TUESDAY
Today was the 1st day we were apart and even though I know he won’t be home until after practice I keep going to the window and looking out for him. I’m afraid something will happen to him in the city but I don’t want to telephone the school because I don’t want him to see how much I worry about him.
Why I’m writing in my notebook again: 1. To help myself imagine that he’s here with me. 2. To record this precious period of my life in writing.
I’ve been with him for 3 weeks and 6 days now and he never mentions my going anywhere else. We’re together all the time: in the city, at the school, in the office, and in his car. I stayed here today because he said he might have time to stop at the Home.
What I feel: that more has happened to me during these few weeks than in my entire life up until now! Charlie can tell how happy I am. He always smiles at me and roughs up my hair and this is what he says: When you’re in love, Danny, the whole world is Jewish!
A question: Is Charlie thinking about me while he’s away, and if he is and he misses being with me the way I miss being with him, when he comes back will he say so, or will he be angry because I’ve made him become attached to me and will this make him give me back to Mr. Gitelman?
Mrs. Mittleman came up before and brought me cookies and a glass of milk. She asked me to call her Shirley but I won’t. She saw my notebook and she told me not to throw away education. There was a sign in her school when she was a girl which said
AN EDUCATION ENABLES YOU TO EARN MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR.
While she kept talking I worked on my memorizing. Two days ago I found the saying in PIRKAY AVOS that our motto comes from but guess what? The motto part isn’t even from Maimonides! He was quoting somebody else’s saying! Here’s the way the whole thing really goes:
AS THE SAGES USED TO SAY, “GIVE ME FRIENDSHIP OR GIVE ME DEATH.” AND IF A PERSON CANNOT EASILY FIND A FRIEND HE MUST STRIVE WITH ALL HIS HEART TO DO SO, EVEN IF HE HAS TO GO SO FAR AS TO COMPEL THE PERSON TO LOVE HIM, EVEN IF HE HAS TO BUY HIS LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.
Mrs. Mittleman looked out the window and said she was worried about Charlie being knifed or mugged. I told her I was doing special work for him and needed to be left alone.
Every morning at breakfast Mr. Mittleman pinches my arm to see if I’m fattening up.
Here are some of the things Charlie does in the city:
1. He collects rents for Mr. Mittleman. Some of the rents are his but most of them belong to Mr. Mittleman and buildings he manages. Charlie gets extra money for the stores and apartments in the black and Puerto Rican sections. He calls this “combat pay.”
2. He checks to see that the buildings are running right and he calls plumbers and electricians to fix things. Sometimes he fixes things himself and shows the supers what to do.
3. Every morning at 9:30 he calls his stockbroker. He says stocks are good because they’re liquid. Other things he keeps his money in are land, bank accounts, Treasury notes, and options. He buys and sells options on land and stocks. He says he learned that from Mr. Mittleman. It’s a way to spread your money.
4. We look at buildings and vacant lots and houses Charlie is thinking of buying, but when he asks me if I like a house I don’t know what to say because I wonder if he’s thinking of buying it for us now, the way he wanted to do for him and Sol.
5. He talks a lot about Sol with me and says that Sol never works at all and never did, as far as he knows. He told me that Sol’s father was a very wealthy Jew from upstate New York who owned a company that made uniforms for athletic teams, and that Sol saved sample uniforms of old teams that are gone like the Brooklyn Robins and the Boston Pilgrims and St. Louis Browns and original Baltimore Orioles. Once a year in the spring Sol would bring his uniforms to the Home in a trunk, along with famous souvenirs of signed bats and gloves and balls.
The reason Charlie’s worried about Sol’s money is because Sol’s father sold the uniform business when Sol was a young man and Charlie thinks that maybe most of the money Sol got then is used up now. He told me that Sol’s father was a founder of the Home. He says people always enjoyed doing things for Sol. He says that’s the most important thing: to make other people want to please you.
He talks to me like that all the time, making sure I learn things, and here are some of the things he taught me so far:
1. The 3 most important things to consider in buying any piece of property are 1. location, 2. location, and 3. location.
2. Always use other people’s money! You can buy things with small percentages and when you sell you get the whole profit after you pay back the loan. He calls this LEVERAGE. In Murray’s house Dov always wants him to crack walnuts in his fingers and when Charlie does Dov shouts “That’s leverage!” and it makes Charlie laugh.
Will Charlie really speak with Dr. Fogel? What will Dr. Fogel feel when he sees him after all these years? If Dr. Fogel finds out how Charlie found out about the land will they get together and try to make me go back?
I’m only afraid of that when he’s not with me but I’m not afraid of Murray anymore. Now that he thinks I’m so smart the way he was he tells everybody in the school I’m a special exchange student from the orphanage he grew up in. Also because he really loves Charlie! When Charlie was 1st put into the Home Murray was older and used to rock him to sleep in his arms every night.
I watched practice with Murray yesterday and he even put his arm around me. I told him how I thought he looked the same as he did when he was a boy in the photos except thinner and he told me about the heart attack he had 4 years ago and how he’s lost 35 pounds. He told me about Charlie visiting him in the hospital every day and what Charlie said to him, through the oxygen tent: “Get well for yourself and nobody else.” Charlie told him that people forget very quickly and Murray said he was right. Charlie said that if Murray died, Anita would remarry, his kids would grow up and have lives of their own, and for everybody else he would only be a memory and “a conversation piece.”
This is how Murray runs his school: The students march from room to room, even the ones who are 18 years old. If you don’t wear a school uniform you get sent home. Smoking, hand holding, and talking are not allowed in the halls. The students have to stand whenever an adult enters a room. All adults are called Mr. Mrs. Sir or Ma’am. Every student must practice a musical instrument 1 hour a day. Every student must study either Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. Every student must play on an athletic team. Murray is allowed to enter a classroom at any time and test students or check homework.
If a student doesn’t like the way he’s treated he can have a 15 minute interview with Murray, but Murray’s decision is final, and there are things he won’t discuss. If students or parents are displeased, they can leave the school.
What surprised me: How happy the students seem to be!
Also: The girls have to keep their arms covered at all times, and the men teachers have to wear jackets and ties.
Murray runs the school this way because he says democracy isn’t everything. He believes that True Freedom comes from developing resources and skills in yourself that you can use for the rest of your life!
What Charlie says: Murray’s happy because he’s the boss.
When they were boys Murray was allowed out of the Home like me to go to a regular public school because he was so smart but Charlie wasn’t. They had teachers come to the Home the way we do for regular subjects, but going to a public school gives you a better chance to get into college.
Every time I ask Charlie if he wants me to help him learn to read he ignores me. In the school library I read about what Charlie has. It’s called DYSLEXIA and it comes because the hemispheres of the brain didn’t establish the right “dominance” when you were young. I read about ways it can be cured with hormones and vitamins and training.
Some dyslexiacs read from right to left, but it doesn’t make them Jews. I asked Charlie and he told me that things switch on him sometimes.
Words I thought of that would be fun if I had mirror vision like him: LIVE would be EVIL. LIVED is DEVIL. WAS is SAW. PAL is LAP.
A Palindrome is a sentence or word that’s the same backward as forward, like MADAM I’M ADAM or DEIFIED.
I told Charlie I thought it would be exciting to be that way so that things could turn inside out at any moment of your life and you might discover something new, but he wouldn’t talk about it.
LATER
It’s pitch black out but he’s still not home. I already had some supper with Mr. and Mrs. Mittleman but I didn’t eat much. Mrs. Mittleman said that Charlie might be late because he was having a date with a woman. She said it was normal for a grown man to want to be alone with a woman and she looked at me when she said it but I didn’t show anything. I wondered if Charlie would visit Dr. Fogel in his home to talk about buying his land.
In the afternoon before supper I turned on the shower so they wouldn’t hear me and I practiced my Haftorah and Maftir. Then I got into bed and played with myself. I have as much hair as some of the players on the team at Charlie’s school. I do exercises and run with them sometimes but I don’t get into a uniform. I’m better coordinated than I used to think I was. I thought of how Charlie and Murray were laughing 3 nights ago because Murray recited what the Director used to lecture to them at their Assemblies. This is what he said: MASTURBATION SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO GET OUT OF HAND.
We eat at Murray’s house at least one night every week, and Murray and Charlie like to argue with each other while Anita watches. Charlie says he’s worried about Sol because nobody’s heard from him, but Murray says he’s really worried about himself. He says that’s the reason Charlie took me in—because he wants somebody to take care of him when he gets old the way he wants to take care of Sol because Sol took care of him when he was a boy! Murray says that he went through a crisis also when he was getting close to 40 about growing old, but Charlie says it has nothing to do with Murray’s theories.
After I played with myself I slept for a while and while I was sleeping I dreamt that I was Charlie. When I woke up I couldn’t tell at first if I was Danny Ginsberg who had just dreamed that he was Charlie or if I was now Charlie dreaming that I was Danny Ginsberg.
WEDNESDAY
It’s nighttime now and the room is hushed with quiet. Charlie’s at his desk, hunched over and adding things up, and I’m sitting in his black chair with my shirt off so I can feel the soft leather against my back. I have my feet up and my socks off.
I was sleeping when he got home last night but he woke me up to tell me he stopped at the Home. He said the place looked so empty it scared him and that he only stayed a few minutes and didn’t speak to the Director or try to see Dr. Fogel. He said that as soon as he saw the way the Home is now he decided not to save it, “Let’s just work on saving you, OK?”
I acted as if I was drowsy from being woken up and I said, “Save the Home!”
“But there are no more orphans,” he said. “What do you want to do—import them?”
I told him that was a pretty good idea. There are poor Jews in other places in the world where they don’t have so much birth control. There are Jews in India and China and Poland and Russia and even in Egypt and Syria. I told him that when men and women soldiers in Israel were killed by Arabs and their children made into orphans we could bring them here until they reached the age when they could go back. That way we could save the state of Israel the expense of raising them and training them.
He scratched his head and laughed at the way my brain works and said it would be cheaper to take in black and Puerto Rican kids from the city and teach them to be Jews but I said Jews weren’t allowed to proselytize.
I was glad I didn’t try to force him to promise me anything more because it might have made the shock of seeing the Home worse. He was relaxed today. We walked in my old neighborhood where I first saw him and I told him about my mother and he told me about his. He said he remembers his mother as being the most beautiful woman he ever saw. He remembers her when she was almost gone and weighed less than 70 pounds, but he said her face still glowed and that she had a look in her eyes which he said would last him forever.
I told him that my mother was very beautiful too, with sandy-blond hair like mine and hazel eyes and that after my father died people told me she wasn’t the same as she was before and that a doctor told her it’s better if we don’t see each other very often. I said she had a lot of money and lived in an enormous old house with a lookout room on the roof like a crow’s nest on a ship from where you can see for miles and miles.
Neither of us remembered our fathers.
He took me to the building where Sol lived with his brother. Sol’s brother died a long time ago and was a bachelor too. It was only 2 stories high and I was surprised that it was so plain. It had fire escapes on the front side and big red brick stoops where you could sit on either side of the door. Charlie said Sol was gone so much he only needed it as a place to sleep in and store his things. I asked him where Sol lived now and Charlie said that was why he was worried. He doesn’t know! He spoke to the super of the building and the super took us down to the basement and showed us a bin with Sol’s trunks and dressers in it, but Sol’s apartment was rented to somebody else.
Charlie told me the story of how when he was a young boy he snuck out of the Home 1 time after Sol brought them back from a game and followed Sol all the way to this house. He said he remembered seeing Sol on the street, teasing young children who were riding tricycles in a group by not letting them get by him. He could tell the children loved to have Sol tease them. He said the children went into Sol’s apartment and he watched through the window while Sol gave them graham crackers and milk. He said he was surprised the place was so small and didn’t have any decorations on the walls.
He laughed, remembering how angry Sol was when he spotted him peering in over the windowsill. He remembered feeling that Sol would have whipped him with a strap if he could have! Sol’s brother took Charlie back to the Home in a taxi and they never mentioned the incident again.
Charlie said he would have another surprise trip for me in a few days!
Here are some other things Charlie does: He takes listings on new houses. He calls banks and insurance companies and mortgage brokers to get money for himself and other people. In the evenings he shows houses and telephones people. He doesn’t have a realtor’s license because he’s afraid to take the test, so Mrs. Mittleman does all his paper work.
In the mornings sometimes we go over the birth and obituary columns in the local papers. People with more children need bigger homes. Widows and widowers want to move to smaller homes.
In the afternoon he coaches the team. They play 6 man football in a league with 7 other private schools and they’ve won the championship every year since Charlie was coach.
Every night Mr. Mittleman shows his movies and they talk business after.
I like to drive into the city with Charlie when the light is just beginning before most people wake up. The city looks beautiful from the bridge. What I think about is how they get enough food into it every day, day after day, to feed 8 million people plus commuters.
I said this to Charlie this morning and he told me he thinks about the exact same thing sometimes and that his conclusion is that it proves the city isn’t dying the way people say it is. He said if he still had his own family he would bring his children up in the city.
Do you think about your daughter a lot? I asked.
No, he said.
But don’t you think about how she keeps changing and you’re not there to see the changes?
He said he still sees her sometimes if he’s in her neighborhood and that he used to wonder about himself because he didn’t miss her, but he says he stopped wondering a few years ago. He sends money to his ex-wife every month and he’ll pay for college if Sandy goes there.
The only thing I think about sometimes, he said, is that after she gets away from home and gets married and has a family, that maybe then we’ll be able to be pretty good friends. He asked me if I thought that sounded funny and I said it didn’t. He said he sees the scene in his head sometimes, of him visiting her and her husband and her children and of them having nice evenings together.
Coming home he told me that Dr. Fogel used to make fun of him and ask him when he was going to learn to read. Who do you think you are—Rabbi Akiba? Dr. Fogel would say. He used to send him out of the classroom and tell him to return when he was 40 years old.
What I imagined Dr. Fogel saying to him at the Home yesterday if Charlie walked into his classroom: GO HOME. YOU’RE 17 MONTHS EARLY!
Charlie said a boy at the Home told him Dr. Fogel hasn’t been there for 4 weeks!
I see Charlie yawning. A good place to stop. The end of a good day!
THURSDAY
Today we went to lunch for the 2nd time with the man from the city about Charlie’s big project. The man didn’t like me being with them but Charlie told him not to worry, that I was an orphan and didn’t understand things. The man looked at me and I gave him my blank look and then they talked business.
What they’re going to do: Charlie has an option on residential land which will be rezoned so they can build a factory. He’ll sell the land to the city for an Industrial Renewal Project in a Model Cities Area. Then he’ll take the profits from the land and put it into the building at special low interest rates and the result will be what Charlie calls “a windfall.”
Afterward Charlie told me that when it’s over the workers could go back on welfare or unemployment and the building could be used for something else or it could be torn down and they could start again. He said that the economy would collapse without projects like this.
A question: Am I writing this only for myself or so that Charlie will find it and want to read it? Whenever he sees me writing he asks me what I’m making up for my storybook today!
After supper tonight we watched movies of Mrs. Mittleman and her brother Oscar and his wife and some friends taken during World War II. They were in the country where they each had rooms in a house and shared a big kitchen, and they were playing games on a Saturday night like musical chairs and break the balloon and steal the baloney and they looked like they were having a wonderful time. “Grown people don’t play games like that anymore,” Mr. Mittleman said.
When Charlie came into the room just before, I recited for him what Maimonides said about buying friendship and he said, That makes sense. I asked him why but he didn’t answer me.
I have 2 books on my lap under my notebook: PIRKAY AVOS and a book Mr. Mittleman gave me called REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT STRATEGY. We’ll see how smart you are, he said. In a month I’m giving a test.
*
When Charlie opened his eyes Danny was standing next to the bed, his tephillin boxes in his hands. He asked Charlie to tell him if he was putting them on the right way. “How would I know?” Charlie said. “Ask Murray. Religion is his department.”
“But you’re a Jew too,” Danny said.
“Sure,” Charlie replied. “But that doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it, does it? If I do or if I don’t I’m still a Jew, right?” He turned away, sat up, and began putting on his socks. “So until I get to forty, leave me be….”
Danny did not move away and—while Charlie dressed and Danny put on his tephillin—Charlie tried not to show how pleased he was by the defiant look in the boy’s eyes.
“Tell me this,” Charlie said, when Danny was done. “Why do you care so much about being a Jew?”
“Because I am a Jew,” Danny replied.
Charlie sighed. “But that’s the point,” he said. “If you do a little or a lot, you’re still a Jew, so why do you care so much? It’s not natural.”
Charlie waited, but the boy said nothing. Charlie saw that Danny didn’t realize he was being playful with him. “You weren’t even brought up in an Orthodox Home,” Charlie went on. “I bet you never even went to shul with your father or saw him put on tephillin in the mornings—am I right?”
Then Danny smiled. “Desire is everything,” he said.
Charlie laughed and brushed the boy’s hair. “You have me there,” he said.
At breakfast Mrs. Mittleman read to them from a brochure about the John F. Kennedy Peace Forest in Israel, to which she was sending a contribution. The trees would be planted on the same slopes where two thousand years before Bar Kochba had fought his last battle against the legions of Rome. Charlie remembered hearing the story of Bar Kochba from Dr. Fogel. Mrs. Mittleman told him that her dream in life would be to go to Israel someday and visit the forest with her husband.
Charlie winked at Danny. “Good luck,” he said.
Mrs. Mittleman bent over and kissed Charlie on the forehead. “But he’s very good to me in his way,” she said. “Sometimes people don’t know everything.”
Driving into the city, and thinking of what Danny had said to him, Charlie told Danny that the thing he’d always wanted in the world was the thing he could never have. He said he knew it was silly, but it was what he wanted: to stand with his father in his own home for his son’s bris, and to imagine himself while the mohel was performing the circumcision as being at his own grandson’s bris with his son imagining the same thing he had imagined a generation before. He said he saw it all, except for his own face. “Sometimes I try to see how many groups of three I can keep straight in my head at once, and how many hundreds of years backward and forward I can go, in equal amounts-do you follow?”
Danny seemed slightly puzzled. “I think you’d make a good rabbi,” he said. “People look up to you.”
“Sure,” Charlie said, smiling. “The rabbi gets the fees, right?—But it’s the mohel who gets the tips.”
Charlie parked the car on Bedford Avenue, not far from Brooklyn College, in a section of expensive private homes. He pointed to a house that looked like a Mexican villa to Danny, with a tile roof, wooden trellises over the porch, and stucco walls. “This is the house I told you about,” Charlie said. “It’s the surprise—”
Danny tried to keep himself from believing anything at all. He got out of the car and walked up the steps, behind Charlie. “Don’t be scared,” Charlie said, and, one hand on Danny’s arm, he rang the bell. When the door opened and Danny saw Dr. Fogel standing there, he gasped and pulled away from Charlie, angry that Charlie had caught him by surprise.
Dr. Fogel was wearing a yamulka, and instead of his old brown suit, a bright orange and blue sportshirt. His skin, where he had just shaved, seemed to shine as if it had been pulled tight over his cheeks and jaws, and his eyes showed Danny how happy he was to see them. “I was expecting you,” he said. “Please. Come in.”
Danny followed him through the doorway and Dr. Fogel asked them both to go back and kiss the mezuzah on the doorpost. He gave them yamulkas to wear, but he did not speak harshly.
They sat in Dr. Fogel’s living room, around a glass table through which Danny looked at gleaming chrome legs. The living room was large, with wall-to-wall green carpeting and lustrous mahogany furniture. One wall was totally covered with books, and a ladder was leaning against the books, for getting to the high shelves. The opposite wall was, from one end to the other, a mirror, and Dr. Fogel sat in front of it, facing them.
Danny waited for Dr. Fogel to say something about their both having been away from the Home, but he only smiled and took a cigarette from a silver box. He had never seen Dr. Fogel smoke before, and once Dr. Fogel let the smoke drift upward from his mouth, he seemed even more relaxed than he had been. “Well,” he said. “I was wondering what had become of you, Chaim. I’ve thought about you often through the years.”
Charlie stiffened when Dr. Fogel called him by his Hebrew name. “I think about you too,” he said.
“I’m glad to see you looking so well,” Dr. Fogel said.
“I’m a coach,” Charlie said, as if he were answering questions. “I coach football. The headmaster of the school I coach for is Murray Mendelsohn—do you remember him?”
Danny saw how dazed Charlie seemed and he wanted to take him by the hand and run from the house with him. He stared into Charlie’s face, hoping Charlie would look his way. “The last I heard was when he had a heart attack,” Dr. Fogel said. “Mr. Gitelman told me. He’s all right now, I take it.”
Charlie nodded. “I’m not married anymore,” he said. “My daughter’s sixteen. I’m in the real estate business….”
Dr. Fogel smiled at Charlie in a way that scared Danny. He seemed so relaxed, leaning back into a big plush, cream-colored couch, that Danny thought that perhaps he was a different Dr. Fogel. “You were the best player I ever had,” Dr. Fogel said. “But you knew that. I never had a boy with as much natural talent as you had.”
“I still can’t read,” Charlie said.
Dr. Fogel closed his eyes and laughed. “I remember the joke you always used to make,” he said, “about waiting until you were forty years old, like the great Rabbi Akiba.”
“No,” Charlie said, shaking his head. “You were the one who said that.”
“Was I?” Dr. Fogel asked, but he waved Charlie’s objections away with his good hand. “Would you like a drink—?”
“I don’t have the time,” Charlie said, looking at his watch. “Danny and I have to be back at our school in time for practice.”
Dr. Fogel looked at Danny, and then spoke to Charlie. “You came because of my land, didn’t you?” he said. “That’s what you said on the phone.”
“That’s right,” Charlie said.
“Well,” Dr. Fogel said, smiling. “I’ll tell you this-you’re a person I could do business with, yes? I’ve been waiting a long time for somebody like you. Come.”
They walked from the living room, down a hallway whose walls were covered with paintings in large gold frames. Charlie held Danny back for a second, and whispered to him that if he bought Dr. Fogel’s land, Danny would be entitled to a commission. Charlie called it a finder’s fee. “Stop making jokes out of everything,” Danny hissed back, but Charlie walked away from him.
They entered a large room paneled in dark-grained wood and filled with modern office equipment. There were file cabinets, swivel chairs, large desk lamps, electronic calculators, an electric typewriter, leather-bound books on real estate and investment, and an enormous oak rolltop desk, with dozens of compartments. The only item in the office that would have told anyone the home belonged to a Jew was a small black and white framed photo of an old synagogue, on the wall next to the light switch. A father and son, in long black winter coats, stood on the bottom step. There was snow on the ground. Danny thought of the secret hideout in the cellar of the Home.
Dr. Fogel unrolled surveyor’s maps on his desk, and, his eyes bright with happiness, he showed them to Charlie and he talked. There were two parcels of land—a smaller one of approximately thirteen hundred acres, on the North Shore of Long Island just above the Suffolk County border, and a larger one of approximately eighteen hundred acres in Rockland County, New York, near Suffern. Danny thought of Dr. Fogel in the shul, unrolling the Torah scrolls, and he remembered what he’d said to him about dying. Danny sat in one of the chairs and swiveled from side to side.
Dr. Fogel was pointing out the areas where cabins had been, and areas where his father had planned to enlarge the settlements. No cabins had ever been built on the Long Island parcel. Charlie and Dr. Fogel talked about access routes and drainage and water tables and zoning laws, and Danny saw that Charlie was becoming more and more relaxed. Charlie was proud that he could show Dr. Fogel he understood how to read surveyor’s maps.
Even while he seemed happy and relaxed, though, Danny imagined that inside his head he was counting his money. Danny remembered the story Charlie had told him about the bread war in the dining room. He thought of trying to warn Charlie about Dr. Fogel, but how could he? He felt, swaying from side to side and hearing the sounds of their words, extraordinarily calm even when the worst thought came into his head—that he was secretly glad to feel so helpless because he now wanted Charlie to be disappointed!
Danny followed them back into the living room; when they were sitting around the table, Dr. Fogel said that he had one question to ask Charlie and that if Charlie answered it correctly the money part of their transaction would be no trouble.
If my mind contains caverns, boxes, webs, mazes, corridors, and tunnels, Danny wondered, then what does Charlie’s mind contain?
“It’s only this,” Dr. Fogel said to Charlie. “But tell me your true opinion. Do you think Israel is a land of the past or of the future?”
Danny gasped. “The future,” Charlie said, quickly.
Dr. Fogel clucked inside his mouth. “I’m very sorry then,” he said, standing. “You’re wrong. Our discussion is over, yes? I’m sorry….”
“What do you mean—over?” Charlie said. His face was red. “Just like that? That’s all?”
Dr. Fogel turned to Danny. “I had thought you would have been a better influence on your friend.”
“You leave the kid alone,” Charlie said. “You just lay off and speak with me.” He stepped toward Dr. Fogel and raised his hands, as if he were going to lift the tiny man and shake him. “I don’t get it,” he said. He forced himself to speak more calmly. “I mean, you haven’t even given me a chance to come up with an offer. It’s not fair, your leading me along like that and then closing the door in my face.…”
“It’s my land,” Dr. Fogel said.
“Okay,” Charlie said, sighing. “If you want to play games I can play too, right? Ask me another question then. I’ll do better.”
Dr. Fogel chuckled. “I like your attitude, Chaim. I always did. So I will give you another chance, yes? Answer me this question—do you put on tephillin every morning?”
“No.”
“Do you observe the Sabbath?”
“No.”
“Are you kosher?”
“No.”
“See?” Dr. Fogel said. “You would do well in Israel. You should think of going there to live—what do you need with my land and my father’s land here in America?”
Charlie turned to Danny and rolled his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve had enough for one day.”
They stood on the front porch together, under the trellis, and Danny wondered if Charlie would turn on him and blame him for what was happening. “It is a good thing to die in Israel,” Dr. Fogel said, “but it is not such a good thing to live there now.” He took one of Charlie’s hands in his own. “You think about our conversation and come back and talk with me again sometime.”
Charlie didn’t say anything. “You’re both smart boys,” Dr. Fogel said. “So tell me: of what use to God is yet another earthly nation in which His children’s blood is spilled?”
He walked down the steps, ahead of them, past his lawn. They all stood together beside Charlie’s car. “God likes jokes also,” Dr. Fogel went on, “and do you know what his favorite joke is? The joke he played on the Zionists! They worked and they worked and they worked, but in the end, why did the world give them the State of Israel? Because of all their work?” He spat, then answered his own question: “Because of the six million, that’s why. Who can believe there ever would have been an Israel if not for the six million? Who? Don’t you see what God is saying to us—?”
“No,” Charlie said.
Dr. Fogel relaxed at once, the passion leaving his voice. “Tell me,” he said, his hand on Charlie’s arm. “What do you think of my house?”
“It’s okay,” Charlie said. “If you want to sell, I have a buyer.”
Danny wanted to argue—to tell Dr. Fogel that he didn’t make sense—the Zionists had not wanted to pay such a price for the state of Israel….
Dr. Fogel was laughing with Charlie. “It’s been good having you visit me. Please—you’ll think things over and you will come back, yes?”
Charlie nodded, indicating he would, and when he did, Danny spoke for the first time: “Mitzvat Yishuv Eretz Yis-roel!” he recited.
“Very good,” Dr. Fogel said, patting Danny’s arm. “Of course. But there are other commandments, equally important, yes?”
*
FRIDAY
WE SAW DR. FOGEL
WE SAW DR. FOGEL
WE SAW DR. FOGEL.
I want to write that sentence again and again because it contains everything, and since we saw him this afternoon Charlie hasn’t been the same.
He’s downstairs now fighting with Mr. Mittleman and screaming that he wants his accountant to look at Mr. Mittleman’s books to make sure he’s been getting the right commissions. He’s learning not to trust anybody.
Is that what Dr. Fogel wanted to teach him today?
I have to write fast because he’ll be up in a few minutes for us to go to Murray, so this is the way it happened: I thought we were going to look at a big house Charlie was thinking of buying but it turned out to be Dr. Fogel’s.
He was glad to see Charlie at 1st but when he called Charlie by his Hebrew name he scared him and Charlie froze. Later Charlie relaxed when they talked about the land but it didn’t fool me. Dr. Fogel was just setting him up. HE MADE CHARLIE BELIEVE THEY COULD HAVE AN AGREEMENT AND THEN HE KILLED CHARLIE’S HOPE!
He asked Charlie if Israel was a land of the past or the future and said that if Charlie answered that right they could come to terms. I knew the answer he wanted and I tried to think the words into Charlie’s head but they never got there. Charlie said The Future and Dr. Fogel told him he was wrong! That was when Charlie started getting angry and he hasn’t stopped yet.
Dr. Fogel also asked him about putting on Tephillin and being Kosher and observing Shabbos and he held out more hope to Charlie because when Charlie was truthful with him about not being a good Jew, Dr. Fogel told him to come back and talk some more!
This is what Charlie said to me in the car, right after we left Dr. Fogel: “If Maimonides said it was OK to pay money for a friend, wouldn’t it be OK to become religious for money?”
This is what I think his mind contains: arrows, muscles, spices, knots, glass, and salty tears!
Dr. Fogel said things against Israel again and I quoted to him what the Rabbis say about it being the duty of every Believer to settle in Israel, but my words meant nothing to him. This is why you can’t argue with him: BECAUSE HE THINKS HE CAN UNDERSTAND GOD’S BITTERNESS.
Charlie kept asking me to explain Dr. Fogel to him, but he talked so much I never had a chance. When I said something to him about taking it easy, this is what he said back: “I have two speeds—stop and go.”
I’ve never known anyone like him! His moods change so fast I’m afraid to speak sometimes and just when I’m thinking he’s so depressed I need to find a joke for him, he’ll turn around and make one to me.
He liked the joke I made this morning in Mr. Plaut’s jewelry store. He told Mr. Plaut I was his trainee and I told him he could deduct me as a business expense. But he said I wasn’t an expense, I was an investment.
Then I drew a line across the middle of my body, right above my waist, and I said: I’m amortized up to here! He laughed a lot at that and Mr. Plaut did also, but the minute I said it I was thinking of the Chasidic Jews who tie belts around the middle of their bodies to separate the holy parts from the profane. I didn’t tell Charlie I thought that.
On the way home he was talking as crazy as Dr. Fogel. He talked all about his money. He said that he always felt disconnected and that money made him feel connected. Money brought him closer to Murray again, money brought him to Mr. and Mrs. Mittleman, money made him able to help me, money would let him help Sol, and money would let him do what he wanted after he was 40.
These are the things he feels disconnected from, in Danny Ginsberg’s opinion: his childhood, his mother and father, his not having real brothers and sisters, his separating from the boys he grew up with, his not living in the Home, his not living in the city.
Also: being Jewish but not practicing Judaism, having had a family but not having one now, doing business with people he doesn’t really know personally, being in a business in which people come to him because they’re moving from place to place.
He got very emotional trying to figure out why Dr. Fogel deceived him and he took my hand and told me he really meant it about becoming a Rabbi after 40. He said it was a feeling he couldn’t explain but that he always believed, since he was a boy, that when he became 40 his life would change.
After lunch Charlie met with a black man who’s a dentist and he talked about selling the man one of Mr. Mittleman’s apartment houses. The black dentist works with a Jewish dentist in an office on Atlantic Avenue and he bragged about how much money they made in only 3 years. They have 6 chairs between them and they work on welfare and Medicaid people. They pull teeth.
These were his words: You can always find 2 teeth to pull in somebody’s mouth.
Mr. Mittleman wants to sell as many of his old buildings as possible and put the money into low income housing. You can get a special 60 month fast write-off on low income housing and if you reinvest the net proceeds of sales in more low income housing you can avoid the recapture rule on depreciation. Mr. Mittleman calls this the quick way to build A Tax Free Empire.
He’s on the stairs.
TO BE CONTINUED
*
Murray asked Ephraim to lead the bentshing that followed the meal, and Charlie was happy to see Danny, sharing a prayer book with Hannah, join in the singing.
What he needed to do, he decided, was to surprise Dr. Fogel.
In Murray’s study, Anita and Hannah sat in front of the fireplace on their knees. Charlie saw Hannah smile at Danny even while Danny was staring at her breasts. When Murray spoke about the Home, Anita held his hand. Her eyes, from the firelight, appeared to be violet.
Once a month Charlie, Murray, and the other guys from their group at the Home got together, usually for a touch football game in Brooklyn, and Charlie had promised to take Danny to their game on Sunday. Murray was talking about the games and about what he felt every month after the reunions. “We’re not right,” he said. “That’s what I keep feeling. Don’t you see it?”
“No,” Charlie said.
“Whenever I go outside the boundaries of the life I’ve cut out for myself here in Mill River,” Murray said, “I feel like a helpless child somehow—and I’m not ashamed to admit it.” Murray looked at Charlie. “Don’t you ever feel the same?”
“No,” Charlie said again.
Murray was silent for a few seconds; then he pointed to Danny with his pipe. “I think the boy’s a lot like me—I think he has the same craving for roots and continuity.”
“Who doesn’t?” Charlie said quickly, and laughed. “But what the hell kind of roots and continuity can you have out here in Mill River where you’re the only Jew in the whole place?”
“Ah,” Murray said. “But that’s just the point, isn’t it? Being the only Jew makes me understand more intensely what it means to be Jewish—as if I’m alone in the wilderness. As if—”
“Oh come on,” Charlie said. “How can anyone think of suburban New Jersey as the wilderness?” He sighed, annoyed with himself for having been trapped into an argument he wanted no part of. “Look,” he said. “I’ll repeat for you what I said to the kid this morning—if I can’t help being a Jew then whatever I do, that’s Jewish too, right? So not being kosher and not putting on tephillin is as Jewish as being a rabbi. That’s the way I figure it.”
“Very interesting,” Murray said. He turned to Danny again. “And what do you think of that?”
Danny smiled. “Rabbis are Jews too,” he said.
Murray laughed. “Very good—I’ll have to remember that.” He puffed on his pipe, and then Charlie heard the familiar words flow—Murray talked about how bringing into his life rituals that had been practiced for thousands of years by other Jewish men and families gave him a sense of being part of the Jewish people, especially in a time when people were always moving to new places and everyone’s values were shifting.
Charlie hardly listened. He saw that Danny was wide-eyed, drinking the words in, but he figured it was all personal—these were things that made Murray happy and that was all there was to it. Maybe, he thought, I can send Murray to talk with Dr. Fogel in my place.
“Being a Jew means being part of a special history,” Murray said, his eyes demanding Charlie’s attention. “And the less Jews practice Judaism, the more that history is lost!”
Charlie smiled but said nothing. He remembered what he’d said to Danny after he’d visited the Home, about letting dying things die, but if he said something like that to Murray—if he told him he shouldn’t resist things that were natural—he imagined that Murray would reply that the craving for roots and continuity was natural too….
When he looked at Danny he was surprised to see the boy smiling with him, as if he were reading Charlie’s thoughts. Charlie blinked. I don’t believe you, he could hear Danny say. I don’t believe you because of what you said to me about the groups of three!
Charlie saw Dr. Fogel standing in front of the classroom, and, from behind, he saw himself raise his hand and stand. If the Torah says that God said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Dr. Fogel asked, then how can we know the rabbis are right to say that God means something else—that He wants a different kind of punishment?
He saw his own body tip to one side and he saw his shoulders lift slightly in a shrug. Dr. Fogel had taught them that God’s laws had to apply to all men for all times. Charlie answered the question with a question: Then what can you do to a blind man who pokes out somebody’s eye?
The class had giggled, but Dr. Fogel had silenced them by telling them that Charlie was right. After class, he recalled, Dr. Fogel made him remain behind and had praised him in a way he never had for anything else. It was the one time Charlie had surprised him.
Murray was laughing and telling another story about one of his children. They were in the kitchen, and, half asleep, Danny was staring into the flickering lights of the Shabbos candles. Murray said that last Friday he had promised to take Eli to the school football game, saying, “Tomorrow I’ll take you to the game,” and that when Eli had awakened on Saturday morning he had been terribly excited and had kept asking, “Is today tomorrow? Is today tomorrow?”
Murray said that he was going to put those three words on an index card and tape the card to his office door. He looked around the table for approval. “Don’t you think it will encourage too much freedom?” Anita asked.
Charlie nudged Danny with his elbow. “Come on,” he said.
“It’s late,” Murray said, refusing to respond directly to Anita’s sarcasm. “And my wife—to whose question I would reply: perhaps, but my students are happy and creative-wants to talk about how severe Murray Mendelsohn is.”
Murray tried to put an arm around Anita, but she pulled away. “Their happiness takes place in a vacuum,” she said sharply. “They’re culturally deprived.”
“Ah,” Murray said. “And what do you propose—that we import blacks and Puerto Ricans from the city?”
“It’s not a bad idea,” she said.
“It’s late,” Charlie said, and he kissed Anita on the cheek. Her skin was warm. “Thanks.”
“Don’t you see it?” Anita asked, barring the door with her body so that Charlie and Danny had to wait. “Don’t you see that Murray’s right—that there is something wrong with him?” She stepped aside. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with being an orphan,” she said quietly. “He can’t use that crutch forever.”
“It’s not a crutch,” Murray replied. “It’s a ladder.”
“Tell him, Charlie,” Anita pleaded. “Once. Please?”
Then she left the room. Murray walked outside with Charlie and Danny. “She gets this way when she’s pregnant,” Murray said. “It’s complicated—she wants the children and she wants her freedom too. She blames me for wanting them and then she feels guilty for blaming me and doesn’t realize it, so she attacks me in front of you. And you—”
“I know the whole story,” Charlie said, patting Murray on the shoulder. “Thank her for us again, okay?”
“It was brewing before you got here,” he said. “The truth is, I believe in cultivating my own garden.” He laughed. “I was explaining it to her while we got ready for Shabbos and I made a joke about planting Jewish seeds and tried to pat her stomach, and she froze on me.” Murray shrugged. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”
In the car, Danny slept with his head against Charlie’s shoulder.
*
SATURDAY
At our game today we won 34 to 6 and Charlie yelled the whole time. He hardly ever smiles at games. It’s the way he gets the boys to work for him: He saves up his smiles and uses them only when it really matters!
I asked him once if Dr. Fogel shouted the way he does and he said Dr. Fogel was so good he never had to raise his voice. Because I’ve never really played sports Charlie thinks I can be a great coach someday like Dr. Fogel. But I don’t have the kind of brain which can plan things far ahead.
For example: at the Home I tried learning chess a few times but I was no good at it.
Murray stood next to me at the game and told me that Charlie could have been better than Sid Luckman or Bennie Friedman or Marshall Goldberg if he’d played football. And if he’d played baseball he could have been another Al Rosen or Hank Greenberg. Murray said he could have been the greatest Jewish athlete of all time, but he decided to get married instead! Sol got him a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers when he was only 16 and they offered him a contract but he turned it down. He was married by 17.
There are a lot of married players, I said.
But Murray said that Charlie refused to do anything that would make him leave his wife overnight. Everyone pleaded with him INCLUDING SOL but Charlie wouldn’t listen to anybody.
Anita was wearing a beautiful orange and black plaid wool coat at the game with a big collar that turned up and made her hair look red and soft inside it. I looked at her stomach when her coat was open but it didn’t look any bigger.
She’s in her 4th month now which means the baby already has everything a baby has, including all the internal organs and fingernails and hair. She’s having the baby by natural childbirth the way she had her last 3 and Murray will be in the delivery room with her. Last night he talked about the last time and how hard the contractions were and this is what Charlie said: If they get too bad again tell her to subcontract!
I saw the way the mothers of some of the players looked at Charlie. I was glad when the game was over and we were back in his car. He asked me what Murray was chewing my ear off about this time and I told him about what Murray said about giving up his sports career for a wife and he said that was bullshit.
He told me he played semi-pro ball and he knew just how good he really was—good enough to make the major leagues but not good enough to make it big. He said he had more money now than he ever would have had if he had fulfilled Murray’s dream.
Last night we spent Shabbos with Murray and his family but Charlie didn’t say anything about our visit to Dr. Fogel. Murray and Charlie argued about being Jewish and I agreed more with Murray who says that if Jews don’t practice Judaism then Judaism will die. Charlie tried to act as if he didn’t care and I hated him for doing that! But then I remembered what he told me he felt about imagining himself and his son at his grandson’s Bris and I felt better.
He said that if I saw Murray at Eli’s Bris 4 years ago I would see that he really felt the things he spoke about. Charlie said he never saw a human being more proud and excited than Murray was on that day.
He told me Murray used to be very different. He said that 10 years ago Murray was very active in civil rights and he and Anita spent summers together teaching at black schools in Alabama. He was once beaten unconscious during a march.
While we were coming home from the game Charlie said there was one thing that stopped him when he thought about becoming a Rabbi.
What is it? I said.
That I’ll never be able to eat lobster again, he said.
I never had lobster, I said.
He thought I was kidding and asked me if I wanted to try and I said I thought he had to get back to the office since it was Saturday, but he smiled and we went to a restaurant.
It was the 1st time I ever ate in a restaurant where waiters came and served you! There were red checkered tablecloths on the tables and the waiter and the owner wanted to please Charlie. They asked him about Sol and Charlie told them Sol was fine and would be visiting him soon after his cross country trip. I had to wear a plastic bib when I ate the lobster and Charlie showed me what to do and how to crack the claws with a nutcracker. I saw how expensive lobster was and I asked Charlie if he could afford it.
This was his answer: I save money faster than I can spend it.
I can still taste the lobster now. I never tasted anything so beautiful and tender. I ate every piece I could, even in the thinnest claws!
When we got home and Charlie told Mr. Mittleman where we were this is what he said: A ship in the ocean was caught in a great storm and all the passengers were screaming. The waves were coming overboard and women were tearing their hair out and praying to God to save them. Only a little old Jewish man sat quietly without screaming. Don’t you care what happens to the ship? a fellow passenger asked. Is it my ship? the Jew replied.
Why I hate Mr. Mittleman: because when Charlie was in the bathroom for a minute and we were alone in the office, he smiled at me and said: Tell me—how do you know you’re really Jewish?
He called Charlie crazy for giving up Saturdays and Sundays for sports when those are the big selling days but this is what Charlie said back to him: Living well is the best revenge!
I told Charlie that when it came to lobster he might be wrong about desire. It would be easier to become a Rabbi if you’d never had any at all!
SUNDAY
In the morning we went into the city with Murray and I met their friends from the Home. I met Irving and Louie and Slats and Herman and Stan and Morty and I saw how they still look up to Charlie as a hero. I even played some football with them and caught a pass from Charlie 2 times. Murray and Charlie made up to say I was from the Home and that Murray had me on loan for his school as an exchange student. They asked me things about Dr. Fogel and if certain other teachers were still there and how many of us there are left and things like that.
BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WAS NOT WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WAS WITH THEM BUT WHAT HAPPENED AFTER!
When we got home and I was here in our room reading he came in and picked up my real estate book and started reading out loud like a normal reader!
Do you know why I can do it? he asked me.
Because you’re happy, I said.
He told me I wasn’t paying attention. I told you once that I read better when I’m excited, he said, and then he said he was excited not because he had a good time with his friends but because ALL DAY LONG FROM THE TIME THEY FIRST MET IN THE MORNING HE’D BEEN IMAGINING HIMSELF DEAD!
It’s what I do whenever I’m with them, he told me. I try to feel what each of them would feel at different points—when they’d get the news about me, when they’d first see each other, when they’d see me in the coffin, and when they’d shovel earth on top of me.
I’m getting gooseflesh again, hearing his voice in my head saying that! I told him he was trying to scare me and he told me that I couldn’t deny how well he was reading. There’s hope for me too, he said, and he went downstairs to fight with Mr. Mittleman.
I don’t know what to do when he does things like that. He makes me feel very helpless.
LATER
We didn’t talk about Dr. Fogel all day.
The man I liked most from their group was Irving, who’s a Professor. I liked him because he didn’t ask me any questions.
Just before I came up, when Mrs. Mittleman asked about Anita, Mr. Mittleman said: Maybe Murray and Anita are so talented, they’ll give birth to an orphan.
They were watching movies of Mrs. Mittleman and her sister in a boat on the 1000 Islands in Canada. Mr. Mittleman asked him what was the difference between a Rabbi and a prostitute and when Charlie said he didn’t know, Mr. Mittleman said that a Rabbi sends bills.
His voice never changes. I hate him more because he’s a Jew!
I said I had a stomachache and I came up here to write.
Herman kidded me and asked if I was a member of Murray’s Alumni Association and if I had a membership card and I got scared for a minute, thinking he knew I ran away, but from the way they talked I found out that Murray once tried to have a meeting of Alumni from over 50 years and rented a big ballroom but less than 30 men came and they stayed in groups and only talked with people from their own years at the Home who they knew already.
I think Anita’s jealous of the time Murray and Charlie spend together and of all the years they had together before she met them!
MONDAY
I have to be ready to go shopping with him in 5 minutes because he says I have no winter clothes. Does this mean he’s going to let me stay with him all through the cold and the snow? Even though it’s been harder living with him since our visit to Dr. Fogel I don’t want to leave. I’d rather live with him worried than any other man relaxed!
When I woke this morning I found him looking at my Tephillin but I didn’t let him know I saw.
At school he and Murray made jokes about cultivating Murray’s garden. Murray said he was fertilizing his lawn with chicken fat and Charlie asked Murray if he could plant him a TSURIS TREE.
They joked about sitting under it together and letting their worries seep into the ground and feed the tree.
I have to hurry. When we do things he won’t let me use any of my own money. He gives me some money for errands I do for him and for writing things down for him, but I keep that money separate. I think he pays Mrs. Mittleman for my meals.
I need to save my money because later I’ll need it to buy a new suit for my Bar Mitzvah.
A girl sat next to me in the school library and asked me if I was the boy who was living with Mr. Sapistein and she said that Murray spoke about me to her class and told them how much I accomplished in my life even though I never stayed in a real school.
She didn’t interest me. I told her I was busy with things to study and she went away.
I read in a book about Zionism and I read about the Fernald Tracing Method against dyslexia and I studied for Mr. Mittleman’s test.
It’s true about Theodor Herzl wanting to let Jewish children be baptized, but he changed his opinion later on. When he was young and for his whole life he really only loved blond and blue-eyed little girls! Also: He was once in favor of intermarriage so Jews would be better looking! This is what he wanted written on his gravestone: HE HAD TOO GOOD AN OPINION OF THE JEWS.
What else I discovered: The King Frederick who locked all the children in the room without words crowned himself King of Jerusalem in 1229.
The best thing that happened today: I found this saying in PIRKAY AVOS and wrote it out in Hebrew and in English for Charlie:
“LET A MAN DEVOTE HIMSELF TO THE STUDY OF TORAH AND TO THE COMMANDMENTS EVEN FOR AN ULTERIOR PURPOSE, BECAUSE FROM AN ULTERIOR PURPOSE HE WILL EVENTUALLY ARRIVE AT THE REAL PURPOSE.”
He thought about that for a while and then he said: I was right then, wasn’t I? What do you make of that?
He said he would try to memorize it and he put it on his list: Memorize Danny’s Saying.
TUESDAY
He came up and stopped me from writing any more last night. It’s morning time now and I’m up before he is. When we got home last night there was a message from Murray saying he got a postcard from Uncle Sol.
After we finished shopping last night we went to a beautiful white house with a long circular driveway. It was past 10 o’clock when we got there and a tall woman came to the door and spoke with an accent. Her husband came to meet us in a red silk bathrobe.
Charlie introduced me to them. Their names are Mr. and Mrs. Szondi. Mr. Szondi is Charlie’s stockbroker. They escaped from Hungary in 1956. Charlie didn’t waste any time. Before they sat down he was yelling at Mr. Szondi and asking him why he paid him good money. Mr. Szondi told him he expected the market to turn and Charlie said he didn’t depend on miracles, that there was as much money to be made in bad markets as good. Mrs. Szondi sat very stiffly in a high velvet chair and her eyes seemed to burn. I couldn’t tell how old she was.
The room was beautiful with lamps and teacups everywhere. The walls were made of wallpaper like velvet with curlicues in reds and pinks. Mr. Szondi tried to explain things to Charlie but Charlie wouldn’t listen. He said he paid Mr. Szondi to do his thinking for him. Mr. Szondi told Charlie he knew about a merger and pension funds that would buy into the new company. The pension funds have been staying away from the market recently. Mr. Szondi said that if things went well Charlie could buy and sell within 60 days for a good profit but that would mean taxes.
Charlie said he never worried about taxes. That was his accountant’s department. Mr. Szondi asked who I was and Charlie said I was a smart Jewish boy.
When we were leaving he asked Mrs. Szondi how she liked living in their house.
This is what she said: The hills are very beautiful but they are not mine.
Charlie made me promise to study a book on the stock market after finishing the real estate one. He said he played dumber than he was and I said he didn’t have to tell me that. He seemed happy after we left and he said that Murray followed the daily ups and downs of things too much. Charlie called that death.
He explained to me what an overlay is and he said that’s what he always invests in. An overlay is if a horse is a 2 to 1 favorite in the morning but the crowd makes him 5 to 1. An overlay in land is when it can be developed in 5 years when everybody else thinks 10. If you only bet on overlays you can’t go wrong!
I took a chance when he seemed in a better mood. I said this: If you don’t let me help you learn to read I’ll leave you.
And go where? he asked.
Lots of people could use a smart Jewish boy, I said.
I’ll think about it, he said.
You’re afraid, I said.
You’re right, he said, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.
I told him I could wait a little longer. The saying I gave him about an ulterior purpose is a good start.
He’s waking up now. He always seems happiest to me when he’s just coming out of his sleep.