"Listen, Morris, listen good, because I will do better for you. I will give you a year, free, but then I will decide my salary. I will decide where, when, and how I will work."
"Accepted!" said Morris, with the soft grind of his dental plates. Everyone old had false teeth then.
Of course, Lew always had extra cash in his pockets for bargaining with janitors and with dealers of scrap. Sometimes you could remove a steam boiler from an apartment building intact.
Repair it somehow and then sell it to a different landlord as something used in good condition. The shortages made many such opportunities, along with kitchen sinks, pipes, radiators, toilet bowls, everything that goes into a house. Junkers did not think as far ahead as we did. Janitors-Lew always called them mister and spoke of them as managers or superintendents when he called on them to work something out-always liked the idea of making a little extra on the side. There was so much of that stuff around, and that's what gave us the idea of starting a business selling used building supplies in some place outside the city where there wasn't enough. I think the idea first came from me. It was a time to take chances. What we needed most was a sense of humor and a strong sense of self, and by then we both had plenty of that.
I have to laugh a lot again when I look back. We both knew so little, and with many things I knew more than he did. I knew what stemware was and Lew had never heard of it. But after I mentioned I wanted stemware, he made sure I had it for our first apartment. It came from a guy named Rocky, an Italian peddler of sorts he had made friends with somewhere, an "anything you need?" kind of entrepreneur. He was always dressed to kill, even when he dropped by the junkshop, a fashion plate with brilliantined hair. Our first car too came from Rocky, a used one. Rocky: "What do you need?" Lew: "A car." Rocky: "What make?" Lew: "A Chevy. Blue. Aqua, she wants." Rocky: "When?" Lew: "March of this year." In March it was there. That was 1947, and the car was a '45. Also the stemware, which Rocky had never heard of either, and I still have the image of the shy glance he gave me and the scratch of a head, with his fingers pushing back his generous mop of wavy hair. But no other sign that he did not know the product. Who did back then? But delivered the next week in partitioned paper leaf-each piece wrapped in a brownish tissue paper-came the two boxes, marked Woolworth's. No charge. A wedding gift from Rocky. Wow! I still have some pieces, I've kept them. And now it's almost fifty years later and Wow! once more, because Rocky pops back out of nowhere and turns out to be the partner on that piece of land in California who Lew said I could trust. They'd been in touch all those years, and Lew never said boo.
"Why didn't you ever tell me?" I had to ask.
"He's been in jail," said Lew.
Do people still make friendships that strong? Lew was hungry, always hungry, and filled with ambition, and always something of a foreigner in the world he saw around him that he wanted to be a part of, never stopped wanting to be in and own. He could have gone to college too, and he could have done as well as anyone else, because he learned fast, but he didn't want to take the time. His mother liked me too-they all did-because I was the only one who wrapped her presents in gift wrap and ribbons. I would sit and spend time with her, even though we could not talk much to each other. I didn't understand much Yiddish and that's about all she spoke, and soon she had what the doctors called hardening of the arteries of the head and was probably Alzheimer's disease, and she hardly ever made sense to anyone. Today it seems we'll all get Alzheimer's disease if we don't die of cancer first. There was Glenda, there was Lew.
"My father too," said Sam. "And don't forget about strokes."
"I don't forget. My mother had one."
"So did mine, finally," said Sam.
I would sit with Lew's mother anyway. My trick was to always answer yes. Every once in a while a no was required, and I could tell by shakes of the head and a kind of muttering that I had said the wrong thing, and when that didn't work and there was still no understanding, I smiled and said, "Maybe."
Lew learned fast enough, and when he struck out with the big oil company with his metered heating oil plan, he saw there were people he could not make headway with and places he would not be able to go, and we were smart enough to stick inside our limits. He never even tried joining the Gentile golf club, even when we had enough friends there to probably get in. He got a bigger kick out of inviting them as guests to ours. We both learned fast, and when we had money for two cars, we had two cars. And when the foreign cars came into fashion and were better than ours, we had two of those too.
No synthetic fibers for Lew, no imitations, ever. Cotton shirts made to order, as long as the cotton did not come from Egypt. Egypt was another pulse tingler for him after the wars with Israel. Custom-tailored suits from a shop named Sills even before anyone knew that John Kennedy was having his suits made there too. And most important: manicures, manicures! He never tired of manicures. I'm sure that came from the dirt from the junkshop, and then in the prison camp. We passed the time that way at the end, when he couldn't even watch television anymore. I gave him pedicures too, and he'd just lie back and grin. We used to do that a lot after we were married; it was something between us. I told the nurses at the hospital to work on his fingernails when they wanted to keep him happy, and they did, the staff nurses too, "He died laughing, you know," I said to Sam.
"He did?"
"It's true. At least, that's what they told me." I'd said it on purpose that way, and Sammy popped with surprise. "He died laughing at you."
"What for?"
"Your letter," I said, and I laughed a little. "I'm glad you sent us that long letter about your trip."
"You asked me to."
I'm glad I did. I read it to him in parts when it came to the house and we both laughed about it a lot. Then he'd read it again himself. He took it along into the hospital when he knew he was going in for the last time, and he would read it aloud to the nurses. At night he might have the night nurse read it aloud back to him. The nurses adored him up there, I swear they did, not like those cranky, snobby ones here in New York. He was always asking them about themselves and telling them how good they looked, the married ones with children and the old ones too. He knew how to jolly them along and to say the right things when they had problems. "Mary, tell your husband he'd better watch out, because as soon as I get just a little bit better, you're going to have to start meeting me after work and on your days off too, and he'd better start learning to make dinner for himself. And breakfast too, because some mornings when he wakes up you won't be there."
"Agnes, here's what we'll do. Tomorrow, I'll check out. You'll pick me up in your Honda at five, we'll go out for drinks and dinner at the Motel on the Mountain. Bring enough along with you in case you want to stay out all night."
"Agnes, don't laugh," I'd say too, because I'd be sitting right there. "He means it. I've seen him work before, and he always gets his way. That's how come I'm with him." It was really a nice, full trip Sam laid out for us in his letter.
" New Zealand, Australia, Singapore amp;" I praised him. "And with Hawaii, Fiji, Bali, and Tahiti thrown in? Did you really mean all that?"
"Most of it. Not Fiji, Bali, or Tahiti. That was put in for you two." i "Well, it worked. He got a big kick out of imagining you in those places. 'Poor Sammy,' is what he said to the night nurse, while she was reading it back to him again on that last night. He died at night, you know, and they phoned me in the morning, and those were just about his last words, Sam. 'Just when he needs me most, I have to be laid up in the hospital. Here the poor guy is going off without us on a trip around the world, and he still hasn't learned how to pick up a girl.' "