11
Lew

Sammy and I enlisted the same day. Four of us set out together. All of us went overseas. All four of us came back, although I was captured and Sammy was shot down into the water and crash-landed another time with a forgetful pilot called Hungry Joe, who forgot to try the emergency handle for lowering the landing gear. No one was hurt, Sammy tells me, and that pilot Hungry Joe got a medal. It’s a name that sticks. Milo Minderbinder was his mess officer then and not the big war hero he tries to pass himself off as now. Sammy had a squadron commander named Major Major, who was never around when anyone wanted to see him, and a bombardier he thought I would have liked named Yossarian, who took off his uniform after a guy in their plane bled to death, and he even went to the funeral naked, sitting in a tree, Sammy says.

We went up by subway to volunteer at the big army induction center at Grand Central Station in Manhattan. That was a part of the city most of us hardly ever went to. There was the physical examination we’d heard about from the older guys who were already gone. We turned our heads and coughed, we milked down our joints, we bent over and spread the cheeks of our buttocks, and kept wondering what they were looking for. We’d heard of piles from our uncles and aunts, but we didn’t really know what they were. A psychiatrist interviewed me alone and asked if I liked girls. I liked them so much I fucked them, I answered.

He looked envious.

Sammy liked them too but didn’t know how.

We were past eighteen, and if we’d waited until nineteen, we would have been drafted, said FDR, and that was the reason we gave to our parents, who were not so happy to see us go. We read about the war in the newspapers, heard about it on the radio, saw it done gorgeously in the Hollywood movies, and it looked and sounded better to us than being home in my father’s junkshop, like I was, or in a file cage like Sammy in the insurance company he worked for, or, like Winkler, in a cigar store that was a front for the bookmaking operation his father ran in back. And in the long run it was better, for me and for most of the rest of us.

When we got back to Coney Island after enlisting, we ate some hot dogs to celebrate and went on the roller-coasters awhile, the Tornado, the Cyclone, and the Thunderbolt. We rode up on the big Wonder Wheel eating caramel popcorn and looked out over the ocean in one direction and out over Gravesend Bay in the other. We sank submarines and shot down planes on the game machines in the penny arcades and dashed into Steeplechase for a while and rolled around in the barrels and spun around on the Whirlpool and the Human Pool Table and caught rings on the big carousel, the biggest carousel in the island. We rode in a flat-bottomed boat in the Tunnel of Love and made loud dirty noises to give laughs to the other people there.

We knew there was anti-Semitism in Germany, but we didn’t know what that was. We knew they were doing things to people, but we didn’t know what they were.

We didn’t know much of Manhattan then. When we went up into the city at all, it was mainly to the Paramount or Roxy theater, to hear the big bands and see the big new movies before they came into the neighborhood six months later, to the Loew’s Coney Island or the RKO Tilyou. The big movie houses in Coney Island then were safe and profitable and comfortable. Now they’re bankrupt and out of business. Some of the older fellows would sometimes take us along into Manhattan in their cars on Saturday night to the jazz clubs on Fifty-second Street or up into Harlem for the music at the colored ballroom or theater there or to buy marijuana, eat ribs cheap, and get sucked and fucked for a buck if they wanted to, but I didn’t go in much for any of that, not even the music. Once the war came, a lot of people started making money, and we did too. Soon after the war you could get that same sucking and the rest right there in the Coney Island neighborhood from Jewish white girls hooked on heroin and married to other local junkies who had no money either, but the price was two bucks now, and they did their biggest business mostly with housepainters and plasterers and other laborers from outside the neighborhood, who hadn’t gone to school with those girls and didn’t care. Some in my own crowd, like Sammy and Marvelous Marvin Winkler, the bookie’s little boy, began smoking marijuana even before the war, and you could find that country smell of pot in the smoking sections of the Coney Island movie houses once you got to recognize what the stuff smelled like. I didn’t go for any of that either, and the guys who were my friends never lit up their reefers when I was around, even though I told them they could, if they wanted to.

“What’s the use?” Winkler liked to groan, with his eyes red and half closed. “You bring me down.”

A guy named Tilyou, who maybe was already dead, became a sort of guy to look up to once I found out about him. When everyone else was poor, he owned a movie house and he owned a big Steeplechase amusement park and a private house across the street from his Steeplechase Park, and I never even connected them all with the same name until Sammy pointed it out to me not long ago on one of his mercy visits up to my house, when all of them were already gone, and George C. Tilyou too. Sammy began coming up a lot to see us after his wife died of cancer of the ovary and he did not know what to do with himself weekends, and especially when I was out of the hospital again and had nothing much to do with myself either but hang around getting my strength back after another session of radiation or more chemotherapy. Between these hospitalizations I could feel like a million and be strong as an ox again. When things got bad here, I’d go into the city to a hospital in Manhattan and an oncologist named Dennis Teemer for treatments they had there. When I felt good, I was terrific.

By now it’s out of the bag. And everyone knows I’ve been sick with something that sometimes puts other people away. We never speak of it by name, or even as something big enough to even have a name. Even with the doctors, Claire and I don’t talk about it by name. I don’t want to ask Sammy, but I’m not sure we fooled him for a minute in all of the years of my lying about it like I did—as I did, as he would want to correct me, like he does, when I let him. Sometimes I remember, but I talk to him like I want to anyway just to heckle him.

“Tiger, I know it,” I will tell him with a laugh. “You still think I’m a greenhorn? I’m putting you on, like I like to do, and hopefully, someday you’ll get it.”

Sammy is smart and picks up on small things, like the name Tilyou, and the scar on my mouth before I grew my big brush mustache to hide it or let what hair I had left grow long in back to cover the incisions there and the blue burn marks on the glands in the back of my neck. I missed a lot maybe in my lifetime by not going to college, but I never wanted to go, and I don’t think I missed anything that would have mattered to me. Except maybe college girls. But I always had girls. They’d never scared me, and I knew how to get them and talk to them and enjoy them, older ones too. I was always priapic, Sammy told me.

“You’ve got it, tiger,” I answered him. “Now tell me what it means.”

“You were all prick,” he said, like he enjoyed insulting me, “and no conflicts.”

“Conflicts?”

“You never had problems.”

“I never had problems.”

I never had doubt. My first was an older one on the next block named Blossom. My second was an older one we called Squeezy. Another one was a girl I picked up in the insurance office when Sammy was working there, and she was older too, and she knew I was younger, but she wanted more of me anyway and bought me two shirts for Christmas. Back then I think I made it with every girl I really wanted to. With girls, like everywhere else, even in the army, I found out that if you let people know what you want to do and seem sure of yourself about doing it, they’re likely to let you. When I was still a corporal, my sergeant overseas was soon letting me do all the deciding for both of us. But I never had college girls, the kind you used to see in the movies. Before the war, nobody we knew went to college or thought about it. After the war, everybody began going. The girls I met through Sammy from his Time magazine before he was married, and after too, didn’t always find me as popular as I thought they should, so I cut down on the personality with them instead of embarrassing him, and even his wife, Glenda, wasn’t really as crazy about me and Claire at first as the people we were used to in Brooklyn and Orange Valley. Claire had the idea Glenda felt like a snob because she wasn’t Jewish and was not from Brooklyn, but it turned out it wasn’t that. When we began to get sick, first me, then her, we all got close, and even before that, when their boy, Michael, killed himself. We were the married couple they could turn to easiest and Claire was the girl she could confide in most.

In Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and everywhere else, I always had girls, as often as I wanted, and even could get them for others, even for Sammy. Especially in the army, in Georgia, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and married ones too, with husbands away. And that sort of always turned me off a little afterward, but it never stopped me from having the good time when I could. “Don’t put it in,” they would sometimes try to make me promise before I made us both happier by putting it in. In England before I was shipped into Europe there were lots. In England in the war every American could get laid, even Eisenhower, and sometimes in France in a village or farm, where we were busy moving forward with the fighting, until we had to move back and I was taken prisoner with a whole bunch of others in what I later found out was the Battle of the Bulge. Except in Germany, but even almost in Dresden as a POW working in that liquid vitamin factory making syrups for pregnant women in Germany who needed nourishment and didn’t have what to eat. That was late in the war, and I hated the Germans more than ever before, but couldn’t show it. Even there I came close to getting laid with my joshing around with the guards and the Polish and other slave-labor women working there, and maybe could really have talked my favorite guards—they were all old men or soldiers who’d been wounded badly on the Russian front—into looking the other way while I slipped off into a room or closet with one or another of them for a while. The women weren’t eager but didn’t seem to mind me—up until the night of that big firebombing when everything around us came to an end in one day, and all of the women were gone too. The other guys thought I was out of my mind for horsing around that way, but it gave us a little something more to do until the war ended and we could go back home. The Englishmen in the prison detail could make no sense of me. The guards were tired too, and they began to get a kick out of me also. They knew I was Jewish. I made sure of that everywhere.

“Herr Reichsmarschall,” I called each one of the German privates as a standing joke whenever I had to speak to them to translate or ask for something. “Fucking Fritz” was what I called each one of them to myself, without joking. Or “Nazi kraut bastard.”

“Herr Rabinowitz,” they answered with mock respect.

“Mein Name ist Lew,” I always kidded back with them heartily. “Please call me that.”

“Rabinowitz, you’re crazy,” said my assistant Vonnegut, from Indiana. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“Don’t you want to have fun?” I kept trying to cheer us all up. “How can you stand all this boredom? I bet I can get a dance going here if we can talk them into some music.”

“Not me,” said the old guy named Schweik. “I’m a good soldier.”

Both these guys knew more German than I did, but Vonnegut was modest and shy, and Schweik, who kept complaining he had piles and aching feet, never wanted to get involved.

Then one week we saw the circus was coming to town. We had seen the posters on our march to the food factory from our billets in the reinforced basement that had been the underground room of the slaughterhouse when they still had animals to slaughter. By then the guards were more afraid than we were. At night we could hear the planes from England pass overhead on their way to military targets in the region. And we would sometimes hear with pleasure the bombs exploding in the hundreds not far away. From the east we knew the Russians were coming.

I had a big idea when I saw those carnival posters. “Let’s talk to the headman and see if we can’t get to go. The women too. We need a break. I’ll do the talking.” The chance excited me. “Let’s go have a try.”

“Not me,” said that good soldier Schweik. “I can get myself in enough trouble just doing what I’m told.”

The women working with us were wan and bedraggled and as dirty as we were, and I don’t think there was a sex gland alive in any of us. And I was underweight and had diarrhea most of the time too, but that would have been one screw to tease Claire about later and to boast about now. I could have lied, but I don’t like to lie.

Claire and I got married even before I was out of the army, just after my double hernia operation at Fort Dix when I got back from Europe and the prisons in Germany, and I almost went wild with a pair of German POWs there in New Jersey for leering and saying something in German when they saw her waiting for me while we were still engaged.

I saw them first in Oklahoma, those German prisoners of war over here, and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. They were outdoors with shovels and looked better than we did, and happier too on that big army base. This was war? Not in my book. I thought prisoners of war were supposed to be in prison and not outdoors having a good time with each other and making jokes about us. I got angry looking at them. They were guarded by a couple of slouching GIs who looked bored and lazy and carried rifles that looked too heavy. The krauts were supposed to be working at something, but they weren’t working hard. There were American stockade prisoners all around who’d gone AWOL and been put to work digging holes in the ground just for punishment and then filling them up, and they were always working harder than any of these. I got even angrier just watching them, and one day, without even knowing what I was doing, I decided to practice my German on them and just walked right up.

“Hey, you’re not allowed to do that, soldier,” said the guard nearest the two I went to, jumping toward me nervously and speaking in one of those foreign southern accents I was just beginning to get used to. He even started to level his rifle.

“Pal, I’ve got family in Europe,” I told him, “and it’s perfectly all right. Just listen, you’ll hear.” And before he could answer me I began right in with my German, trying it out, but he didn’t know that. “Bitte. Wie ist Ihr Name? Danke sehön. Wie alt sind Sie? Danke vielmals. Wo Du kommst hier? Danke.” By now a few of the others had drawn close, and even a couple of the other guards had come up to listen and were smiling too, like having a good time at one of our USO shows. I didn’t like that either. What the hell, I thought, was this war or peace? I kept right on talking. When they couldn’t understand me, I kept changing the way I said something until they did, and then there were nods and laughs from all of them, and I made believe I was grinning with happiness when I saw they were giving me good marks. “Bitte schön, bitte schön,” they told me when I said “Danke, danke” to them in a gush for telling me I was “Gut, gut.” But before it was over, I made sure I let them know there was one person there who wasn’t having such a good time, and that person was me. “So, wie geht jetzt?” I asked them, and pointed my arm around the base. “Du, gefällt es hier? Schön, ja?” When they said they did like it there, like we were all practicing our German, I put this question to them. “Gefällt hier besser wie zuhause mit Krieg? Ja?” I would have bet they did like it there better than they would have liked being back in Germany at war. “Sure,” I said to them in English, and by then they’d stopped smiling and were looking confused. I stared hard into the face of the one I had spoken to first. “Sprechen Du!” I drilled my eyes into his until he began to nod weakly, answering. When I saw him fold I wanted to laugh out loud, although I didn’t find it funny. “Dein Name ist Fritz? Dein Name ist Hans? Du bist Heinrich?” And then I told them about me. “Und mein Name ist Rabinowitz.” I said it again as a German might. “Rabinovitz. Ich bin Lew Rabinowitz, LR, von Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Du kennst?” And then I spoke Yiddish. “Und ich bin ein Yid. Farshstest?” And then in English. “I am a Jew. Understand?” And then in my fractured German. “Ich bin Jude. Verstehst?” Now they didn’t know where to look, but they did not want to look at me. I’ve got blue eyes that can turn into slits of ice, Claire still tells me, and a pale, European skin that can turn red fast when I laugh hard or get mad, and I wasn’t sure they believed me. So I opened my fatigues one button more and pulled out my dog tags to show them the letter J stamped there on the bottom with my blood type. “Sehen Du? Ich bin Rabinowitz, Lew Rabinowitz, und ich bin Jude. Understand? Good. Danke,” I said sarcastically, glaring coldly at each of them until I saw the eyes drop. “Danke schön, danke vielmals, für alles, and a bitte and bitte schön too. And on the life of my mother, I swear I will pay you all back. Thanks, buddy boy,” I said to the corporal, as I turned to go. “I’m glad you had a good time too.”

“What was it all about?”

“Just practicing my German.”

In Fort Dix with Claire, I wasn’t practicing. I was mad in a second when I saw them snicker and say something about her, and I was ready to wade right in, madder than I’d ever been in combat, as I moved straight toward them. My voice was low and very calm, and that vein in my neck and jaw was already ticking, like the clock of a time bomb just dying to explode.

“Achtung” I said in a soft and slow voice, drawing the word out to make it last as long as I could, until I came to a stop where they were standing on the grass with their shovels near a dirt walkway they were making.

The two of them looked at each other with a hardly hidden smile they must have thought I wouldn’t mind.

“Achtung,” I said again, with a little more bite on the second part, as though carrying on a polite conversation with someone hard of hearing in the parlor of Claire’s mother in her upstate home in New York. I put my face right into theirs, only inches away. My lips were drawn wide, as they would be if I was going to laugh, but I wasn’t even smiling, and I don’t think they got that yet. “Achtung, aufpassen,” I said for emphasis.

They turned sober when I didn’t shout it. They began to see I wasn’t kidding. And then they straightened up from their comfortable slouching and began to look a little bit lost, like they couldn’t make me out. I didn’t know till later that I was clenching my fists, didn’t know until I saw blood on my hands from where my nails were digging in.

Now they weren’t so sure anymore, and I was. The war in Europe was over, but they were still prisoners of war, and they were here, not there. It was summer and they were healthy and bare-chested and bronzed from the sun, like I used to be on the beach at Coney Island before the war. They looked strong, muscular, not like the hundreds and hundreds more I’d seen taken prisoner overseas. These had been in first, and they had grown healthy as prisoners and strong on American food, while I was away with trench foot from wet socks and shoes, and was covered with bugs I’d never seen before, lice. They were early captures, I guessed, the big bully-boy crack troops from the beginning of the war, that whole generation who by now had been captured, killed, or wounded, and they looked too good and too well-off for my taste, but there were the rules of the Geneva Convention for prisoners, and here they were. The two I faced were older and bigger than me, but I did not doubt I could take them apart if it came to that, weak as I was from the operations and thin from the war, and maybe I was wrong. I wasn’t fed as good as they were when I was a prisoner.

“Wie gehts?” I said casually, looking at each in turn in a way that let them know I wasn’t being as sociable as I sounded. By now my German was pretty good. “Was ist Dein Name?”

One was Gustav, one was Otto. I remember the names.

“Wo kommst Du her?”

One was from Munich. I’d never heard of the other place. I was speaking with authority, and I could see they were anxious. They didn’t outrank me. None could be officers if they’d been put to work, not even noncommissioned, not unless they had lied, as I had done, just to get out of the last prison camp and go somewhere to work. “Warum lachst Du wenn Du siehst Lady hier? You too.” I pointed at the other one. “Why were you laughing just now when you looked at the lady here, and what did you say to him about her that made him laugh some more?”

I forgot to say that in German and spoke in English. They knew what I was talking about, all right, but were not too sure of the words. I didn’t mind. This was a hard one to put into another language, but I knew they would get it if I put my mind to it.

“Warum hast Du gelacht wenn Du siehst mein girlfriend here?”

Now we all knew they understood, because they did not want to answer. The guard with the gun did not understand what was going on or know what to do about it. He looked more scared of me than of them. I knew that I wasn’t even allowed to talk to them. Claire would have wanted me to stop. I wasn’t going to. Nothing could have made me. A young officer with campaign ribbons who’d come up quickly halted when he saw my face.

“Better keep back,” I heard Claire warn him.

I had campaign ribbons on too, including a Bronze Star I’d won in France for knocking out a Tiger tank with a guy named David Craig. I think that officer was reading my mind and was smart enough to keep out of my way. I seemed official and talked tough as hell. My German threw all of them off, and I made sure to speak it loudly.

“Antworte!” I said. “Du verstehst was ich sage?”

“Ich verstehe nicht.”

“Wir haben nicht gelacht.”

“Keiner hat gelacht.”

“Otto, you are a liar,” I told him in German. “You do understand and you did laugh. “Gustav, sag mir, Gustav, was Du sagen”—I pointed to Claire— “über meine Frau hier? Beide lachen, was ist so komisch?” We weren’t married yet, but I didn’t mind throwing in that she was my wife, just to tighten the screws a little more. “She is my wife,” I repeated, in English, for the officer to hear. “What nasty thing did you say about her?”

“Ich habe nichts gesagt. Keiner hat gelacht.”

“Sag mir!” I commanded.

“Ich habe es vergessen. Ich weiss nicht.”

“Gustav, Du bist auch ein Lügner, und Du wirst gehen zu Hölle für Deine Lüge. To hell you will both go for your lie and for your dirty words about this young lady, if I have to put you there myself. Now. Schaufeln hinlegen!”

I pointed. They laid down their shovels tamely and waited. I waited too.

“Schaufeln aufheben!” I said, with no smile.

They looked about miserably. They picked up the shovels and stood without knowing what to do with them.

“Dein Name ist Gustav?” I said after another half a minute. “Dein Name ist Otto? Jawohl? Du bist von München? Und Du bist von … Ach wo!” I didn’t really care where the hell he was from. “Mein Name ist Rabinowitz. Lewis Rabinowitz. Ich bin Lewis Rabinowitz, from Coney Island, on West Twenty-fifth Street, between Railroad Avenue and Mermaid Avenue, bei Karussell, the merry-go-round on the boardwalk.” I could feel the pulses in my thumbs beating too when I took out my dog tags to make them look at that letter J, to make extra sure that they knew what I was saying when I told them next in Yiddish: “Und ich bin ein Yid.” And then in German: “Ich bin Jude, jüdisch. Verstehst Du jetzt?” They weren’t so bronze anymore, and didn’t look so powerful. I felt peaceful as can be, and never more sure of myself as LR, Louie Rabinowitz from Coney Island. There was no more need to fight with them. I spoke with my hateful smile that Claire says looks worse than a skeleton’s and like a deadly grimace. “Jetzt … noch einmal.” They put down the shovels when I told them to and picked them back up as though I had trained them perfectly. I indicated Claire. “Hast Du schlecht gesagt wie als er hat gesagt wie Du gesehen Dame hier?”

“Nein, mein Herr.”

“Hast Du mitgelacht als er hat gesagt schlecht?”

“Nein, mein Herr.”

“You are lying again, both of you, and it’s lucky that you are, because I might break both your backs if you told me you did laugh at her or said something bad. Geh zur Arbeit.” I turned away from them with disgust. “Corporal, they’re yours again. Thanks for the chance.”

“Lew, that wasn’t nice,” Claire said first.

Then the officer spoke. “Sergeant, you’re not allowed that. You’re not allowed to talk to them that way.”

I saluted respectfully. “I know the rules of the Geneva Convention, Captain. I was a prisoner of war there, sir.”

“What was it all about?”

“They looked at my fiancée, sir, and said something dirty. I’m only just back. I’m not right in the head yet.”

“Lew, you’re not right in the head.” Claire started in the minute we were alone. “Suppose they didn’t do what you told them to?”

“Calm down, little girl. They did do what I told them. They had to.”

“Why? Suppose the guard made you stop? Or that officer?”

“They couldn’t.”

“How did you know?”

“Just understand.”

“Why couldn’t they?”

“I tell you and you must believe me. Certain things happen the way I say they will. Don’t ask me why. To me it’s simple. They insulted you, and they insulted me by doing that, and I had to let them know they couldn’t do that. They’re not allowed to do that.” We were already engaged. “You’re my fiancée, n’est-ce pas? My Fräulein. I would get mad at anyone who looked at you and made a smutty remark, and so would my father and my brothers, if they saw any other guy ever snicker at you like that, or at one of my sisters. Enough chitchat, my dear. Let’s go back to the hospital now. Let’s go say good-bye to Herman the German.”

“Lew, it’s enough with Herman already. I’ll wait downstairs and have a soda if you feel you have to go through that with him again. I don’t find it funny.”

“You still won’t believe it, baby, but I don’t find it funny either. That’s not why I do it to him.”

The problem with Claire then, as Sammy and Winkler saw and let me know, was that she did have big tits. And the trouble with me was that I got jealous fast and felt ready to just about kill any other guy who noticed them, Sammy and Winkler too.

So four of us went down to enlist that day and all four of us came back. But Irving Kaiser from the apartment house next door was killed by artillery fire in Italy and I never saw him again, and Sonny Ball was killed the same way there too. Freddy Rosenbaum lost a leg, and Manny Schwartz still walks around with hooks on an artificial hand and is not so good-humored about it anymore, and Solly Moss was shot in the head and hasn’t been able to hear or see too clearly since, and as Sammy mentioned once when looking back, that seems to have been a lot of casualties for just a couple of blocks in a pretty small section of a pretty small neighborhood, so a lot of others everywhere must have been killed or wounded also. I thought so too. But the day the four of us went off we didn’t think there’d really be danger or casualties.

We were going to war and we didn’t know what it was.

Most of us married young. And none of us knew from divorce then. That was for the Gentiles, for the rich people we used to read about in the newspapers who went to Reno, Nevada, for six weeks because it was easier there. And for someone like Sammy’s Glenda and her roving first husband who liked to play around a lot and just didn’t seem to give a shit who knew it. Now even one of my own daughters has got her divorce. When I first heard about that marriage breaking up I wanted to set right out after my ex-son-in-law and work out the property settlement with my bare hands. Claire shut me up and took me back to the Caribbean to cool off instead. Sammy Singer was the only one I know of who waited, and then he married his shiksa with three children and the light-brown hair that was almost blonde. But Sammy Singer was always a little bit different, short and different, quiet, thinking a lot. He was strange and went to college. I was smart enough and also had the GI Bill of Rights to pay for it, but was already married, and I had better things to do than go to school some more, and I was in a bigger hurry to get somewhere. That’s another reason I never liked John Kennedy or anyone around him when he jumped into the limelight and began to act like an actor having too good a time. I could recognize a man in a hurry. I blinked once when he was shot, said too bad, and went back to work the same day, and got ready to begin disliking Lyndon Johnson, when I wanted to take the time. I don’t like bullshitters and people who talk a lot, and that’s what Presidents do. I hardly read newspapers anymore. Even back then I couldn’t figure out why a guy with brains like Sammy Singer would want to go to college just to study things like English literature, which he could read in his spare time.

When I was thirteen and ready for high school, I got into Brooklyn Technical High School, which was not so easy to do back then, and did well in things like math, mechanical drawing, and some of the science courses, as I did not doubt I would. And then I forgot just about everything but the arithmetic when I got out and went to work for my father in the junkshop with my brother and one of my brothers-in-law, who lived with my oldest sister in the basement flat of the four-family brick house with a porch the family already owned. I used the arithmetic most in pinochle, I guess, in the bidding and playing, where I could pretty much hold my own in the boardwalk and beach games with almost the best of the old-world Jews from Russia and Hungary and Poland and Romania, who talked and talked and talked even while they played, about cards and the Jewish newspapers, and about Hitler, whom I hated early, as early as they did, and Stalin, Trotsky, Mussolini, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom they liked, so I liked him too. In Coney Island I’ll bet there was never a single Jewish voter for any Republican except maybe my brother-in-law Phil, who was always against everything everyone else around him was for, and still is.

My father did not think much of my genius at cards. When I asked him what else I should do with my time when we weren’t working, he didn’t know. When he didn’t know something, he didn’t want to talk about it. In the army there was no real pinochle, so I made my money at blackjack, poker, and craps. I almost always won because I always knew I would. If I didn’t feel I would win I hardly ever played. When I lost, it wasn’t much. I could tell in a minute if there were players at work who were just as good as I was and on a streak, and I knew enough to wait. Now I use my math to calculate discounts, costs, tax breaks, and profit margins, and I can do my figuring without even feeling I’m thinking, like my bookkeeper or counter girls could with their computers, and just about as fast. I’m not always right, but I’m almost never wrong. With the idea for metered home heating oil for builders and developers, even after I found the meter that would do it, I never felt sure. With metered oil there’d be no need for a fuel tank for each house in a development, and the company that owned the meter would sell the oil there. But I had the feeling I’d have trouble getting the people at the big oil companies to take me seriously, and I did and they wouldn’t. When we met I was not myself. I wore a suit with a vest and had a different personality, because I had the feeling they would not like mine. They didn’t care much for the one I used either. I was out of my league and knew it the minute I tried to step into theirs. There were limits, and I had guessed from the start that the sky was not one of mine.

The war was a big help, even to me, with the building boom and the shortages of materials to build with. We made money on the demolitions and on the first Luna Park fire right after the war when my hernias were fixed and I was back in the junkshop and strong as a bull again. I found I still loved the hard and heavy work with my brothers and brother-in-law and the old man. Smokey Rubin and the black guy were gone, but we had others when we needed them, and two trucks and another one we rented by the week. But I hated the dirt, hated the grease and the filth, and the stink from the rot from the ocean in the newspapers from the trash cans on the beach the scavenging ragpickers brought in to sell on the carts they pushed and pulled. I was afraid of the dirt and the air we breathed. I’m afraid of bugs. The old newspapers sometimes came with dead crabs and clumps of mussels with sand and seaweed and with orange peel and other kinds of garbage, and we put those in the middle of the big bales of papers we still wired up with our hands with pliers. There were machines now to bale newspapers, Winkler let us know like the voice of experience on one of those days when he had nothing better to do and came by to watch us working our asses off and hang around until I finished up. Winkler could find machines for anything, secondhand ones too. State-of-the-art machines, he liked to call them. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

Winkler had found his state-of-the-art machines to slice up surplus army aerial film into sizes for consumer cameras and planned to make his first millions doing that before Eastman Kodak caught wise and tooled up again for the whole population and took back the market. People were getting married and having babies, and they wanted baby pictures.

“Never mind the machines, I don’t want your machines,” the old man grumbled at Winkler, grinding his dental plates and speaking in the thick Polish-Jewish accent Claire had hardly ever heard before she started going out with me and sleeping over in my other sister’s room. No one would let us get together under that roof. She was upstate Jewish, where things were different than in Coney Island, and both her parents had been born in this country, which was different also. We met when they rented in Sea Gate one summer, for the beach and the ocean—we had one of the best beaches and ocean for swimming when it wasn’t filthy with condoms and other things from the toilets on the big ocean liners steaming past into the harbor almost every day, and from sewers. We called the condoms “Coney Island whitefish.” We called the garbage and the other floating stuff “Watch-out!” We had another name for the condoms. We called them scumbags. Now we call those pricks in Washington that. Like Noodles Cook, and maybe that new one now in the White House too.

“I got my own machines, two right here,” the old man said, and flexed his muscles and smiled. He meant his shoulders and arms. “And three more machines right there.” He meant me and my brother and my brother-in-law. “And my machines are alive and don’t cost so much. Pull, pull,” he called out. “Don’t stand there, don’t listen to him. We got pipes to cut and boilers to get later.”

And he and his three live machines went back to work with our baling claws and long pliers and thin steel baling rods to be pulled and twisted into knots, keeping our eyes and nuts out of the way in case a wire snapped. We tumbled one bale down on top of the other, where they both shook and quivered, in a way Claire thought was sexual, she told me, like a big guy like me tumbling himself down on top of a girl like her.

The old man took to Claire right off, from the time she started showing up at the junkshop to watch and help so I could finish up earlier when we had a date, and because she spent good time talking to my mother, who was not always easy to talk to anymore. And she gift-wrapped the small presents she brought for birthdays and holidays. Gift-wrapped? Claire was the first we knew of to gift-wrap. Before Claire showed up, who in the whole large family, in the whole world of Coney Island, knew about gift-wrapping? Or “stemware”? None in the family was sure what stemware was, but I knew I wanted it once Claire did, and I talked about our “stemware” to a higher-level Italian guy named Rocky I bought things from. Rocky liked me and liked Claire’s way of talking straight with him, and after we both moved away and went separately into buying lots and building houses, we sometimes did things for each other. Rocky liked girls, blondes and redheads with lots of makeup and high heels and big bosoms, and was very respectful of wives, like Claire and his own.

Her father was dead, and my father put his foot down at the beginning about me ever sleeping over at her house, even with her mother home.

“Listen, Louie,” my father, Morris, told me, “listen to me good. The girl is an orphan. She has no father. Marry her or leave her alone. I’m not making a joke.”

I decided to marry her, and I found out, when I thought about it, that I wanted my wife to be a virgin. I was surprised, but that was the kind of a guy I turned out to be. I had to admit that every time I talked a girl into coming across, I thought at least a little bit less of her afterward, even though I usually wanted to do it with them again. And even six years later, when Sammy got married to Glenda with her three children, I still could not make myself understand how any man like him or me could get married to a girl who’d been fucked by someone else, especially by someone who was still alive, and more than once, and by more than one guy. I know it’s funny, but that’s the kind of a guy I turned out to be.

And still am, because there are things about my two daughters that Claire and I no longer even try to argue about. They wouldn’t believe me when I let them know their mother was a virgin until we got married. And Claire made me swear I would never tell that to anyone again.

I usually backed away from Claire’s temper, but never from fear. I was not afraid in the army or the prison camps, not even in the firefights and scattered artillery barrages when we were pushing forward through the rest of France and Luxembourg and in toward the German border, not even when I looked up from the snow after the big December surprise and saw those German soldiers with clean guns and nice new white uniforms and the bunch of us were captured.

But I was afraid of the rats in our junkshop. And I hated the filth, especially when I was back after the war. Even a mouse at a baseboard would be enough to make me nauseous and set me shivering for a whole minute, like I do now when I get the taste of my mother’s green apples or even remember it. And when I finally set up in business for myself in the town over two and half hours from our place in Brooklyn, the best location I could find was the building of a bankrupt mousetrap factory near the freight siding of the railroad station, and now there were plenty of mice there too.

One day after another I was disgusted by the dirt under my fingernails, and I was ashamed. All of us were. We scrubbed ourselves clean when we finished up, with cold water from the hose, which was all we had there. It took maybe an hour. Even in the winter we soaped and hosed ourselves down with stiff industrial brushes and lye soap. We didn’t want to walk out and come home with all that muck on us. I hated the black beneath the fingernails. In Atlanta in the army I discovered the manicure—along with the shrimp cocktail and the filet mignon beefsteak—and in England I found the manicure again, and in France, moving through, I had my manicure whenever I could. And back in Coney Island I never wanted to be without it. And I never have been. Even in the hospital, at times when I’m feeling the lousiest, I still care about my cleanliness, and a manicure is one of the things I always make sure of getting. Claire already knew about manicures. After our marriage it was part of our foreplay. She liked pedicures too, and having her back scratched and her feet massaged, and I liked holding her toes.

I drove a good car as soon as I had money for one and bought another good one for Claire when I had money for that, and we didn’t have to go out on dates in the company pickup anymore, and once I discovered hand-tailored suits I never wanted to dress myself up in anything else. When Kennedy became President it turned out we both had our suits made by the same shop in New York, but I had to admit I never looked as good in mine as he did in his. Sammy always said I didn’t know how to dress, and Claire used to say so too, and maybe they’re right, because I never did pay much attention to things like colors and style and left that to the tailors to choose for me. But I knew enough to know I always felt just grand walking around in a handmade suit that cost over three hundred dollars with the sales tax and might have cost as much as five hundred. Now they’re over fifteen hundred and go up to two thousand, but I still don’t care, and I have more of them now than I’ll ever have time to wear out, because my weight keeps changing a lot between remissions, and I always like to look my tidiest in a suit and manicure whenever I dress up and go out.

I wore cotton shirts, only cotton. No nylon, no polyester, no creaseproof, never any wash-and-wear. But no Egyptian cotton, not ever, not after Israel and the war of 1948. When Milo Minder-binder and his M & M Enterprises went big into Egyptian cotton, I stopped carrying their M & M toilet bowls and sinks in my plumbing business and their building materials in my lumberyard. Winkler knows I don’t like the idea, but he still buys Minderbinder cocoa beans for the chocolate Easter bunnies he’s into, but we throw them out when he sends them as gifts.

I discovered cheese when I discovered the Caribbean, French cheese. I loved French cheeses from the day I found them. And Martinique and Guadeloupe and later Saint Barts became our favorite vacation spots in the Caribbean in winter. Because of the cheeses. I was not hot for Europe. I went once to France and once to Spain and Italy and never cared to go back to any place that didn’t speak my language and couldn’t get a good idea of the kind of person I thought I was. And then one day on Saint Barts, while having just a grand time with Claire after picking up two neat parcels of land in Saint Maarten at what I just knew would turn out to be a very good price, I ate a piece of cheese I always liked on a piece of bread I liked too, a Saint André cheese, I think I remember it was, and then a little while later felt coming up that taste of green apples I’d never forgotten, a burning, sour taste that I remembered from very far back when being sick as a kid, and I was scared that something not right might be going on inside me. And my neck felt stiff, like it was swelling up. Sammy would say that it had to swell up, because it couldn’t swell down. I can smile at that now. It was something more than just indigestion. Till then I almost never felt nauseous, no matter how much I ate and drank, and I don’t think I’d ever felt anything but good as a grown-up. In the army I was cold and dirty a lot and wanted more sleep and better food, but I don’t think I ever felt anything but safe and healthy, or that anything that was bad and unusual was ever going to happen to me. Even when that sniper got that corporal named Hammer in the head when we were standing near that recon jeep and talking to each other just a foot apart. The town looked clear, that’s what he was reporting back to me, and he was sure we could move on in. It didn’t surprise me that it was him, not me. I didn’t feel it was just good luck. I felt it had to happen that way.

“Honey, let’s go back tomorrow,” I said to Claire, when I felt that old, sick taste of green apples bubble up, and later gave her some baloney after we were back in our room and had balled each other again. “I thought of something I might do in Newburgh that might turn out pretty good for us.”

I was feeling fine after the sex together and even after we were home. But just to make sure I dropped in at the doctor’s. Emil looked and found nothing. I still don’t know if he should have looked harder, or if it would have made any difference. Emil could easily believe that what I had on the island was not what I have now.

I’m not afraid of people but I’m getting more afraid of green apples. The first time in my life I remember getting sick, my mother told me I was sick because I had eaten some green apples she was keeping in a bowl to bake or cook something with. I don’t know if I’d even really eaten them. But every time I got sick that way again and felt nauseous and threw up, from mumps, from chicken pox, from a strep throat one time, she put the blame on those same green apples, and after a while I began to believe her, even though I’d eaten no green apples, because that taste of throwing up was always the same. And I believe it still. Because each time I get sick to my stomach, before the radiation or chemotherapy and during the radiation or chemotherapy and after the radiation or chemotherapy, I taste green apples. I tasted my green apples with the surgery for the double hernia. And when I got really sick that first time driving back from a weekend at Sammy’s house on Fire Island with a couple of some of Sammy’s lively friends from Time and felt my neck swell so that I couldn’t turn my head to keep driving and then went faint over the steering wheel and threw up just outside the car and began to babble to myself a little deliriously, it was about green apples I was babbling, Claire told me. And the kids in the back of the station wagon, we had just three then, said so too. We told people who wondered why we weren’t home till late that it was only an upset stomach, because that’s what we thought it was. Later we said it was angina. Then mononucleosis. Then tuberculosis of the glands. When I had my first real collapse seven years later and was in a hospital in the city and Claire told Glenda what it really was, it turned out she and Sammy both already knew or guessed. Glenda had some experience with an ex-husband with a different kind of cancer, and Sammy, as we knew, was smart, from reading Time magazine every week.

Claire had never met a family like ours, with Brooklyn accents and Jewish accents from my mom and pop, or gone out with a guy like me, who had picked her away from someone else on a double blind date and was able to do whatever he wanted to do, and whose future was in junk. I didn’t like that last idea, but never showed it until we were already married.

“There’s no future in junk, because there’s too much of it,” Winkler would say to us before his first business failure. “Louie, a surplus is always bad. The economy needs shortages. That’s what’s so good about monopolies—they keep down the supply of what people want. I buy Eastman Kodak surplus army aviation film for practically nothing that nobody wants because there’s too much, and I turn it into regular color camera film that nobody has. Everybody’s getting married and having babies, even me, and everybody wants pictures in color and can’t get enough film. Eastman Kodak is helpless. It’s their film, so they can’t knock the quality. I use the Kodak name, and they can’t come near me for price. The first order I got when I mailed out my postcards was from Eastman Kodak for four rolls of film, so they could find out what I was doing.”

He and Eastman Kodak soon found out that army aviation film, which was good at ten thousand feet, left grainy splotches on babies and brides, and then he was back driving a truck for us on days we needed him before he began making honey-glaze and chocolate-covered doughnuts for the first of the bakeries he went into next before he moved to California and bought the first of his chocolate-candy factories that didn’t work out either. For twenty years I slipped him money now and then and never told Claire. For twenty years, Claire sent them money when they needed it and never told me.

Before I got out of the army, Claire, still just a kid, talked seriously to me about reenlisting because she liked the opportunities to travel.

“You must be joshing,” I told her, back from Dresden and flat on my back in the hospital after my operations. “My name is Louie, not screwy. Travel where? Georgia? Kansas? Fort Sill, Oklahoma? You’ve got no chance.”

Claire helped at the junkshop with the telephone and business records when my big sister Ida had to be home with my mother. And she helped with my mother when Ida was in the shop. She could make her smile more than we could. The old lady was getting stranger and stranger with what the doctor told us was hardening of the arteries of the head, which was natural with age, he said, and which we now think was probably Alzheimer’s disease, which maybe we now think of as natural too, like Dennis Teemer does with cancer.

Claire is still not much good at math, and that worries me now. She can add and subtract all right, especially after you give her a hand calculator, and even divide and multiply a little bit, but she is lost with fractions, decimals, and percentages and doesn’t understand the arithmetic of markups, markdowns, and interest rates. She was good enough for the bookkeeping then, though, and that’s about all the old man wanted her to do after the time she began throwing pieces of brass and copper into the last paper bale of the day to help us finish up sooner. The old man couldn’t believe it, and his groan shook the walls and probably drove all our rats and mice and cockroaches jumping out in a panic onto McDonald Avenue.

“I’m trying to help,” she gave as an excuse. “I thought you wanted the bales to be heavier.”

I laughed out loud. “Not with brass.”

“With copper?” asked my brother, and laughed also.

“Tchotchkeleh, where did you go to get educated?” the old man asked her, scraping his dental plates, with the different noise they made when he was feeling jolly. “Copper, brass too, sells for fourteen cents a pound. Newspapers sell for bubkes, for nothing by the pound. Which is worth more? You don’t have to go to Harvard to figure that out. Here, tchotchkeleh, sit here, little darling, and write numbers and say who must pay us money and who we got to pay. Don’t worry, you’ll go dancing yet. Louie, come here. Where did you find such a little toy?” He took my arm into that grip of his and pulled me into a corner to talk to me alone, his face red, his freckles big. “Louie, listen good. If you were not my own son, and if instead she was my daughter, I would not let her go out with a tummler like you. You must not hurt her, not even a little.”

She wasn’t as easy to fool as he thought, although I probably could have done everything I wanted with her. She’d heard from a cousin nearby about the Coney Island boys and their social clubs, that they would dance you into the back room with the door and the couches and get some clothes off you fast so you couldn’t go back out without feeling ashamed, until you gave them at least some of what they wanted. When she said she wouldn’t go back there with me the first time, I just picked her up off her feet while we still were dancing and danced her around down the hall into our back room just to show her it wasn’t always true, not with me, not then. What I didn’t let her know was that I had already been there with a different girl about an hour before.

She was weak at arithmetic for sure, but I soon found out I was better off leaving business things in her hands than leaving them with any of my brothers or my partners, and I always trusted my brothers and partners. None of them ever cheated me that I know of, and I don’t think that any of them would have wanted to, because I always picked men who were generous and liked to laugh and drink as much as I did.

Claire had good legs and that beautiful bust, and she still does. She spotted before I did that nearly all the Italian builders we did business with always showed up for appointments on the site with flashy blondes and redheads for girlfriends, and she would pitch in by tinting her own hair back closer to blonde when I brought her along to something maybe more important than normal. She would load on the costume jewelry, and she could talk to them all, men and girls alike, in their own language. “I always wear this when I’m with him,” she would say with a bit of a tired sneer about the wedding ring she was sporting, and about the low V neck of the dress or suit she had chosen to wear, and all of us would laugh. “I don’t have the license with me to prove it,” she’d answer, whenever any of them asked if we were really married. I’d leave those answers to her and enjoy them, and sometimes if the deal was good and the lunch went long, we would sign into the local motel also for the rest of the afternoon and always leave before evening. “He has to get home,” was the way she would put it. “He can’t stay out all night here either.” In restaurants, nightclubs, and vacation spots she was always great at starting up conversations in the ladies’ room and scoring chicks for any of the guys with us who didn’t have any and wanted one. And she spotted before I did what I was beginning to have in mind for one knockout of a tall Australian blonde girlfriend of one of the Italian builders, a lively, swinging thing in white makeup with high heels and another great pair of boobs who couldn’t stand still for wanting to dance, even though there was no music, and who kept making broad wisecracks about the naughty toys she had in mind for the toy manufacturers she worked for.

“She’s got a roommate,” the guy said to me without moving his lips. “She’s a nurse and a knockout. They both put out. We could go out together.”

“I’ll want this cookie,” I said for her to hear.

“That’s okay too. I’ll take my chances with the nurse,” he said, and I knew I would not want to pal around with him. He couldn’t see my fun was in charming her, not in getting her as a gift.

Claire guessed it all. “No, Lew, not that,” she let me know for all time, as soon as we were in the car. “Not ever, no, not when I see it happening.”

I took the message, and she never saw that happening again, as far as I know.

And in the hospital at Fort Dix, she faced me down over Herman the German. I knew then she was right for me, after I cooled off and stopped simmering.

“Who takes care of you here?” she wanted to know, on one of her weekend visits from the city. “What do you do when you need something? Who comes?”

I’d be enchanted to demonstrate, I assured her. And then I bellowed, “Herman!” I heard the frightened footsteps of the orderly before I could roar out a second time, and then Herman my German was standing there, slight, timid, panting, nervous, in his fifties, no Aryan superman hero he, no Übermensch, not that one.

“Mein Herr Rabinowitz?” he began immediately, as I’d taught him I wanted him to. “Wie kann ich Ihnen dienen?”

“Achtung, Herman,” I ordered casually. And after he clicked his heels and snapped to attention, I gave the order he understood. “Anfangen!” He began to tell me about himself. And I turned to Claire. “So, honey, how was the trip down? And where are you staying? Same hotel?”

Her eyes boggled as the man recited, and she couldn’t believe it when she caught on. And she didn’t look pleased. I almost had to laugh at her comical expression. Herman reported his name, rank, and serial number, and then his date and place of birth, education, work experience, family background and situation, and everything else I’d told him I wanted from him each time I stood him at attention and asked him to begin telling me about himself again. And I continued chatting with Claire as though I didn’t see him and certainly didn’t care.

“So I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking. I’m not going to reenlist, so forget about that one. The old man might need me back in the junkshop for a while.”

Claire couldn’t figure out which of us to pay attention to. I kept a straight face. The room went quiet. Herman had finished and stood there blinking and sweating.

“Oh, yes,” I said, without turning, as though I had just remembered him. “Noch einmal.”

And he began again. “Mein Name ist Hermann Vogeler. Ich bin ein Soldat der deutschen Armee. Ich bin Bäcker. Ich wurde am dritten September 1892 geboren und ich bin dreiundfünfzig Jahre alt.”

“Lew, stop—it’s enough already,” Claire broke in finally, and she was angry. “Stop! Stop it!”

I didn’t like her talking to me that way, in front of Herman or anyone else. That vein in my neck and jaw started ticking. “So I think I’ll begin with the old man again,” I said right past her. “Just to have some kind of income while I try to decide what we want to do with ourselves.”

“Lew, let him go,” she ordered. “I mean it!”

“My father raised cows and sold milk,” Herman was reciting in German. “I went to school. After school I applied for college, but I was not accepted. I was not smart.”

“It’s okay,” I told her innocently, while Herman went on as obediently as the first time. “It’s what he’s trained to do. They trained him to bake. I trained him to do this. When he’s finished I’ll have him do it a few more times, so that none of us will ever forget. We can live with the folks for a while in the top-floor apartment. We’re the youngest, so they’ll make us climb stairs. I don’t think I want to take time to go to college, not if we’re married. You want to be married?”

“Lew, I want you to let him go! That’s what I want! I warn you.”

“Make me.”

“I will. Don’t push me.”

“How?”

“I’ll take my clothes off,” she decided, and I could see she meant it. “Right here. I’ll undress. It’s enough! I’ll take everything off and get on the bed on top of you, right now, if you don’t let him stop. I’ll sit on top of you, even with your stitches, even if they open. I’ll let him see everything you’ve seen, I’ll show it to him, I swear I will. Send him away.”

She knew how I felt, that slick one. When bikini bathing suits came in, I didn’t have to tell her not to wear one, and I finally gave up trying to talk to my daughters about them and just did not want to go to the beach when they were there.

She began unbuttoning. She kept unbuttoning, and she unbuttoned some more. And when I saw the white slip with the low neck and lace and the swell underneath of those really big tits that I never wanted any other man in the world ever even to take notice of, I had to back down. I could picture her unzipping and stepping out of her skirt with him still in the room, and then raising her slip, and I was afraid of that and just couldn’t stand the thought, and I had to stop Herman, and I did it as though I were angry with him instead of her, like it was all his fault, not hers, or mine, and I had to send him away.

“Okay, enough, button up.” I was in a rage with her too. “Okay, Herman. Genug. Fertig. Danke schön. Go out now! Schnell! Mach schnell! Get the hell out.”

“Danke schön, Herr Rabinowitz. Danke vielmals.” He was quivering, which embarrassed me, and backed out bowing.

“That wasn’t funny, Lew, not to me,” she was letting me know as she buttoned up.

“I wasn’t doing it to be funny.” I felt nasty too.

“Then why?”

I didn’t know why.

By the time he left, I actually had a soft spot for the poor old guy, and I went out of my way to wish him luck before they shipped him off for what they called repatriation.

By then I felt pity for him. He was weak. Even by other Germans he would be considered weak, and at his age he would never be strong. He’d reminded me already in certain ways of Sammy’s father, a sweet old quiet man with silver hair who all summer went off for a long dip in the ocean as soon as he came home from work. Sammy or his brother or sister would be sent out by Sammy’s mother to keep an eye on him and remind him to come home in time for supper. Sammy and I were both lucky. We each had an older sister to take care of the parents at the end. Sammy’s father read all the Jewish newspapers, and in his house they all liked to listen to classical music on the radio. At the Coney Island library, Sammy would put in reservations for books for him that had been translated into Yiddish, novels mostly, and mostly by Russians. He was friendly. My father was not. My folks hardly read at all. I never could find the time. At the beginning when Sammy tried writing short stories and funny articles to sell to magazines, he tried them out on me. I never knew what to say, and I’m glad he stopped using me.

Sammy had that old picture of his father in uniform from the First World War. He was a funny-looking young guy, like all those soldiers then, in a helmet that looked too big for his small head, and with a gas mask and a canteen on his belt. Old Jacob Singer had come to this country to get away from the armies over there, and here he was back in one. His eyes were kind and smiling and they looked into yours. Sammy doesn’t always meet your eye. When we were younger and started with the kissing games, we had to tell him to look right at the girl he was holding and hugging, instead of off to the side. Sammy at sixty-eight is already older than his father was when he died. I already know I’m not going to live as long as mine did.

Sammy and I lived on different blocks and our parents never met. Except for relatives who lived somewhere else and came on summer weekends for a day at the beach, none of us ever invited other families in for dinner or lunch.

My old man was not especially friendly to anyone outside the family, and friends like Sammy and Winkler were not all that comfortable when they came to my house and he was home. I was the favorite he had in mind to run the business when he grew too old and see to it that there was always a livelihood for him and for all of the brothers and sisters and their children who needed it and couldn’t find anything else. The Rabinowitzes were close. Always I was the best outside man there too, the talker, the schmeichler, the salesman, the schmoozer, the easygoing guy who would go to one old building after another to butter up some poor wretch of a janitor who was shoveling coal into a cellar furnace or rolling out garbage cans and ask him politely if he was the “superintendent” or the “manager.” I wanted to talk to the “gentleman” who was in charge and would hint at all the ways we could help each other. I would leave him a business card Winkler had made up for me cheap through a printer he knew, and try to establish a contact with him that could lead to our getting the old pipes and the old plumbing fixtures like sinks and toilet bowls and bathtubs and the broken steam and hot-water boilers in the house, sometimes even before they were broken. We knew people who could fix anything. If it couldn’t be fixed, we could sell it for junk. There would always be junk, my father would promise us like an optimist, while Claire and I would try not to smile, and always someone to pay you to take it and pay you to sell it. He made sure to talk to both of us when he talked about money after I was back. Now that I was not a child, he would raise me to sixty dollars a week, almost double. And to sixty-five a week after we were married. And of course we could have the top-floor apartment until we could afford something of our own.

“Listen, Morris, listen to me good,” I told him when he finished. I had almost four thousand in the bank from my gambling and army pay. “I will do better for you. And sometime you will do better for me. I will give you a year free. But after one year, I will decide my salary. And I will be the one to say where, when, and how I want to work.”

“Free?”

That was okay with him. From that came the move after a while into the old mousetrap factory in Orange Valley, New York, and the idea of selling used building materials and plumbing fixtures and boilers and hot-water heaters in a place that didn’t have much and needed things in a hurry.

Claire was a better driver than any of us—she’d come from upstate and had a license at sixteen—and she drove the truck back and forth into Brooklyn when I was too busy. She was tough and she was smart and could talk fresh when she had to, and she knew how to use her good looks with cops and filling station garages to get help when anything went wrong, without promising anything or putting herself in trouble. I remember the first ad for the local newspaper Sammy helped write that we still laugh over. WE CUT PIPE TO SKETCH.

“What’s it mean?” he asked.

“What it says,” I told him.

That line brought in more business of all kinds up here than anybody but me would have thought.

From that came the lumberyard and then the plumbing supply company, with the ten-thousand-dollar loan from my father, at good interest. He was worried about his old age, he said. He had a shaking in his head from a small stroke he’d already been through that nobody ever talked about but him.

“Louie, talk to me, tell me good,” he would ask me. “Does it look like my head shakes a little, and the hand?”

“No, Pop, no more than mine.”

I remember that when my mother’s mind was all but gone, she still wanted her hair combed and whitened with rinse and the hairs tweezed from her face. I know that feeling now of wanting to look your best. And for almost thirty years now I try to keep out of sight until I look fine and healthy again.

“You’re a good boy, Louie,” he said with a kidding disgust. “You’re a liar, like always, but I like you anyway.”

We rented a house in our new community and had two kids, then bought a house and had a third, and then I built a house to sell and built some more, one at a time, with partners on the first few, and they did sell, for profit. Profit was always the motive. I found myself lunching and drinking with people who hunted and voted Republican, mainly, and who flew the flag on national holidays and felt they were serving the country by doing that. They put out yellow ribbons each time the White House went to war and acted like military heroes who were fighting it. Why yellow, I would jolly them, the national color of cowardice? But they had a volunteer fire department that was always on the spot and an emergency ambulance service I had to use the second time I got nauseous suddenly and lost all my strength and Claire panicked and rushed me into the hospital. That time they transferred me back to the hospital in Manhattan with Dennis Teemer, who fixed me up again and sent me home when I was back to normal. I joined the American Legion when we first moved up here, to make some friends and have a place to go. They taught me to hunt, and I liked doing that and liked the people I went with, felt beautiful when I hit. They cheered me whenever I brought down a goose and one time a deer. They had to gut it for me. I couldn’t even watch. “It’s the Christian thing to do,” I’d say, and we’d all laugh. When I took my first son out, it was always with other people so there’d be someone to do that for us. He wasn’t crazy about hunting and soon I stopped going too.

Next we got the golf club in a town nearby. I made more friends, a lot from the city who moved up out here to the distant suburbs, and we had different places to go and ate and drank with other married couples.

I learned more about banks, and bankers too. At the beginning they let us know, even the women who were tellers, that they didn’t much like having to serve customers with names like Rabinowitz. That changed, I admit. But I didn’t. They got used to me and a lot of others, as the area kept growing. They thought more of me when I borrowed than when I put money in. When I put money in I was only another hardworking guy struggling with a small business. When I was big enough to borrow, I turned into Mr. Rabinowitz, then Lew to the officers, to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Hardy—a client, of means and net worth—and I would bring them as guests to my golf club as soon as I got in and introduce them as Ed Clinton and Harry Hardy, my bankers, and they were so tickled they blushed. I found out about bankruptcies. I couldn’t believe those laws the first time I found myself being screwed by them.

I found out about Chapter 11 from a builder named Hanson and his lawyer, and they found out about me. When they left his house at the start of a business day, I was out of my car while they were still on the porch.

“Lew?” Hanson was so surprised he actually smiled, until he saw I didn’t. He was a tall man and he had his hair cut close to the ears in the kind of haircut we had to wear in the army, and I didn’t like it even then. The one with him was a stranger. “How are you?”

“Hanson, you owe me forty-two hundred dollars,” I said right off. “For lumber and shingles and toilet and kitchen fixtures and pipes. I’ve sent you bills and talked to you on the telephone, and now I’m telling you to your face I want it today, this morning. Now. I’m here to collect.”

“Lew, this is my new lawyer. This one is Rabinowitz.”

“Ah, yes,” said the new lawyer, with the kind of a smile you always see on lawyers that makes them look like hypocrites you want to strangle on the spot. “My client is in Chapter 11, Mr. Rabinowitz. I think you know that.”

“Tell your client—sir, what is your name? I don’t think he gave it.”

“Brewster. Leonard Brewster.”

“Please advise your client, Brewster, that Chapter 11 is for him and his lawyers, and for the court and maybe for the other people he owes. It’s not for me. It’s not for Rabinowitz. Hanson, we made a bargain, you and me. You took my material, you used it, you didn’t complain about the delivery or quality. Now you must pay for it. That’s the way I work. Listen to me good. I want my money.”

“You can’t collect it, Mr. Rabinowitz,” said Brewster, “except through the court. Let me explain.”

“Hanson, I can collect it.”

“Lew—” Hanson began.

“Explain to your lawyer that I can collect it. I don’t have time for court. I can collect it through the pores of your skin if I have to, one drop at a time, if you make me. You’re keeping your house? Not with my forty-two hundred. It will go out from under you brick by brick. Are you listening good?”

“Lenny, let me talk to you inside.”

When they came out, Brewster spoke with his eyes down.

“You’ll have to take it in cash,” he told me under his breath. “We can’t leave a record.”

“I think I can do that.”

I trusted banks a little better now, but not that much, and I put the money in a safe-deposit box, because I didn’t ever want to have to trust my accountant either. Claire looked faint when I said where I’d been.

“You didn’t know they would pay.”

“If I didn’t know, I would not have gone. I don’t waste time. Don’t ask me how I know. People do what I want them to. Haven’t you noticed? Didn’t you? Next—what about Mehlman, that gonif, as long as this is pay-up day?”

“The same story.”

“Call him. I’ll talk to him too.”

“How much should I ask him for?”

“How much is six times seven?”

“Don’t confuse me. Does he still get the discount?”

“Would you know how to figure it?”

“Does he pay interest or not? That’s all I want from you! Don’t put me back in school again.”

Claire didn’t care for deadbeats and chiselers either, no matter what their religion, any more than I did back in the days when we were working very hard and she would help out on the phone when the lumberyard was still small and she wasn’t busy getting the kids off to school or rushing home to be there when they got back. Later on, when she had more time and we had more money, she had a piece of an art gallery up here that wasn’t supposed to make money and didn’t, and after that even a half share of an art school in Lucca in Italy I bought her to help give her something else to think about when there wasn’t always that much good anymore to think about here. When Mehlman called back, I grabbed the phone from her. She was too polite, like we were the ones who were supposed to apologize.

“Mehlman, you are a liar,” I began right in, without even knowing what he’d been saying. “Listen to me good. If you force me to prove it you will hang yourself, because you’ll have nowhere left to turn and no lies left to tell, and I will make you ashamed. Mehlman, I know you are a very religious man, so I’ll put the matter to you in religious terms. If I don’t have the money in my hands by Thursday noon, this shabbos you will crawl to shul on your knees, and everyone in the temple will know that Rabinowitz broke your legs because he says you are a liar and a cheat.”

I didn’t know if Mehlman was lying or not. But the money was mine, and I got it.

Of course, later on I had a much more lenient view of Chapter 11 when I finally had to go into bankruptcy myself, but none of the creditors were people. They were only corporations. People were proud of me and clapped me on the back.

By then I was older and had this ailment slowing me down. I had less pep and not much reason for keeping up with newcomers who were younger and hungrier and willing to work as hard as we used to want to. I would have liked to hold on to the lumberyard and the plumbing business to pass on to the children if they wanted to keep it or sell if they didn’t. We both felt the cost was too high and it was not worth the risk.

By then the cat was out of the bag. My disease was an open secret in the family. The children knew but didn’t know what to make of it, and three of them weren’t so small anymore. For a while they must have thought I didn’t know. It was a couple of days before even Claire could look me in the eye and tell me what I already knew and did not want her to find out, that I had this disease called Hodgkin’s disease, and that it was serious. I didn’t know how she would take it. I didn’t know how I could take it, having her see me ailing and weak.

I’ve lasted longer than anyone thought I would. I count. I divide my life into seven-year stretches since.

“You listen to me now,” I told her that first week in the hospital up here. “I don’t want anyone to know.”

“You think I do?”

“We’ll make something up.”

By the time we let the business go and stuck only to our land and building, it was out of the bag everywhere and we could finally stop pretending to everyone that I had angina pectoris, which often laid me up and made me want to vomit, or relapsing mononucleosis, which did the same, or a nuisance of a minor inflammation I thought up and decided to call tuberculosis of the small glands that left those small scars and blue burn marks on the neck and lips and chest when treated. My muscles came back fast, and so did my appetite. Between spells I kept myself overweight just in case, and I still looked large.

“Okay, Emil, no more kid stuff,” I’d said to my doctor in the hospital after the tests, when I saw his laugh was false. He was swallowing a lot and clearing his throat. If I shook his hand I knew it would be limp. “Listen to me good, Emil. It wasn’t green apples like I told you, because I don’t eat green apples, and I don’t even know what they taste like anymore. My neck is swollen and hurts. If it’s not an allergy, and you won’t say it was food poisoning, then it’s got to be something else, doesn’t it?”

“Hodgkin’s disease,” said Emil, and that’s the last time in twenty-eight years anyone spoke of it to me by name. “It’s what it’s called,” Emil added.

“Cancer?” It was hard for me to speak that word too. “It’s what we’re all afraid of.”

“It’s a form of that.”

“I was afraid it was leukemia.”

“No, it’s not leukemia.”

“I don’t know the symptoms, but I was afraid it was that. Emil, I don’t want to hear it, but I guess I have to. How much time do I have? No lies, Emil, not yet.”

Emil looked more relaxed. “Maybe a lot. I don’t want to guess. A lot depends on the biology of the individual.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I told him.

“They’re your cells, Lew. We can’t always tell how they’re going to behave. A lot depends on you. How much can you take? How strong is your resistance?”

I’d been holding him by the forearm without realizing it, and I squeezed good-naturedly until he turned a little pale. I laughed a little when I set him free. I was still very strong. “The best you’ll ever meet, Emil.”

“Then, Lew, you might be okay for a long, long while yet. And feel good most of the time.”

“I think that’s what I’m going to do,” I informed him, as though making a business decision. “Now, don’t tell Claire. I don’t want her to know what it is.”

“She knows, Lew. You’re both adults. She didn’t want you to know.”

“Then don’t tell her you told me. I want to watch how she lies.”

“Lew, will you grow up? This thing is no joke.”

“Don’t I know it?”

Emil took off his glasses. “Lew, there’s a man in New York I want you to see. His name is Teemer, Dennis Teemer. You’ll go into his hospital there. He knows more about this than anybody here.”

“I won’t want an ambulance.”

We went down by limo, in a pearl-gray stretch limousine with black windows that allowed us to see out but nobody to see in, with me stretched out in back in a space big enough to hold a coffin, maybe two.

“We sometimes use it for that,” said the driver, who’d told us he was from Venice and the brother of a gondolier there. “The seats go flat and the back opens.”

Claire left him a very big tip. We always tip big, but this time it was for luck.

Teemer had his office on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum and a waiting room of quiet patients. Down the block on the way uptown to his hospital was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home—a “home,” they called it—and I made jokes to myself about the convenient location. Now when I hear about those big society parties they have at the museum and places like that, I get the feeling I’m upside down in a world that’s turned topsy-turvy. There are big new buildings in the city that I don’t even recognize. There are new multimillionaires where there used to be Rockefellers and J. P. Morgans, and I don’t know where they came from or what they’re doing.

After that first time in Dr. Teemer’s office, I never let Claire walk inside there with me again. She would cross into the museum and I would meet her when I was finished and we’d look at pictures if she still wanted to and then go off for lunch somewhere and go home. In that waiting room there is no one ever laughing, and I am never in a mood myself to try to get anything jolly going there. Teemer himself is still a skinny little guy with a gloomy manner, and when he does cheer me up, he does it in a way that always leaves me cranky.

“You might be interested to know, Mr. Rabinowitz,” he began when we met, “that we no longer think of it as incurable.”

All at once I felt very much better. “I’ll strangle Emil. He didn’t tell me that.”

“He doesn’t always know.”

“So there is a cure? Huh?”

Teemer shook his head, and my breath caught. “No, I wouldn’t put it that way. We don’t think of it as a cure.”

Now I felt I might sock him. “I’m listening good, Dr. Teemer. The disease is now curable, but you don’t have a cure?”

“It’s a matter of vocabulary,” he went on. “We have treatments.” He was trying his hardest, maybe too hard, to be nice. “And the treatments usually work. They will work with you, but we don’t know how well. Or how long. We can’t really cure it. We can suppress it. That’s not the same as a cure. We never feel sure we’ve gotten rid of it for good, because the genesis of the disease, the origin, is always in yourself.”

“For how long can you suppress it?”

“For very long when the treatments are effective. There are problems, but we’ll handle them. In the periods of remission you should feel perfectly normal. When the symptoms come back, we will treat it some more.”

“You’re sure they’ll come back?”

“They mostly seem to.”

It was not the asbestos I’d worked with that brought it on. He could almost be positive about that, if anyone could be sure of anything when it came to one’s genes, which were always selfish, he said, and oblivious too.

“They won’t do what I want?” I almost laughed, nervously. “They’re mine and they don’t care about me?”

“They don’t know about you, Mr. Rabinowitz.” He smiled just a bit. “It might be triggered by any number of things. Tobacco, radiation.”

“From what?”

“Radium, electricity, uranium, maybe even tritium.”

“What’s tritium?”

“A radioactive gas that comes from heavy water. You may even have some on your wristwatch or bedroom clock.”

“Radiation causes it and radiation cures it—excuse me, suppresses it?” I said, making my joke.

“And chemicals too,” he said. “Or—I almost hate to say this, some people don’t like hearing it—it might be your natural biological destiny, nothing more sinister than that.”

“Natural? You’d call that natural?”

“In the world of nature, Mr. Rabinowitz, all diseases are natural.” It made sense to me at the time, but I didn’t like hearing it. “I’ve depressed you enough. Now let me help. You will be going into the hospital. You’ve got transportation? Has your wife made plans to stay?”

She stayed at a hotel that first time, the next, seven years later, when we both thought she was losing me, with Sammy and Glenda, because she needed someone to talk to. This last time there was no Glenda, so she stayed at a hotel again with my older daughter, but they ate with Sammy and he came every day. Teemer had been Glenda’s doctor too.

I was better in three days and home in five. But the day I knew I’d survive I felt very bad too, because then I knew I was going to die.

I’d always known I was going to die. But then I knew I was going to die. The night that sank in, I woke up in the morning with my eyes wet, and one of the night nurses noticed but didn’t say anything, and I never told anyone but Claire. We were going home after my breakfast.

“Last night I shed a tear,” I admitted.

“You think I didn’t?”

That was just over twenty-eight years ago, and for most of the first seven I felt as good as I had ever felt before. I couldn’t believe how fine I felt and I would come to believe it was gone forever. When I didn’t feel fine I went into the city for Teemer once a week for half a day. When I did feel good, I played golf or cards with Emil maybe once a week and kept in touch with him that way. When the diaphragm slipped and Claire found herself pregnant again, we decided against the abortion without even saying so and had our little Michael, I felt so good. It’s a way we showed confidence. We named him after my father. Mikey, we called him, and still do when we’re kidding around. I felt so vibrant I could have had a hundred more. His Jewish name is Moishe, which was the Jewish name of my father. By then the old man had passed away too, and we could use his name without seeming to wish to put a curse on him while he was still alive. We Jews from the east don’t name kids after parents who are still alive. But now I worry about Michael, little Mikey, because apart from money, I don’t know what else I’m leaving him in the way of genes and his “natural biological destiny,” and the other kids too, and maybe even my grandchildren. Those fucking genes. They’re mine and won’t listen to me? I can’t believe that.

I don’t really take to Teemer, but I’m not afraid of him or his diseases anymore, and when Sammy needed a specialist like him for Glenda, I recommended him over the one they already had, and he’s the one they stuck with for the little time it took. It’s those green apples I’m more afraid of now, all the time, those green apples in my mother’s loony theory that green apples were what made people sick. Because more than anything else now, I’m afraid of nausea. I am sick of feeling nauseous.

“That’s a good one, Lew,” Sammy complimented me, when he was up here the last time.

Then I got the joke.

Sammy wears his hair combed back and parted on the side, and it’s silver and thinning too, like I remember his father’s. Sammy doesn’t have much to do since his wife died, and then later he was forced out of his work at his Time magazine and into retirement, so he comes up here a lot. I don’t want him in the hospital up here, but he comes in anyway sometimes, with Claire, and we bullshit until he sees I’ve had enough. We talk about the good old days in Coney Island, and now they do seem good, about Luna Park and Steeplechase and the big old RKO Tilyou movie theater, and how they’ve all gone away, disappeared, in d’rerd, as my father and mother used to say, in the earth, underground. He comes up by bus and, when he doesn’t sleep over, goes back at night by bus to the bus terminal, that unreal city, he calls it, and then into the modern high-rise apartment he took in a building with everything, including some knockout models and call girls, when he found himself living alone in empty space he no longer wanted. Sammy still doesn’t know what to do with himself, and we don’t know what to do to help. He doesn’t seem interested yet in settling in with someone else, although he talks about wanting to. My oldest daughter has introduced him to some of her unmarried lady friends and so has Glenda’s oldest daughter, but nothing happened. They always find each other only “nice” and that’s all. Claire’s unattached women friends are too old. We decide that without even having to say it. He still likes to get laid now and then, and does, he tries to hint, when I kid about it. Sammy and I can chuckle now when he tells of the times he came in his pants—I never had to—and the first few times he finally got up the nerve to get girls to jerk him off: girls went for him, but he didn’t know what to do with them. And the night his pocket was picked in the bus terminal and he found himself with no money and no wallet, not even carfare to get home, and was arrested and locked up in the police station there. I was the person he telephoned. I told off the cop after I vouched for Sammy and demanded the sergeant, I told off the sergeant and asked for the man in charge, and I told off the captain, McMahon, and said I would bring the wrath of the American Legion and National Guard and Pentagon down upon him, and the full force of me, former Sergeant Lewis Rabinowitz of the famed Army First Division, if he didn’t show some sense and give him the cab fare to get him home. Sammy still can’t get over how good I could be at things like that.

“He was lying down, that Captain McMahon,” Sammy swore, “on a bed in a cell in the back of that police station that was furnished like a bedroom, and he looked sick. And the cell next to that one was set up with desks and toys like a little classroom, a kindergarten, but cops with ashtrays were playing cards with each other. There were children’s mobiles hanging over them in a prison cell, and one was a mobile of a black-and-white cow jumping over the moon, and they were luminescent, like they reflected light and would shine in the dark,” Sammy explained, “like those old radium watches we all used to wear before we found out they were dangerous. There was another man there, named McBride, who was dusting and moving things around, and he’s the one who lent me the money to get home. When I mailed him a check to pay him back, he even sent me a thank-you note. How’s that one?”

When the kid, their Michael, flipped out with his drugs and disappeared upstate about a year before he hanged himself, I did the same thing on the telephone, although I would have driven right up to Albany if I had to, but I didn’t have to. I called the governor’s office, the head of the National Guard, and the headquarters of the state police. It was personal, I knew, but this was Sergeant Rabinowitz, formerly of the famed First Division in Europe, the Big Red 1, and it was a matter of life and death. They found him in a hospital in Binghamton and had him transferred in a government car to a hospital in the city at state expense. Sammy never got over how good I could be at something like that one too.

“I’ve made jokes that were funnier,” I told him this time, when he pointed out the one I’d just made about getting sick of feeling nauseous. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“And the word is nauseated,” he said to me.

“What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The word is nauseated, not nauseous,” he explained. “People don’t get nauseous. They get nauseated.”

I liked it better my way.

“Sammy, don’t you be a prick,” I told him. “You can get nauseated. I’ll get nauseous, if I want to. Just think, Sammy. It wasn’t so long ago that I nabbed that kid in the city with the stolen pocketbook. I picked him right up, turned him around in my hands in midair, and slammed him down on the hood of a car just hard enough to let him know I was Lew Rabinowitz. ‘Move and I’ll break your back,’ I warned him, and held him there until the cops came. Who would believe it, looking at me now? Now I feel like I couldn’t lift a pound of butter.”

My weight is not coming back fast enough, and Teemer and Emil are thinking of trying something new. My appetite isn’t back to normal either. Mostly I have none, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe this time there’s something new going on I don’t know about yet. Sammy may be ahead of all of us, because he looks worried about me, but he doesn’t say. What he does say, with his small smile, is this:

“If you’re that weak, Lew, I might be willing to take you on at arm wrestling now.”

“I’d still beat you,” I came back at him. That made me laugh. “And I’d beat you at boxing too, in case you ever want to try that one with me again.”

He laughs too and we eat the rest of our tuna sandwiches. But I know I look thin. My appetite has just not come rushing back like after the other times, and now I seem to be beginning to know—this has not happened to me before—this time I seem to be beginning to know that this time, I may be getting ready to die.

I don’t tell Claire.

I say nothing to Sammy.

I’m well into my sixties and we’re into the nineties, and this time I’m beginning to feel, like my father felt when he got old, and his brother too, that this time things are beginning to come to an end.