We drive around and don’t find the boy. The policeman says “There are so many young thieves wearing the outfit you described. Parka jacket, fancy running sneakers, hat sort of extra tall and squeezed on top, sometimes with a pompom, sometimes not. Tough luck about your necklace and painting though.”
“I could’ve told you,” my father says, seated beside me. “Fact is, I told you — a thousand times about how to be wise in New York, but you always got your own ideas. You think I’d ever exit through a revolving gate when there’s no token booth there, even in what they call the better days? That’s where they leap on you, trap you against the gate on either side or on the stairs leaving it, but you never want to play it safe. Now you’ve lost everything. Well, you still got your life and it’s not that I have no sympathy for you over what happened, but it seems you were almost asking for it it could’ve been so easily avoided.”
“Layoff me, will you? I already feel bad enough.” I get out of the car in front of Magna’s building. “Thanks, officers.”
“As I say,” my father says, going in with me, “I can understand how you feel. But this one time, since your life depends on it, I wish you’d learn from your mistake.”
I go upstairs and tell Magna about the robbery. My father sits on the daybed she uses as a couch. “Every week closer to the wedding she gets more radiant,” he says. “You got yourself one hell of a catch. She’s smart, she’s good, she has wonderful parents and she’s also beautiful. I don’t know how you rate it but I’m glad you did.”
“It had your special present in it,” I tell her, “plus some drawing for you I know he’s going to just throwaway. I won’t tell you what the special gift is. I’ll try to get something like it or close to it. God, I could have killed that kid.”
“That wouldn’t have helped,” she says.
“It certainly wouldn’t’ve,” my father says. “Because in the process you could’ve got killed in his place, and those kids always got ones working with them or friends for revenge. This is what I tell you and hope you’ll remember for all time: stay out of other people’s business, and if something like a robbery happens to you, shut your mouth and give everything you have. Twice I got held up by gunmen in my dental office and both times my advice worked. They not only didn’t harm me but gave me back my empty wallet.”
Magna and I go to the Marriage License Bureau. The line for applications extends into the hallway. “I hate lines,” my father says. “I’ve always avoided them by calling before to see what time the place opens and then trying to be the first one there.”
“It looks like the line for food stamps,” the woman in front of us says to her mate.
“To me like the one for Welfare,” another woman says. “Unemployment insurance,” Magna says to me. “I’ve been on them. Didn’t want to but had no choice. Have you?”
“Him?” my father says. “Oh, he was too pure to take unemployment. He deserved it too but you know what he did? Refused to even go down to sign up for it. He was living home then and I told him he was crazy. I said ‘I always want you to have a job, but if you’re fired from one or laid off, well, you paid for that insurance, so take it.’ But him? Always too damn pure. That can work against you as much as it can for. Must’ve got that trait from his mother, because he certainly didn’t get that way from me.”
“I could have got unemployment a few times,” I say to her, “but I always had some money saved and so thought I’d live off it and write at the same time. To sort of use the time break to produce some writing that might earn me some money but not intentionally to make me money—”
“There he goes again with his purity bent. Look, I never encouraged my children to take anything that wasn’t theirs. Oh, maybe by my actions I occasionally did, but I never encouraged them personally to take like that. But he wouldn’t listen about that insurance. We had terrible fights over it. Of course he never would’ve had to reject or accept any unemployment insurance if he’d’ve become the dentist I wanted him to. I pleaded with all my sons to and each one in turn broke my heart. But he out of all of them had the brains and personality for it and he could’ve worked alongside me for a few years and then bought me out of my practice. I would’ve even given him the practice for nothing if that’s what it took to get him to become a dentist, though with maybe him contributing to my support a little each month, mine and his mother’s.”
“I wasn’t good in the sciences,” I say to him. “I told you that and offered my grades as proof over and over again. I used to almost regurgitate every time I went into the chemistry building and biology labs. I tried. I was predent for more than two years.”
“Regurgitate. See the words he uses? No, you didn’t want to become a dentist because I was one. You wanted to go into the arts. To be an artiste. The intelligentsia you wanted to belong to. Well, now you’re able to make a decent living off it teaching, but for how many years you practically starved? You almost broke my heart then, seeing you struggle like that for so long, though you still have time to become one. Dentists average even more money than doctors today.”
“Next,” the clerk says.
Magna gives her our blood tests results. She gives us the application to fill out.
“Can we come right up to the front of the line after we fill it out?” I say.
“You have to go to the back,” she says.
“Why aren’t there two lines as there are supposed to be? Why’s the other window closed?”
“We’re a little shorthanded today. You think I like it? It’s double my usual load.”
“There are three people typing over there and two putting away things in files. Why not get one of them to man the other window till this line’s a little relieved?”
“Shh, don’t make trouble,” my father says. “You can’t avoid the situation, accept it. It’s the city.”
“I’m not the supervisor,” she says, “and the supervisor can’t just tell someone to do something when it’s not that person’s job. Next,” she says to the couple behind us.
Magna pulls me away. “Wherever we are,” she says, “I can always count on you to try to improve things.”
“Am I wrong?”
“You’d think at the Marriage Bureau you’d tone it down a little, but no real harm. It’d be too laughable for us to break up down here.”
“He was always like that,” my father says. “Always a protester, a rebel. Nothing was ever good enough in life for him. He’d see a Broadway play that maybe the whole world thought was great and which’d win all the prizes, he’d say it could’ve been much better. Books, politics, his schools, the banks — whatever, always the same. I told him plenty of times to run for mayor of this city, then governor, then president. He never took me seriously. I suppose all that does mean he’s thinking or his heart’s mostly in the right place, but sometimes he can get rude with people with all those changes of his he wants. He doesn’t have the knack to let things roll off him as I did. Maybe that’s good. I couldn’t live with it if that was me. You’ll have troubles with him, young lady.”
We go to the Diamond Center for wedding bands. “How’d you find us?” the man behind the counter says.
“We saw all the stores and didn’t know which one to choose,” I say. “So I asked this man who looked as if he worked in the area ‘Anyone place carry only gold wedding bands?’ He said ‘Nat Sisler’s,’ who I suppose, from the photo there, is you, ‘4 West, down the middle aisle on the right. There are forty other booths there but you won’t miss his. He’s got the biggest sign.’”