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.’”