“David who?” she asked. “This friend of yours.”
“Schwartz.”
“I don’t remember anybody named David Schwartz.”
“The one who used to work for me when I had the Army-Navy store.”
“I don’t remember him.”
“He called me up, asked me if I could get a break for him on a pair of diamond earrings. He knows I’m in business, he knows I have connections.”
“So you laid out the money for him.”
“Sure, he’s an old friend. He used to work for me, Esther!”
“You laid out all that money.”
“What was it, a lousy four hundred bucks, something like that?”
“You know what it was,” David’s mother said.
“Something like that,” his father said, and shrugged.
“Did he pay you back?”
“Certainly, he paid me back.”
“When?”
“Last month sometime, who remembers? Just before he left for Chicago,” his father added, and David suddenly knew he was lying.
“Oh, he went to Chicago,” his mother said.
“He moved to Chicago.”
“So he’s not here, right? To call and ask about these earrings you bought for him.”
“He’s not here, right.”
“Where is he in Chicago?”
“Who knows? I haven’t heard from him since he moved.”
“You’re a lying bastard,” his mother said. It was the first time in his life David had ever heard her use profanity. “Get out of my house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go live with this woman you give diamond earrings to.”
“What woman? Esther, please, you don’t really think I bought earrings for some woman, do you? Can you really believe that?”
David’s mother looked him dead in the eye.
“Yes,” she said.
He left that same night. He hadn’t seen his brother Max in maybe three, four years, but he drove to New Jersey and asked him if he could stay with him for a few days. He also cleaned out the joint savings account he shared with David’s mother, withdrew $2,400 from it the very next day, leaving a balance of $121.32. He was gone for almost two weeks before David wrote his anonymous letter. The anonymous letter was in David’s own hand, but he signed it “A worried friend.” He addressed the letter to his father at Uncle Max’s delicatessen in New Jersey. The letter read:
Dear Morris:
I haven’t seen you around the building or in the neighborhood for the past few weeks. I hope nothing is wrong. I hope you know that your son and your wife love you and miss you very much. I hope you will come home soon.
Warmest personal regards,
He never knew whether his father received the letter or not; he certainly never mentioned it to David. But he did come home several weeks later, the day after David began his first semester at N.Y.U., in fact. He was driving a new car. A 1954 Chevrolet. He had traded in the old Chrysler and had added to its resale value almost all the money he’d withdrawn from the joint savings account. He was smoking a big cigar when he pulled up and honked the horn. David went to the window; he somehow knew the person downstairs honking the horn was his father. And there he was, smoking a big cigar and opening the door of a brand-new car, and looking like Rockefeller himself in a new tropical suit and a new snap-brim Panama hat that entirely hid his baldness. His mustache looked very trim and very black. David’s mother joined him at the window. His father was standing outside the new car now, his hand on the shiny black fender. He looked up at David’s mother. “Hello, kiddo,” he called up to her. “I’m back.”
Just as if nothing had happened.
David’s mother never forgot those earrings, though, or the mysterious lady who had occasioned their purchase. Her whole life long, she made little digs about the incident.
“Morrie should open a jewelry store, he’s such a diamond expert.”
Or: “Morrie has a good friend in Chicago, right, Morrie?”
Or, more pointedly: “Morrie cheats. But only at poker, of course.”
David wondered for a long time whether his anonymous letter was what had caused his father to come home. He sometimes felt that his father started becoming a pain in the ass right then, in September of 1953, when in his magnanimity he decided to return to his forlorn family and exact from them the proper measure of repentance for having falsely accused him. David wondered about that a lot, too — had his father been falsely accused? Or was there indeed a mysterious lady someplace, wearing his father’s four-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar diamond earrings? His lie had seemed such a clumsy one; surely a man as clever as he could have come up with something a bit easier to swallow. (“You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?”) On the other hand, would he have lied so blantantly if he really had purchased those earrings for another woman? Maybe she hadn’t existed at all. Maybe there really was a friend named David Schwartz who had moved to Chicago. Who the hell knew?
Eventually, David stopped thinking about his father’s alleged infidelity. He preferred not thinking about it. He thought about it again, years later, when his mother died. He thought about it when his father was choosing a coffin, and again when he sold his mother’s fur coats — but that was another story. Now, after four years of not thinking about it, he was thinking about it once again. He was thinking about it because of the words he’d read in his mother’s letter this morning. I honestly was giving you a fair chance but I guess you did not want it as you are still lying to me. The letter was still in his jacket pocket, in the closet across the room. He wondered if he should read the rest of the letter.
No, the hell with it, he thought.
Who the hell cares?
He was suddenly ravenously hungry. He looked at his watch. Almost ten already; my, how the time does fly when you’re having a good time. He wondered if room service was still serving. He picked up the phone and dialed twenty-two for the front desk.
“Is room service still serving?” he asked.
“No, sir,” the desk clerk said. “Seven a.m. to nine-thirty p.m., sir.”
He put the receiver back on the cradle. Miami Beach in the off-season, he thought. He wondered if there were any crumbs left on Hillary Watkins’ dinner tray. He was tempted to dial 1712 and ask her if there were any leftovers he might have. Is there anything left on your tray? he would ask. What are you wearing? he would ask. He wondered what young, long-legged, full-breasted English girls wore to bed at night. T-shirt and knickers? Did they still call them knickers? Surely they didn’t call bikini panties knickers? He was tempted to call her and ask her what she called her panties.
He wished he had another drink.
He lifted the phone receiver and dialed 1712.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hillary? It’s David.”
“Well, hello,” she said.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“What are you...?”
“Yes, I thought I heard you. Why do you want to know?”
“Do you still call them knickers?”
“Well, I suppose if I were wearing any, I might call them that, yes. Although, actually...”
“What are you wearing?”
“Nothing at all,” she said. “And you?”
“Why don’t you...?”