The game came to an end and my father walked up. He said: My friend here says you’re dangerous.
The stranger said: I can be.
My father said grinning broadly: He says you’ll kill me if I win.
The stranger said: Are you so sure you’ll win?
My father said: There’s only one way to find out.
The stranger said: And who might you be?
My father said he was at the seminary.
The stranger expressed surprise at finding a seminarian in the bar.
My father said We are all sinners, brother, in a rather sarcastic tone of voice.
The stranger and my father played a game and five dollars changed hands.
The stranger said: Do you want your revenge?
They played another game which took longer. My father was still playing carelessly; he naturally did not talk while the stranger was playing, but when it was his own turn he answered the stranger’s questions with sarcastic stories about the seminary. The stranger was a man of few words, but he seemed amused. My father won in the end with a lucky shot and five dollars changed hands.
The stranger said: Now let’s make it interesting.
My father said: How interesting do you want to make it?
The stranger asked how much money my father had in the world and Buddy Holly mouthed the words NO NO Don’t tell him you stupid jerk from behind his back and my father said he had $500.
The stranger said he would give any odds against the $500. My father couldn’t tell if he was serious.
He said: A hundred bucks. Best of five.
The stranger said in that case he’d like to see the color of his money, because he had to get back on the road and he was not going to hang around for a hundred bucks. He said 5 to 1.
My father had $25 on him. He borrowed $25 from Buddy and the rest in tens and fives from people in the bar who knew he was good for it.
They played two games and the stranger won them both easily. They started the third game and the stranger began to win easily, but then my father’s luck turned and he pulled himself together and won. He won the fourth game, though it was a hard fight, and then he won the fifth game and it was silent in the bar. Other people in the bar had seen the gun too.
The stranger reached inside his jacket and everyone froze. Then he took out a wallet. He extracted five $100 bills from a thick stack.
He said: I don’t suppose you’ve had this much money all at one time before.
My father pointed out that he already had $500.
The stranger said: $1,000! That’s a lot of money.
He said: I hate to see a man with money who doesn’t know what to do with it.
My father said: What do you mean?
The stranger said if you knew something a little ahead of other folks you could sometimes make money if you already had money.
My father said: What do you know?
The stranger said he wouldn’t be surprised if the new highway was built that way.
My father said: If you know that for a fact why don’t you do something about it? Buy some real estate.
The stranger said: I don’t like property. It ties you down. But if I didn’t mind owning property, and I had $1,000, I’d know what to do with the money.
The bar closed and the stranger drove off. It happened that Mrs. Randolph, Buddy’s landlady, wanted to sell her house and move to Florida, but no one was buying. My father pointed out that if the stranger was right they could buy this house and turn it into a motel and make a lot of money.
If, said Buddy.
The fact was that they were both convinced that the stranger knew what he was talking about; the gun lent a mysterious conviction to the story.
My father said he wasn’t going to have time for that though, because once he was through with the seminary he was going to Harvard. He had written to Harvard to take up the earlier offer.
A few weeks went by. A letter came from Harvard explaining that they would like to see what he had been doing for the past few years and asking for his grades and a reference. My father provided these, and a couple of months went by. One day a letter came which must have been hard to write. It said Harvard was prepared to offer him a place based on his earlier record, and it went on to explain that scholarships however were awarded purely on merit, so that it would not be fair to other students to give one to someone with a D average. It said that if he chose to take up the place he would need to pay the normal cost of tuition.
My father went home to Sioux City for Easter. Buddy went home to Philadelphia to celebrate Passover. My father took the letter to his father.
My grandfather looked at the letter from Harvard, and he said that he believed it was God’s will that my father should not go to Harvard.
Four years earlier my father had had a brilliant future. Now he faced life with a mediocre degree from an obscure theological college, a qualification absolutely useless to a man incapable of entering the ministry.
My father was struck speechless with disgust. He left the house without a word. He drove a Chevrolet 1,300 miles.
In later years my father sometimes played a game. He’d meet a man on his way to Mexico and he’d say, Here’s fifty bucks, do me a favor and buy me some lottery tickets, and he’d give the man his card. Say the odds against winning the jackpot were 20 million to 1 and the odds against the man giving my father the winning ticket another 20 million to 1, you couldn’t say my father’s life was ruined because there was a 1 in 400 trillion chance that it wasn’t.
Or my father might meet a man on his way to Europe and he’d say, Here’s fifty bucks, if you happen to go to Monte Carlo do me a favor, go to the roulette table and put this on number 17 and keep it there for 17 spins of the wheel, the man would say he wasn’t planning to go to Monte Carlo and my father would say But if you do and he’d give him his card. Because what were the odds that the man would change his plans and go to Monte Carlo, what were the odds that 17 would come up 17 times in a row, what were the odds that if it did the man would send the money on to my father? Whatever they were it was not absolutely impossible but only highly unlikely, and it was not absolutely certain that my grandfather had destroyed him because there was a 1 in 500 trillion trillion trillion chance that he had not.
My father played the game for a long time because he felt he should give my grandfather a sporting chance. I don’t know when he played it for the last time, but the first time was when he left the house without a word and drove 1,300 miles to see Buddy in Philadelphia.
My father parked in front of Buddy’s house. A piece of piano music was being played loudly and bitterly in the front room. Doors were slammed. There were loud voices. Somebody screamed. The piano was silent. Somebody started playing the piano loudly and bitterly.
My father found Buddy who explained what was going on.
Buddy had wanted to be an opera singer and was an accountant. His brother Danny had wanted to be a clarinettist and worked in his father’s jewelry business. His sister Frieda had wanted to be a violinist and worked as a secretary before marrying and having three children. His sister Barbara had wanted to be a violinist and worked as a secretary before marrying and having two children. His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.