Collected Stories (76 page)

This summer day began like all the others. Harry prepared his breakfast in the kitchen—Rice Krispies with skimmed milk and Sanka sweetened with saccharin. At about nine-thirty he took the elevator down to get the mail. A day didn’t go by that he didn’t receive a number of checks, but this day brought a bounty. The stocks had fallen, but the companies kept paying the dividends as usual. Harry got money from buildings on which he held mortgages, from rents, bonds, and all kinds of business ventures that he barely remembered. An insurance company paid him an annuity. For years he had been getting a monthly check from Social Security. This morning’s yield came to over eleven thousand dollars. True, he would have to withhold a great part of this for taxes, but it still left him with some five thousand dollars for himself. While he totaled up the figures, he deliberated: Should he go to the office of Merrill Lynch and see what was happening on the Exchange? No, there was no point to it. Even if the stocks rose early in the morning, the day would end in losses. “The market is completely crazy,” he mumbled to himself. He had considered it an iron rule that inflation always went along with a bullish market, not with a bearish market. But now both the dollar
and
the stocks were collapsing. Well, you could never be sure about anything except death.

Around eleven o’clock he went down to deposit the checks. The bank was a small one; all the employees knew him and said good morning. He had a safe-deposit box there, where he kept his valuables and jewelry. It so happened that all three of his wives had left him everything; none of them had made out a will. He didn’t know himself exactly how much he was worth, but it couldn’t be less than five million dollars. Still, he walked down the street in a shirt and trousers that any pauper could afford and a cap and shoes he had worn for years. He poked with his cane and took tiny steps. Once in a while he cast a glance backward. Maybe someone was following him. Maybe some crook had found out how rich he was and was scheming to kidnap him. Although the day was bright and the street full of people, no one would interfere if he was grabbed, forced into a car, and dragged off to some ruin or cave. No one would pay ransom for him.

After he had concluded his business at the bank, he turned back toward home. The sun was high in the sky and poured down a blazing fire. Women stood in the shade of canopies looking at dresses, shoes, stockings, brassières, and bathing suits in the store windows. Their faces expressed indecision—to buy or not to buy? Harry glanced at the windows. What could he buy there? There wasn’t anything he could desire. From now until five, when he would prepare his dinner, he needed absolutely nothing. He knew precisely what he would do when he got home—take a nap on the sofa.

Thank God, no one had kidnapped him, no one had held him up, no one had broken into his apartment. The air conditioner was working, and so was the plumbing in the bathroom. He took off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa.

Strange, he still daydreamed; he fantasized about unexpected successes, restored powers, masculine adventures. The brain wouldn’t accept old age. It teemed with the same passions it had in his youth. Harry often said to his brain, “Don’t be stupid. It’s too late for everything. You have nothing to hope for any more.” But the brain was so constituted that it went on hoping nonetheless. Who was it who said, A man takes his hopes into the grave?

He had dozed off and was awakened by a jangling at the door. He became alarmed. No one ever came to see him. “It must be the exterminator,” he decided. He opened the door the length of the chain and saw a small woman with reddish cheeks, yellow eyes, and a high pompadour of blond hair the color of straw. She wore a white blouse.

Harry opened the door, and the woman said in a foreign-accented English, “I hope I haven’t wakened you. I’m your new neighbor on the left. I wanted to introduce myself to you. My name is Mrs. Ethel Brokeles. A funny name, eh? That was my late husband’s name. My maiden name is Goldman.”

Harry gazed at her in astonishment. His neighbor on the left had been an old woman living alone. He remembered her name—Mrs. Halpert. He asked, “What happened to Mrs. Halpert?”

“The same as happens to everybody,” the woman replied smugly.

“When did it happen? I didn’t know anything about it.”

“It’s more than five months already.”

“Come in, come in. People die and you don’t even know,” Harry said. “She was a nice woman … kept herself at a distance.”

“I didn’t know her. I bought the apartment from her daughter.”

“Please have a seat. I don’t even have anything to offer you. I have a bottle of liqueur somewhere, but—”

“I don’t need any refreshments and I don’t drink liqueur. Not in the middle of the day. May I smoke?”

“Certainly, certainly.”

The woman sat down on the sofa. She snapped a fancy lighter expertly and lit her cigarette. She wore red nail polish and Harry noticed a huge diamond on one of her fingers.

The woman asked, “You live here alone?”

“Yes, alone.”

“I’m alone, too. What can you do? I lived with my husband twenty-five years, and we didn’t have a bad day. Our life together was all sunshine without a single cloud. Suddenly he passed away and left me alone and miserable. The New York climate is unhealthy for me. I suffer from rheumatism. I’ll have to live out my years here.”

“Did you buy the apartment furnished?” Harry asked in businesslike fashion.

“Everything. The daughter wanted nothing for herself besides the dresses and linens. She turned it all over to me for a song. I wouldn’t have had the patience to go out and buy furniture and dishes. Have you lived here a long time already?”

The woman posed one question after another, and Harry answered them willingly. She looked comparatively young—no more than fifty or possibly even younger. He brought her an ashtray and put a glass of lemonade and a plate of cookies on the coffee table before her. Two hours went by, but he hardly noticed. Ethel Brokeles crossed her legs, and Harry cast glances at her round knees. She had switched to a Polish-accented Yiddish. She exuded the intimate air of a relative. Something within Harry exulted. It could be nothing else but that heaven had acceded to his secret desires. Only now, as he listened to her, did he realize how lonely he had been all these years, how oppressed by the fact that he seldom exchanged a word with anyone. Even having her for a neighbor was better than nothing. He grew youthful in her presence, and loquacious. He told her about his three wives, the tragedies that had befallen his children. He even mentioned that, following the death of his first wife, he had had a sweetheart.

The woman said, “You don’t have to make excuses. A man is a man.”

“I’ve grown old.”

“A man is never old. I had an uncle in Wloclawek who was eighty when he married a twenty-year-old girl, and she bore him three children.”

“Wloclawek? That’s near Kowal, my hometown.”

“I know. I’ve been to Kowal. I had an aunt there.”

The woman glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s one o’clock. Where are you having lunch?”

“Nowhere. I only eat breakfast and dinner.”

“Are you on a diet?”

“No, but at my age—”

“Stop talking about your age!” the woman scolded him. “You know what? Come over to my place and we’ll have lunch together. I don’t like to eat by myself. For me, eating alone is even worse than sleeping alone.”

“Really, I don’t know what to say. What did I do to deserve this?”

“Come, come; don’t talk nonsense. This is America, not Poland. My refrigerator is stuffed with goodies. I throw out more than I eat, may I be forgiven.”

The woman used Yiddish expressions that Harry hadn’t heard in at least sixty years. She took his arm and led him to the door. He didn’t have to go more than a few steps. By the time he had locked his door she had opened hers. The apartment he went into was larger than his and brighter. There were pictures on the walls, fancy lamps, bric-a-brac. The windows looked out directly at the ocean. On the table stood a vase of flowers. The air in Harry’s apartment smelled of dust, but here the air was fresh. “She wants something; she has some ulterior motive,” Harry told himself. He recalled what he had read in the newspapers about female cheats who swindled fortunes out of men and out of other women, too. The main thing was to promise nothing, to sign nothing, not to hand over even a single penny.

She seated him at a table, and from the kitchen soon issued the bubbling sound of a percolator and the smell of fresh rolls, fruit, cheese, and coffee. For the first time in years Harry felt an appetite in the middle of the day. After a while they both sat down to lunch.

Between one bite and the next, the woman took a drag from a cigarette. She complained, “Men run after me, but when it comes down to brass tacks they’re all interested only in how much money I have. As soon as they start talking about money I break up with them. I’m not poor; I’m even—knock wood—wealthy. But I don’t want anyone to take me for my money.”

“Thank God I don’t need anyone’s money,” Harry said. “I’ve got enough even if I live a thousand years.”

“That’s good.”

Gradually they began to discuss their finances, and the woman enumerated her possessions. She owned buildings in Brooklyn and on Staten Island; she had stocks and bonds. Based on what she said and the names she mentioned, Harry decided that she was telling the truth. She had, here in Miami, a checking account and a safe-deposit box in the very same bank as Harry. Harry estimated that she was worth at least a million or maybe more. She served him food with the devotion of a daughter or wife. She talked of what he should and shouldn’t eat. Such miracles had occurred to him in his younger years. Women had met him, grown instantly intimate, and stuck with him, never to leave again. But that such a thing should happen to him at his age seemed like a dream. He asked abruptly, “Do you have children?”

“I have a daughter, Sylvia. She lives all alone in a tent in British Columbia.”

“Why in a tent? My daughter’s name was Sylvia, too. You yourself could be my daughter,” he added, not knowing why he had said such a thing.

“Nonsense. What are years? I always liked a man to be a lot older than me. My husband, may he rest in peace, was twenty years older, and the life we had together I would wish for every Jewish daughter.”

“I’ve surely got forty years on you,” Harry said.

The woman put down her spoon. “How old do you take me for?”

“Around forty-five,” Harry said, knowing she was older.

“Add another twelve years and you’ve got it.”

“You don’t look it.”

“I had a good life with my husband. I could get anything out of him—the moon, the stars, nothing was too good for his Ethel. That’s why after he died I became melancholy. Also, my daughter was making me sick. I spent a fortune on psychiatrists, but they couldn’t help me. Just as you see me now, I stayed seven months in an institution, a clinic for nervous disorders. I had a breakdown and I didn’t want to live any more. They had to watch me day and night. He was calling me from his grave. I want to tell you something, but don’t misunderstand me.”

“What is it?”

“You remind me of my husband. That’s why—”

“I’m eighty-two,” Harry said and instantly regretted it. He could have easily subtracted five years. He waited a moment, then added, “If I were ten years younger, I’d make you a proposition.”

Again he regretted his words. They had issued from his mouth as if of their own volition. He was still bothered by the fear of falling into the hands of a gold digger.

The woman looked at him inquisitively and cocked an eyebrow. “Since I decided to live, I’ll take you just as you are.”

“How is this possible? How can it be?” Harry asked himself again and again. They spoke of getting married and of breaking through the wall that divided their two apartments to make them into one. His bedroom was next to hers. She revealed the details of her financial situation to him. She was worth about a million and a half. Harry had already told her how much he had. He asked, “What will we do with so much money?”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with money myself,” the woman replied, “but together, we’ll take a trip around the world. We’ll buy an apartment in Tel Aviv or Tiberias. The hot springs there are good for rheumatism. With me beside you, you’ll live a long time. I guarantee you a hundred years, if not more.”

“It’s all in God’s hands,” Harry said, amazed at his own words. He wasn’t religious. His doubts about God and His providence had intensified over the years. He often said that, after what had happened to the Jews in Europe, one had to be a fool to believe in God.

Ethel stood up and so did he. They hugged and kissed. He pressed her close and youthful urges came throbbing back within him.

She said, “Wait till we’ve stood under the wedding canopy.”

It struck Harry that he had heard these words before, spoken in the same voice. But when? And from whom? All three of his wives had been American-born and wouldn’t have used this expression. Had he dreamed it? Could a person foresee the future in a dream? He bowed his head and pondered. When he looked up he was astounded. Within those few seconds the woman’s appearance had undergone a startling transformation. She had moved away from him and he hadn’t noticed it. Her face had grown pale, shrunken, and aged. Her hair seemed to him to have become suddenly disheveled. She gazed at him sidelong with a dull, sad, even stern expression. Did I insult her or what? he wondered. He heard himself ask, “Is something wrong? Don’t you feel well?”