able to sleep or read on the train, even a newspaper. He was awful then: cranky, angry, bitter, inconsiderate, unfeeling. Tough as it was for him to be there, it wasn’t so easy for her either. But he never said things to her like ‘How you holding up? It must be rough, not just this back-and-forth trip, but taking care of the kids and being so short of cash and going along on your own day to day. I’m miserable without you too and for what I’ve done to you, but please don’t let that add to your upset; I’ll get through it OK.’ She left the children in the care of someone. All of them except the youngest go to the same elementary school three blocks from their home, so the helper only has a few hours with them. She’s allowed to see him once a month for up to two hours, and once a week for ten minutes if she wants. Documentary trips they call those. Sign this, that’s it, out. She’s never gone up for just those ten minutes. Wants no part of them: so cold. If there’s business between them she saves it for the long visit when they can also talk about other things. The business stuff can be brutal and it’s also a long trip and so many preparations and expensive for just ten minutes. They’re not allowed to touch. Signs say it everywhere, unless the couple is given written permission by the chief guard. ‘They might give it if I’m a perfect boy for a year,’ her husband once said. ‘But fingers through the hole only, so expect no kiss.’ Glass is between them where they sit. A screened hole the size of a silver dollar in it to talk through and a hole the size of his fist at the bottom of it to eventually touch fingertips she hopes and to put things through for him to sign if she has to. When that happens a guard unlocks the hole on her side, another guard stands beside her husband, and the paper and pen, having been inspected by the chief guard in the anteroom before she comes into this meeting room, are put through by the guards. Then the hole’s locked, and after he signs, hole’s unlocked and the pen and paper’s passed through to her guard who reads it to see her husband didn’t write anything he wasn’t supposed to, like, she supposes, ‘Put a hand grenade in a cake to help me escape,’ or even ‘I love you dearly and want to screw you madly,’ and given to her. Today she wants him to sign a change-of-name form for the kids. ‘Where does that leave me?’ he says. She says ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It means no one will ever know me through my kids.’ ‘It doesn’t have to mean that. It could mean we just wanted to make their lives simpler by anglicizing their names. But all right, I warned you not to do it, you kept doing it. I warned you some more, you kept doing it some more and a whole slew of other stupid things which thank God — don’t worry, nobody can hear me — you were never caught at. I warned and warned you even more—’ ‘Stop harping on me. Don’t be a bitch. You know I don’t like bitches. I never did and you’re acting like a total worthless foul-mouthed nagging bitch of all time. It makes you look ugly when by all rights you could be pretty.’ ‘Insults won’t change my mind or the conversation’s direction.’ ‘Sticks and stones, go on and tear me to pieces and chew up my bones, think I care? Think I’d dare? blah-bah-bah, you rotten bag. Just lay off.’ ‘Stop being a jackass and trying to avoid this. Please sign. That’s all I ask. Please please sign.’ ‘Why?’ ‘We’ve gone over it.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s best for the kids.’ ‘How?’ ‘You’re like a broken record.’ ‘How?’ ‘Because they’re being hounded, as I’ve already told you, hounded by their schoolmates and people because their father’s in prison and lost his dental license and was involved in a smelly citywide scandal and newspaper stories and photos of you and the whole world and his brother knows of it and other things. Because you’re famous in the most terrible low way. And through you, guess.’ ‘So it’ll be better by the time I come out.’ ‘The news stories. Think, why don’t you. Just don’t sit there pigheaded, unconcerned for anyone but you. People will never forget, or not for thirty years. The Mirror’s centerfold photo of you on the courthouse steps, for one thing.’ ‘What was so wrong with it? I was dressed well, looked good, big smile, wasn’t in cuffs.’ “The lousy change, nickels and dimes, falling through your pants pocket and rolling down the steps and you chasing after it like a snorting hog.’ ‘What’s the snorting? What’s with these pigs?’ ‘Panting. You were out of shape. But for the money, is what I mean. The same kind of man running after petty change where he could break his neck or get a stroke, would try to save a few dollars in fines by bribing a building inspector. Whatever it was, that’s why they took it and used it and it was ugly.’ ‘I told you to sew those holes.’ ‘That’s hardly my point. Besides, you cram so much change and keys in them, your pockets are always going to have holes.’ ‘I need the change for the bus and subway. And newspapers.’ ‘Since when do you buy your own newspaper?’ ‘I buy it.’ ‘Maybe the Sundays. The rest you take out of garbage cans.’ ‘Sometimes if it’s a clean one and just laying there on top, but obviously clean and looking almost unread, why not? Why waste? So many people waste. I was brought up poor and taught not to.’ ‘Sometimes some of the ones you brought home had spit on them, and once, dog doody.’ ‘I didn’t see. The subway station was poorly lit or something. But one out of a hundred. So what?’ ‘Let’s drop the subject and concentrate on the other one.’ ‘What other one? If it’s what I think it is, there isn’t any other one.’ ‘Three people have already sent that photo to me through the mail. All anonymously. What did you do to make so many enemies? Anyway, it’s an example of how many people know about it regarding the children.’ ‘I didn’t make enemies. If I made a lot more money than most other dentists, maybe that’s why. Jealousy, and this is how they get even with me, but behind my back. Or there are thousands of crazy people in the city who do nothing all day but read the papers. And when they see a man down, someone they’ve never even laid eyes on but through the papers think they know, they get their kicks pushing him further. But believe me, people will forget. In a year, two at the most. I’ll be old news, or their minds don’t remember that far. The few who don’t forget, the hell with them. I’ll tell all those nutjobs and sickies that I did it standing on one foot.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘That it was easy — this is — and in some ways, even good for me. I’ve met lots of decent people here. Gentlemen. Men of means. Big successes in all kinds of fields. Future clients, some of them. They have me working in the prison clinic’ ‘I know.’ ‘So, for one thing, I’m able to stay in touch with the latest dental gadgets and machines. It’s very well equipped. But best yet, I see twenty patients a day, all men from the prison. No thieves or killers but tax evaders, embezzlers, extortionists, but not strong-armed ones, plus some draft dodgers. Those I don’t especialy like, in what they’re doing, but that’s their business. And then the conscientious ones who won’t go into the army for their own more personal reasons. Moral, religious, none of which I go along with or else don’t understand, but at least they’re better types. And they all got teeth. Most, I just look in their mouths, pick around a little and take an x-ray or two to satisfy them, since they usually have nothing wrong with them a quick prison release wouldn’t cure or else need major bridgework, some of them complete upper and lower plates, which the prison’s not going to put out for. They let me extract and fill and even do root canal to as many teeth as I want, since they don’t want their immates walking around in pain and maybe kicking someone over it. But they feel the more expensive work, which means sending it out to a dental lab, the prisoner should pay for himself on the outside. All of which is to the good, since when a lot of these men get out they’ll come to me.’ ‘How? You won’t have a license to work when you get out.’ ‘Ill get it in a year, maybe two.’ ‘You might get it in ten years if you’re lucky. That’s what I’ve been told.’ ‘By who?’ ‘The license people and Democratic club leaders you sent me to speak to for you.’ ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it much sooner. But till I do I’11 get different kind of work and do very well in it. I did in dentistry — started with borrowed money and no more skills than the next dentist — I can do well in other things. And by working at it long and hard and mixing in the right places a lot. I bought a house for us from it, didn’t I? A building, Five stories of it and you decorated it to your heart’s content.’ ‘Fine. One where it cost more to keep up than the rents we get plus all the problems that go along with it.’ ‘What problems? Be like me. Tenant complains, tell him to move out if he doesn’t like it. And we also got our apartment from it. Two floors. And my office, so those were supposed to make up the difference. And it was an investment if the neighborhood ever turned good. Not only that, we had other things. A full-time maid. One left, another came the next day. And a car whenever we needed one. And summer vacations for all of us but especially all summer for you and the kids. So stop complaining. I can do all that again no matter what I go in to. And maybe a little dentistry — the hell with them — you know,’ and he makes jabbing motions with his thumb over his shoulder, indicating he’ll do it on the side or behind their backs. ‘Till everything comes through.’ ‘That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. They’ll find out-one of your good friends who’s an enemy will squeal — and you’ll land right back here getting acquainted with all the latest dental instruments.’ ‘Anyway, no job is that complicated unless it’s a real profession like dentistry and medicine and law. But I’m sure I won’t have to do anything else for very long. The people you spoke to were being extra cautious. You’re my wife? How do they know you also weren’t working for the state, in return for helping to reduce my sentence or getting my license back, by letting them say “Well, now, you want him to get his license back sooner than ten years you’ll have to pay for it.” They’re no dopes. I never should have sent you to them, but thanks for trying. Because of course they built up the time to you till I get my license back and pretended to be saints. But when I see them I’ll talk to them like a boy from the boys. And on a park bench — no one in fifty feet of us or where the air can be bugged — and not in a restaurant or room. I know what to do.’ ‘What? Bribing them?’ ‘Shut your mouth. That one they heard. Say something quick and silly as if you were joking.’ ‘They didn’t hear. And like how,’ she whispers, ‘by bribing them?’ ‘Shut up with that word. I’m serious. Smile. Make believe you’re laughing, the whole thing a joke.’ She smiles, throws her head back, closes her eyes, opens her mouth wide and goes ‘huh-huh-huh’ through it. ‘OK,’ her face serious again, ‘what’ll you do? The same stupid thing?’ ‘That time was a mistake. I did it to the wrong inspector.’ ‘He was a city investigator, not a building inspector.’ ‘I thought different. He was an impersonator, that’s what he was — a lowlife mockie bastard in it for a promotion or raise. Or maybe he does both — inspects, investigates — when there’s cause for alarm or just that things are getting too hot in the department that other inspectors are taking graft. So one true-blue one in there. But they all take, so they wouldn’t use an inspector to investigate.’ ‘You did it to all the inspectors. Fire, water, boiler, sewage — whatever they were, that was your philosophy in owning a building. Even if I’d seen to every inch of the building and complied to the last decimal to every city rule and law, matter of course you handed out fives and tens to them.’ ‘To keep them happy. They expect it. They don’t get it they feel unhappy and can write out ten violations at a single inspection, some that’ll cost hundreds to correct. Or my office. I got water and electricity and intricate machine equipment I depend on and I don’t want them closing me down even for a day. Every landlord knows that and every professional man who owns and works in his own building.’ ‘It’s a bad way to run a brownstone, and dishonest.’ ‘But it’s the practical way, or was. Did we ever get a violation before? Why do you think why not? They’re all on the take or were till the investigation, and probably now are again. There’s a lull, then it’s hot; it never stops. Cities are run on it, the mayor on down. What happened then was they were using me. They wanted to get a professional man bribing an investigator in personating an inspector so they could say “See, even doctors and dentists give bribes, so how bad is it that our building inspectors take them? Dentists earn five times as much as our inspectors and get from the public ten times the respect, but the briber is as serious a criminal as the bribee,” or whatever they call them, the bribed guy who takes. And that’s why they trapped me and that doctor in Staten Island and the CPA who owns a much bigger building — an apartment one, twelve stories — in the Bronx. I met them both, since they’re both here for around the same-length terms as mine. Nice family men and they shouldn’t be in prison. For what good does it? You want to make them pay, have them work in city clinics or helping the poor with their taxes for twenty hours a week for the next few years. Ten hours, but where it adds up to about what they’d put in nonsleeping time here.’ ‘Please sign the name change.’ ‘I can’t. I know you think it’s best for them, that it’s going to help their future. But today’s big graft and news story will be tomorrow’s trash, or something — yesterday’s news. Last year’s. Last two. That’s what I wanted to say. No one will ever have heard of the case or remembered my name from it by then. “Doc who? Nah, what graft story’s in the paper today?” And I’ll be out and practicing again with an even bigger clientele. And if I’m not? If they’re so stupid to deprive my family of a good livelihood and the country of a lot more income taxes because of some dumb bribe I gave a dumb building inspector or investigator or actor, then I’ll do something else. The Garment Center. I’ll sell dresses or sweaters or materials. One fine gentleman in here on some illegal immigration or something offense owns a large suit and cloak house on Thirty-fifth Street and says he’ll take me in as a salesman the minute I get out. If he’s still in here, he’ll tell his partner to put me on. Not road selling but the showroom. He thinks I’m sharp and palsy-walsy, so just the right type, besides knowing my way around and eager for money. And it’ll give the house a little extra class, having a doctor working for them. They all wanted to be doctors or dentists or their parents wanted them to. Or some other house if that one doesn’t work out. Most of the men here bullshit, so you can’t really count on them. But I know lots of people in the Garment Center, and also one of the ones from here might come through. And in it for a couple of years, working very hard, I’ll learn enough to start my own business. I can do all that, why not? and then we’ll be rolling again. But to have my kids walking around with the name Teller when I’m Tetch? How am I to explain it?’ ‘You don’t have to.’ ‘No, I do.’ “Meet my son Gerald Teller?” “Was your wife married before and the boy kept his real father’s name?” “No, I’m his real father. Same blood and nose.” “Then why the different names?” “Because all the kids want to be bank tellers when they grow up and my wife thought it’d give them a head start.”’ ‘That’s just stupid,’ she says. ‘Why, you got a better explanation? OK. “Because I was in prison for being too honest and my wife thought to really jab the knife in me to get even she’d change the kids’ name so no one would know they were mine.” Because you don’t think that’s what people will ask? Over and over they will. For what father has a different name than his kids’?’ ‘People we know are always shortening or anglicizing their names. But if you don’t like that one, I was thinking of another. Tibbert. It sounded good.’ ‘It sounds awful. It has no meaning. It sounds like a bird or frog or some little barnyard animal singing by a brook or up a tree. “Tib-bert! Tib-bert!” Anyway, something silly sitting on a lily pad in a pond. Look, don’t give me that paper. You do, don’t give me the pen, because I won’t take both at the same time. I won’t be pressured. Just because I’m here, I haven’t become a jelly fish.’ ‘I’ll tell you what you’ve become.’ ‘Sure, and you’re my wife. But what about Tibbs as a name? We’ll start shortening the anglicized. Or Tubbs? Or Terbert? We can change Howard’s name to Herbert and he’ll be Herbert Terbert. Or forget the T. Who says in a name change it has to start with the same letter as Tetch? Sherbet. Gerald, Alex, Howard and Vera Sherbet. The Sherbet kids. They can go on stage. Tell jokes, take off their clothes, do little two-steps. I don’t know why, but it all sounds right. Or the Shining Sherbets. Up on the high wire. You can change your name to Sherbet too and go back on the stage or up there in the air with them. You still got the face and figure for it. Or just divorce me if you want.’ ‘Oh please.’ ‘I’m not kidding. You want it, you got it.’ ‘What are you talking about? Though don’t think for a few moments I haven’t thought of it.’ ‘So think of it some more, think of it plenty. What the hell do I care anymore? You’re so ashamed of me—’ ‘It’s not that—’ ‘You’re ashamed!’ ‘Well, I told you not to do—’ ‘You told me and you told me you told me and I did it and admit it and they had me and now I’m here doing it on one foot and soon I’ll be out on both, or not so soon but a lot sooner than any of my kids’ lifetimes so far and later everything will be forgetten and the same. Except I probably won’t be doing those things again, that’s for sure, but you’ll still be hocking me about it till I’m dead. In fact your hocking will make me dead. Look, you want a divorce, it’s yours, on a platter. Take the house, the kids, the platter and whatever you find in the mattresses. You find another kid there, take that one along too.’ ‘Don’t give me what I don’t want. When you get out and if you still want it, we’ll talk. The children will be a little older then and maybe more able to adjust to it. But not now.’ ‘Why not now? Why not? Why not?’ The guard on her side comes over. ‘Anything the matter?’ ‘Nothings the matter, thank you.’ ‘She says nothing but let me tell you what she wants me to do,’ tapping the glass to the paper on the table in front of her. ‘He knows,’ she says, ‘they all have to know. It had to be screened before it got to you.’ ‘So good, everyone knows. But did you know,’ he says to the guard, ‘she wants to force me to do it? She thinks I’ll bend, because prison somehow has weakened me, but not me, sir, not me.’ ‘Please, Simon, let it ride,’ she says. ‘OK, it’ll ride, to please you. Everything to please you, except that goddamn name change.’ ‘Let that ride too.’ ‘I’m afraid to say your time’s about up,’ the guard says to them. ‘That’s what I really came over to say’ ‘OK, OK, thanks, but just a few seconds more — How’s the new dentist doing in the office?’ he says to her. ‘Better than the last. He seems to be busy, mostly older people-plates, extractions, primarily, from talking to a few of them going in and out.’ ‘Just like me then. I pull out about ten teeth a day here and does it ever feel good. And some of these guys are bullvons, with teeth like dinosaurs’—I’ll pull out yours too, Mr. Carey, if you want me to — no charge.’ ‘Thanks but no. Ones I don’t need I let fall out.’ ‘Smart guy. And I know you’re Carey because you got it stitched on your jacket. Don’t let me fool you.’ ‘You didn’t.’ ‘But no plates here,’ he says to her. “They won’t shoot for it for the prisoners. But I already said that. I’m repeating myself when I’ve only seconds left. I’d like to be making them. Keep my hands in so I don’t get rusty. Does he pay the rent on time?’ ‘First of the month. And for the summer, when he was going to a dental convention in Chicago and then on to a vacation somewhere — Denver, he said; the Grand Canyon to hike and ride horses—’ ‘Lucky guy. Not the hiking, but I used to ride horses. Once in army training, then in Prospect Park a couple of times. I’ve pictures. You’ve seen them.’ ‘—he gave me two months in advance. I think he’ll be there for as long as we like.’ ‘Tell him not to get too tied to the place. Or why not? I’ll open an office someplace else. It doesn’t always have to be in my own home.’ ‘Time’s really up,’ Carey says. ‘Now we’re all breaking rules and can be penalized. Your wife, with shortening her visits. You, because of that. Me, in that they don’t like me being this lenient at the end of a visit and I get a talking-to—’ ‘Can I kiss her hand through the bottom hole here?’ ‘Afraid not.’ ‘Right now she wouldn’t go for it anyway’ He stands. ‘Good-bye, dear,’ she says. ‘I mean it: please call and write as often as you can. And try to forget most of what we went over today — what might disturb you.’ ‘The kids. Give them each a big kiss on the head from me.’ Carey signals a guard behind the glass, who goes over to her husband. ‘Tell them I love them like nobody does but don’t tell them where I am.’ Carey shuts the speaking hole. ‘Gerald knows.’ Her husband cups his hand to his ear and his expression says ‘What?’ ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble here,’ she says louder, ‘but Gerald knows.’ ‘Yeah, I know, I know,’ he shouts, ‘but not the others and tell Gerald not to tell.’ Carey opens the hole and says ‘Everything all right, Yitzik?’ Yitzik waves that everything’s fine, puts his hand on her husband’s shoulder and says ‘Please don’t make a fuss.’ ‘Me? A fuss? You hear that, Pauline? This nice guard here thinks I’m going to make a fuss — Not goodtime Simon, sir. Not a chance,’ and without looking at her or back at her he goes with the guard through a door. She puts the paper back into a manila envelope, winds the string around the tab in back to close it, goes through her door, is asked if anything was slipped to her by the prisoner and is given her pocketbook back, calls for a cab, leaves the prison, takes the cab to town, goes to a bar near the train station and has two strong drinks, something she only started doing every day once he went to prison and which she has one or two more of and never has supper or lunch the day she visits him.”

“Each of his parents lived home till they were married, then moved to Brooklyn together when they came back from their honeymoon. They’d already furnished the place: a large ground-floor apartment opposite Prospect Park and with a woman working full-time for them from around the second month after they got there. ‘I had a difficult pregnancy from almost day two of my marriage, so the woman always had plenty to do, since half that time I could barely get out of bed.’ She was a virgin when she married. His mother was. A story she told a lot was that when she was pregnant the first or second woman to work for them complained of ‘“serious female ailments.”’ His mother took her to her own gynecologist and he said she was pregnant and had syphilis and rectal tissue damage and if he were her he’d get rid of the woman right away. ‘Lax morals like that and not too careful, you don’t want her taking care of your baby. For one thing, you won’t know what she’ll drag into the house while you’re out. For another, she might develop a fantasy about taking your husband away when you’re big and bloated and so not as attractive.’ ‘I discharged her on the spot though with two weeks’ severance pay and the address of a good a.b. man if she wanted. I felt sorry for her for she said her boyfriend had deserted her and her entire family was in Ireland. I should have known better, having been a medical secretary though for a roentgenologist, but I thought syphilis could spread sometimes just by touching the syphilitic or sitting on things she’d put her bare bottom on or touched. I’d also seen photos of people, though mostly newborns, who had it in the mouth and I winced when I pictured her kissing my baby. Also the “lax morals.” But I knew your father would never fool with her. She was too pimply and pudgy for him and she didn’t seem to bathe or brush her teeth enough and she wore a cross. I didn’t want to tell him my real reason for discharging her. He wouldn’t have given her the severance pay and might have even docked her a week’s wages for jeopardizing the health of our unborn baby, or some insincere excuse like that. Anything to save money. For he never expressed any interest in the baby’s or my health during the pregnancy. I’d come home from my monthly examination and near the end, from my weekly, and he wouldn’t ask a word about it or how things were going or even once think of accompanying me.’ But every good woman then was a virgin, she told him. ‘Oh, I played around. Did what we called harmless petting — squeezing fingers, a bit of kissing with our mouths closed, rubbing each other’s backs very hard — but no more than that. Now I regret it. To only have experienced one man in your life isn’t enough. I should have had more adventures before I married. Gotten madly involved with a couple of men, had an affair that nearly broke my heart before it dissolved, even gotten pregnant by some rotter who didn’t want to help me and had an abortion all on my own and at my expense. Maybe not that far, and no venereal diseases. Traveled more. Then I could have drifted into marriage a little more easily. But your father persuaded me. He had a way with words, a wonderful smile and a great sense of humor.’ ‘I remember. And you’ve told me most of this.’ ‘So I’ve told you. So what? It only indicates how true it was. But whenever things turned sour for him he could be as disagreeable as they come.’ ‘I know. I saw that too. Over the dinner table. Christ, the battles you had, and all over money. He’d throw your weekly allowance across the table at you and you’d yell you won’t be treated like that and throw it back and all of us kids around and he’d yell and you’d scream—’ ‘I don’t remember that.’ ‘It’s true. I’ve mentioned it several times.’ ‘I don’t remember that too. And Gerald has no recollection of those arguments.’ ‘He was out of the house by that time. But let’s forget it. Maybe it was wrong of me to bring it up, or at least now.’ ‘We argued, and over money sometimes, because he could be tight, as I know I’ve told you, but not at the table. That’s one place it stopped. I didn’t want to ruin your meals, send you to bed with bellyaches because of it. But I felt — your father — if I massaged his scalp enough I could bring some of his hair back and make him handsomer. And I put him on a diet and a regimen of exercises from the day we came back from our honeymoon, hoping to make his body less flabby, so more attractive to me, but it never worked. He went, with or without me, to his mother’s for dinner two to three times a week. Think of it — they lived off Delancey, we lived in the middle of Brooklyn, but that often. Took the car. All right, traffic wasn’t as bad then and you could park where you pleased, and for our first ten years his office was either in her building or right near her, so he could just close it and walk over. And most Sundays and Friday nights some of you children went with him — she loved feeding all of you and her cooking for that kind of food was pretty good — so it gave me some relief. I know I’ve told you he worshiped her. The very ground, even if it had gook on it sometimes, and worse. One of my greatest fears was that my father-in-law would die and she’d come live with us, even though she had a daughter to go to. But your aunt was poor, living in a space half the size of ours with your cousins running all around and her husband a schlemiel and your father doing most of the supporting for them, so I knew she’d come to us, where we had a maid and he’d let her boss me. As it was, she died first and your grandfather wanted to live alone. I would have taken him in but I doubt your father would have let me — his silence and nebbishness made your father uncomfortable. You know your father phoned her at least once every day when she was married.’ ‘You mean he. Or possibly we’ ‘He. But by all rights he should have been married to her, so maybe that’s what I really meant. I don’t know that much about psychology. I in fact think it’s a science, if that’s what it is, started by crazy people and kept alive by them — the people who run it — but that part about some mother-son relationships they speak of I believe. If it was possible to marry and have a family by her, he would have. I’m kidding, of course, when it comes to your father. Both of them, though she hated her husband. Dirtied all over him. And phoning her that much as your father did would have been a nice thing to do if she’d been a nicer person. I know I’d appreciate it if you did it every day, or certainly wouldn’t mind it — even every other day — if we usually had something interesting or useful to say. Because they spoke — they really spoke. Oh, just hearing from you that often would be nice, forget that it has to be interesting. But you’re so silent on the phone most times you’d make me wonder in those calls what I’d done wrong with you the previous times. I know you don’t mean it, but that’s what it provokes. Anyway, she wasn’t a nice person at all. She was a mean wicked bitch who made life hell on earth for me those first ten years. I know I’ve said this also, but I’ve never gotten over how much she ruined my life then and how he let her. Your father was a pansy only regarding his mother. Did I ever tell you what my cousin Elsa said about her?’ ‘The bit about her being a prostitute on the Lower East Side? Malicious bullshit, only because she thought you wanted to hear it.’ ‘No. She was a very hard woman, so I could believe it. Besides, Elsa, who I knew for a long time and trusted — she didn’t tell stories or cater to anyone — said friends her parents knew in your grandnother’s building swore she was. That they saw men enter her apartment when her husband was out, and heard the goings-on through the walls. The whole neighborhood knew. But she wasn’t the kind who walked the streets. She took in a couple of steady men a week — three or four — to make ends meet. When your father, who was the oldest, was very small and your grandfather wasn’t doing well, which was mostly always. He drank too much; was a good darner and weaver but couldn’t hold a job. Maybe this — her giving it for money and her husband soused in a bar several days a week — was why your father gave so much of his income to her and your Aunt Ida and her family. Because he knew — had seen it — might have been locked in the bathroom when it was going on, or told not to leave it. No, he’d probably be in school, if he got to be that old while she was still doing it, and they had no bathroom — only a public toilet in the building’s hallway. Maybe he was put in a closet each time. But anyway, he was ashamed of it — what she did — though we never, Dad and I, talked about it once, so I don’t know for sure how he felt. And once he had the money he wanted to make up for what she’d gone through for him and his brothers and sisters and also wanted to prevent Ida from doing what her mother did. That’s a possibility, since Ida had few scruples too. Or maybe his mother did it because she enjoyed it, and thought what the hell, she’ll make some money out of it. And your grandfather was not only a poor provider but too drunk, or had some other problem, to fulfill her, or after a while to do it even once. He seemed like it. Nice but a weakling. But doesn’t it make sense?’ ‘What’ ‘That your father was scarred by it and that’s what made him look down on women so. He felt sorry for her in one way, hated her for having done it, in another way. It’s all very complicated — beyond me. Though maybe I should have been a psychologist after all, fake as the field is. But she was so ugly and fat that I think what could a man have seen in her to want to pay for it again and again? She was even ugly and fat in the photograph of her as a child bride. She was always, even at fourteen, an old lady and a sourpuss, which is sad. Though maybe she was extra special in the bed department, knew tricks nobody did, or just extra cheap and every so often tossed one in for free, but I don’t want to think of it.’ He died two months to the day before his grandmother was born. He means — They were still living in Brooklyn then. Said that. Three boys, Vera on the way. His father kept his office on Stanton and Cannon, he thinks it was, till his mother died. His father’s mother, and maybe he should check a map. His own mother got pregnant the first time she had sex with his father. People thought, she said, they’d slept together before their marriage because his oldest brother, Gerald, was born three months premature and was conceived the first night. ‘I let everyone who wanted to, believe it. It made me into a more interesting person and it’s what I, or maybe I’m only thinking this in retrospect, wanted to do, but not so much with your father. Let’s face it: almost not at all. Gerald had croup because of his undeveloped digestive tract. Life was misery for us because of it. I’m sure for him too, but they say babies that age don’t really suffer that much pain. At his briss — a mangled job, but not a peep. Maybe it was the wine smeared on his lips and the moyl’s spit as an anesthetic around his prepuce just before he was clipped. But he cried day and night for half a year from his croup. Your father was hardly home then. His mother, cronies, and he worked all the time, even on Sundays. Not Saturdays though. He was still orthodox on Shabbas except for carrying money and driving a car. He stopped right after his mother died and we moved to Manhattan. I still have his tefillin, bag and boxes and straps, if you ever want it. Just as a keepsake, and it’s very old and in good condition so may be worth something one day. Gerald thinks it’s the ugliest thing existing and won’t have it in his house. It does at times look like some dark crouched-up creature ready to pounce out of the drawer at me. Your father’s father lived for about six years after his wife died. You remember him.’ Doesn’t. ‘You should. Because you were named after her, he played with you more than with anyone when he was here.’ Her mother died a few years after he was born. ‘You remember her?’ No recollection. ‘It was horrible. She could have lived another twenty years. The doctors operated on the wrong problem and killed her on the table. I don’t know why I wanted to become one when I distrusted them so much. But that happened years after I gave up my goal of becoming a doctor. My dad lived several years after that. Of any of your grandparents, I’m sure you remember him.’ Nothing. ‘But he read you stories, fed you dinner, took you to the park and to your first movie and merry-go-round, taught you whole sentences in German and was the first adult to understand what you were saying in English. He used to love telling all you kids about when he was in the Polish calvary and his white horses. No, that was my Uncle Leibush; my father fled the country because they wanted to put him in the army. And Leibush wasn’t really my uncle. We called him that because he was so close to us. I know you remember him, since he lived till you were around ten and visited us once a week.’ ‘He’s the only one of those people I remember, and even something about the calvary. Full white hair, bushy gray mustache, lanky and statuesque, always in a suit and vest even in warm weather, and he walked with a walking stick or cane. A cane.’ ‘That’s nothing like him. He was short and stocky, had no walking problem nor affected one, and didn’t have a single hair on his skin. He had some condition. You’ve seen people with it. That’s another reason I thought you might remember him, though he almost always wore a sea captain’s cap, which was supposed to resemble his Polish calvary cap, outdoors and in. He came to America after my father, was only going to stay with us till he got on his feet. Landsmen of my father — whole families of them — were always doing that with him. He was that kindhearted — he even paid the way over for some of them — but Leibush ended up living with us most of his adult life. He was in love with my mother — that’s why he never left. Gentle and outgoing, compared to my father’s gruffness and reserve — you could see why she’d be attracted to him too. Go ask my father why he put up with it. Probably financial. Leibush opened the bar and grill for him at five or six every morning while my father slept till noon. Then he finished his work at the bar around midafternoon and my father, except for coming up for dinner most nights, never got home till 2 or 3 a.m. They even say Aunt Rose was Leibush’s daughter through my mother. Look at her next time and then at one of the photographs I have of Leibush and see whom she resembles.’ ‘Mom, Mom—’ ‘I’m not joking. Everybody’s said Rose looks like no one in the family. Taller than all the girls by about four inches, those googly eyes and thick lips, she even got sicknesses none of us did and escaped some that all of us got at the same time. Don’t mention anything about it around Rose. The secret’s been kept from her all this time, even if by now she must suspect. But Rose is dead — last year, or the one before — so what am I talking about?’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Still, don’t ever tell Uncle Gil. During her first few years of marriage she probably thought she could be disinherited; after my father died, I don’t know what. But I’m sure she thought for something like these reasons or others he might leave her if he found out she was momma’s love child, so she never said.’”

“My mother threw out or gave away or loaned, without there being a good chance of getting it back, anything of mine when she felt like it. My electric train set. The one thing, I told her months after I graduated college and went to Washington to work, I wanted kept in my closet or the basement. T might want to give it to my own kids one day. When I have them. It’ll certainly be valuable twenty to thirty years from now, if one has to look at it that way.’ She gave it to my youngest cousins a year after their father died. ‘Aunt Gussie was broke. Ben left her with no insurance, an overdrawn checking account and nothing but big waddings in all their mattresses. She pleaded with me for some of my boys’ old toys. She knew I gave you kids everything of the very best you wanted, and with a basement to store things in, she guessed I still had some of them. So I gave her what I thought you’d never use again and which they’d love most — a twenty-year-old train set — and they appreciated it tremendously; really’ ‘The set was around forty years old. I found it in its original box on top of some garbage cans down the block. Someone must have thrown it out because it wasn’t working, or maybe it was put on the street by mistake. Or someone had several sets — you know how some rich people are — and got rid of the oldest to make space. Alex fixed the wiring or something in the engine — that’s all it needed, plus a new transformer, which it took me months to pay him back for — and for years it was my favorite thing to play with on earth.’ ‘So there was little money lost in it, realistically speaking. And if it was that old when you found it, it was ancient and no doubt in ruins when I gave it to them, so what great value could it have had?’ ‘Personal. I’d put little clay figures I made into the engine and on top of the coal car and at the back of the caboose, get down real close with my eyes right up to the passenger car windows when I made it pass very slow, and it looked like a real train. And just that I dragged that box home all by myself — none of my friends would help me, jealous, probably, that I found it first. And with Alex’s help made the best thing I ever had out of it, except for maybe that used tricycle that could be converted into a bicycle, someone gave you for me, and which was stolen in a week. Because you never would have bought me a new set of trains.’ ‘Something like that — like even that tricycle-bike — with so many kids, was just too expensive for us, fairly well-off as we were for a while. Anyway, to me it was a piece of junk. The tracks scratched your floor. And when you played real rough with the trains, crashing them intentionally or using them as dive bombers or something, the engine made holes in the floor. I was also always afraid you’d electrocute yourself. That thing was forever shorting and blowing the fuses, wasn’t it?’ ‘No. Maybe once. That’s nothing and I don’t even think you were home. I replaced the fuse myself and later told you about it.’ ‘Anyway, what can I do now? I’ll try to remember not to repeat anything like that when your heart’s so set against it.’ ‘You can ask Gussie for it back.’ ‘After so many months and when her boys are practically taking the trains to bed with them at night? Please, put yourself in their position. These kids have gone through enough. Their father dying so young. And their being so young when he died. And he was a good father — attentive — just wonderful to them. And his debts and their mother practically begging for them and their being forced out of their house into a cheap apartment and her working at the worst kinds of menial jobs the first year to get them back on their feet. I helped by giving what I could — money, when your father wasn’t looking, and everything else, like your trains — and still do, though don’t mention a word to him about it. But now for them to lose these trains? Forget it and just feel good they’re being distracted by them for an hour or two a day. I know Gussie’s very grateful to you.’ ‘I never got a card or anything saying so.’ ‘She’s got other things on her mind. Don’t be hard.’ A year later, after I continued to be upset about the trains being gone, I wrote Gussie asking if she’d mind giving them back or anything she and her sons might want to part with of them. ‘Though old and not really worth anything, they had a certain sentimental value, which my mother didn’t realize when she gave them to you.’ I was even willing, I said, to buy her boys a new set if it didn’t come up to too much. She wrote back that her sons had busted the transformer and engine and cars where she was almost sure they couldn’t be fixed, so she gave the whole thing to a junkman, tracks too. My plants. I went to Europe for a month, left two grapefruit trees with her I’d started from seeds some ten years before and which were about five feet tall, one starting to produce grapefruits the size of tiny mothballs. I’d heard that was impossible. That the seeds had come from ordinary store grapefruits that had grown on grafted trees, and so had no sex. There’s a better word for it. When I came back she said ants had got on the trees — I’d put them in her backyard — and she threw them out. ‘Ants?’ I said. ‘What are they? You brush them away. They don’t hurt people or trees.’ ‘These were the biting kind — red ants. I was afraid they’d not only nip me when I had my coffee outside but get into the house and all through the cupboards, and that you’d understand why I did it. You know, when you leave something with someone, who’s doing it as a favor and which could possibly be inconvenient, although this wasn’t. Just a little watering every other day as you told me to do, which I liked — it kept me cool and gave me something to do — though getting rid of them, they were so heavy and spread out, was no easy chore. But anyway, you’re doing it with a little risk involved, that’s what I’m saying. I could take sick and be unable to water them for a week or remember to tell anyone to. Or something worse happening to me, which could leave them unwatered in a drought, let’s say, for the entire month.’ ‘But none of that happened. And you could have told me what you were going to do with the ant-infested trees and I would have told you not to. I called from Europe every ten days or so, so what was the rush? I would have asked you to phone a few friends of mine and one of them would have come over and put them in a cab and kept them in his or her apartment till I got back. I only chose you because I thought they’d be cheerful and colorful — some more greenery — and also because they could use a month outdoors.’ ‘I didn’t think I had the time to wait. They were swarming, seemed to be multiplying every day, and once I had the super put the trees out front, the ants disappeared from the backyard, except for a black ant or two, which I’m used to. So I was right. There had to be something in those trees that was attracting the red ants. The little grapefruits perhaps, or the smell of the leaves. If it’s any compensation to you, the trees were gone before the garbage truck came, so I’m sure they got a good home.’ He put signs up on her block’s lampposts and parking-sign poles and the bulletin board in the corner candy store, saying that two grapefruit trees, approximately five feet tall and one bearing miniature green fruit, were placed by mistake in front of such and such building on around a certain date and he was willing to give a modest reward for their return or replace the trees with two good plants, but no one called him about it and his mother said most of the signs were down in a day. His manuscripts. He got a teaching job in California for a year and left clothes and two dresser drawerfuls of manuscripts in what they called the boys’ room in her apartment. He told her he had sublet his apartment to two men who needed both closets for their clothes and more shelf space for their knickknacks and books. Besides, they found his manuscripts on the shelves an eyesore. She said ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got nothing but room in that closet and dresser, so they’ll be nice and safe here and I promise never to read what’s on the papers.’ ‘Read them, I don’t mind. About half are typescripts — you know, the original manuscripts, if that’s what typescripts are. And the rest I just want to keep and maybe use some day or at least give a last hard look at before throwing them away.’ He returned and stayed with her at Christmas for a couple of weeks, looked in the dresser for his manuscripts and later asked her where they were. ‘Oh, gone, did you need them? I thought they were all published, and since you had them in magazines and books as you said, you had no use for them anymore.’ ‘Half of them were published, but even most of those I could have used if I ever wanted to rewrite the magazine stuff for a book. And there were tons of unpublished work that some of I have copies, most I don’t, and which I might have wanted to rewrite or take parts out of or use in some way. Why didn’t you phone me when you were thinking of throwing them out? I wasn’t in Europe or Australia but just a dollar-a-minute call away.’ ‘It wasn’t the money. You know I’m not like that. Money, for all the good it’s done me, I piss on, as your father used to say. But the pages were getting brittle and yellow or maybe most of them were old like that when you put them in the dresser. But every time I opened one of those drawers—’ ‘Why would you so much?’ ‘The first time out of curiosity. To see how they were and if I could rearrange them or stack them better. Then when I saw them all crumbling apart, I looked more and more often, and each time I looked they were worse off than the last. I thought of you, but didn’t know how to preserve them. I tried mothball flakes — just sprinkling them on, which I read in the Times would help — but then my friend Marion down the block said they might make the paper crumble faster. But it was like walking into a sawdust mill, every time I opened the drawers and so many little pieces had fallen away. I’d also heard that roaches and mice love the ink and glue in paper—’ ‘What glue? These were all typewritten or photocopied pages.’ ‘That waxy coat you had on what you said was erasable paper. If these pests like glue, I was sure they’d like that or would smell it, and you know I’m scared to death of those things.’ ‘If you were really afraid you could have put them in an airtight trunk.’ ‘Where do I have one?’ ‘You could have told me, about the whole thing and your mothball flakes, and I would have phoned a luggage store around here and had them deliver one to you. It would have been a little extra work for you, transferring it all to a trunk, but probably no more so than sticking them in the garbage cans outside. But I also would have paid some worker — the woman who comes to clean for you once a week — to do it and to bring the trunk down to the basement, or the super for that. Because those things — the unpublished stuff — were practically priceless to me.’ ‘Then you should have taken them with you if they were so much to you that way and in the very trunk you say you would have bought for me.’ ‘I told you when I left. I couldn’t be shlepping them from city to city like that. I thought they had a safe place here till I got back. I also wanted to be away from them for a while, thinking — who knows? — that some new idea might come to me about them if they weren’t by my side. That’s how it works sometimes.’ ‘Well I’m sorry. Doubly so for thinking I could do something good for someone by letting him keep his things here. But people think my place, because of the basement and that I have so many spare bedrooms now, can be a warehouse for them, but OK. I’m also sorry, for when the pages were discomposing to nothing, to think I was doing the right thing by getting rid of them. But my worst fears — roaches and mice, and even rats, possibly, though we’ve never had one in the house but I have seen one on the street — got the best of me. There’s nothing I can do about it now but grieve along with you. But just for my sake, since this is beginning to kill me too, think if all you said was so valuable to you, really is.’ Books. She once gave half the books he had in his old bedroom to Salvation Army or some organization like that. ‘They knocked on the door. I have a bell that works, but they knocked. They were very polite, though, when they told me what they wanted my old books and furniture for. The poor, handicapped, and so forth. I was affected by it, thought I could do some good for them and also clean out my place a little, which I’m always promising myself to do but never really get around to it. So I gave them a couple of broken chairs and an old card table and lots of odds and ends in the basement and then some of the books in the bookcases in the boys’ room that looked the oldest and also in the credenza in the back hallway.’ ‘My books were the oldest. A few were more than a hundred years old, and precious to me in other ways. Novels, poetry, critical works, essays.’ ‘Some were so old they were coming apart.’ ‘I would have had them rebound.’ ‘But you didn’t. And these people were so needy. And they said they’d box them and carry them out, giving me a lot more shelf space for my own books, besides cleaning up whatever mess they made. They did. Your room and the basement were cleaner than when they came. They also gave me a tax-writeoff slip. Asked me what amount I thought everything was worth — I said three hundred dollars though didn’t think it was half that — and they wrote the figure in. I’ll never use the slip — I don’t earn enough — but you can have it if I can find it. Besides all that, you haven’t looked at those books in years, so I thought you lost interest in them and wouldn’t mind what I did. If you hadn’t gone to your room for something else, you never would have noticed they were gone. Be honest with me: you weren’t interested in those books anymore.’ ‘Not true. You don’t follow my every move. When I come here I often go to my old room, take a book out and sit on the bed and read it for a few minutes, or even longer, and if my interest’s sparked or renewed, I take it home with me. But I never told you or showed you the book and said “May I borrow it?” because the book was mine. Just lucky for me I took what I did those times.’ Candlesticks. When he was going to Hebrew school to learn his haftorah and such to get bar mitzvahed, he got involved for about a month selling raffle tickets for the synagogue. The boys who sold the most, he was told, would get a big prize, one they’d treasure for life. Besides, the synagogue would always be proud of them. So he went around his neighborhood selling raffle tickets, and tried to sell them at whatever function his parents gave, and cornered strangers who came to the house, like the furnace man, delivery people. He sold the most for anyone in the pre-bar mitzvah group and was invited to the synagogue’s auditorium to get his prize. Rows of chairs had been set up, a cookie and juice table was at the side, his name was announced, there was a little applause, and he walked to the podium and the rabbi shook his hand and presented him a box of two wooden candlesticks ‘made in our new state of Israel.’ He had his mother use them at dinner that night. His father complained they made the room so hot he was sweating, and they were snuffed out before the meal was over. After dinner she scraped the wax off them and put them in the curio cabinet in the foyer. When he got his own apartment about ten years later and didn’t have much to put in it, he thought of taking the candlesticks, but didn’t like the looks of them. They were drab, old-fashioned, reminded him of Hebrew school, which he’d hated, and if someone at dinner turned either of them over and saw the ‘Made in Israel’ sign stamped into it, he might be thought religious, or zealotic, or even Jewish, when he sometimes didn’t want to be. He began to admire the candlesticks about ten years after that, wanted to take them home and use them, but felt they’d been in her cabinet too long to remove. If she ever asks him if he wants them back, he thought, he’ll take them, but not till then. About a month ago he was at his brother’s for dinner and saw them in his breakfront. ‘Where’d you get those?’ he said. ‘Mom. She said “Aren’t these yours?” and I said “I don’t know, are they? From when?” and she said “Hebrew school, when you were a bar-mitzvah boy and won first or second prize for selling an enormous number of something — rafffle tickets or candies.” So I thought well, it could have happened. I was always doing things like that for the synagogue when I wasn’t playing hooky from it, and Iris liked them a lot, so I took them. Mom also said she never cared for them much and only kept them in her foyer cabinet all these years so as not to hurt my feelings. So I didn’t think I was really taking anything from her, even if she occasionally says things like that just to give us things because she knows we won’t take them otherwise. But what do you think? To me they’re kind of graceful and pretty, and they’re obviously fairly old, but I’d never put candles in them. If they burned all the way down the wood might catch fire.’ Howard said ‘They’re nice, but I think Mom got her boys mixed up. I was the one who won them by selling the most raffle tickets for my group at the synagogue a few months or so before I was bar mitzvahed. I even remember the ceremony when the rabbi gave them to me.’ ‘No, really, I think Mom was right and I did win them. Once I began talking about them in the car ride home with Iris, I started remembering how I acquired them. I recalled canvassing the neighborhood and all the local Columbus Avenue stores to sell raffle tickes for prizes the synagogue was giving — tickets to the opera at the old Met, for instance. Box seats, in fact, I just remembered, with Lily Pons and I think Richard Tucker in it. He was a member of the congregation at the time. And by selling the first or second greatest amount of raffle tickets, though I don’t remember being in any age category or anything, these candlesticks are what I got.’ ‘Then I must have been the winner of a different kind of raffle contest. Or the same kind — the West Side Synagogue was always big on benefits at the Met if they had Jewish stars in them — but about seven years later. But OK, let’s forget it. You might be right. And what good are they if I can’t use them? I’ve accumulated so much stuff in my apartment that I can’t stand owning anything anymore that has no purpose if it isn’t at least extremely aesthetic’ His old van. She once gave a tenant in their building the extra keys to it and said she was sure her son wouldn’t mind him borrowing it for a couple of hours if the man could find a parking space for it good for tomorrow. ‘He came downstairs and asked if you’d help him move something heavy from Brooklyn to his new apartment here. He’d seen your brightly colored van and thought you might also be doing private moving on the side. You weren’t here and for some reason I volunteered giving him the keys. Maybe because he’s so nice, pays the biggest rent in the building by about double, and has a very dependable job. He was willing to pay fifteen dollars for the two hours, twenty if it came to three, which he said was the going rate for a van with no driver or mover with it, but I told him to work all that out with you when you got home.’ The van stalled on Manhattan Bridge. The man couldn’t get it started, walked to a garage on the Brooklyn side, drove back with a mechanic and found the battery, wheels and windshield wipers gone. He had the car towed to the garage and called Howard’s mom. Howard answered and the man said ‘A valve’s shot and needs replacing, plus of course the wheels and battery now and the wipers, for when you need them.’ ‘I’d like to get another estimate on the valve job and check around on the wheels,’ and the man said ‘Listen, sorry as I am that it happened, it’s really your problem coming from years of use on the van, and I also haven’t the time to hang around here bargaining with this guy. From what I know about cars, and as a kid I tinkered with them and worked in gas stations for years, what this guy’s charging can’t be more than twenty to thirty bucks higher than what another mechanic would charge, and to get it to another garage for an estimate you’ll have to pay an additional tow charge. What I suggest is you junk it. It’s only good now for its parts’ Howard asked the mechanic to make an offer, which came to the amount of the tow charge. She was always doing things like that. A while ago at dinner he asked her why. She said she thought she explained it well enough at the time each of those things happened. ‘My train set then. It was an old Lionel and has to be worth a thousand dollars today. The only answer I’m looking for is what could have possessed you to give it away when I’d pleaded with you to keep it?’ ‘You didn’t plead. You said try to keep it around, which I did but then years passed and you were away and I assumed you lost interest in it. Besides all that, are you going to go that far back to get something against me, for some reason? Your poor cousins needed diversion, nice toys. And poor because of what they’d gone through emotionally and also because Aunt Gussie could hardly pay her rent at the time and was still suffering tremendously over Ben. You remember: he just tipped over on the golf course and that was that. I was the first one she called.’ He said she never did things like that with her other children and she said ‘Sure I did, except to them, and now only Gerald, it was just plain common human error on my part or a misunderstanding because I didn’t hear right or they didn’t explain it well or compassion or good neighborliness from me, and they never made a big stink out of it. You seem to hold some sort of deep grudge against me, which I was unaware of till now.’ ‘Joe,’ he said. ‘I almost forgot it. I’m off to camp for the summer when I’m eight or nine — Miss Humphries’s — and when I come back he’s suddenly gone. “Where’s Joe, where’s Joe?” I remember screaming, hunting through the house for him, surprised he didn’t greet me at the door as he always did, and after this long, even more so.’ ‘He was all your kids’ pet, not just yours, and I think you’re exaggerating your alarm at the time. You came home, you didn’t know he wasn’t there till I told you, and then you looked a little sad but said you were hungry and asked for a snack or lunch.’ ‘That’s not so. I remember it the way I said it. Because it was such a terrible thing to me, the picture was put there that day and stayed. For weeks I’d been looking forward to him jumping all over me when I got back, and he didn’t. I remember even telling my bunkmates at camp what he’d do. And Joe was my dog almost exclusively, since I was just about the only one to feed and walk him and give him Christmas gifts and things and he always slept under my bed when he could which meant the day or two a month you let him. But everyone knew whose dog he really was. “My dog,” people called him, meaning “His … the kid’s … Howard’s.”’ ‘He was tearing up the apartment.’ ‘Probably because I was gone. So you should have loaned him out for the summer or put him in a kennel.’ ‘Not only when you were away. He caused what would be today hundreds of dollars a year in furniture damage and this went on for all the time we had him. Your father never wanted him in the first place. But because he came free and you kids begged on your knees, even if we knew none of you would ever take care of him, though you say you did, he gave in, which talking of surprises, was a lulu for me. I never minded the damage that much — I could live with a scratched chair leg or couch cushion thrown up on — but your father couldn’t or just used it as an excuse to get rid of Joe. Also the succession of girls, after Frieda, working for us. Very prim, some from good working-class families. While you kids were in school or away they had to walk him and none of them liked it when he did it in the street or sniffed another dog’s feces. Besides, Joe could be an angry dog, and they said he occasionally snapped and bit.’ ‘Never. He licked, he kissed, or only showed his teeth when someone provoked him.’ ‘If you say. But you remember I did go all the way out to Long Island by train with you to look for him and had convinced your father that if we found Joe we’d have to take him back.’ ‘Maybe you only did it to make me feel good at the time, but I appreciated it then and still do.’ ‘No, I don’t waste time like that; we were really looking for him. Place where they last saw him, pound where some dogcatcher might have brought him. The man your father had given Joe away to was taking him to his summer bungalow out there, and Joe had jumped out of the car window when the man was getting gas.’ ‘That’s one story I never fell for. I remember Dad saying the man had left the car window open only about eight to ten inches. I don’t see how a big dog like Joe could have squeezed through it and especially at the top.’ ‘That’s what your father told me. If he was lying he was doing it to us both, which means I did go on a wild goose chase. Anyway, what are we quibbling over, since we’ll never know.’”

“Memory of it starts with them stepping off the train, then standing alongside it, conductor near them, same uniform it seems train conductors have always worn, gray cold day, cold gray day, but that’s the way he always pictured it, contrast of the dark train and gray backdrop, his mother looking this way and that with an expression what’s she supposed to do now? She told him to sit on the bench inside the station while she looked for a cab. Next thing he remembers they’re sitting at a luncheonette counter in town, which they must have walked to for through the window he can see the train station across the street. While he ate she called a few taxi services in town but no cabs were available. It was wartime, gas shortage, gas rationed, scarcity of cars, cabs were considered a luxury out here, she was told, two of the three taxi services listed in the phone book weren’t even in business anymore. Most of that he got from talking about it with her years later though never telling her the main reason he was interested in the trip so much. There was about an hour, a half-hour, during it when he can’t remember ever having felt so close to her. The counterman said the one operating taxi service would take her if she were a local or a regular customer off the train, but since she just spoke to them it was too late for that. Two men seated at the end of the counter near the wall phone asked if they could help her. She told them what she’d come out for. First a trip to a gas station several miles out of town to show the people there a photo of a dog and ask if they’ve seen it around since he jumped out of a car there a month ago. Then to the local dog pound to look for the dog. They said they’d take her and her boy, no charge except for the cost of the gas and maybe if they could bum a few cigarettes off her. She said no, really, that was too kind, but they could certainly have the cigarettes. They said it’s OK, they’ve nothing doing at the moment, just so long as she doesn’t spend all day at the garage and knows they’re going to leave her at the pound; it’ll only be a mile walk back along the boulevard to the train station if she can’t get a cab or another hitch. Next thing he knows he’s walking beside his mother, his hand in hers, across the street to the corner where the car’s parked. Next thing after that he’s in the back seat and the men in front. When the car was pulling away from the curb the driver quickly rolled down his window and spoke to a man running up to him, either a policeman or someone in the army or marines. Their conversation was jovial, seemed to go on for minutes, then the man outside waved goodbye to the men in the car and bent down to where his face almost touched the back side window and smiled and waved to Howard who was right behind the driver. By this time there was lots of cigarette smoke in the car, from his mother and the two men, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Maybe because of the fresh air from the open windows, maybe something else. He wondered how the two men were able to fit in front. Only because his mother and he were so crowded in back. Was the front wider than the back? He didn’t see how, still doesn’t, at least not by that much, for the men were big and there seemed to be plenty of space between them and between each man and his door. When they started driving he thought the men might be bad men who were going to do something awful to them. Kiss his mother, steal her pocketbook, kill them both. She must have sensed what he was feeling for soon after she patted his hand and said don’t worry, it’s going to be a nice trip and I hope we find Joe. But sitting in back with his mother. This part of the trip has come back to him many times, maybe even a hundred, when no other part of it has. In fact, to get to think of any other part of it, it almost always comes after he thinks of this. Pressed close to her, the scratchiness of her wool jacket or coat, her arm around him, other hand stroking his hair, part of the way his head on her lap, cool silk or rayon dress or skirt, her hard leg his head rested on, hand stroking his cheek and the back of his neck, he even thinks he remembers her leaning over and kissing the top of his head, but most of all his eyes closed and his head and torso squeezed against her side and her arm around his shoulder or back and other hand smoothing his forehead and running through and curlicuing his hair. They’d been alone outside lots of times in different places. She once took him to a movie at night. They sat in the mezzanine and he was allowed to find the men’s room by himself and then to choose any one candy he liked from the two candy machines. All the times she took him to Indian Walk for shoes and after that to Schrafft’s where she’d let him pocket a few sugar packets and he’d have a vanilla ice cream soda and have to sit on a phone book to reach the straws. Cabs to several places, usually the doctor’s. But they’ve never, he believes, been alone together in so enclosed and cramped a space. He’s saying maybe that’s the reason, helped it happen, or maybe it was also something she was feeling toward him or something else at the time that made her act to him the way she did. Maybe even the cigarette smoke had something to do with it, for them both; he just doesn’t know. They must have gotten out of the car at the gas station, but he’s never remembered it. When he’s talked about it with her she’s said she doesn’t remember any gas station, just the train and dog pound and quite possibly the luncheonette, which does strike a bell, maybe from all the times he’s mentioned it—‘Though if that was the case,’ she’s said, ‘I don’t see why not the gas station too’—but she can’t say they were there for sure. So maybe she changed her mind about going to the gas station or the men suddenly didn’t have enough time for both the gas station and pound or else convinced her not to go: that it was silly, for example, to think the dog would go back there once it escaped. During the drive the men turned around every so often to ask her questions and she answered them gaily. He remembers smoke pouring out of her mouth and nose when she laughed and spoke. Actually, he doesn’t know how accurate that memory is. It could have come from lots of other times, for she always smoked and spoke a lot and at the time laughed a lot too. She was having a good time though. That he definitely recalls. She smiled and laughed like the times when his father put his hand around her waist and planted a kiss on her cheek or grabbed her around the shoulder and with his eyes open kissed her lips hard or when he grabbed her waist and hand when there was some radio or Victrola music on and did a couple of dance steps or twirls with her or when he teased her in front of the children, all this was in front of the children, or said something about how beautiful their mother was or what a great figure she still had, though he usually jokingly called it ‘figger.’ He felt cold in the car — probably because of the open windows for the smoke — and putting her arm around him and their bodies so close made him warm and probably made her warmer too. He doesn’t know why they waited a month before going out there to look for Joe. Phone calls to the gas station and pound and the man who lost Joe were made but that was all. His guess is that he badgered her till she gave in or she thought that after a month of him being depressed about it, only going out there to look for Joe would make him feel better. She’s said ‘I suppose we went out there when we did because it was the earliest I could find time for it.’ ‘I know we got a cab to the pound,’ she’s said, ‘and I’m almost positive it was from the train station. Though I might have gone to the luncheonette just to call for it, but there were certainly no men.’ ‘Well I definitely remember them,’ he’s said. ‘Two of them in the car, that they were young, the car old and leather-smelling till you all started up with smoking. Big bushy hair on one of the men. I forget the other’s hair and I can’t say whether the driver or guy beside him had the bushy hair — I think the driver. Maybe the car was actually a cab and the driver was a cabby and the guy beside him a friend going along for the ride or a passenger going in the same direction as us but getting off last. And this passenger or friend was the one with the bushy hair and the driver’s I never remembered because I couldn’t see it under the cabby’s cap. And the uniformed man hurrying over could have been a fellow cabby and the uniform I saw might have only been his cabby’s cap. Or else he wore it to complete what I think was sort of the standard cabby’s uniform then and that was with a waist-length yellow jacket, leather or cloth, though maybe I got the color wrong and even the material and design. But what’s it matter really? And it also wouldn’t account for the luncheonette I swear we met those two men in. Maybe the driver and his friend were having lunch at the time and one of the cab companies you called from the train station, you say — the only one you said was still in business because of gas rationing and no new cars being made — or even from the luncheonette, if let’s say the phones at the station were tied up and we crossed the street to call from there — said if you want a cab you’ll find their one available driver having lunch this very moment at the luncheonette across from the train station, or the same one you’re in. Or maybe we went in there to call for a cab or have a bite before we did and met the cabby by accident. But all of us sitting at the counter for at least a few minutes — so maybe you and I didn’t have lunch there or even a snack, though I could almost swear the men had plates and coffee cups in saucers in front of them. Then walking to the corner where the cab or private car was parked. And the pudgy uniformed cabby or policeman or soldier hurrying over to the driver’s window right after the car pulled out, and the man waving good-bye to me good-naturedly, though that might be an embellishment, his smile and bending down to me to wave; still, it stays. But without question the cab or car ride, long or short, to the dog pound, which I might have slept part of the way through, so comfortable and close was I in the back with you, even if my head was lying on or up against what I remember as your itchy jacket or coat, which normally would have kept me awake.’ They went to the pound. Neither recalls how they got back to the train station, though she thinks she told the cabby that took them there to wait. ‘That’s what I’d usually do in a situation like that and in an area I wasn’t familiar with. And cabs were cheap then and the waiting period particularly, or else I just called for another cab from the pound. For sure we didn’t walk.’ The man at the pound said it was unlikely their dog was there, she said, after so long and especially since the last time she called him about it, but he’d show them around. They went into a large airy room with about forty cages with dogs in them and a few cats. They walked down one aisle and back along the other. None of the dogs looked at all like Joe. Then he heard a dog barking from behind a wall. ‘Listen,’ he said, and listened. ‘That’s Joe.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ his mother said. ‘This gentleman will tell you: if he’s not in this room, he’s not here.’ ‘That’s Joe, I’m saying — coming from through there. I know how he barks. He knows I’m here — must have smelled and heard me — and wants me to come get him.’ The man said the next room was where they kept animals that had recently been brought in. ‘If they don’t show any signs of illness or anything, we let them in here. I know not one of them even remotely resembles an airedale.’ ‘It’s him, don’t tell me,’ Howard yelled and started for the door to the room. ‘Just to amuse him could you let him in there?’ she must have said something like. She doesn’t remember saying it, neither does he, but it’s what he thinks she would have said from the picture in his head of her at that moment. They went in. It was a small room with no windows and only a little artificial light. Four or five dogs in cages on tables and they all started barking when they came in. ‘At least we looked,’ she said outside the pound. He wanted to go to another. Said something like ‘Joe was a great runner and could have run twenty, even fifty miles in one day from where he jumped out of the car.’ She said they’ve done enough to find Joe today, that she’s already called every pound on Long Island twice but would call each of them a last time this week, but that they now have to catch a train so she can get home in time to do some other important things, and so as far as she’s concerned the matter’s closed for the day. If she said that in those words he probably said what does she mean when she says a matter’s closed? He probably also cried but stopped in a minute or two or just quietly sobbed but went along with whatever she said. He doesn’t remember any part of the trip back or anything more about that day or ever thinking of doing anything to find Joe again. Memory of it ends with them in front of the pound, wide gray sky behind her. He assumes the whole trip took about six hours and that it was dark when they got home.”

“‘When I was a little girl,’ his mother said, ‘till I got to around ten, we slept two to three to a bed. Girls with girls, of course, boys altogether. Under lots of thick quilts when it was cold, one pillow per bed, and four of the girls in two beds in one tiny room and three boys and my two older sisters in two beds in another small room. My mother or one of the Polish girls would have to wake us up because we slept so heavily. She’d bang two pots together most times to do it or tinkle a spoon against a glass if we were already stirring. Strange we all slept the same, for in the next room the others had to be gotten up that way too. And also that we were all sent to bed the same time, even though there was twelve years between the oldest and youngest. I suppose my mother wanted to make sure she got an hour to herself. Or if there was any hanky-panky between her and Uncle Leibush, who lived with us, that would be a good time, with my Dad still at work.’ For years after she got married she woke up around eleven or even noon. The children would be in school or in the nursery or bedroom with the live-in maid. His father would have left for work at seven. ‘Some people like to have their teeth fixed before they go to work,’ he said, ‘because it’s their only free time to or they think if they’re still half asleep they won’t feel as much pain. And lots of my patients I don’t give novocaine to when they need it because they want to keep the bill down.’ Then she’d come into the kitchen in her bathrobe, make fresh coffee (his father had his breakfast made by the maid), read the paper, smoke some cigarettes, have a second or third coffee, then bathe and dress. ‘It was a little bit too hedonistic,’ she said, ‘but I loved it while it lasted. It made me feel like a real lady and late at night I got lots of good reading done.’ She changed this routine when his father went to prison and she had to get a full-time job. Then she’d be up before seven, shower and dress, get the children up and ready for school, let the nanny in for the youngest child, make herself a quick breakfast, leave the house with her two youngest sons but in front of the building go left to the subway station while they went the other way to school. ‘A kiss, a kiss, a kiss,’ he remembers her saying on the sidewalk, after his brother and he started off, and she’d get down almost on one knee so they could one at a time or together come into her arms easier and kiss her. A few months after his father got out of prison she started getting up around nine, after the children had left for school. They had a housekeeper who’d make breakfast for his father, wake the children up and help then off to school, take the youngest to kindergarten and pick her up and take care of her the rest of the day. His father had a number of jobs for about ten years before he got his dental license back. Factory worker, shoe-store salesman, department store floorwalker, then for eight years selling materials in the Garment Center. He always left early to get to work before anyone else. ‘No matter how menial a job it is, the boss appreciates it,’ he said, ‘and the extra hour gives you a jump on everyone else. So you do it for show and possible advancement and the little time alone everybody needs and to make more money.’ She was an interior decorator by then — she’d taken an interior design program at night while he was in prison — and once her business got going she’d usually begin seeing clients around 11 a.m. His parents came home around the same time at night and there was lots of take-out Chinese-American food and dishes like lasagna and roast turkey and flanken soup she’d cook to last three to four days. She started sleeping poorly twenty-five years ago, she said, when his sister’s disease got much worse and the first symptoms of his father’s showed. ‘I got up five to six times a night, just as I do now, but then to help them, running from one room to the other sometimes.’ He said a few times it could be the black coffee now she drinks late at night and, after his sister died, the hard liquor she seems to start drinking around noon. ‘I don’t drink coffee after dinner and I only nurse a drink or two a day, and when you’re here for dinner or a chat and the way you pour, maybe a bit more.’ He once checked her bourbon bottle and in three days it was two-thirds gone. ‘You have anyone over for drinks since I was here last?’ and she said ‘No, why?’ ‘This bottle. You couldn’t have consumed that much since then. The woman who cleans up for you, maybe?’ ‘You mean to sneak? No, and what about how much is gone? I bought that bottle almost two weeks ago. They say twenty-two shots to a bottle, so it’s right on time.’ ‘I think I opened it for you when I was here last,’ and she said ‘Couldn’t be, since you were here about six days ago and I never could have drank so much in that time.’ ‘That’s not the way I remember it, but I could be wrong.’ ‘You’re wrong, believe me, dead wrong. I’d be puking every night instead of just tired if I put so much away. As I’ve told you, I nurse my drinks, put lots of water in them, and ice, which becomes even more water the way I drink them, and lots of times after that ice melts I put in some more. Sometimes I think it’s the taste of the bourbon-tinted water I like rather than the bourbon.’ Almost every time he speaks to her on the phone she complains she didn’t sleep well the previous night. ‘Last night I was up almost the entire time. I put on the TV at four in the morning and watched it — the cable weather station, as nothing more interesting was on — till six, while I read and did my needlepoint, and then lay in bed for an hour trying to keep my eyes closed till it took away too much energy from me and I got up for the day. I know old people don’t need that much sleep, but a few hours wouldn’t kill me.’ From what he’s seen and she’s said over the years her day runs something like this: bed by eight or nine, sleep till ten or eleven, read a book or watch TV in the sitting room while she sews or does needlepoint, back in bed listening to radio call-in shows and reading and sometimes sleeping for an hour, in the kitchen around three or four, a drink, some coffee, watch TV or read or both, back in bed, sleep for an hour or so, up, coffee, bathe, fresh coffee, half a toasted bagel or slice of dry toast, read the Times delivered to her building’s vestibule, maybe make cookies or bread, preparing them now, baking them later, every other day a short walk around the neighborhood or block but sometimes, even when the weather’s nice and she’s feeling well, not leaving the house for three straight days, shopping for food, about every other week stopping to sit for an hour on a bench on one of the Broadway islands and listening to other elderly people talk, a phone call or two, her sister, her sister-in-law, a real estate agent calling to see if she’s interested in selling her building, slice of bread or the other half of that bagel with cottage cheese for lunch, maybe a tomato or green pepper slice and a couple of radishes or celery stalks, drink before, drink after, sip it, forget where the drink is, pour a new one, drink from it, the other, thinking they’re both the same glass, bourbon, little water, lemon slice or twist if one’s been left over from the last time he was there or if he cut a number of them for her later and put them in wax paper and told her where they were in the refrigerator, since she likes twists better than slices, every five days or so opening her mailbox, every other day for an an hour working on the books for the building which she hates, every Friday telling the cleaning woman what work needs to be done and pitching in with some of the lighter chores, once or twice a week letting a building inspector in or oil burner man downstairs or accepting a package for a tenant or telling the delivery boy to leave her groceries on her doormat and then dragging the box or bags into the foyer and almost item by item carrying the groceries to the kitchen, once or twice a month depositing the rent checks in the bank and getting a few weeks’ cash, seeing her doctor and dentist twice a year, week every summer staying with him and Denise in Maine, drink before dinner, dinner around six, slice of Gruyère or Brie or tallegio cheese on bread, maybe a baked potato with a pad of butter or butterless sweet potato or yam and piece of fish or half a can of white tuna or piece of chicken from a breast she baked and which’ll last three days and a salad or a carrot and a few of her cookies but never her own bread, those loaves she gives away to neighbors or freezes for her sons or grandchildren who once every week or two stop by or come for dinner which they usually bring cooked and prepared or make there with their own food, about two out of every three Sundays lunch at home with her sister-in-law and then a walk along Columbus or Broadway to look at the shop windows and perhaps have an ice cream or in Central Park if it’s not crowded or rowdy or the music too loud and then sitting, before her sister-in-law takes the bus home, along the wall outside the park opposite the bus stop, drink after dinner which she nurses till she puts the glass with whatever’s left in it into the refrigerator for the next day or carries it to bed. ‘If you are going to drink,’ he’s said to her in various ways, ‘and I’m sure a little of it’s OK — blood vessels, and to relax or for the lift it gives and just to have something in your hand other than another coffee or cigarette — why not wine or beer? The hard stuff isn’t good for your stomach after a certain age, at least not more than a shot a day. Fifty, I’d think, if you’ve drunk your share for a while, is when one should call it quits with it, and you’ve gone more than thirty years past that. Fine, means great constitution, ability to withstand liver and kidney corrosion or wherever it is. And your mind’s still sharp, which I hope, if I inherited it right, means good news for me. But from my own experiences, it gives you a gnawing often aching feeling in your gut that keeps you up nights or a good slice of them. Or a glass of sherry or port, if you want to drink something late at night to help you sleep, another of its pluses, but not the cheap stuff but the better Californian or Iberian kind. And no coffee after three or four in the afternoon, and if you can keep it down to just one in the morning and then tea after and preferably herbal or vegetable teas or substitute coffees bought in health food stores, even better.’ ‘When I was a girl,’ she answered him once, ‘I thought I’d never take a drop of alcohol in my life. I was surrounded by it, that’s why. My dad owned a saloon downstairs and the fumes from it rose to where it got in our bedroom window three flights up or through the floorboards some way, passing through the ceilings between us. I wasn’t crazy. My sisters smelled it too and we always woke up with the stench in our hair and on our freshly laid-out clothes. His clothes also stunk from it and from cigarette and cigar smoke, something I also thought I’d never touch or marry a man who did, because he was in that place fourteen hours a day. I blamed alcohol for my not seeing him except an hour at dinner when he came up and if I bumped into him on the street during one of his brisk walks when he said he had to get out or not breathe, which is another reason I hated alcohol so much, though he never drank anything but a little schnapps every now and then and several glasses of religious wine on the holidays.’ She often looks exhausted when he visits her and says she hasn’t slept well the previous nights. She quickly uses up bathrobes and he’s been buying her one every other Christmas. He once said ‘Maybe it’s your mattress that’s keeping you from sleep,’ and went to her room and felt it and said ‘It’s lumpy, slumps sharply to the side, I’m surprised you don’t roll off it and end up sleeping on the floor. Let me get you a new one — a whole new bed, even. This year’s Christmas gift instead of another plaid robe.’ ‘What for? It’s still a good bed. Aunt Teddy gave it to me when I had my double one taken out.’ ‘That’s my point. It was probably her son’s first bed. Even if the frame’s still OK, the mattress must be sixty years old. Get rid of it. Get a double one so you can turn over in it without falling out, have a place to put your books and newspapers on when you read in bed and then fall asleep while reading without being poked or rattled by them.’ ‘Why a double for a single woman? And then I’ll have to buy several changes of sheets to replace the ones I gave you when I sold the double bed.’ ‘I’ll give you them back. Or buy you some all-cotton ones for the ones you gave me. As a birthday gift if you won’t take so much for Christmas. But a single bed’s for kids just out of the crib and convicts; it’s too confining, part of some punishment.’ ‘I’ll think about it, maybe it’s not a bad idea,’ but she’ll never let him buy it for her nor get one herself. It’d have to collapse first and be declared unrepairable by both his brother and he and the super. Then she’d say she doesn’t care what size bed she gets, queen, double or single: she won’t sleep well on it anyway. When he moved out of town and came in for a weekend on some business or just to see her and slept in the old boys’ room in her apartment, he’d hear her late at night or very early morning flushing the toilet, chopping or slicing vegetables on a cutting board, prowling about the house with her slippers flopping and sometimes past his door with a glass tinkling, could smell cigarette smoke, sometimes hear the TV going, hear her hacking loudly or trying to cough up phlegm or blowing a clot out of her nose, smell bread or cookies baking, coffee brewing, a stew starting which she’d jar and give him to take home because she doesn’t eat red meat, twice heard her typing, forgot to ask what but he thinks a letter because after one of those times she asked him to mail one for her when he goes out. Later those mornings he’d say she seemed to have slept badly last night and she’d usually say ‘I slept better than I have since the last time you stayed over. I don’t know why, since I’m no longer afraid of a break-in after all those locks and bars and alarms and steel doors I had installed, but my mind feels much easier with you here.’ Sometimes he’s said ‘I hate to bring this up again but maybe you’d always sleep well if you didn’t drink and smoke and have coffee so late at night.’ ‘What drinking?’ and one time he mentioned the glass tinkling and she said ‘That tinkling was from an inch of drink I put back in the refrigerator yesterday and added some ice to this morning and which will probably be, because you’re staying another night, the first of the only two I’ll have all day.’ One time she said ‘Leave me alone, stop hounding me about it, for what other pleasures do I get? If I lived this long with them in pretty good health, I’m not about to die because of them, and if I suddenly did, what of it? I’m already eight years older than your father was when he died at a respectable age and some twenty years older than my parents ever got and which I never thought I’d be.’ ‘When I was a girl,’ she said recently, ‘I was spilling over with self-respect. I dressed beautifully, did my nails, we had a girl for this but to get it done the way I liked I ironed my own clothes, bathed with a special rough soap to clean out my pores, washed my hair every night even though I had to boil water to do it, combed and brushed my hair till it shone, held it with tortoiseshell barrettes I saved up months for to get, was always chipper and alert in the morning, sharpest one at home and in class, would often run to school just to get out of breath because it felt so good, could beat up some of the bigger boys when they got too cheeky with me, played ball so well and ran so fast that I was called, in spite of my good looks and feminine clothes, a tomboy, ran errands for money after school till around dusk and between each of them studied my schoolbooks. Later on I found I wasn’t a day person anymore though I certainly kept up my appearance and wardrobe. Now with old age everything’s gone to pot. I could care less what I look like. I forget to eat and don’t bother with makeup or wear nice clothes and do little with my hair, though the beauty parlor I went to for forty years is still right around the corner. I’m a mess and I should do something to correct it. Maybe now that you’re here for the weekend I will. You’ve always let me know when I’ve let myself go and I’m grateful for it.’ ‘You haven’t, and when have I let you know that much? You still look good — your skin and the way you carry yourself and the texture and nice gray color of your hair, and unlike most old people your nose hasn’t grown too long and in fact has stayed thin. What I wonder about is why you wear torn stained housecoats around the house and slippers and socks that are falling apart when you must have new ones or the money to buy them.’ ‘Because I can’t sleep and so always wear the easiest clothes to slip off just in case I suddenly feel like getting into bed, and also that I’ve become a slob. But keep harping on me about this and also what you’re not saying about my hair and face and I’ll change.’ When he lived in the city and she invited him for dinner, he’d sometimes ring her bell, get no answer, let himself in with keys, call out for her, go to her bedroom door to see if she was asleep or sick. Sometimes he’d leave a note that he was here and left and other times he’d sit in the kitchen for an hour or two sipping scotch and listening to a classical music station if it had good music while reading one of her newspapers or the book he always carried with him when he went out, then would leave a note saying he waited for her, she must have slept badly last night so he was glad she was able to nap for so long, hope it isn’t that she’s coming down with something, he took some salad and cheese and bread so don’t worry — he ate plenty and had a drink too and he’ll call her tomorrow around noon. A few times he’d hear her clopping in her slippers from her bedroom, then she’d come into the kitchen in her bathrobe, say she was sorry but she’d only put her head down to rest a few minutes, she wasn’t hungry but he should go ahead and have something, and she’d turn on the ovens and burners to warm up the food. He’d eat just enough to satisfy her and eventually convince her to have a slice of toast and cheese and glass of milk or some cottage cheese or yogurt before she had a drink. ‘When I was young I talked and talked and talked,’ she once said. ‘Some people thought it a problem. When I got older I just talked and talked. By your age I was listening more than talking, and now I have nothing to say.’ When he sat with her at one of these dinners or took her out to eat, after they talked about the food or the restaurant table and her health and she asked and he briefly told her how his work and other things were going, they didn’t talk much unless he thought up things to ask her, a lot of which he’d asked before and so often knew the answers: what she did the last couple of weeks, whom she’s seen and spoken to recently, anything interesting or unusual that might have happened to her lately, what’s the book she’s reading about? she go to any recent movies or see anything she liked on TV? anything particularly excite or disturb her in the papers? what about that woman with the strange Indian name who eagerly testified against her mother who’s a judge? what about that beast who beat his child into a coma and then instead of helping her smoked cocaine after? how’d she get along when Dad was in prison? was it tough going back to full-time work after so long? any friends or relatives cut her off once that mess started? any of the women she danced with on stage or in movies become celebrated actresses or dancers or known in any way? who were some of the more famous headliners in the show? she have anything to do with them offstage? ever see Gershwin? she remember her first impression when she heard Stravinsky or Bartok or even Mahler? she ever try to return to the stage after her father pulled her off? did he actually drag her off during a performance or rehearsal or just told her not to go to the theater again? she have any interest in the election? she ever have any interest in politics? who was the president she admired most? What’s she think of this new information that Roosevelt didn’t do enough to save the European Jews? other than the fellow she’s mentioned a lot were there other men she was in love or infatuated with or could possibly have married before she met Dad? he fool around a lot or was that all just gossip? how would they have split up the kids or time with them if they had divorced? how close did it get and how often? what was it like living for a while with someone she didn’t like? either of them take it out on the kids? did she ever think of living with a man when she was unmarried? what stopped her and would it stop her if she were a young woman today? did her father fool around? what was it like living by gaslight? her eyes get tired reading or playing the violin or was the light as bright as in the average-lit room today? how’d firemen reach the top floors of six-story and seven-story walkups then? were the Lower East Side streets as teeming as it’s been said? she feel safe alone on them at night? can she recall a woman or girl getting raped on the street or in a park or anywhere then by a stranger? what kind of violence did she witness then outside her apartment? were there still many horses on the streets? she get interested in the book he gave her last week? if she has a choice does she prefer what’s been called a good biography or a great fiction? her parents have a radio or telephone when she was a girl? did radios play classical music then or just what did they have on them? she go to concerts or poetry readings or art galleries and museums when she was in her early twenties or even in her teens? what she think then of Picasso and Braque and Matisse and artists like that? she read or see or was aware of any of the literary magazines? Pound, Eliot, Stevens? when she first hear of Ulysses the book? anyone she know bring it in as contraband or buy it when it came out here? how’s her sister doing? she hear from any of her favorite nieces and nephews? doctors think Uncle Lewis will pull through? when and where did she learn to drive and in what kind of car? what was the farthest she ever drove west? what’s she remember of World War I? outside of lighting candles on Friday nights once Vera got very sick was she ever religious? what was the thinnest she ever saw Dad? does she remember him ever having more hair? what did they discuss then? was it ever a problem for her that he rarely read books and perhaps outside of grade school never a line of poetry? were there sex manuals at the time? her brother Leonard and older sisters prepare her in any way for sex? were there blacks in her elementary and high schools? what did she do the day of the Crash? she remember the day Roosevelt died when they were all in the same room crying? what forms of contraception were used in the teens, twenties and thirties other than condoms, the rhythm method or where the man pulls out or woman moves aside? any one teacher make a difference? what were some of the beers sold in her father’s saloon? Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Mann, Kafka or Babel? what can she remember about the bohemian art scene in Greenwich Village then? the village life of her parents and what they said about their parents’ before her parents boated over here? what meals she like best that her mother or her mother’s Polish girls or Dad’s mother cooked? they lock the doors at night then? when he was a boy they really keep the lobby and front doors unlocked when school was out or just over for the day? any relatives of hers and Dad’s still over there when the Nazis came? when she go up in her first plane? she have any Gentile friends she could take home when she was a schoolgirl or from her jobs later on? she ever go out with a non-Jew? what was Cuba like on their honeymoon? she get drunk on rum there? what did bathtub gin taste like? she ever take a drug in the twenties just to get high? she read Gertrude Stein or just about her in the papers during her famous trip here? Hemingway when he was starting out? is he right that she never liked Faulkner and why? what did she and Dad do in Europe that time they went other than drinking beer at Heidelberg Castle and champagne at the Folies Bergère? what was it again Dad said to Jimmy Durante and Durante then said to him at that Coney Island nightclub or beerhall where he entertained? she ever go to Luna Park and what was it like? did a proper young woman ever go into a subway washroom? she ever get along well with anyone from Dad’s family? what made her call Dad’s father such a schnook and schmo? What were the Polish towns again her parents and Dad’s came from? when she was pregnant with him and before she had to change his name to one with an H when Dad’s mother died where’d she come up with Peter Anthony? what was it like being in the opening-night audience of a new O’Neill play? they ever go to the ballet? would she like to one of these days? what was the greatest single thing including mind-reading acts and trained elephants that she’s seen on a stage? the day Lindbergh landed? has she changed her mind about Israel and the Palestinians in any way? she read the paper today? how about that cult leader on the West Coast who as a disciplinary example to the rest had his little daughter beaten to death and then hung out a window by a rope? outside of lynchings were there things like that then? she really come in second or third in a Miss America contest or did it have a different name then or was all that just to enthrall the kids? did Fitzgerald’s antics and works make an impression on her early on? was the Charleston difficult to learn? has life sort of measured up to what she thought? she often talks about death but if she stayed healthy would she like to live another twenty-thirty years? is there any philosophy she’s followed or thinks she should have? if she had one or two pieces of general life advice for him what would it or they be? what were conditions like giving birth in a hospital then? did he really start to come out in a taxi? was she allowed to watch or assist her brothers and sisters being born on the kitchen table? does she know how either of her parents were born? what’s she think of him as a father? are there any similarities he has to Dad other than physical? what did Dad truly think of him? what were some of the nicest and worst things he used to say about him? would she be honest for once and say what she thinks are her greatest disappointments regarding him? does he measure up in any way to what she thought he’d be like or be? she think he has any regrets how things have turned out for him and his present prospects? any writer she thought great whom she hasn’t heard anything about or much for fifty to sixty years? Dad ever take him for a solitary stroll in his pram? did Sophie Tucker really sit with them at the nightclub she was singing at and try to drink Dad under the table? he really do his term standing on one foot or was all that just a big boast? how was it Edward G. Robinson sat for a few hours in their breakfast room one afternoon? she remember the time he was small and fell down a coal chute up the block and she had to pay the coal man a dollar to climb in after him? the time a popsicle got stuck to his tongue and she thought the best thing to stop him from crying hysterically and possibly choking on it was to pull it off? wasn’t that earthquake something with the ratio of killed to injured ten to one? what was the worst personal and worldly catastrophe she’s heard of or had? the worst worldly or personal catastrophe she’s ever known? how well can she still speak Yiddish and French? would she like to go to a kosher restaurant one of these days? would she make gefilte fish for him and his family if he brought over all the ingredients and the three kinds of fishes he thinks it is already ground? what were the first words he said? she recall his first steps or were there just too many kids? who of her brood showed the most intelligence and coordination and creative abilities and sensitivity and things like that from the start? does she still have that synagogue say memorial prayers every year for Vera and Alex and Dad? what’s she think of people spending more than they earn or can pay back in good time? did she or Dad instill ideas of frugality or penuriousness in him or she think they came on their own? Not that he’s really that interested in it but does she think the federal deficit’s going to cause another depression or runaway inflation or will ever be improved? does she still think of Vera and Alex every day as she said some years back? she mind him asking questions like that? she think Gorbachev will carry it off or summarily get poisoned by the Kremlin kitchen like perhaps the last two or three guys? was she one who thought Stalin a louse from the start? is there anything she wants to ask him? is there any one woman he’s known she’s intensely disliked? does he ask too many questions? is there anything she’s been curious about him for years but never said? is there anything she thinks he wouldn’t answer or face himself? how does she think things are going between him and Denise? as husbands come and go where would she rate him? if she can’t really hear him then doesn’t she think she should get her hearing aid checked or just go for another ear exam after so many years? is there anything to this that he can’t remember her or Dad ever reading to him? did Dad like to put him on his shoulders or when he was very small carry him in one arm? how did she take him along when she wasn’t using a nanny or stroller or older brother or pram? she still get her teeth checked twice a year? did she ever get a response or even a thank-you from any of the people she sent his last work to? which of the desserts looks good to her even though he knows she won’t touch it? does she think he drinks too much wine with his food? what is it about this place that they always go to it when there are ten other restaurants within a ten-block range of her house? Sometimes he’s suggested she go to her general man and get a prescription for a mild sleeping pill or tranquilizer to help her sleep. She’s said ‘I never took one of those things in my life, never wanted to though sometimes I probably needed to, and it’s not because I think I’ll get addicted, but I’m not about to start taking them now.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I want to fall asleep when it’s natural to and not through stimulants.’ ‘They’re not stimulants. They’re relaxants or whatever the technical term is.’ ‘They stimulate you to relax or sleep. They do something or they wouldn’t have to be prescribed.’ ‘You take coffee; that’s a stimulant.’ ‘Not for that. I take it to relax and pass the time away and because I like the taste of it, something you could never say about a tranquilizer or sleeping pill. And it does relax me, the two or three cups I have, but not enough for sleep.’ ‘Then alcohol. You take that and technically it’s a depressant, isn’t it, which I think would be worse than a relaxant or sleeping pill to get you to sleep.’ ‘It doesn’t get me to sleep, even though you’ve told me to take a glass of sherry or port at night for that, and it doesn’t depress me. If anything, it picks me up and keeps me going gently, the one or two drinks I have in a day’ ‘Then go to a drugstore and buy a bottle of Nytol or one of those.’ ‘Sometimes the over-the-counter drugs are more dangerous than the prescribed ones. You know that when they suddenly jump to have to being prescribed.’ ‘But it’s been years of you not sleeping well — ten, maybe fifteen.’ ‘That’s OK; I’m still healthy for my age. If it slows me down at times, it’s better than dropping me dead. And when all my worries go, good sleep will come.’ Whenever she says something like this he doesn’t want to say ‘What worries?’ He knows she’ll say ‘Bills to pay, checkbooks to balance, getting over to the bank, filling out complicated city forms, the building, waiting all day for oil burner men and inspectors and delivery boys to come.’ He calls and says ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me, Howard, how are you?’ and she says ‘All right, I guess. I was up all night.’ Usually he says ‘I’m sorry, what’s wrong?’ but this time he says ‘Sorry to hear that.’ Sometimes he thinks ‘I’ve heard all this so much and in the same exact delivery and the same lines,’ while she’s saying something like ‘I should sleep better tonight though, now that I’ve spoken to you.’ The conversations are always short. He doesn’t like talking on the phone to anyone or not for long and if he’s particularly brief that call she says ‘Is anything the matter with you? You don’t sound well.’ ‘No no, I’m fine.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah, sure, in the pink.’ She always ends the call with ‘Thanks for calling, and I love you,’ unless she’s very tired or sick, and he usually says ‘Same here with me, much love’ or ‘Me too.’ ‘When will I see you?’ she says this time and he says ‘I’ll try to come in soon.’ ‘Good. How are the children — Denise, the whole family, of course?’ ‘Fine, fine.’ ‘Nobody with colds — nothing like that? With the weather so changeable as it’s been, that’s when they come.’ ‘No.’ ‘Good. And how are you?’ ‘Fine, you know me — almost always healthy. But how you doing? Everything’s OK?’ ‘I don’t sleep. I just can’t these days. Maybe an hour, two. I seem to worry about everything — the bills, paperwork for the city I don’t have to have in for weeks to some of it for three months. It’s stupid, but I do.’ ‘I’ve said this before, and I’m not saying it now to make you upset or that I expect you to change your mind or anything, but you really should go to your doctor and have him prescribe something very mild to help you sleep. Or just talk to him over the phone and have him do it. I’m even surprised, when he last saw you, he didn’t suggest it on his own.’ ‘He did, but I told him what I’m telling you now. I never took them and I’m not about to start. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I know that at my age I should relax about life a little, so why do I worry about these things so much? When I figure it out, I just might relax. Because I’m not sick for someone so old, knock wood. None of the ailments. And I have enough savings and income from the building to live without struggling, and a roof nobody’s going to take away from me. It must be my nature to worry over nothing, I suppose. But the children, Denise — they’re all okay?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Good. You?’ ‘Fine, thanks.’ ‘I’m glad. Any of them around so I can speak to them?’ I’m calling from school and am actually on a ten-minute break from class.’ ‘Then I won’t keep you. And nothing’s really happened in my life since I last spoke to you, so I don’t — except one thing. Did I tell you about Cousin Nathaniel?’ ‘No.’ ‘I didn’t tell you? You know who I’m talking about?’ ‘Nat, Ida’s son. What’s wrong? He’s OK, isn’t he?’ ‘He’s finished. Beyond life. I read this little newspaper article about it days before I heard it. It’s a real story. You have another minute? Or call me back when you do or I’ll call you if I don’t hear from you.’ ‘No, tell me, what?’ ‘He was stabbed to death. In his apartment. I read this little article in the Times last week—’ ‘Stabbed to death?’ ‘First hit on the head all over. Then stabbed as if the person went completely crazy when doing it. Cut to pieces, hacked. But this article I read — At the bottom corner of the page, could easily be missed, so I don’t know what attracted me to it, said an unidentified man was found stabbed to death with multiple wounds in his apartment on Avenue J. Neighbors had complained of the smell for four days, so they called the police. Or he’d been there for four days and they only started smelling it for three or two. When it said Avenue J, I wondered if it could be him. He’d taken over Ida’s apartment when she died, which was their whole family’s once — you remember, when you were all young. How much older would he be than you?’ ‘Seven years, eight. But because I think he’s a few years older than Jerry, maybe even more. But good God. Dinners all the time there. Fridays. I can’t believe it. In the same apartment.’ ‘That’s what I thought when I first read the article. When it said unidentified man I almost knew it was him.’ ‘But Avenue J’s a long avenue. Thousands of people must live on it, so I don’t see how you could have thought it was him.’ ‘It just entered my mind. Because he was such a loner, maybe. And he was so strange, I heard, these last few years — worse than he ever was — that who knows what kind of people he might have hung around with or let in for what. His sister didn’t. And he’s the only person I know who lives on Avenue J since his mother died. But that’s just half the story, what I told you. Hanna — I’m not going to get you in trouble with your school?’ ‘No, what?’ ‘What?’ ‘His sister Hanna.’ ‘She called me a few days after he was found and told me it all. The funeral was only last Sunday. I don’t know why it slipped my mind not to call you when I found out. I guess I didn’t think you’d be that interested or just that you’re so occupied with all the work you do and just the problems with small children — sickness and things.’ ‘But I don’t understand you. He was my favorite cousin when I was a boy. So really the only one I ever got close to, since I hardly knew the others. He and Hanna, but he would also come over to the house, take Alex and me places.’ ‘That I didn’t know. But it was at Pinelawn or something. A veteran’s cemetery on Long Island. Funeral and burial both. Hanna was hysterical most of the call. But she said that’s where he always wanted to be buried, to save on the cost for them, since he’d been almost penniless for years. Taps and everything, she said they had at it; beautiful chapel and immaculate grounds, so as nice a place to be as anywhere. And everything except the rabbi, since she wanted her own, and half the casket paid by the government. I didn’t go because I didn’t know of it and I couldn’t have got out anyway and I don’t think Jerry would have driven me.’ ‘Sure he would have if he wasn’t supposed to be out of town that day. He’s told me Nat was his favorite cousin too.’ ‘I wish I had known that. But how they couldn’t identify him immediately when they knew he lived in that apartment I don’t understand. Maybe he just never went out much lately or only when neighbors and the super couldn’t see him. He had that kind of peculiarity in him. What I’m saying is his appearance might have changed so much recently — starving himself, if he was so penniless, though I’m sure he could have eaten anytime he wanted at Hanna’s or her girls’ or borrowed if he needed from her — that they didn’t recognize him. Or else—’ ‘Come on, don’t go off like that.’ ‘Why? Since he lost his shoe store, or walked away from it — the story’s never been straight — he’s been peddling toys up and down Broadway and not making a dime from it. He was sloppy, dirty, half the time unshaven for days, Hanna said. Nothing like his father, who was always perfectly groomed and spotless — so nobody wanted to buy from him and he was stuck with what he wanted to sell. Hanna said the police were letting her into his apartment for the first time this week and I bet she finds nothing but toys and thousands of his old jazz records.’ ‘About his appearance change, I bumped into him last year at around 116th and Broadway and he didn’t look much different than he did at Dad’s funeral, only paunchier. We had a nice chat on the street. I wanted to take him in for coffee, but he said he had to deliver the boxes he was carrying.’ ‘Those were the toys. He was too ashamed to tell you he’d become a peddler. But I didn’t know you saw him.’ ‘I told you then. I was staying with you that weekend. I even brought up the records with him — that when we were kids he used to bring us into his room to play them for us — but he said he got rid of them twenty years ago.’ ‘Anyway, the story is that he went to the veteran’s office in Brooklyn to collect his pension check-no one gets them mailed, or social security checks, in his neighborhood, Hanna said. Afraid they’ll be stolen from their mailboxes, if the boxes still even have locks on them. And then he cashed it at another desk and left with a man he seemed to only have just met there, people said. It was obviously this man who went home with him and killed him for the money he saw he had. The door wasn’t broken in or fiddled with. The police said it looked exactly like something somebody would do who walked in with him — a friend, or someone later let in. Nathaniel couldn’t have had much money if it was a veteran’s pension he was on. He was nothing but a buck private, if I remember, and had no disability from the war. Though who knows what Dad might have arranged for him years ago and even what that man might have thought he had. He saw two hundred dollars in Nathaniel’s hands, he imagined two thousand in his home. But Dad did that for Nathaniel’s father when he fell off a stepladder through a window at work. Workmen’s Compensation and his insurance company wanted to give him the bare minimum — said it was his fault plus something about the store not having him properly on the payroll. Dad spoke to some people and maybe even fixed things with some schmears and got him full disability pay for life and also for Ida after Jack died. Your father was very smart about things like that when people didn’t work for it or deserve it and my guess is that Ida asked Dad to do that for Nathaniel too when she saw the kind of character he was going to end up as. He’d do anything for that family — there was no better brother and son. And then Nathaniel, as the way I see it, with a temper sometimes like his mother’s and Grandma Tetch. You remember all the stories I’ve told you about her. She used to beat her children with broomsticks, Ida included. That whole family, except your father, were either weaklings or violently nuts. Anyway, when the man wanted the money, Nathaniel must have fought and talked back like I think he would because of his temper, and that’s when he got beaten on the head several times and stabbed when he kept on fighting. You have to admire him if that’s what happened, though I don’t know how many times your father told him, when he had his shoestore and there was a chance he might get robbed — you know, they all worshiped Dad and usually took his advice — to just give the money up and anything else they wanted.’ ‘What a way to go though. Just awful, awful.’ ‘Terrible, I know. And they don’t think they’ll ever get the guy. Somebody nobody ever saw before in the veteran’s office, if it was him. And if it wasn’t him who did it, then the police are really stumped, according to Hanna. Not that she wants him caught. She’s afraid if he is, then his friends or the killer out on bail will come after her for no better reason then that he’ll think she pressed the police to catch him or she knows something more about him than she does. She knows nothing, she says, and wants to keep it that way, so she’s not pressing. That’s what she told me. You ever hear anything like that? But look at me. Before all this about Nathaniel I was going to say nothing happened in my life since I last spoke to you, and in a way that’s still true. But what’s the best time to call you so I get you and can speak to everyone else?’ ‘Six.’ Then that’s when I’ll call. Not tomorrow, since I just spoke to you, but the next day or the weekend. I’m tired now but I’m sure I’ll be in much better shape to talk next time.’ ‘Stay well, then.’ ‘Thank you and thanks for calling, and I love you.’ ‘Same here with me, Mom.’ ‘What?’ I said much love to you too and I hope you’re feeling better — have had enough sleep, aren’t so tired — you know, the next time.’ ‘Something must be wrong with our connection all of a sudden, or this hearing aid. It works and it doesn’t. I think it’s even made my hearing worse, for it was never that bad where I didn’t hear anything. Let me adjust it…. There, now say something.’ ‘Hello, hello, I’m speaking, can you hear me, Mom’?’ ‘No, nothing, just faintly, as if you’re a million miles away. What time did you say was the best to call, and loudly’ ‘Six, six.’ ‘What?’ ‘Six! Six!’ ‘Oh, I’ll just take my chances and call some time this Saturday, but only after I get this rotten thing fixed. I’m sorry, dear. Bye.’”

“He’s in his mother’s neighborhood and decides to drop in. Though he has the keys to her apartment, he’ll ring the vestibule bell. If she doesn’t answer, he won’t let himself in. She could be napping, resting, taking a bath, just wanting her privacy. She’s walking up the steps of her building’s areaway when he’s coming down the block. ‘Mom?’ he yells from across the street. She doesn’t look his way. ‘Mom, Mom?’ he yells, crossing the street. She reaches the sidewalk, holding on to the wall and then the short iron fence on top of it to get there, stops, takes a deep breath, and starts down to Columbus Avenue. Probably has her hearing aid turned off or else not in. He starts to run after her, then thinks follow her, see what she does for a while, he’s always been interested and has never done it before, maybe because this is the first chance he’s had. So he follows from about fifty feet behind. If she sees him hell say he just rang her apartment bell, she didn’t answer, he didn’t want to disturb her by letting himself in if she was home, and was heading now to Broadway to catch the subway or bus. She walks slowly. Every three buildings she stops to rest. She looks at the sky or the tops of buildings while she’s standing still, to the sides, a couple of times behind. He doesn’t wave and she doesn’t seem to notice him or not as her son. One time he pretends to tie his shoe when she looks at him, another time when she turns his way he actually has to tie that same shoe. She’s carrying a small canvas shopping bag and she probably has her handbag in it. She has on the black sneakers he convinced her to buy a few years ago to make walking easier, or they could be a second pair. Black slacks, shirt and jacket and with her hair handsomely combed and pinned back, so she could be dressed for going to just about anywhere: a movie, stores, a stroll. Near the end of the block she stops and looks at the second-story window of the building she’s in front of. She smiles and waves to it. The window opens, a woman’s head sticks out. ‘How are you, Marion?’ his mother says. ‘Fine, thanks; nice day for getting out, I’d say. How is everything?’ ‘All right, considering. I thought I’d do a little shopping.’ ‘What I should do with the weather this nice. And the family?’ ‘You know — you hear from them and you don’t. And yours?’ ‘As well as can be expected.’ ‘The same thing?’ his mother says. ‘But worse.’ They chat for a few more minutes. He sits on a stoop, takes a book from his jacket pocket and pretends to read while listening to them. His mother tells her to try to come for lunch tomorrow or the next day. ‘Nothing elaborate; we’ll talk.’ ‘The next day I can make it.’ ‘Then I’ll see you there at noon if I don’t see you on the street before then, dear.’ She waves, Marion waves, and she goes to the corner. She looks left and right, then across the avenue as if she’s only now deciding which way to go. Left, crosses the street, stops at the third store along Columbus, goes inside, comes out with an ice cream cone, strawberry it seems, sits on the bench in front of the store and eats it. He looks in the window of a children’s toy and clothing store next to the ice cream shop. If she sees him and calls out his name he’ll say ‘Mom, oh hi, I was in the neighborhood, stopped to look at all the nice things in that store for Olivia and Eva, not that I’d ever buy anything — way too expensive — but I was on my way to see you. In fact I was going to call you at the corner phone there in about ten seconds. I guess I would have got nobody home.’ A young woman and her daughter sit beside her, filling up the bench, the girl right next to her. ‘Hello,’ she says to the girl. ‘You know, I once had a little girl — you’re around what, seven, eight?’ ‘Six.’ ‘Six? My, how much more grown up you look. And what am I talking about? I’ve a granddaughter your age and had two your age before they grew up and became big. But my daughter when she was six had long dark hair like yours and was slim and pretty like you too and she also loved ice cream cones. What’s your favorite flavor? I bet I can guess.’ ‘Flavor?’ ‘What ice cream cone do you like best?’ her mother says to her. ‘Vanilla.’ ‘Say it to the lady, and in a loud clear voice; don’t be shy or intimidated.’ ‘Vanilla!’ ‘I’ve told her a hundred times: If there’s anything I can do to prepare her for the adult world, it’s that. I won’t have her — you know, mealy.’ ‘My granddaughter too. But that was my favorite flavor when I was six,’ his mother says to the girl. ‘Till I switched to strawberry — I don’t know why I did — and it was my daughter’s favorite flavor all her life. Vanilla was.’ The two women talk while the girl eats her ice cream and looks at the traffic and people passing. The talk quickly gets into large families — the woman came from one, so did his mother—‘The Jews years ago and the Irish forever,’ his mother says, ‘nothing insulting intended’—and then their voices gradually get lower and he hears the words ‘breasts … breast-feeding … warm compresses on them to draw the milk up, and also drinking dark beer and stout.’ His mother’s giving advice—‘I nursed all mine for more than a year and nobody thought I had the equipment for more than two months’—but it must be for someone the woman knows, for her breasts don’t seem like a nursing mother’s and her stomach’s flat, and where’s the baby if she has one? Maybe at home with a nanny or someone, and he could be all wrong about her breasts. A woman he knew who he thought was almost flat chested, and when she took off her blouse the first time, ‘Oh my goodness, gosh, I had no idea, not that it should mean that much or I’d feel any different to you if they weren’t so large, but still…’ and went up to her from behind and put his hands around her on them. She still had her bra on and when she unhooked it and slid off the shoulder straps and twisted her head around to kiss him, breasts and bra fell into his hands. Palo Alto, back of a house by the train tracks, twenty-three years ago. The woman and daughter stand up; the two women shake hands. His mother finishes the ice cream in the cone, bites off a piece of the cone, looks around before spitting it into the paper napkin he didn’t know she was holding, drops the napkin and cone into a trash can beside the bench and continues down Columbus. She still stops every forty feet or so, sometimes a deep breath. A young woman passing her looks at her standing still, stops a few feet away to look back at her, goes back and says ‘Is everything OK?’ ‘Yes, thank you. Just resting, but I can make it fine to where I’m going, dear.’ ‘You’re sure you’re OK?’ ‘Positively. You’re a sweetheart for asking.’ Sidewalk’s now crowded because of a row of vendors near the curb and the enclosed restaurant patios jutting out from the buildings. Her eyesight’s not good and she refuses to wear her glasses outdoors, so there’s even less chance she’ll recognize him now. She does, he’ll say ‘Mom, why hi, I was just over your place, rang the outside bell, no response, so I let myself in — I hope you don’t mind — and when I saw you weren’t home, thought you might be on Columbus or in one of the stores here and came to look for you. If you weren’t, or I couldn’t find you, I was even going to walk to Broadway to D’Agostino’s and Fairway, the two other places I thought you might be. Like to stop in for a coffee or snack someplace, on me?’ She crosses the next street and goes into the supermarket at the corner. He follows her, picks up a basket by the door, puts a few beers in it from the cases stacked at the front of the store, too good a buy, loses her, looks up the nearest aisle, goes to the entrance and looks up the first aisle and sees her at a meat counter looking at what’s there. She takes out a chicken — whole, parts, he can’t tell — puts it in her cart, some beef — cubes for stew, looks like — at the dairy section gets cottage cheese, yogurt, two or three different foreign cheeses, goes down an aisle and gets scouring powder, big box of laundry detergent — how’s she going to carry it all? Probably will have it delivered — Brillo, silver polish, floor wax, then several cans of tuna, seltzer, marmalade, English muffins, lettuce, carrots, radishes, scallions, bananas, kiwi, a cantaloupe. ‘You think this is ready?’ she says to the woman who weighs the produce. The woman taps and smells the cantaloupe and presses its ends, says ‘Think I know what I’m doing? I see the regular man doing it, I do it. But he’s off today, so don’t go by me.’ ‘Let’s say if you were thinking of buying it-would you?’ ‘You’re asking me that, customer to customer, I would, ‘cause it’s a great buy, and I’d keep it in a warm spot for a few days, but not the stove, you know? Now the bananas,’ weighing them — his mother puts the cantaloupe back—‘yours are good, you could eat them while you’re walking home. But the ones over there — too green, so I wouldn’t touch them.’ I think those are Spanish bananas — plantanos, I think they’re called — and are supposed to be green. You cook them.’ ‘Do you? They look like green bananas to me that’ll take weeks to ripen.’ ‘That reminds me,’ and she squeezes a number of avocados, puts two of them in her cart. ‘Nice talking to you, dear’ she says. ‘Same here. Have a good one.’ Package each of figs and dates, jar of apple sauce, several jars of baby food pear sauce, two six-packs of Dutch beer from the cases in front, and goes to the checkout counter, writes out two delivery forms, pays by check, says ‘I wrote on it to leave the packages by the door,’ gives a dollar tip for the delivery boy and leaves. He quickly pays for his beers on the express line, goes outside and sees her crossing the avenue at the corner. She buys a used book at a vendor’s table on the sidewalk, goes into a card and party goods store at the corner and through the window he sees her smiling and another time laughing as she reads some cards. She takes one to the counter up front, he goes to the open door to listen. She sees him he’ll say ‘Mom, hi, I happened to be in the neighborhood for something (he’ll think of what), passed this store and saw you in it, but for some reason I could never stand these kinds of shops. Too what? Schlocky, meretricious, if I’ve got the word right for what I mean, and that cloying incense smell from the candles or something — soap, I don’t know — though maybe that’s all unfair of me and I don’t really catch their value and worth — the stores’, not of course the candles’. Anyway, I decided to wait out here till you came out or saw me from inside.’ But the beers. ‘Mom, hi, I was looking for you on Columbus, saw a good buy for Dutch beer advertised on Pioneer’s window, so went in and bought a few and coming out of the store saw you crossing the avenue…. You were in Pioneer at the same time? Amazing, but I just shot in and out. Anyway, saw you were having such a good time browsing through the cards — they can be very funny, I know — that I thought I wouldn’t spoil your fun so would just wait outside. What do you say? Like to have a bite or drink someplace?’ She tells the salesman behind the counter how different cards are from what she remembers them ten, fifteen years ago. ‘I’m almost sure I told you this before, but I can’t believe how risqué some of them are. I’m no prude, but do they really permit it? Can someone be arrested for sending one of the dirtier cards through the mail? I’m not joking. Monkeys doing it with people in one. Grotesque statues having orgies with figures in paintings. I’m sure it isn’t only that my attitude can be a little out of date.’ ‘Oh no, we get complaints about them from every age. But plenty of people, and I’m not justifying the cards, find them funny and cute, and they cost more than the others, so the owner’s happy. But you got a good traditional one — one of my favorites, both universal and clever. Whoever’s getting it will get a big lift.’ He wonders who that is. Nobody’s birthday or wedding anniversary’s coming up that he knows, and from what the man said he doubts it’s for a religious holiday. Friend of hers he doesn’t know of? Better yet. He turns to the window as she leaves, looks at the party material while watching her reflection cross the avenue. How would he have explained his window-looking? ‘I was thinking of the kids — their birthdays — I know that’s three and four months from now, but you have to plan ahead…. But what crap. And the prices!’ She sits at a table in front of a Mexican restaurant. He sits at an outside table of the adjoining restaurant — Indian; he didn’t even look — and when the waiter comes up, ‘No food, please; just a European or Japanese beer, or Indian if you got.’ She orders nachos and cheese and a draft beer. Draft he should have asked for. She leafs through the book she bought while she eats and drinks. She sees him he’ll say ‘Mom, I don’t believe it, patio-to-patio restaurants — what a fantastic surprise. I called you just ten minutes ago — was in the neighborhood so thought “Why not?” But wanting to know if you’d like to go out for exactly what you’re having now, a snack and beer. I didn’t know you liked those nacho things. I can’t — the cholesterol; my doctor would have a heart attack — but you’re incredible, arteries like a child’s, and if I had known I would have suggested taking you to a Mexican restaurant long ago. There must be some things there I could eat. But think my patio will mind if I move my beer to yours? I’ll just drink up and pay up and get a beer at your table.’ She reads several pages in the middle, the last page, closes the book and has a look as if she doesn’t know by what she’s read if she wants to read the whole book, looks at the people passing, lights one of those he supposes he could call them cheroots. A young man at a table on one side of her asks if he could bum one from her. ‘Of course — take two; less I smoke of these, the better.’ He takes one, asks what book she’s reading, she lights his cheroot with her lighter. Asks if she reads a lot. Was she a teacher at one time? Has she always loved good literature? He wishes he read more. He wanted to read that very same book for years, but in college was too busy with studies, in graduate school too busy with his thesis and teaching, and now at his job too busy working. ‘Carry it with you,’ she says. ‘On the subway or whatever you take. Long elevator waits. That’s what my son says he does and he gets an extra ten-fifteen pages a day in that way. Here; it only cost me a measly two dollars and I know after a few minutes with it I’ll never finish it. At my age — well, anyway.’ He wants to give her the two dollars; she won’t think of it. ‘Then let me treat you to another beer.’ ‘No, one’s my limit in the afternoon.’ Thanks her and says he’s going to do as she says: ‘Read between the cracks.’ She doesn’t understand. ‘It’s an expression: whenever I find a few minutes free.’ ‘That’s it,’ smiles, pulls a newspaper out of her bag and reads. He sits back and opens the book and looks at her. ‘Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you again, but I just noticed you read without glasses. You’ve never worn them and you’ve read so much? What’s your secret?’ ‘I wear a pair for distance sometimes but don’t really need them. Neither of my parents needed glasses either, though my father wore them because he thought they made him look more like Emperor Franz Josef.’ ‘Which emperor was he?’ ‘Of Austria and Hungary before the first World War. He idolized him; emulated many of his mannerisms and dress; so much so there was a framed photograph of him — this big — over my parents’ bed. Strange now when I mention it.’ The man thinks about it: one eyebrow up, couple of forehead furls. She reads the front page for a few minutes, pays, wishes the man a good day — he’s startled away from the book, waves it at her and says ‘So far, great; thanks’—and heads back up Columbus. On the next block someone shouts ‘Mrs. Tetch? Pauline?’ and runs over to her. Woman he knew from the neighborhood when he moved back to it fifteen years ago and introduced his mother to. They kiss, woman asks how she is, his mother says ‘All right, I suppose, for an old dust bag like me.’ If either sees him — he’s looking at one of the sidewalk tables: unisex jewelry: rings, earrings, nose rings, clips and things for the hair — he’ll say he was on the subway uptown, got off to see his mother—‘But how are you, how are you, a great double surprise,’ and kiss them. The woman’s talking about diet, health, alternative medicine, good food, lots of organically grown fruit juices and greens and grains, a mail order house in Pennsylvania where you can get health foods sent to you — she’ll bring her the catalog; ‘A lot more expensive than store-bought health food — you can even get fresh apples and carrots and bread and nondairy cheese — but it comes right to your door, so why not try it? It can give you a few extra years.’ ‘I’m too old to start into that,’ his mother says. ‘Where were you thirty years ago?’ They talk for around ten minutes in the middle of the sidewalk. People have to walk around them; one man passing him says to his companion ‘What’s with those two? Don’t they know they’re holding up traffic? People can be so unaware.’ He wants to say to him ‘Come on, give them a break; she’s an old lady.’ He crosses the sidewalk to a store window; men’s clothes, too fancy and expensive for him; but what would they say if they saw him? ‘You, the original cheap jeans and T-shirt guy, thinking of buying those clothes?’ ‘Oh my God — hi. I was just on my way to see my mother. Truth is, I saw you two there but was curious, long as I was in the neighborhood and you were still busy talking, as to what these stores think men wear these days? Obviously plenty of men do wear what’s in there, since half of them on the street have on a lot of the same stuff in the window along with some of the self-mutilating jewelry there on the sidewalk. But what a surprise. How are you both? I don’t know which of you I should kiss first.’ The women are kissing goodbye. His mother holds and pats the woman’s hand and says ‘You know I always had a special place in my heart for you the moment I first met you and was devastated for you when Barry died.’ ‘I know; thanks, Pauline; no one could have been kinder after.’ He forgot about Barry, doesn’t think he’s thought of him for years, even though he has two of his huge paintings hanging in his home, which the woman had given him, and had wheeled him in the park every day for an hour or so for a few weeks before he died. His mother continues up Columbus, stops, rests, looks in store windows — women’s shoes, women’s handbags and gloves — goes into a gourmet shop and has some things weighed; about a quarter-pound of sliced turkey breast, he sees through the window; salads scooped into half-pint and pint containers; a pickle and two onion rolls. She makes onion rolls better than he’s bought anywhere, even when they’re a couple of days old, but they’re usually to give away; she hardly eats what she bakes. She puts the grocery bag into her shopping bag, stops in front of the ice cream store — she’s not going to get another cone, is she? — sits on the bench. She tells the young man eating ice cream beside her that her heart suddenly started palpitating rapidly; she felt faint, that’s why she’s sitting without buying an ice cream. ‘Though I bought one from here just before.’ Should he go to her, say he overheard, is she all right, does she want him to hail a cab to get her home or to a doctor or hospital? The man says ‘Do you want me to do anything?’ ‘Excuse me, what? My hearing aid is going on and off again.’ ‘I said do you want me to do anything for you — your heart?’ ‘No, thank you, it’s just about passed. It always does after I sit or lie down for a few minutes. It wasn’t serious, so don’t worry. And my hearing aid’s working again.’ What would he say if she had died right in front of him? He wouldn’t say anything. He’d get down on his knees, hold her face to his till the police or ambulance came, cry and cry, and only if somebody thought he was crazy and wanted to get him away from her, say ‘I’m her son.’ She asks where the man’s bicycle is. He’s in bicycling gear — backwards cap, shirt, special pants and shoes, fingerless gloves. He points to a bike fastened to a parking sign pole. ‘When you were buying your ice cream, weren’t you afraid it would get stolen?’ ‘Even the best bike thief couldn’t break that lock in less than two minutes. It’s made of the highest-tension steel — you’d need the kind of clippers that not even police cars carry — and I never keep my eyes off it for more than a minute.’ He’s looking in the window of the children’s toy and clothing store of before, would give the same excuse to her he thought up then. ‘From what I’ve read,’ she says, ‘these city thieves are always one step ahead of the police in the latest gadgets in everything — guns, bulletproof vests, picks for locks, even knockout darts. And maybe they’ll just want to take the wheels and leave the lock and frame part behind. You always have to be more careful than you think.’ ‘If they’re that desperate,’ but he can’t hear the rest of what the man says because of a truck with a defective muffler and bouncing-around cargo driving past. She pretends to have heard, nodding while he talked, or maybe she’s become adept at reading lips. She says she’s completely better now, thanks him for his concern and walks to the corner and goes up her street. A landlord on the block stops her to talk. He turns around, opens his book and takes out a pen and uncaps it and holds it over a page. If either of them sees him he’ll say he saw them just now but suddenly got an idea about this book, which he’ll be teaching next term, and wanted to write it down before he forgot it. ‘Hi, how are you though? Nice to see you both. Funny, but I was just on my way to see you, Mom.’ The landlord says ‘You can’t walk along Columbus — but every nice day, not only weekends — without getting bumped into or pushed into the street or asked or even threatened for money by beggars, though most of them look as if they live better than you or me. The clothes they got. And why aren’t they working at a real job when they’re so strong looking and young? I’m not talking about the skinny women with the children, who are pitiful.’ ‘No one panhandled me this time,’ his mother says, ‘but I know what you mean. Maybe they’re just — the healthier looking ones — not in their right minds.’ ‘Oh they’re in their right minds, all right. To work like that for your money? Your hand out — sometimes two hands out for two people at once — and a few of the same words each time: “Money for food?” “Money to get back to Trenton?” One actually told me that, and next day he told me the same thing. “Money for my babies?”—but you don’t see the babies; it’s just a line. And no physical effort in it either, and I hear some of the better ones pull in four to five hundred a week tax free and probably with Monday-Tuesday off. I’d take the job if it was offered me.’ There must be more to it than that for most of them. Like I said: troubled heads; drugs. But I can never refuse anybody begging. It doesn’t happen that often, and what’s a dime?’ ‘A dime? You give them a dime and they’ll throw it back if not poke you. It’s a dollar for coffee. It’s two dollars for subway fare for him and his friend. It’s five dollars to help get him a hotel suite so he doesn’t die homeless in the street.’ ‘No they wouldn’t. Still, I like Columbus better now. It’s prettier, more exciting. You have a greater choice of places to eat.’ ‘But to shop? For the essentials?’ ‘There are still some stores for that, or you go to Seventy-second or Amsterdam. But because of all the people walking and hanging around on it, the neighborhood’s safer than it ever was.’ ‘This one’s getting robbed, that one’s being raped, and you say it’s safer. Not the sidestreets. And the worst elements are coming here for a day, while before because they lived here you at least knew their face.’ ‘So it’s the same. Or worse in ways. I forgot. I’d have to ask the police what they have to say.’ She then asks about a new form the city sent landlords regarding property taxes. ‘I don’t understand it,’ the woman says. ‘As usual it’s too complicated for the average nonlegal mind.’ ‘That’s why I brought it up. Neither did I or Mr. Benjamin up the block, but I thought maybe you or your husband might.’ ‘No, but we’re seeing our accountant early next week about lots of things and he’s very good at those. If we find how to fill it out, want me or Lloyd to drop by and help you?’ ‘Please or else I’ll have to travel downtown to the city rent office for it. And of course you’ll take home some fresh cookies I’m baking this weekend and a couple of frozen zucchini breads.’ She continues up the block, stops, deep breath, steps off the curb carefully, crosses the street and carefully steps onto the sidewalk in front of her building. She takes out her handbag, reaches into it, probably for keys, though he’s told her to have her keys ready for use in her pocket before she even starts up the street, and if outside her pocket, then concealed in her hand. She takes out the card she bought, slips it most of the way out of the envelope and looks at it and smiles. Puts the card back into her bag and pulls out her keys. She looks around. He’s told her to do this before she goes downstairs to her building, in case anyone’s around who looks as if he might follow her into the vestibule. Anyone is, she’s to walk to Columbus, where there are always more people than on her street, and if the person follows her, to go to a store marked Safe Haven on the window or door and tell someone there to call the police. She turns around, still looking for suspicious strangers, he supposes, and sees him across the street waving at her. She waves back and he crosses the street and says ‘Mom, how are you? I was in the neighborhood,’ and kisses her on the cheek.”

“He takes his mother out to dinner, drinks too much at her apartment first and then at the bar while they’re waiting, because she wants one, for a window table, and gets sentimental and sad to himself about how old she looks and fragile she is and weak her voice has become, though doesn’t want to reveal what he’s feeling. But for the first time, he believes, he sees her as—”

“I asked my mother to tell me a thing or two about her mother she remembers the most. She asked me what I meant. I said ‘A memory, some incident, something she did to you or around you or to anyone — anything, a trait, habit or ritual she went through, religious, dress, food, or otherwise. But just something that keeps coming back and back to you — a quirk, even, or some physical gesture or a pretension — and you do or you don’t know why it does come back or why you can’t forget it or even what it means to you or just in itself, but something that possibly, well, you know, exemplifies her, but it doesn’t have to be as sweeping as all that.’ She looked at me as if she still didn’t understand. I shrugged as if saying ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Really, sweetheart, you’re not making yourself very clear, and I don’t think it should be blamed entirely on my hearing.’” Enough, give up.