each slice every five seconds, and she cursed irritably when the bacon fat spat. She left the kitchen to put on a robe and a Vivaldi record, and when she came back things were burning. I said that I rarely ate breakfast anyway and only needed a cup of coffee, which annoyed her. So I ate like a pig.
'Tell me about yourself,' I said, chewing.
'I was born, grew tall and fair, knew both joy and tears, grew old, and died an abbess.' Phlox, recognizing early that she lacked a strong sense of humor, or rather that she lacked the ability to make up jokes, had memorized thousands of bizarre passages from books and from here and there, and had developed, in place of humor, an ability to drop these bombs into a conversation, sometimes with incongruous, killer accuracy. She had, in fact, a number of unlikely conversational skills, or rather stunts. She knew and could explain with admirable clarity the secrets of machinery, how elevators tell the third floor from the fourth, why a spot is born and quickly burns away when a television is turned off; she could mentally alphabetize a fairly long and random list of words; and, most impressively, she remembered everything anyone had ever told her about himself, trivial things-the name of a childhood pet goldfish or of a distant cousin. This last ability made her the bane of a casual liar. Deceiving her demanded a great deal of care and attention.
'I understand that you've been born again?' I said.
She banged her juice down on the table and rolled her eyes, as though she had recently run out of patience with regard to Jesus. 'No, that was just a
'Amen,' I said. 'So what other things have there been?'
'Well, let's see. I've done the punk thing, the biker's girl thing, the seamstress thing, the prep school thing, and sort of the housewife thing, although I wasn't married. I've never done the marriage thing.'
'You were a seamstress?'
'I sew like an angel.'
'What's next?' I said, thinking that this was a glaring straight line.
'I don't know,' she said, lightly. 'Probably a broken heart.'
'Ha,' I said.
That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver's head.
'Hey, bus driver,' I said. 'Can I smoke?'
'I love you,' I said.
In the big, posh, and stale lobby of the Duquesne Hotel-in a city where some of the men, like my father, still wear felt hats-one can still get one's hair cut, one's shoes shined, and buy a racing form or a Tootsie Roll. When I was a kid, and we would come into Pittsburgh to visit with my mother's relatives, I used to think that my father, who was perhaps born forty years too late, had had the Duquesne built for him. My father believed in the sports page brought up to his room on a tray with the java in the morning, and in the cigarette girl who prowled the bar with her Luckies and Philip Morris Commanders. Although he was in many ways a man of modern tastes, for music, hats, and hotels he looked to the Depression, and loved nothing but Goodman, snap brims, and the Duquesne.
The door to his room was unlatched; I pushed against it and found him sitting in a chair by the window, talking on the telephone. I made a noise as I came in, so that he could end the call if it was something I ought not to hear, but he half-waved, puckered his lips at me, and kept on talking. From his muttered replies I tried to guess to whom he was talking.
'Fine, fine,' he said. 'Listen, Artie just walked in. Yeah, yeah, he looks great. I'll tell him hello, sure. Right. Thirty-seven five. Right. See you tomorrow. Good-bye.'
'Uncle Lenny,' I said.
'He says you should come for dinner.'
'I can't stand Aunt Elaine.'
'Neither can he. My God, Art, your hair-you look terrible. Do you want me to give you the money to buy a comb?'
'No, thanks, Dad. I'm going to make one at home. Out of common household items. You look great.'
'Business is good.'
'Oh.'
We both frowned. I never knew what to say upon hearing that business was good; it was always as though my father had just gleefully told me that he'd taken out a huge life insurance policy on himself, with me as beneficiary.
Then we said we were hungry and went out, down the laborious old elevator and into the street. A thunderstorm was imminent; big dusty rings of newspapers and the straw-pierced plastic lids of paper cups blew along Smithfield Street. We walked across the Smithfield Street Bridge to the South Side, and my father reminded me of the day fifteen years before when we'd driven across this bridge and I had astonished him by spelling Monongahela, unbidden.
'You were a smart boy,' he said.
'What happened?' I said, and laughed, and he laughed, and said, What indeed.
I had decided to ask him about Cleveland, though I knew that if Cleveland had not met my father, a fairly important man, it was unlikely that my father would even know of Cleveland, whom I supposed to be an errand boy for the Stern family. Rarely did I ask my father about his work, and I didn't like to do it.
'Pops,' I said, trying to imply my nonchalance by dipping a morsel of French bread into my enormous bowl of lobster bisque, 'do you know any of the guys who work for Uncle Lenny?'
'Know them?' he said. 'I went to the weddings of half of them. Danced with their wives.'
'Yes, well. I mean some of the guys in the lower echelons.'
'Why, do you know one? One of the kids?' He looked annoyed. 'Where are you hanging around that you're meeting that kind of kid?'
'Well, gee, at the Symphony, the Carnegie Institute, the opera, the economics department, you know. Around. '
'Look,' he said, the blood flowing into his ever-pink face. 'You always profess such a disdain for the business of your family. And those are men who, yes, don't have the education that you and I do, but who've been working hard all their lives, who have children and wives, and who make money to give it to their children and wives. And now you, Mr. Academic, you're hanging around with punks. Greedy little morons who give their money to other greedy little morons. '
'Okay, Dad, okay. I'm not hanging around with any of Uncle Lenny's apes. I just asked if you knew them.'
'Happily, no,' he said, in his best dry voice.
We fell silent. I looked down from our perch in the highest and most expensive restaurant in Pittsburgh onto the lights of downtown, and the black wishbone of rivers and the stadium on the other shore, illuminated for a night game, and thought about old ball games for a minute or two.
My father was the moneyman for the Maggio family (the Bechsteins, like the Sterns and all the Jewish crime families, having long since dwindled and been absorbed), but he also served as a kind of liaison between the people in the capital and those in Pittsburgh. Coming to Pittsburgh was pleasure as much as business for my father; he had met my mother at a wedding in Squirrel Hill, and so had a lot of family here; he knew its streets and crazed beltway system and suburbs and golf courses, and was a long-standing Pirates fan. I had been to Forbes Field as a tiny boy, and to Three Rivers Stadium a thousand times. The day I kept track of an entire nine innings in my scorebook, without making a single mistake, he bought me two hundred dollars' worth of toys at Kaufmann's, far more toys than I had ever wanted.
'Pops, I met this new girl.'
He drained his glass of tonic water.
'Why do you make a face?' I said.
'After Claire, why shouldn't I? I'm sorry, Art.'
