"Annually?"
"That's my baby. You've got a head on your shoulders."
"With capped teeth. And a little face work too."
"So why can't you learn numbers?"
"Sixty thousand dollars a year, with no taxes to pay."
"Great. That's my sweetheart. And that's where the beauty of being really rich comes in. If a Rockefeller or anyone else has a hundred million in those same bonds, he'll make-"
"Six hundred thousand? That's some bundle!"
"No, a bigger bundle! Six million a year in interest for doing nothing, and no taxes, and that's better than you or I will ever do. Isn't finance wonderful? Now then, if instead of a million tax-free you have only nine hundred thousand invested at that same six percent-"
"Oh, Lew, for God sakes, give me a rest!"
"Think. Work on it."
"That's six times nine all over again, isn't it?"
"Yes, right, that's the only difference. So how much money will you earn at six times nine?"
"The kids will know."
"Forget the kids! I don't want you to have to depend on them and I don't want them to have to depend on you. People change, people turn crazy. Look at Teemer. Look at all the fuss and fighting that went on with Glenda and her sister over that farmhouse after her mother died. You remember what happened to my father with the ten thousand I borrowed, and you saw what happened to my mother's head before she even got old."
When his father loaned him the ten thousand dollars to start up the secondhand-plumbing business that then became our lumberyard too, the money he produced was all in cash, and none of us knew where it came from or where he kept it before he set the terms and had the papers drawn up, all official and very legal, so it would go to Minnie and then to all of the others if anything happened to him first. There had to be papers, and there had to be interest. The old man, old Morris, who was never afraid of anyone in his life, was afraid of being poor in his old age, and he was already over eighty.
God, how I remember that junkshop like it was only yesterday. It was small, small quarters, about the width of a truck garage, about the size of the restaurant in the city Sam Singer and I had lunch in, although the truck was always parked outside because there was always so much junk inside, and out in back. Heaps of metal, sorted into brass, iron, and copper, and a big scale large enough to hold a bale of newspapers, and so much dirt, filth. The clean newspapers were hauled from the cellars of the janitors all over the houses in Coney Island, who saved them, for a price, and these were put on the outside of the big bales. Inside them could be anything. At the end of the day, all of them-Lew, his father, the brothers, the brothers-in-law, and even Smokey Rubin and the black guy-they scrubbed their bodies and fingernails with cold water from the hose, a big industrial scrub brush, and lye soap. And I'd be waiting there all dressed up, ready to go out with him on a date.
His one fear was rats, not just the rats themselves, but the thought of them, in the army too when he was overseas, and then in the prison camp. In the slaughterhouse in Dresden it was all very clean, he said.
All of that, all of those people and all of that work, was as foreign to me as I'm going to find the Israelis if I do buy a house and ever start living there. Lew would have liked the idea of me in Israel, although I never could get him to go-I hardly ever could get him to go anywhere abroad where he didn't know the language and they didn't know who he was. It's just about the farthest part of the world I think I can find to live in and relax and maybe enjoy some memories while I try to experience some new kind of adventures in a place of old lore for me with people with a morale that has some kind of hope and meaning, I want to enjoy it.
I was brought up Jewish too, but my home life in a small family upstate was nothing like that one. My father was a bookkeeper. And then he was a bookmaker like Marvin's, and he gambled a lot, but he always wore a suit and shirt and tie and liked those panama hats and fancy black-and-white shoes they used to wear, I remember, with those large perforated holes. This big, loud, hardworking family of Lew's, with their Yiddish and Brooklyn accents, confused me and appealed to me. And so did that whole open, noisy, fast bunch of guys in Coney Island. I met him on a blind double date with my cousin, who lived there, and I was supposed to be with someone else, but once he made his play for me and let me know he'd kind of like to go on, no other fellow I ever met anywhere else ever had a chance. We were just the right type for each other. We never brought the subject up, but I guessed I would want to marry again, whether he would have liked the idea or not, and I think I do. We married young, and I've always been married, and I don't know if I can ever get used to living alone, but where am I ever going to find a guy who will fill his shoes?
"Don't count on me," said Sammy, when I poured all this out to him.
"You didn't have to tell me," I snapped. I have that habit: it sounded ruder than I'd meant. "Sam, no offense, but I could never share a bedroom with you."
"I don't think so either," Sam said, with his soft smile, and I was pleased to see his feelings weren't hurt. "He's going to be a tough man to replace."
"Don't I know it? But he used to envy you, envy you a lot, for your life in the city. Or for what he thought was your life. Even after you married Glenda he had this picture of you drinking it up every night and scoring with all those fancy girls in the office and those others you kept meeting in advertising."
Sam looked very pleased. "I never did," he said, looking a little proud, and a little ashamed. "Not once after I married Glenda. I stopped wanting to while she was alive. And hey, Claire, you know Glenda was right there in the office with me for a good couple of years too, so how did he think I was going to get away with that? Where do you think you're going to find someone, Claire? You may not know it, but you've got very strong standards."
I had no good ideas. I still owned most of that art school in Italy outside Florence Lew bought me as a surprise birthday present. How many other women ever got a birthday present like that one? But I don't trust Italian men on the whole or take to artists as anything but artists. I don't trust Israeli men, but they at least come right out and let you know they want your body for the night or half an hour and would like your money too. I've outgrown Coney Island men by now. They're all gone anyway. I'll have to lie about my age, and for how long can I get away with that?
"Sam, remember the junkshop on McDonald Avenue?"
He remembered the junkshop but only some in the family, because they weren't too cozy with outsiders, or even always with each other. There were always at least a couple of families living in close quarters in that small apartment building Morris bought and owned. They did not necessarily always like each other-his brother-in-law Phil went out of his way to be a pain in the ass to everybody, and even voted for Republicans like Dewey and Eisenhower and Nixon-but they were loyal in defense of each other, like no others, including in-laws, and then me, once I came there for dinner now and then and began sleeping over in the room of one of his sisters, even before we were married. God help anyone who ever hurt my feelings or said anything impolite, even when I was wrong. Except maybe Sammy and then Marvin, with their needling, and then a couple of those other wise guys with their cracks to Lew about my full bosom. I didn't enjoy hearing from him that they were kidding around about my breasts as big tits, but he could never figure out whether it might really be a compliment, as sly Sammy Singer kept arguing. The old man took a fancy to me, and set out to protect me because my father had died. He considered me an orphan. "Louie, listen to me, listen good," he told him, even when I was right there. "Either marry her or leave her alone." He did not want Lew to sleep over at my house, even when my mother was home. "Maybe her mother can't see, but I can."