FORTUNE, 1865

HE WAS AN IMPOSING MAN, A MAN WHO LIKED TO TAKE chances. At sixteen he had begged his father and brother to invest the better part of the family fortune in a certain kind of sewing machine, invented by an eccentric American. According to a family connection in New York City, the American was an actor—though supposedly very clever—and, through this family connection, the opportunity for investment had presented itself. Abraham had assured his father and Meyer of the eccentric American’s bright future, his inevitable and phenomenal success, but his father and brother had considered the risk too great—too many people were making advances with sewing, the man was an actor—and because Abraham had listened to them, because he hadn’t enough experience yet to make substantial decisions, other men of industry prospered while there was no Singer sewing machine fortune added to the Shein family name. In addition to this criminally bad decision, the product that his father and his brother had deemed a sensible investment was a new-fangled confection of chocolate-covered bananas and the whole damn shipment, widely anticipated, melted on the journey from a West Indian island whose name he’d decided to forget. Abraham could barely look at a sewing machine or a goddamn banana without spitting on the ground.

He was a man who liked to take chances. He was shocked and thrilled when his timid brother alighted for America in lieu of military service, and he had not only followed Meyer soon after but he was the first to make the long trip not only farther west to California, but back home to Berlin for a visit. He was a man so swollen with pride that, in his early days of doing business, if a customer questioned a quoted price—even perfunctorily, even if the customer didn’t hear so well—he refused to sell him the goods. Dry goods. Everything from a pin to a piano. He kicked the customer out into the street—out into the hot dust and dirt and burro shit of Santa Fe, refusing to accept money from such a man. He was a proud man, proud of many things, chief among them his ability, while traveling, to keep up not only his own spirits but those of his traveling companions, and he was also proud of his thick hair, his height. He was a tall man, tall for a Jew or a gentile and he liked the outdoor life. By now he had crossed those Great Plains on horse or mule or ox and buggy many times; he’d shot antelope, buffalo—butchering the meat and cooking it himself.

Upon his return to Berlin, he was ready to describe these trips; he was ready to be feted. He was primed to toast the Shein Brothers’ American success and was almost eager for all kinds of questions about the exotic frontier. But when he walked into the handsome apartment, where he had not been in over ten years, it was nothing but darkness and gloom. Someone had died—one of his mother’s former piano pupils—a young woman. This was tragic of course, but he had not known her, and there was his own mother, despondent on the day of his arrival! She had also grown old. With each of his mother’s letters that had miraculously arrived in Santa Fe, she had begged her sons to make a European trip, and yet now that he was present—offering his arm while walking, giving detailed reports about their profits—she seemed to find little consolation.

He went to the shivah of his mother’s former pupil. Why did he attend? Perhaps he wanted to pay his respects to the family—he had something of a formal urge to represent his father whenever possible—or maybe, in addition, he remembered the pupil’s sister, a young girl with whom he had walked nearly twelve years ago, and he was curious how she had grown. It had been in Karlsbad, that dreadful spa town, and his mother had been talking with the most pale-skinned woman he had ever seen. There was a clingy daughter who could not have been more than five years old, who kept climbing on her mother’s lap, who’d insisted on holding her hand, and it was clear the two ladies wished to speak without the child’s interruption. It was a hazy plum sky, the end of summer. His brother had already sent for him, and his only ideas of America were perfectly dripping with gold. In the spirit of generosity he took the little girl’s hand and she had wept bitterly. What is it? the pale woman had exclaimed. He is so ugly, the girl had cried.

Would his mother have reminded him of that amusing story? If she had done so, it would have been an impressive form of persuasion, as Abraham liked nothing better than to prove himself, if only to a formerly petulant child. Or would his mother have said nothing of the sort—or at least not until much later—when such tales would be briefly inflated with retrospective meaning? Most likely, Abraham Shein attended the shivah in order to get out of the dark rooms of his ancestral home, full of familiar smells and old reminders of his beloved father, a smart man with a simpleton’s death—he died soon after Abe left for America from a sour stomach; it was said he died from eating too much fruit.

If his mother had told him the story about the little girl in Karlsbad, he would immediately have recognized the woman sitting by the window as being that very same girl, for she still looked like a child—her delicate black boots barely grazed the Oriental and she clasped some bits of string, which she passed back and forth between her hands. Her childlike quality was no doubt exaggerated by the contrast of her severe mourning attire; her impish face was hollowed by shadows. She appeared as if she had been crying for days, and yet he liked the look of her.

It was hopeless to imagine the possibility of her smile, as her eyes seemed to take up the whole of her face, eyes so deep and seemingly imploring, as she turned from the window to face him.

“Oh,” said Eva Frank, as if she had been woken from a dream.

“Abraham Shein,” he said too loudly, followed by an important nod. “My condolences.”

“Mr. Shein,” she said, “thank you.” She played with the string, and he thought of the alley cats outside of his home across the world, how they kept him up at night with their hungry mews, scratching fenceposts outside his window.

“I have just arrived from America,” he said. He could not fathom ever tiring of those words.

“Yes,” she said. “I know about you.”

“Is that so?”

She turned back to the window, and he too looked outside: bare spotted birches and a wrought iron gate. Nothing. It occurred to him that perhaps she was simple, and the thought did not displease him.

“What is it like,” she asked softly, “to live so far from home?”

Though she kept her gaze out the window, he smiled expansively and took hold of his suit lapels; he waited for her to turn around. He noted the slender slope of her neck, how one lone hairpin had sprung loose from the pile of curls atop her head.

More than black peignoirs and painted lips, more than breasts moving in shadow behind muslin, more than breasts—tawny and utterly available—presented in the flesh, more than the hungriest whore in the most lawless of American territories—this one lone hairpin in a dour setting suggested such possibilities. There were other young ladies of marriageable age—ladies who were richer and fairer, on whom he had intended to call; there were other families waiting to receive him, but they would be waiting in vain. “It is another world,” he said, pleased with his decision.

She looked in his eyes and began to cry—her narrow shoulders rose and fell, a stilted movement under starched, pressed black—but he assumed these tears had nothing to do with him. The girl had lost her sister, there was no way around it, and he expected she would mourn for a suitable period of time.