That summer, like all the years before, Nelson stayed in Middletown on weekends. Friday afternoons Mort and Leo would head off to Woodmont, but Nelson knew, even if the others were too polite to say it, that there was no room for him there. “You’re always invited,” Ada had told him years ago and had reiterated any number of times, but the truth was that should he ever have taken her up on the offer the entire configuration in the cottage would have been upset. He knew perfectly well there wasn’t a bed to spare, that Bec, single like him, was put out to pasture on the screened porch. Where would they put him? On the roof? Moreover, what would he do there? He’d grown too fat to be anything but embarrassed at the thought of sitting in bathing trunks in the sun. And, apart from Howard, he rarely engaged with the children; he knew we took notice of him only for his ready supply of Tootsie Rolls. His brother and Leo would be involved with their wives, their children. And the women—Ada, Vivie, and Bec—who, for their high spirits and easy laughter, he would have liked to talk to the most, well, God only knew how to spend a weekend talking to women.
So the summer was a little quiet, a little lonely, but the first week in August—the week preceding my parents’ Shabbos fight—Mort had brought Howard back to Middletown for a week to help out with end-of-summer inventory, and Nelson felt a surprising sense of relief at the sight of his nephew. “Hey, hey, hey,” Nelson had called out when Howard first walked through the store’s front doors. “Who’s this big guy? Joe DiMaggio?” he asked, swinging his arms as if holding a bat. “Uncle!” Howard had cried in surprise as if he were as thrilled to see Nelson as Nelson was to see him.
Though Howard was full-grown it seemed to Nelson he’d gained substantial height in the weeks since he’d last seen him. Certainly he’d grown tan, and there he was, taller than ever, extraordinarily handsome, flashing a brilliant smile, with skin a golden brown that matched the stripes in his tie. The boy threw his arms around Nelson’s shoulders. “How are you, Uncle?” he asked.
“Fine, fine,” Nelson said. “You looking good there,” he added, nodding.
The rest of the men in the store gathered round.
“It’s the sailing,” Howard said.
“Sailing. Sure, sure. Wind’s been your friend,” Nelson muttered, admiring his nephew’s vitality. “Sun’s been your friend, too.”
“But this week you stay the hell inside,” Mort said, leaning to slap Howard’s back affectionately. Nelson and Kurt Hanson, the new employee, rocked with a quick burst of laughter. Even Leo, typically dour, smiled. Yes, Nelson thought, that’s what work was: not a week in the sun but a week inside the store, and didn’t they know it. He found himself hoping that a week of inventory wouldn’t cost Howard too much of his tan. The kid had a right to his good looks. He was young.
Inventory was a dogged, tiring business, and that’s why Howard had been dragged back from the rocky shores of Woodmont to Main Street in Middletown to help. They had to negotiate the creaky steps leading to the basement to open any remaining boxes there, checking and counting their contents, deciding if anything was worth the schlep upstairs: pairs of socks and stacks of men’s ties, boxes of stationery and greeting cards, a few women’s hats; they sold it all at Leibritsky’s Department Store. They had to go through every item on the floor and compare it to their records. They had to pull item after item off the main racks or shelves and place them onto sales racks or shelves, or into the basement for another season. To be prepared for fall, they had to reorganize the menswear, the women’s wear, and the children’s wear. Out with the old; in with the new. They had to reconfigure the kitchen appliances and stack the newest gems—more of the Waring blenders and Sunbeam’s Mixmaster—where they couldn’t be missed. Thanks to a soft spot Mort had for selling shoes, Leibritsky’s had developed a reputation in this department, especially for its practical, all-purpose shoes, the kind with thick soles and heavy laces, the kind that stretched a dollar, and this required going up and down every row of shoe boxes, accounting for each box’s contents. They had more than a few pair of men’s shoes from 1940 that had never sold, several women’s from 1942, ’43, and ’44. The wartime rationing of those later years had something to do with the unsold stock, Nelson knew. It was late in the day on Tuesday by the time they got to those and Howard looked up, astonished.
“This is nuts. We’re well into nineteen forty-eight,” Howard pleaded to Nelson.
“Keep them,” Nelson answered, briefly glancing around to see that neither Mort nor Leo had heard him. They, too, would think having such old inventory nuts. Then again, Nelson realized, what did it matter what they thought? After all, Nelson was the one with the MBA, and from Harvard no less, Harvard. They wouldn’t dare contradict him even when his advice was so stupid a teenager’s instincts immediately told him so.
“Not so nuts,” Nelson stubbornly insisted to Howard. “There are people who like what they already know. They’ll sell eventually. Trust me.” And of course Howard did. Indeed, Howard nodded with appreciation as if he’d just been taught a wise lesson, not from uncle to nephew but from master to apprentice, professor to student. Absentminded nut, Nelson then admitted to himself, patting the box from 1940.
Yet a pair of the dated shoes did sell, the next day, a Wednesday. Midafternoon, the heat from the street wafting in, causing them all to slow down, to drop themselves into any one of the chairs strewn about the store, and Giorgio D’Almato trundled in, looking like he might fall down from fatigue or imbalance—he was eighty-seven and refused a cane. Nelson and Howard were still at the wall of shoes, the Wailing Wall, they had taken to calling it just that morning, and they had each written a favorite joke on a scrap of paper, folded the scrap tightly, then slipped it in a space between the boxes of shoes the way printed prayers were tucked around the stones of the sacred wall in Old Jerusalem. Howard, laughing, had davened for good measure.
“Let’s not get crazy, you know?” Nelson had urged. “It’s a tough business over there. Tough going. A little fun, that’s all. A little fun.”
But so far that week every moment around Howard had seemed exceptionally fun, whether they were overtly joking or simply engaged in everyday tasks. And that’s why, perhaps, as Giorgio D’Almato slowly approached, Nelson found himself opening his arms wide and calling out in a welcoming tone he didn’t even know he had, “Mr. D’Almato, sir. What do you say, young man, what do you say?”
When what the old man said was “Something practical, size nine, why ask, don’t you know?” Nelson, winking Howard’s way, turned toward the wall and pulled from it the unsold shoes from 1940. Old man D’Almato leaned his face toward the open box, scrutinized the contents, sniffed the leather, and gave a quick nod of assent. Nelson held Mr. D’Almato’s arm as he lowered himself to sit in a nearby chair. With a nod toward Howard, Nelson watched as Howard helped relieve the man of his worn shoes, the soles cracked, the laces nearly gone. He had bought them here, Nelson knew, probably some ten years ago. Indeed, everyone in the D’Almato family bought at Leibritsky’s Department Store and the Leibritsky men, in turn, got their hair cut at the D’Almato barbershop. If you were good to people, Nelson knew, the people of those people were good to you. This was the first rule of business, absolutely, and do you think even one knucklehead at Harvard had ever heard of it? A shoehorn at one heel, then the other, Howard eased the man’s feet into the new shoes. Howard practically lifted the man upright so he could take a turn in the new pair. Old man D’Almato liked them. He rubbed his palms together and mumbled to himself. Nelson smiled.
Once the shoes were purchased—at a spontaneous and decent discount—Nelson told his customer, “Let me get Mort. He’ll be sorry not to have said hello.”
The man nodded. This, too, was a rule of business, the greeting from the eldest brother. And Giorgio D’Almato, like everybody else, knew the rules. He waited.
Thursday morning, the inventory still under way, Nelson felt sorry that the time with Howard, a particularly congenial thing, would soon end. But the weekend was coming. He’d be staying; they’d be going. As if reading his thoughts, Mort patted Nelson’s shoulder, telling him, “Look, you’re doing a nice job here. Nice job. Howard’s enjoying it. He likes your company. Always has.”
A little boost was what his brother’s remarks gave him, a boost of energy, a boost of confidence, and when he found his nephew a few minutes later sitting by the new display of kitchen appliances, clearly bored, fingering the Sunbeam Mixmaster, Nelson motioned to him. Howard rose and followed Nelson into the basement.
“Look, there’s some old things in the back, see, and nobody will be the wiser if we just let them go. Maybe we can find you something. You never know, maybe you need a new shirt, something like that. A boy heading off to college like you are. A new tie, maybe,” Nelson urged.
“A new tie, circa what, Uncle—nineteen twenty-eight?” Howard smiled. “’Twenty-eight. Was it a good year, Uncle?”
Nelson glanced at Howard, who was laughing, and the two walked toward the several large boxes pushed against a back wall which Nelson had discovered earlier that summer and, to save face, had kept out of the inventory.
“Some wisecracker,” Nelson said, opening one of the boxes. Inside were the men’s shirts from the summer before, short-sleeved, cotton. Though the box was covered with dust, the shirts inside were pristine, still wrapped in their original packaging. “Forgot about these one year and they’ve been hiding here ever since. But the time has come,” Nelson announced, pulling out several and handing them to Howard. “Yes?”
“This store is a crazy mess!” Howard kicked the box as he grabbed the packages and studied them. Like Giorgio D’Almato the day before, Howard soon began happily mumbling.
Now was no time to play a record, but it was a good time for a sit, and Nelson dragged his rocker toward Howard and watched as the boy continued to fish through the box. “Five too many?” Howard asked.
“Whatever you need.” Nelson pulled a Tootsie Roll from his pocket. He threw one to Howard and the two silently chewed under the weak glow of the basement’s lights. It was warm down here, Nelson reflected, rocking forward and back, but not so bad. Relaxing, he heaved a tired sigh. “Long week,” he said.
Howard nodded and continued chewing. He held his new shirts in one hand as he might notebooks for school. Upon swallowing, he cleared his throat.
“Uncle?” His voice was quieter than before, tentative.
Nelson stopped rocking. He waited for Howard to go on, but the boy said nothing, his posture suddenly tense. Nelson reached to pull another chocolate from his pocket for Howard, but Howard shook his head no. A silent moment followed, at least between the two of them. Above, the floors persistently creaked.
“I really can’t tell anyone,” Howard began. “You know, anyone down there.”
Nelson realized soon enough that the boy was speaking of Woodmont.
Down there. The place he never went.
“There’s this girl,” Howard finally began, and because his tone of voice was unusually earnest, it took Nelson back to a collage of moments sitting beside a much younger Howard at Middletown’s Palace Theater. Before each movie Howard would stare entranced at the blank screen, curtain still down, as if the show were already under way. Finally he’d turn to Nelson and beseech him in a voice not so different from the one he’d just heard, “Will it start soon?” “Soon, soon,” Nelson would answer, and then he’d pass Howard a candy, and, feeling good, like a father, he’d cup the top of Howard’s head then give the kid a pat.
Yes, there was a girl, Howard repeated, and he was pretty sure she was the one.
Green eyes, a lot of freckles, a big smile, though she was often serious, and with each detail Nelson nodded, until Howard paused, suddenly somber, and then said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Forget it, Uncle.”
The words made Nelson self-conscious, as if they implied that a man like him knew nothing about love. But Howard, he longed to say in response, I wasn’t always this fat.
He’d been a handsome kid himself, shorter than Howard, but good-looking in his own way, a wide face, a soft smile, a little shyness that wore off once people got to know him. Back then, when he was Howard’s age, people did take the time to know him. Before Harvard he’d gone to Boston University—his father insisted that he and Mort get their college educations, this was America after all, this was what it was all about, what all the saving and scrimping was for. But Mort had been pulled from college after only a year and a half—the store was too much for just the old man—and it was consequently left to Nelson to do the learning for them all. He’d studied history, just like Mort did before he left, just like his father told him to, and in the course of things he’d met Mimmie Klein, up in Boston from New London, Connecticut. Mimmie Klein, Nelson almost said out loud to Howard.
“Tell you what,” he said instead when he finally did interrupt his nephew. “We can’t stay in this basement forever. Time to get back to it. But let’s have dinner tonight, me and you. Then you can tell me the whole story. I do want to hear. The one? Is that what you said, Howard?”
Howard’s expression remained grim. He nodded.
Nelson had risen from his rocker and had begun to climb the basement stairs when he turned back to Howard, behind him. “What’d you say her name was?” Nelson asked.
“Didn’t say.”
“No name? Howard, the girl for you has no name?”
Howard said, “Uncle, come on now. This is private business. We’ll talk about that later.”
They were seated in a booth at the Garden Restaurant, on the corner of Main and Washington, he and Howard waiting for their orders of hamburgers to arrive, Howard somewhat agitated, picking at his napkin, glancing about the place as if he’d never been there before, and Nelson felt it again, the old urge to pat the kid on the head, tell him, “Soon, soon.” Instead he broached the subject of the girl again, the as yet unnamed girl, and Howard sighed. “Let’s eat first,” he suggested, and Nelson, though curious, nodded.
Mimmie Klein, he again almost blurted to Howard. Isn’t that some name?
The first time he’d met Mimmie he’d treated her to a meal, though unlike the present one with Howard, that meal of long ago was an inadvertent gift. He was at a deli on Commonwealth Avenue the winter of his sophomore year at college and she, a stranger then, was there too. It was nearly seven in the evening and Nelson, hungry, already had his sandwich wrapped to go and was in line to pay. Even as the sandwich was being made he’d begun to sweat inside his winter coat, but waiting in line he started rapidly to overheat. Someone ahead was taking a long time to pay. Nelson, like the person before him, unbuttoned his coat and pulled his hat off. Mimmie stood two people ahead of him in line. And ahead of her was an elderly man, dressed like the rest of them in heavy winter gear, who also had a sandwich wrapped to go. He was trying to pay but no matter which pocket he dug into, the change didn’t add up. The young clerk behind the counter became angry. Nelson noticed how he was as red-faced as the flustered man. “Can’t you see there’s a line?” the clerk scolded as the old man reached into one more pocket. “I don’t understand,” the man said, glancing behind him at Nelson and the others, and the clerk answered, “It’s simple. Pay up or give up. We can’t be running a charity.”
Nelson stepped past the customer ahead of him and then past Mimmie. Standing beside the elderly man, he told the clerk he would pay for the man’s sandwich.
“What?” the clerk said, still glaring at the man. “You’re doing what?”
Nelson paused. He’d already pulled out a dollar but he fished in his pocket for another. “In fact, I’m paying for everybody,” Nelson added.
A fifth customer joined the line.
“Paying for everybody,” the clerk said, loudly and mockingly, as if Nelson were attempting to show off. But that wasn’t his intent. He just didn’t like the clerk. Not at all.
Nelson glanced behind him, then back at the clerk. Even though a sixth person, hearing the news, joined the line, Nelson nodded, then searched his pocket for more dollar bills, but there were none, just some change. As he pulled out everything he had, the elderly man beside him held a weathered hand to his shoulder.
Nelson was eleven cents short and the clerk let him and everybody else know it. “Paying for everybody,” the clerk gibed.
“Here you go,” someone, a woman, said from behind Nelson, and in the next moment Mimmie was standing next to him, looking not at him but at the clerk. She handed him the extra change. She glanced Nelson’s way then leaned around him to catch the eye of the older man. “Generosity,” she said, her eyes back on the clerk. “Ever hear of it?”
The clerk took the money—two dollars and seventy cents from Nelson and eleven cents from Mimmie—and without further conversation, five sandwiches and a tub of potato salad were purchased.
The last person in line was a father holding his child’s hand, and with the exchange of money the child unwrapped her sandwich and bit into it despite the father telling her, “Slow down, Clara. Don’t want to get a stomachache.” As Nelson passed him, the man reached into his pocket and threw a penny Tootsie Roll Nelson’s way. Nelson caught it, instinctively, and the man nodded a silent thanks. Mimmie clapped.
Nelson was back outside, a block away, feeling all the chillier after sweating inside with his coat on, when Mimmie caught up to him.
She offered him two quarters but he shook his head. Snow had begun to fall and the traffic, what little there was on Commonwealth Avenue, had slowed.
“People don’t always stick up for what’s right,” she told him.
“I don’t know,” Nelson said. “It was just a matter of some change.” In fact it was a matter of all the money he had for the rest of the week—three more days—and realizing that, he began to grow anxious. He’d eat just half the sandwich that night and save the rest for the next day.
“Some change, as you say, can sometimes mean life and death,” Mimmie asserted.
“Not today, thank God,” Nelson answered, though he wasn’t so sure about the days to come.
“No, not today,” Mimmie agreed. She was tiny and had curly hair. Those were the only details he noted in the darkness.
Nelson was shivering and he could see that Mimmie was too. He was about to nod and turn to go when Mimmie said, “Come on, let’s get some coffee.” She pointed to a shop across the street. But for lack of any money, even pennies, Nelson shook his head.
He changed his mind, though, when Mimmie insisted, “My treat. Least I can do.” She showed him the quarters again. “Name’s Mimmie Klein,” she said.
They met for dinner the next week at the same coffee shop on Commonwealth. He already knew that she was up in Boston from New London—that first meeting they’d shared their backgrounds, their Connecticut stories—but he hadn’t yet learned that she was studying math.
“Surprised?” she asked him. He couldn’t decide if she expected the reaction or wanted it.
Either way he was surprised, but only because he found mathematics so difficult. That anybody could be good at it surprised him.
“People often can’t believe it,” she said, telling him next that her being female was what threw people at first. After all, Boston University was among only a handful of places that even allowed a girl a higher education. So simply being female was quite the thing, quite the mystery, but being a cutie—she articulated the word with a seriousness it didn’t often connote—was the kicker. She shook her head, causing her curls to bounce, and Nelson found the gesture appealing. She was cute. And she was serious and surprisingly direct. If she’d been ugly, Mimmie explained next, leaning with some urgency across the table toward Nelson, of course the matter would be a little easier to understand.
“But I’m not that bad,” she concluded, frowning.
“No, no,” Nelson agreed, blushing, then feeling an unusual stirring in his heart.
He stank at math, he confessed—he was a word guy, not so much out loud, of course, everyone knew that, but he had words going in his head left and right, he was very busy with words in there, he told her—and for the rest of the semester as he and Mimmie grew close he discovered that he’d been right: he couldn’t have passed introductory calculus but for the big mathematical brain inside the otherwise tiny Mimmie Klein.
But in the end he’d lost her. If he had told Howard about her, if he had put his burger down and asked Howard to do the same, and if, folding his napkin and shaking his head in seriousness, he had begun speaking, he would have said, I lost her. I lost my love, Mimmie Klein. But instead he said, “Pretty good, huh?” holding up his burger. And Howard said, “Someday I’d really like to try a cheeseburger.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Nelson responded, his tone a warning to Howard about the rule banning meat with dairy.
“Just dreaming,” Howard said.
Howard’s girl in Woodmont played piano, he noted at long last, pushing his plate aside. She’d been taking lessons since she was six.
“You’ve heard her play?” Nelson was genuinely interested. But Howard shook his head. She’d just told him all about it, he answered, suddenly embarrassed.
Nelson stopped asking after that. He would listen, merely listen. And soon enough Howard offered a bit more. She was good with numbers, he said. “She’s the best checkout girl at Treat’s,” he boasted, and with his napkin and an imaginary pencil he did a quick imitation of a person adding numbers.
“Numbers,” Nelson repeated, surprised to find Howard’s girl having something in common with his own. The likeness caused a quickening in his heart, and he pulled two Tootsie Rolls from his pocket. He threw one Howard’s way and waited for Howard to say more, but he didn’t. Finally Howard began describing the walks he and his girl took along Beach Avenue, part of the many evenings they’d spent “just talking,” Howard said. Then he corrected himself. “Mostly talking.”
“Talking’s good,” Nelson responded. “She sounds like a catch, Howard. You’re a lucky man.”
“Uncle, there’s more.”
Howard shifted on his side of the booth. A moment ago, engrossed in unwrapping the candy, Howard had looked like the nephew Nelson had always known. Years had passed, but nothing, really, had changed. He could see the little boy right then inside the big kid. But a second later Howard looked so much older, so much more serious. Nelson blinked, surprised, when Howard buried his face in his hands and groaned—something Nelson had never seen him do before.
“Hey, hey, hey. She sounds like a nice girl. A good girl. Howard, you telling me you’re in some kind of—” Nelson paused. Never had he had this kind of talk with his nephew. “Trouble?” he whispered. “Howard, you in trouble?”
“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” Howard answered, his voice resigned.
Embarrassed, Nelson turned away. He swallowed his chocolate. “Hell, Howard. I wasn’t thinking of any particular kind of trouble. No, no. I wasn’t.”
“Want to know her name?” Howard asked.
“Of course.”
“Megan.”
“Megan,” Nelson repeated, nodding.
“Megan O’Donnell.”
There was a moment of silence and then Nelson said, “Dear God, Howard.”
“I know.”
“God almighty, boy.”
“I know.”
“Holy mackerel, Howard.”
“Uncle, can’t you stop? I thought I could tell you. I thought you’d be the only one who wouldn’t jump down my throat. Uncle, what do I do?”
“Oh boy, Howard. If only all you wanted was a cheeseburger. That’d be easy. I’d say, for crying out loud, in my presence alone, have a goddamned cheeseburger. Just once and it’ll be over with.” Nelson paused, fingering the small pile of candy wrappers beside his plate. “But about that girl,” he added at last. “I’m just your uncle. I can’t be the one to tell you what to do.”
Within weeks of meeting Mimmie, Nelson knew what to do: he made seeing her a regular thing. By spring of his sophomore year he and Mimmie were planning their days around each other, studying together at the university library in the evenings, taking walks along Commonwealth Avenue most afternoons, going to the movies on Saturday nights, eventually holding hands inside the darkened theater, turning to each other sometimes to laugh or smile.
She was the one, he soon concluded, no doubt about it. But he was too shy to even kiss her much less tell her so. Then, a week before they were to part for the summer, he finally made his move. They were in a theater and the movie—Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances—was coming to a close. The music was swelling, the credits rolling. And if they rolled any faster, Nelson figured, the moment would be gone. He pulled Mimmie close and pressed his lips, quickly, to hers. When they parted she called his name, quietly, lovingly. He kissed her again.
A long summer came after that, and Nelson went home to work in the store while Mimmie stayed in Boston with an aunt, but when they returned to school the next year the affection flowed freely. Something had happened over the summer—a lot of letters back and forth, and, for Nelson at least, a lot of dreaming—and they couldn’t keep themselves from sneaking kisses every chance they got. His third year of college passed in what felt like a flash: days as full and happy as Nelson had ever known. He was reading for classes and getting good grades; he was working part-time in a stationery store, easy enough tasks compared to the convoluted ordering for all the departments he did back home at Leibritsky’s; and he was in love with Mimmie who, every time he kissed her—whether on the banks of the Charles River or in the doorway to her student house—kissed him back. “Nelson,” she would so often murmur, just as she had that first time, whispering his name for no reason other than to say it.
For two and a half years they kissed, only kissed. Then, late in the fall of their senior year, they did more than kissing. They did—as he would have quietly told Howard, if he could have opened up and told him everything—they did the other thing: the act of love.
Thanksgiving break his senior year, Nelson traveled back to Middletown to be with the family and to work at the store. Moreover, he planned to broach the subject of marriage to Mimmie with his father. The year before she’d met the family, briefly, as she’d detoured through Middletown on her way home to New London. Everything had gone well. She had walked each aisle of Leibritsky’s Department Store. She’d shaken Mort’s hand and then Zelik’s. Nelson and Mimmie had then ambled along Middletown’s Main Street, Nelson pointing out each business to her as if it were an old friend. “I see. I see,” Mimmie noted as Nelson told her the history of the enterprises along Main Street.
For two years already Nelson had saved every cent he could for an engagement ring. By that Thanksgiving of 1927 he had forty-six dollars. It would have to do, he figured, as he hurried into Pinsker’s Jewelers, at the corner of Main and College streets, several blocks south of Leibritsky’s. A half hour later, and exactly forty-six dollars poorer, he returned to work.
“We have this idea,” his father told him upon his return from the jewelers. Zelik, along with Mort, was sitting on a crate in what was then the back room, a storage room. The store was a smaller place then, just a hole in the wall, filled with odds and ends. For so many years before this Zelik had been a peddler, running goods first by horse and cart between Middletown and Hartford, following the routes along the Connecticut River, until one day, just outside Hartford, his horse’s knees buckled, a trunk of women’s clothes fell to the ground, opened, and spilled, muddying the lot of them, and that was it: Zelik Leibritsky was determined to open a shop. For some reason Zelik, once he’d urged Nelson to sit, repeated this personal history. Then he told Nelson to eat; for lunch they were nibbling sardines from small tins and drinking cream soda. Zelik’s beard was already fully gray. He’d been forty by the time Nelson was born in 1906 and now he was closing in on sixty-two. Sometimes, it seemed to Nelson, listening to Zelik as he rattled on about how they could continue to build the business, all those years between them were as wide as a world. The old man still had one foot in age-old Europe, in Russia, where all his ideas came from. Nelson, on the other hand, was modern. He had a few ideas that came straight from Boston, USA.
“Yes, we have an idea. In the next years you’ll get an MBA,” Zelik said, his words a pronouncement. He nodded at Mort, who in turn nodded at Nelson. Nelson was stunned by the remark, which didn’t sound old-fashioned at all. How did his father even know what an MBA was? he wondered. “Try for Harvard,” the old man continued, astonishing Nelson further. “You’re up there anyway. Why not? Knock on their door, see if they let you in. Let’s get fancy is what I say. God knows, it’s going to be good for the store. And good for the family.” Zelik took his now empty soda bottle and blew over its lip until it whistled.
Until that moment Nelson had considered teaching, a notion that resurfaced just then as a whisper in his mind. He opened his mouth. “But—”
“But nothing,” Mort told him, suddenly rising and looking down at Nelson. “We’ve all put in our time. Now it’s time for you to put in yours.”
Nelson nodded, though the thought in his mind still rustled for attention. When he nodded some more, its calling ceased.
Later that day, when Nelson spoke of Mimmie to his father, Zelik asked only one question. “Jewish?”
“Of course.”
“Okay.”
A week after Thanksgiving, and for a second time he and Mimmie made love. Like before, he snuck her up to his room, a rental on Beacon Street, a boardinghouse for male students only, a risky enough venture even if all they’d planned was a serious study session. He locked his door and pushed a wooden chair against it for good measure. He smoothed the sheets on his bed.
Mimmie was wearing a green wool coat and a matching green cap. She had auburn-colored hair, and the outfit, coupled with her petite figure, gave her the appearance almost of a leprechaun. Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold outside. Just as he lunged toward her she collapsed into a helpless shudder.
Their lovemaking, quiet, delicate, and cautious, nevertheless left them insatiably hungry. “Isn’t that interesting?” Mimmie remarked of their sudden voraciousness, and Nelson, nodding, mumbled an embarrassed “Well, there’s been a lot of …” He couldn’t put words to what they’d just done. But the act had changed everything. Outside on Beacon Street the lamps on the sidewalk were glowing especially bright, and the whistling of the coastal winds, so often a hostile sound, seemed to blend into a kind of music. Every store they passed—a pharmacy, a shoe repair shop, another pharmacy—seemed exotic, compelling. It was as if they’d never walked on Beacon before. But how was that possible? Nelson wondered as they hopped a trolley and headed to nearby Brookline, where they could readily find the Jewish food they most craved.
Once they’d been seated at their favorite delicatessen, Mimmie laughed and held her hands to her face, smothering what would otherwise have been a near outburst. She continued laughing as she ordered pastrami on rye, chicken soup, and black coffee.
When the food arrived they ate rapaciously and in silence, except for Mimmie’s occasional “Almost like my mother’s.”
“You know, Nelson,” she said, finally pushing her plate back. She’d consumed all the soup and most of her sandwich. He’d had half as much. “I had a talk with my father last week when I was home.”
“My father talked to me, too.”
“Busy fathers, yes? Well, look. We’re graduating soon. Our fathers are concerned. Mine asked me something surprising. He asked if I wanted to be a doctor like him, a medical doctor. Me, an M.D. Can you imagine? I told him I didn’t know, I’d never thought about it.”
She looked at Nelson for some kind of agreement, and he nodded. She’d never spoken about being a doctor, just a mathematician, which he still found remarkable enough.
“I mean, I’ve taken the biology and chemistry,” Mimmie continued, “so maybe I was thinking about it all along, in the back of my mind. I don’t know. Maybe. But you know what?” She stirred sugar into her coffee. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and I do. It’s come to me. I really do.” She raised her hands in front of her, palm to palm, as if to pray. “It’s like a dream and I can’t shake it,” she told him. “Some things are meant to be.”
For a week he’d carried in his coat pocket the engagement ring he’d purchased in Middletown. Each day that week he’d wondered if the moment to present it would arise, and as the days passed he began to worry that he’d not recognize the moment even if someone were to hold up a sign: This is it. But Mimmie had just said, “Some things are meant to be,” and even though the delicatessen wasn’t the setting of his dreams, he pulled the velvety jeweler’s box from his pocket.
“Some things are meant to be,” he said as he placed the box between them. “That’s what I think too.” He paused for some time, staring at the box, too anxious to look at Mimmie. He finally continued. “You’re the reason for everything. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”
He inched the box toward her but still didn’t look at her face. “Life will be good, Mimmie, so long as you’re with me.”
She smiled at him then reached toward the box. But before she opened it she looked up. “With you where?” she asked. Seeing his surprise, she added quickly, “Nelson, we have to be sure of things.”
He grabbed a napkin to swipe his brow. “Middletown,” he began. “First I’ll get an MBA. Then I’ll go back to the store. We had a family meeting. It’s been decided.”
“By whom?”
“My father. Mort. Me. We discussed it.”
“That’s what you talked about with your father?”
He nodded.
“And me?” she said.
“I talked with him about you too.” From her questioning look he knew that wasn’t what she meant. He added, “There are doctors in Middletown. God knows, there are plenty of sick people. You could be a doctor in Middletown just as well as anywhere else. I won’t hold you back. Mimmie, I’d never do that.”
She paused, considering, then plucked up the little box, springing it open. She gasped. “Nelson, what did you do?” she whispered.
“It’s for you,” he blurted, then felt stupid for saying something so obvious.
But she didn’t mind. She nodded more vigorously as if coming to an understanding, as if his words had actually helped. She looked at the ring for a long while without trying it on or remarking further. She turned the open box one way and then the other. Finally she put the box down and took a bite of what remained of her pastrami sandwich. She chewed, then sipped her coffee. Nelson watched in disbelief. All the after-sex euphoria had drained from her face. She looked serious, almost grim. She swallowed and said, “But you love history. You’re good at it. You write beautiful papers. All your professors say so. You could study history and become, I don’t know, a professor or a teacher or something, and I could study medicine, and we could stay right here. Right here.”
For a moment he imagined them spending years together nowhere else but at this Brookline delicatessen.
“I have to get the MBA. I promised. I agreed.”
“The MBA,” she said with disgust. “That’s not you.”
Unable to think of a reply, he shrugged. He didn’t know where to begin to explain why he’d agreed. “You’re doing what your father asked,” he said defensively.
“My father opened up a world. He made it a thousand times bigger. He gave me permission. But your father. What did your father do?”
“Everything he does, he does for us,” Nelson answered, still defensive. “How many people get an education like this? It’s not like he has one. Mort couldn’t even finish college. You talk as if this is a bad thing. Mimmie, it’s a chance for me.”
“And then you’re indebted. Then he wants you to do what he wants you to do. And you and your brother,” she snapped her fingers, “you just do it, like that.”
“Mimmie, we want to do it. We’re family.” His voice had almost left him. For reasons that baffled him, he was losing what was always the most persuasive argument in the world. Her people were German Jews and his were Russian, so much poorer, so much more religious. Perhaps that explained the gulf that now emerged between them. In a near whisper he said, “It’s a family business. Don’t you know about family?”
“Of course. That’s what I’m saying.” She lifted her coffee cup, then lowered it without taking a sip. Holding the engagement ring up to the light she said, “So pretty, Nelson. And thoughtful. Just like you.”
He waited for more but there wasn’t more. She hadn’t said yes. But she hadn’t said no, either.
“Nelson, I’m thinking,” Mimmie explained. When she reached for his hand across the table he felt an intense relief. They loved each other; everything had to work out.
A few minutes later she pulled her hand back and began speaking, her words deliberately paced, her tone firm. “Nelson, I don’t want you to get an MBA because it isn’t you. And I don’t want to go back with you to Middletown because it’s not where I should be. Your family, it’s going to swallow me up and I’m going to choke, Nelson. I can tell from everything you’ve said, from everything I’ve seen. But even more than that it’s not where you should be. You’re no businessman. You and I both know this is true. What I’m saying is, it’s not a good fit, that life in Middletown. And neither you nor I deserve to be unhappy.” She placed the ring back into the box. When she snapped the cover shut, causing a loud clap, Nelson’s shoulders jumped.
He stared at Mimmie. He loved her.
“You’re going to have to choose,” she continued, calmly as before.
“Uncle, you’ve got to tell me what to do,” Howard repeated. But before Nelson could explain to Howard why he was the last person to ask such a question of they were interrupted by a waitress who took Nelson’s and Howard’s plates and then brought them coffee. “Everything good?” she asked. She chatted with them for a minute as Nelson stirred his coffee then slipped another Tootsie Roll into his mouth. He’d eaten five since they’d finished their burgers and Howard had announced that Megan O’Donnell was the one for him.
“Uncle, please,” Howard said once the waitress left.
Nelson shook his head. He stared into his coffee. He glanced at Howard—still so young—then turned back to his drink. His hands on the cup were fat, ugly, old.
His next thought was not a new one but it nevertheless came to him with urgency: how right Mimmie had been all those years ago. He’d had a choice, but at the time he couldn’t see it. All he could see then was an inevitable unfolding of something he called, simply enough, the way of things. And by the time he saw that the way of things was like a river, fierce with current, but something you didn’t have to fall into, get dragged along by, by the time he’d had that revelation, he’d graduated from Harvard, had been working at Leibritsky’s Department Store a long time, had settled into something he’d never imagined, a bachelor’s life, a life the others, respectful as they were, pitied.
“Uncle?”
“Soon, soon.”
He was still thinking, still taking in Howard’s youthfulness, contrasting it with his own age, his own regrets.
On most days he felt like a fool. That was another thought, equally urgent. So often at family dinners, Erev Rosh Hashanah, for example, or Passover seder, he felt like a fool, sitting there without a wife, without children, except for a few friendly enough banalities talking to no one, having a life no one else in the family could even imagine, so many dinners alone at diners on either end of Main Street, so much solitude on the weekend. Everything about life, Jewish life, their life, was about having a family, and so many times he’d wondered what kind of Jew he was if he’d missed out on this most basic thing. The answer wasn’t so hard to find, really. He was an idiot Jew. An outcast Jew. All three of them, Mort, Leo, and Howard, would be heading to Woodmont the next day and he’d be left behind, as he’d been left behind for years and years. “You’re always welcome,” Ada had insisted because she had to, because he was her husband’s brother, because it was the respectful thing to do. But there wasn’t any room for him there. He knew that. And they did too.
“Am I crazy, Uncle? Am I out of my mind?”
Nelson didn’t know. It could go either way, he figured, crazy to say yes, crazy to say no.
He motioned to the waitress, asked that she clear the table of the used napkins and candy wrappers. They reminded him of his life, and the depth of disgust that he felt for it just then was overwhelming.
Crazier to say no. That was the truth of it. His truth. A little morsel of life experience he could unwrap, offer to Howard.
“Okay, so,” he began, slowly, once the table had been cleaned. Howard, who’d been silent and sulking, looked up. “Consider it a theory is what I was thinking,” Nelson told him. “Consider your feelings for this Megan O’Donnell a theory, something you have to test to be sure.”
“We’ve talked for hours, Uncle.”
“So you talk for some hours more. You take some more walks. I recommend you take in a picture or two. Just the way we used to back in the old days. Two people can get to know each other quite well by going to the pictures.”
Howard nodded.
“And if in the end you still feel she’s the one, then what I say is it’s okay to do in life what you really, really want to do. You just can’t be stupid about knowing you really, really want it. You can’t be a jerk on that one. Of course that’s just my opinion. Someone else—” Mort came to mind. “Someone else may have something different to say. That’s how life is, Howard. A bundle of opinions. But maybe you should know of mine.”
Howard’s eyes were wide. “I won’t be a stupid jerk,” he said gravely.
“I didn’t think you would be. I was just saying.”
Howard grinned and Nelson nodded. He reached into a pocket but there were no more candies. “Some night out,” Nelson said, shrugging, wondering already—as he would the rest of the evening—if he’d said too much.
“Some night!” Howard agreed, slapping the tabletop as if it were a drum. “Now how about that?”
The next morning, Friday, Nelson woke with a mild headache. He hadn’t slept well. But some news in the morning paper got him just a little bit charged up: at the London Olympics an American named Bob Mathias, a kid just Howard’s age, had surprised the world by pulling ahead in the decathlon. Nelson brought the sports section in to work to show Howard, who perhaps hadn’t slept well either. But Howard, not the least tired, had already read about it. “I know, I know,” he said confidently when Nelson passed him the paper.
All morning Howard seemed that way: confident, knowing. By noon he’d made an easy seven sales, a good number, but not so unusual for a talented salesman like him. After lunch, though, and in just an hour, he made seven more. “Call me Bob!” Howard quipped at one point, passing Nelson, who was standing near the register, doing nothing but gazing at Main Street. Crazy to say yes, he was telling himself anxiously.
A few hours later Nelson stood in the office as Mort and Leo, their weekend suitcases nearby, prepared to go to Woodmont. Seeing those suitcases, Nelson dropped down into the basement. Soon the drums of “Sing, Sing, Sing” had his feet tapping despite the melancholy—a regular piece of Friday—that he felt creeping up on him.
Crazier, he realized anew, to say no.
When he emerged from the basement it was time for them to leave, and Howard was suddenly at Nelson’s side. “Thanks again for everything,” Howard said. Through the office doorway Nelson could see Mort speaking on the phone and jotting something down as he did. Nelson cleared his throat. “Sure, sure,” he said.
Then he and Howard walked into the back office together.
“What’s that?” Mort asked Howard, noticing the packages of shirts in his hands, the ones he’d chosen the day before.
“I thought he could use a few things for college,” Nelson explained, stepping in front of Howard protectively. But Howard didn’t need his help. Not just then. He was back on the sales floor, whistling. A few minutes later Mort, Leo, Howard, and Nelson walked to the front doorway and Howard practically ran from the dim interior of Leibritsky’s Department Store past his father and uncle and into the brightness of the afternoon. “Let’s go,” he said. He had his suitcase in one hand and the car key in the other.
Mort took a few steps outside then turned back to speak to Nelson.
“Happy kid. He really enjoyed this week, Nelson. You’re what he enjoyed the most.” He patted Nelson’s shoulder several times. “You’re a good brother. A good uncle.”
Out on the sidewalk again, Mort turned Nelson’s way and waved.
“Good Shabbos, my brother.”
“Sure, sure. Good Shabbos,” he said.