“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