Songs at Twilight: Stories of My Time

By Arthur Langer

Songs at Twilight is a collection of non-fiction stories stretching from the days of The Great Depression through World War II to the golden years beyond; growing up in the 30's, adventures in khaki, life upon the wicked stage, the world as an oyster, and material witness to the perfect murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781463432027

Arthur Langer

Arthur Langer, a veteran of World War II, grew up in Brooklyn when baseball was its true religion and Ebbets Field was its cathedral. Most of his time in the Army was spent with Central Security, the security and intelligence headquarters for the Western Defense Command. Drawn to the theatre as a career, he has served as producer, general manager, and playwright, another grand adventure.

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© 2012 Arthur Langer. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 4/12/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4634-3202-7 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-3203-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-3204-1 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011911546

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Long Ago And Far Away

Before The Parade Passes By

The Jersey Bounce

Girl Of My Dreams

What Is This Thing Called Love?

Take Me Out To The Ball Game

Running Wild

Show Me The Way To Go Home

Auf Wedersehn

Sentimental Journey

Among My Souvenirs

Our Love Is Here To Stay

It’s Only A Paper Moon

When I See An Elephant Fly

All That Jazz

Arrivederci, Roma

The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down

The Wheel Of Fortune

Thanks For The Memory

Cocktails For Two

Baby Take A Bow

Autumn Leaves

Strike Up The Band

Swinging On A Star

April Fool

Déja Vu

Desire Under The Palms

We Found This Moment

The Samba Does Something To Me

It Ain’t Over Yet

The Household Cavalry

King Kong

I Could Write A Book

For Sentimental Reasons

Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries

How Long Has This Been Going On?

For Polly

Long Ago And Far Away

Before The Parade Passes By

The idea arose after I had written to Dave McPheeters in Cincinnati telling him that I was leaving New York and moving up to the Hudson Valley where Polly and I owned a home in Woodstock. Dave was unprepared for this turn of events, calling me as soon as he read the letter.

Leave New York? he asked, somewhat incredulous. As though I had chosen to violate some historic compact. How can you leave New York? he went on. You’re such a New York kinda’ guy.

His astonishment sang out like a sonar wave bouncing off some unseen glacier. I had never thought of myself as a New York kinda’ guy, even though I had been born and raised in Brooklyn when it was still a fabulous part of the city. I have always loved New York, but by the time I was leaving, I had grown to love a lot of elsewheres also. There were moments I regretted not going back to San Francisco after the war. I never got over the quiet sophistication of London when I had the flat off Chesham Square in Belgravia. And how could anyone not fall in love with the charm and elegance of Paris? Put me down in Atlanta or San Diego and my homesickness for New York would evanesce pretty quickly.

What are you going to do in Woodstock? he wanted to know, his voice betraying a lack of confidence in my judgment. You’re no rock ‘n roller.

Dave was making the same mistake that half the world kept making. The Woodstock Festival was never held in Woodstock, but in a place called Bethel about thirty miles away. Woodstock was still a prominent artists community - once an integral part of the Hudson River School - and still the home to painters, sculptors, ceramists, and writers. I would not be a stranger among them.

I’ll probably write another play, I answered almost coyly, knowing that my reply had no chance of satisfying him. While we were good friends, my career in the theatre had always been a mystery to him. Dave was as far away from the Arts as he was from playing shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds. Yet I understood his sense of concern.

Why don’t you write your memoirs instead, he suddenly suggested. You always had such wonderful stories to tell. Some of them were awfully funny. Why don’t you put them down on paper?

I hadn’t thought of writing stories for a long time. I had lost my interest as soon as I went to work in the theatre. Although I had spent the major part of my career in production and management, I sometimes wrote plays. But outside of a one-woman musical, the others were still waiting to be discovered. Yet coming from Dave McPheeters, the idea of writing my memoirs seemed strange. Dave had many of his own stories to tell but never put pen to paper. He had been a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, that legendary contingent of Army Air Corps fighter pilots that never lost an American bomber over Europe during World War II. Then, when I first met him, he was working for The Urban League during the civil rights struggle. Afterwards he became director of the Head Start program. Dave was throwing me one from left field. But after hanging up the phone, I started to think about it.

Write my memoirs?

At first the idea exploded in my head like a wet firecracker. Pffft! Who the hell would be interested in reading my memoirs? I had always chosen to be laid back, never coming on strong about anyone or anything, preferring that my action or lack of action would say it all for me. I always basked in the applause I received for a job well done; like good grades in school, or winning a race, or catching a touchdown pass in an intramural football game. But fame was never the spur. Still I had always thought of myself as a writer, even when I wasn’t writing. I can no longer remember what it was that started me down that path, but no doubt the loneliness and surge of patriotism I felt while I was in the Army had a lot to do with it.

Now we have come, my comrades

For a cause which is far greater

Now we have come, my comrades

So that no one shall come later

To see my poetry and stories in Army publications filled me with an inordinate sense of pride, feeling that, perhaps, they were bringing a note of hope to the GI Joes and Janes caught in some dismal region of the globe. That was even electrifying. In later years I began reading the Martha Foley anthologies which were collections of the best stories chosen from outstanding journals and magazines. In college I became a mainstay of its literary publication and even had one short story published in an obscure magazine in Chicago. I was on my way, until The New Yorker sobered me up. It seemed that each time I submitted a story to its editors, it was taken from one envelope, then quickly placed in another, and sent back to me by return mail. It didn’t take long for me to understand that there could be no future in an exchange like that. I soon gave up the quixotic idea of writing the great American novel. Besides the theatre was calling by then and God had other plans for me.

So, what kind of a memoir? An autobiography?

Several theatre luminaries I had either worked with or admired had written autobiographies that no one ever read, except their staffs, their families, and me. All of them disappeared as quickly as they came. Act One by Moss Hart and Dance To The Piper by Agnes DeMille made something of a splash for a while and then inundated the stalls of secondhand book shops. Mister Abbott by George Abbott should have done better, because here was a man with a terrific sense of humor. But, outside of the theatre, no one seemed to notice.

A tell-all memoir?

There have been so many of these in recent years that the art of subtlety and innuendo has been lost. Besides, from the reviews of these books, it seems that for a tell-all confession to succeed it must contain some truth, some half-truths, and a lot of untruths, embroidering all three into a triptych of contrivance. Reading tell-all books is like smoking cigarettes. They might give you a momentary jag, but add nothing to your life expectancy.

Yet there were other kinds of stories I could tell. Growing up within the shadows of Ebbets Field when the Brooklyn Dodgers played there had a dynamic all its own. Then I can still recall the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. It was a turning point for Americans that still resonates among us today. It changed everyone’s life in ways that were completely unforeseen when it happened. For the young men of my generation choices were narrowed. It was no longer what college you would attend or the kind of career to pursue. It was either Army, Navy, Marines, or Coast Guard. On the night of my graduation from Boys High School at the Academy of Music in January 1944 some mother in the audience seated next to mine whispered to her very softly -

They’ll make a fine bunch of soldiers!

And we did. Most of us answered the call to the colors and most of us came home. A bunch of American kids who hadn’t learned to shave yet. Those were momentous days when the world had turned upside down.

There were boyhood stories, family stories, travel stories, and theatre stories as well. There was even one murder story. As I began to assemble notes, I started to see them as the landmark episodes of my life. By painting a broad canvas I could create a gestalt, a Freudian term which is the basis of some modern art. It theorizes that when a person looks at a painting, he or she will focus on the key elements in the picture. So if that is the case, why not simply paint the key elements and allow the viewer’s imagination to fill in the rest of it? The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It would relieve me of the burden of minutiae which most likely could put the reader to sleep. Not only that, but I might be put to sleep as well. Once I understood where I wanted to go, I saw the immediate danger. For a writer to become his own editor might be a symptom of hubris. I hoped not. Out of the plethora of incidents and people that shaped my life I decided that the stories I selected have an attraction that outperforms the rest.

In the theatre the phrase Take it from the top is a directive in rehearsal for the cast to repeat everything from the beginning. Of course, unlike the theatre, nothing in life is a rehearsal nor is it make-believe. Yet having been there before, the last thing left for me to say is -

This is where I came in.

The Jersey Bounce

No one knew where Max Ader came from, nor did anyone care. Some of the Jewish farmers in Pine Brook thought he had emigrated from Rumania. Others weren’t sure about that, only agreeing that from his accent, he had probably been born in the Carpathian Mountains. My mother said he was never born at all, only hatched.

He had been introduced to my Aunt Rosie by Sam Nachamson, a dairy farmer who let him sleep in his barn during cold winter nights in return for chores like sweeping out the stable and seeing that the cows remained content. As far as my mother went, he was an anathema. Although my mother could never qualify as a Brahmin, Max Ader in her eyes was an Untouchable. Of course, no one knew what he thought about her.

Nor did anyone know what Max did for a living. Maybe that’s because he never did anything. He was perfectly content to live off the earnings of his wife which wasn’t much at all. Yet somehow he and Rosie managed to scrape together enough money to buy a dispossessed shack on Route 46, a two-lane highway that cut through New Jersey from the George Washington Bridge to the Delaware Water Gap. Back in the years of The Great Depression the house lay in a bucolic area of farm country with brooks that babbled and where fruit trees grew. There was also an abundance of corn fields with scarecrows standing guard like sentinels. If you didn’t have to worry where your next meal was coming from, which farmers never do, Pine Brook was a pleasure dome of sorts, far away from the great metropolis on the other side of the Hudson River. Here the air was fresh and life was good.

Rosie was one of my father’s sisters who had forged a path to the New World before him, moving in with Esther, another sister. Esther lived in a cramped tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was raising five kids on her own, having been abandoned by a husband who had run off with a cashier at the restaurant where he worked. There was no bed in which Rosie could sleep, so most of the time she slept standing up. Rosie learned very quickly that she had no options except to die, so after several weeks she said goodbye to Esther and headed for New Jersey, the land of opportunity. She found work at once, mostly as a dishwasher in diners. Later she was promoted to short order cook which compelled her to handle bacon and ham, forbidden to her by the dietary laws of her religion. She was amazed to find that these abominations did not bring forth thunder and lightning. The Greek who owned the diner set up sleeping quarters for her in a storeroom off the kitchen and in addition to her dawn to midnight hours, she had to look after the coal stove during the night. So what? she thought out loud. This was America, and you had to start somewhere.

In spite of her humble origins, she was accorded respect by my brother and me. To us she was Aunt Rosie and, in turn, her consort was called Uncle Max. My mother called him the worst names she could think of. In spite of the story my mother kept repeating about the Nachamson barn, no one really knew how they met. There was certainly no family bible in which it was recorded, and if there had been, my mother would have removed the archive and flushed it down the toilet, or down the dumbwaiter along with the potato peelings and cantaloupe rinds. Yet her loathing of Rosie’s husband, as well as her disdain of their home as a shanty, never kept her from spending the summer in the country. Taking me and my brother and Grandma Gold along with her to escape the city heat, it was not beneath her to billet her family in that hovel. Foreign to the pleasures of Newport or Martha’s Vineyard, a summer in some mysterious resort gave her one-upsmanship over her neighbors who had to place mattresses on the fire escapes or drag them up on the roof to find some sleep during the wicked hot spells. Of course, she never mentioned that the toilet facility was an outhouse behind a clump of bushes at the rear of the resort, or that you had to do your laundry in a brook. It also worked out well for Rosie. Whatever my mother paid her, it was more than she would have earned flipping hamburgers. It also gave her experience as an innkeeper where she slowly learned the skills she would later use at the hotels in the Catskills and Miami Beach. But the arrangement had a unique codicil. Max Ader was never to join the family at the table. Since my mother did the shopping, as well as the cooking, the folyock, that lazy bum, could fress goll, swallow his own bile. The line was drawn in the sand.

The house centered around one large room which served as parlor, kitchen, and dining room, if one could call it that. There were two small bedrooms and a storage shed that had been outfitted with bunk beds for my brother Ralph and me. At the rear of the house a staircase rose into the attic above, Max’s bedroom when his home was turned into a guest house. It was more like a hayloft than an attic, with a pulley system that Max used to hoist and lower whatever he needed to survive. It was how Rosie delivered his meals and collected the empty dishes. The plumbing was antique. Although the kitchen had running water, there were no bathroom facilities, and we all had to bathe in a large zinc tub that hid behind a curtain. As far as our other bodily functions were concerned, we eventually got used to the outhouse out back. Though it was always fly-infested and smelled awful, I noticed that the grass and foliage around it had a deep green color, like an oasis in a desert. Along with the coal stove, this was my mother’s way of spending the summer in the country.

It was always hard to figure out just what Max was doing upstairs. He left no clues that could indict him. Still he had some proclivities that were noticeable. Like melting down lead pipes to make slugs for the slot machines across the road at Grossman’s, a drive-in hamburger stand that was a scheduled stop for the DeCamp Bus Line traversing Route 46. Or else he would spend his day making bathtub hooch in the zinc tub, using fermented grain alcohol and coloring it with maple syrup. There was no doubt that he had the leanings of a petty criminal who aspired to greater opportunities. He liked music in the same way that Al Capone liked opera. Up in his attic he kept a ukulele which he played whenever the Muse engaged him, serenading his beleaguered wife with assurances of undying devotion.

I can’t give you anything but love, baby

That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby

Whatever it meant to Max, it worked for Rosie. So what if Max was a little odd? Her sister Esther was divorced and raising five kids on her own. Rosie was childless, but at least she had a man, and in the social order from which she came that counted for a lot. Her days were often filled with anguish, wondering where Max could be all night, hearing him climb up the attic stairs and then sleep away the day. During the summer months when we were there, I sometimes heard him at the ice box in the kitchen, sampling the leftovers my mother had stored for another meal. He liked my mother’s cooking, except for one thing. He seemed to abhor anything made with garlic. The pot roasts and meat loafs and liver stews were always untouched. He always seemed attracted to rare beef.

His whiskey business started to take off. But his best efforts came from the calls he received for wine. That was a lot safer than the moonshine from which his patrons could go blind. The wine was easier to handle. Sometimes Ralph and I would watch him pour buckets of cherries, which he had scavenged from the surrounding orchards, into the zinc tub. Of course, he was careful to remove the pits before he crushed them into a pulp with a sledge hammer. Then he would soak them in alcohol and let the whole mess ferment for a day. Where he got the alcohol was a mystery that was never solved, but he got it, or stole it, and it gave birth to an underground beverage which he named Mount Vernon Red. It was his way of thanking his country for the opportunity it gave him.

Boys, he once said to us, beaming like he had struck gold, be glad that you were born in America. Here all things are possible.

He became his own distributor. He got all the Mom ‘n Pop stores to carry it for their select customers under the counter. The Great Depression was in full blossom at the time, and he found he was unable to supply the demand. The churches and synagogues became his best outlets, the churches using his product as sacramental wine, and the synagogues used it for Kiddush along with the sponge cake after their Sabbath services. He had found a way to beat Prohibition and his future was endless. Until one day a large Packard limousine pulled up at the house and out of it came Dutch Schultz himself. Schultz went right to the point.

If you don’t stop making this poison, he said to Max, having the public welfare in mind, you’re gonna wind up at the bottom of the Hackensack River with cement shoes.

Max knew it was time to retire from the spirits business. He also retired to his attic like someone suddenly condemned to solitary confinement. He stayed in his place of exile throughout the day, and only came out at night to forage through the ice box for food. But his problem didn’t end there. When my mother found out about the Dutch Schultz visit, she pretended to faint. Then after she pretended to revive, she started screaming at Rosie like she had just been deflowered.

I pay you good money each week, she wailed uncontrollably. I put food on the table. And for that I’m forced to live in a house with a murderer?

Rosie turned pale and her voice started to waver. Max is not a murderer, she tried to assure her sister-in-law. He just does crazy things sometimes.

Then he should be in the crazy house, she yelled. If you don’t put him there, then Louis will. Suddenly my father had become a party to the action.

No one made dinner that night. Grandma Gold, who could turn day into night herself, walked into the darkness, preferring to be among the fireflies, almost talking to herself. Ralph and I were given tomato and cheese sandwiches to eat, and dashed into the storage shed to escape the continuing maelstrom my mother would not let go of. It wasn’t until about ten o’clock that things quieted down and all of us went to sleep. But sleep was not on Max Ader’s agenda. He had other plans for his house guests that would sear themselves into our brains, imprinted on our memories like tattoos. It was Grandma Gold who first heard him. She listened carefully for a while. And then shook my mother. Becky, she whispered, trying to remain calm. Something is going on. My mother stirred and sat up. From the attic came a low hissing sound, like that of a snake, but with it came words of terror.

I must have blood, a voice called. I must have blood. No one could doubt where the voice was coming from. It seemed to sound more foreign than usual, as though it were echoing through a vast canyon. Max Ader was now revealing a side of himself that no one ever suspected before. His lust for blood was relentless and unsatiated, curdling through the night like the cry of a vampire. Everyone was up. My mother burst through the door of the storage shed and ordered Ralph and me to dress quickly. She then went back into her own room and threw on a house coat. Both Grandma Gold and Aunt Rosie were also in house coats and were standing at the front door, their eyes glazed with panic.

I must have blood, the voice of doom kept calling, repeating it over and over again. All of us stumbled into the pitch black night, leading each other by hand, and heading towards the home of Dino Albertini, the Caldwell fishmonger who lived on Route 46, about a quarter of a mile away. The moon was down that night, and only the croaking of bullfrogs and the chirping of crickets told us that we were still among the living. It took about an hour of groping our way to make the pilgrim’s journey, and as soon as we reached Dino’s house, my mother started to bang on his door with a measured fury that resounded like a hammer striking an anvil. In a short moment the front light went on and Mrs. Albertini unlatched the lock. She stood there somewhat bewildered, staring at us as though we might be grifters about to ply our trade.

We were going to be murdered, were the first words my mother spoke, her eyes wild with fright. Please help us. It was the first time, and only time, that I ever heard her ask a favor of anyone, her fear outweighing her disdain. Dino’s wife said nothing at first, seemingly dazed by the sudden appearance of supplicants.

Come on in, she said. I’ll make some breakfast. Then I’ll call the police.

The next morning Rosie’s house was surrounded by local police and state troopers. There was also a reporter from the Caldwell newspaper. All of us, along with Dino and Claudia, stood outside on the front lawn and watched the cops hustle Max Ader down from his redoubt in the attic.

Don’t you know that attempted murder is a crime? a state trooper asked him. It can get you ten to twenty at Rahway.

Max remained cool. Show me who I tried to murder, he fired back, and I’ll sign a confession.

These people there, the trooper said, pointing his finger at us. None of us said anything.

Anybody sign a complaint? Uncle Max asked, his Carpathian accent now gone. I’m entitled to a lawyer. It was odd the way he suddenly became someone else.

The officer looked at him with newfound respect, suddenly aware that he had no evidence, witnesses, nothing. Look, wise guy, he said scornfully, the next time we get a call about you, we’re gonna’ make you awfully sorry. He then pivoted abruptly and walked quickly to his car and was soon gone in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

By noon that day my mother and Grandma Gold had us all packed and standing on the other side of Route 46 waiting for the DeCamp bus that would carry us back to the safe haven of Brooklyn. Of course, it was a sad ending to a summer of delights for Ralph and myself. But there was a lesson of sorts to be learned from it. For Max it was a pyrrhic victory. He had chased away his she-devil, but lost the income that permitted him to engage in his fantasies. Rosie had to scrounge for work again, eventually selling the house in Pine Brook and moving down to Florida with her man. Grandma Gold went back to haranguing my grandfather. My mother kept my father running out to funerals on Sundays. Ralph started to become interested in girls, a lifelong avocation for him. And I kept wishing that things had turned out differently for all of us.

Girl Of My Dreams

My grandfather had a sense of humor. Not only that, but he could also tell a story, or even create one when he had to. He had a vivid imagination and was always able to see the amusing undercurrents in people and events. Looking back to my childhood, he was the one member of my family I truly looked forward to seeing. Benjamin Gold was one hell of a guy.

My grandmother Gussie was the exact opposite. A harridan, a shrew, as well as a shrike, she ruled her family as though she had been given a divine right which also gave her some kind of lien on the world beyond. Her vision of life on earth was gloomy and morbid, something like a devil’s workshop where you had to do unto others before others could do unto you. Although she thought she had a special alliance with the Almighty, she was really irreligious. She was penurious and uncharitable. She was also a lousy cook.

It was a marriage that was made in hell. Benjamin was always the recipient of her anger and discontent. In order to maintain the facade of a home life, he forced himself to submerge his sense of humor in order to guard himself against her wrath and scorn. He was always careful of what he said, and if something struck him as funny, he would quickly place his hand over his mouth whenever he felt the need to laugh. It was always something of a conundrum to me as to how this tall, handsome, sandy-haired man ever got together with this short, dark, swarthy-skinned woman who was always regarded by the neighborhood merchants as a direct descendant of Attila the Hun. No matter where she went, she somehow managed to leave a wake of destruction, just as her Hun ancestors left no blade of grass growing wherever they rode.

Both of them had been born and raised in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef. In the day of universal military conscription, when many young men fled to America to avoid the call to serve, Benjamin decided to do his bit for his country. He entered the army, was assigned to an infantry battalion, and discovered he was a crack shot. Singled out as a sniper, he quickly rose to the rank of corporal. But since Austria was not at war, he spent most of the time pulling guard duty in remote provinces like Galicia. Seeing the bright side of it all, he enjoyed the garrison life. For a youngster away from home for the first time in his life, there were plenty of girls and plenty of schnapps. The army had made a man out of him, as armies throughout the world usually do, and at the end of three years he came home to an uncertain future.

In fact, he had no future. With only a basic education and untrained for any trade or profession, he spent a long time looking for work. He finally found a job as a waiter in a tavern where he depended mostly on tips from the barflies who patronized the place. But in a way it was a perfect fit. He enjoyed the freedom of civilian life and was able to save some money, and quickly developed a following among the customers. Most often many of them came to the tavern to hear his quips and stories about life in the army, or the wayward camp followers, or the town drunks. His tips began to soar, and the future that had been the last frontier for him now turned brighter than he ever could have imagined when he was on the verge of hopelessness. He was off in some unforeseen direction and he began to think of opening his own place, maybe near some military cantonment where he could speak the argot of soldiers out for a night’s action. It was all falling into place until Augusta Maltz walked into the place with her two sisters.

In later years when he reflected upon it, he never could figure out how a woman, as prim and proper as she professed to be, could ever patronize a taverna, considering the moral climate of Central Europe at the time. Yet in the years of their declining marriage, it provided him with the one weapon she could never fend off. On the many occasions when her rantings and ravings drove him from the house, he would turn on her with a sense of triumph and reduce her to a pitiful savage by calling her one name: kurve, whore! It was something she could never live down or ever explain away. But it didn’t stop her from her mission of castration. Instead it empowered her with a fierce resolve to maintain her image of holiness.

In spite of tacit avowal of guilt, she never denied her visit to the tavern with her two older sisters. Both Ruth and Tillie were married and awaiting their shiffkarten, their steamship tickets, which would start them on their journey to America where their husbands had already gone. As much as he thought about it in later years, none of it really added up. They were not the kind of young women who were usually seen in places like The Devil’s Den. None of them tried to pick up any of the men who were serious drunkards there. They seemed to sit demurely at a large round table taking in the sights and sounds of what had been Verboten to them by an overprotective father and a fanatic brother. Benjamin just concluded that they were simply out on the town for a few kicks, but in fighting off his wife’s constant anger, he was forced to turn her visit into more than it really was.

What did you think when you met her? I asked him. We were sitting at the white steel-topped table in the kitchen of my house where we often sat when he came to visit. Once he started talking about his years as a young man, I tried to find some kind of relevance to my pedigree. He let the question sink in before he began to answer. He turned and looked out the window that opened on the courtyard where someone’s wash flapped lazily on a clothesline in the dull summer breeze. He then reached into a vest pocket and withdrew a cigarette stub which he had put out several hours earlier. I watched him relight it, inhale deeply, and then emit the smoke in a steady gray stream. A rueful look began to cloud his pale blue eyes.

I thought she was cute, he said, but in a way that made it sound as if it were extracted by torture. There were very few Jewish girls in our village, so I thought it was time I took a wife. It was a rather clinical way of putting it, and for a young boy like myself who was starting to notice girls, it started to erode my innate sense of romanticism. That’s all? I asked. You thought she was cute?

That drew a laugh, even though it sounded slightly