Collected Stories

finger.

“Tina, give that ring to me. Give it here,” said Isaac.

“No. It was hers. Now it’s mine.”

“It was not Mama’s. You know that. Give it back.”

She outfaced him over the body of Aunt Rose. She knew he would not quarrel at the deathbed. Sylvia was enraged. She did what she could. That is, she whispered, “Make her!” But it was no use. He knew he could not recover it. Besides, there were too many other property disputes. His rents were deposited in Aunt Rose’s savings account.

But only Isaac became a millionaire. The others simply hoarded, old-immigrant style. He never sat waiting for his legacy. By the time Aunt Rose died, Isaac was already worth a great deal of money. He had put up an ugly apartment building in Albany. To him, an achievement. He was out with his men at dawn. Having prayed aloud while his wife, in curlers, pretty but puffy with sleepiness, sleepy but obedient, was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. Isaac’s Orthodoxy only increased with his wealth. He soon became an old-fashioned Jewish paterfamilias. With his family he spoke a Yiddish unusually thick in old Slavic and Hebrew expressions. Instead of “important people, leading citizens,” he said “Anshe ha-ir,” Men of the City. He, too, kept the Psalms near. As active, worldly Jews for centuries had done. One copy lay in the glove compartment of his Cadillac. To which his great gloomy sister referred with a twist of the face—she had become obese again, wider and taller, since those Adirondack days. She said, “He reads the Tehillim aloud in his air-conditioned Caddy when there’s a long freight train at the crossing. That crook! He’d pick God’s pocket!”

One could not help thinking what fertility of metaphor there was in all of these Brauns. Dr. Braun himself was no exception. And what the explanation might be, despite twenty-five years of specialization in the chemistry of heredity, he couldn’t say. How a protein molecule originating in an invisible ferment might carry such propensities of ingenuity, and creative malice and negative power, be capable of printing a talent or a vice upon a billion hearts. No wonder Isaac Braun cried out to his God when he sat sealed in his great black car and the freights rumbled in the polluted shimmering of this once-beautiful valley Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness.

“But what do you think?” said Tina. “Does he remember his brothers when there is a deal going? Does he give his only sister a chance to come in?”

Not that there was any great need. Cousin Mutt, after he was wounded at Iwo Jima, returned to the appliance business. Cousin Aaron was a CPA. Tina’s husband, bald Fenster, branched into housewares in his secondhand shop. Tina was back of that, of course. No one was poor. What irritated Tina was that Isaac would not carry the family into realestate deals, where the tax advantages were greatest. The big depreciation allowances, which she understood as legally sanctioned graft. She had her money in savings accounts at a disgraceful two and a half percent, taxed at the full rate. She did not trust the stock market.

Isaac had tried, in fact, to include the Brauns when he built the shopping center at Robbstown. At a risky moment, they abandoned him. A desperate moment, when the law had to be broken. At a family meeting, each of the Brauns had agreed to put up twenty-five thousand dollars, the entire amount to be given under the table to Ilkington. Old Ilkington headed the board of directors of the Robbstown Country Club. Surrounded by factories, the club was moving farther into the country. Isaac had learned this from the old caddie master when he gave him a lift, one morning of fog. Mutt Braun had caddied at Robbstown in the early twenties, had carried Ilkington’s clubs. Isaac knew Ilkington, too, and had a private talk with him. The old goy, now seventy, retiring to the British West Indies, had said to Isaac, “Off the record. One hundred thousand. And I don’t want to bother about Internal Revenue.” He was a long, austere man with a marbled face. Cornell 1910 or so. Cold but plain. And, in Isaac’s opinion, fair.

Developed as a shopping center, properly planned, the Robbstown golf course was worth half a million apiece to the Brauns. The city in the postwar boom was spreading fast. Isaac had a friend on the zoning board who would clear everything for five grand. As for the contracting, he offered to do it all on his own. Tina insisted that a separate corporation be formed by the Brauns to make sure the building profits were shared equally. To this Isaac agreed. As head of the family, he took the burden upon himself. He would have to organize it all. Only Aaron the CPA could help him, setting up the books. The meeting, in Aaron’s office, lasted from noon to three P. M. All the difficult problems were examined. Four players, specialists in the harsh music of money, studying a score. In the end, they agreed to perform.

But when the time came, ten A.M. on a Friday, Aaron balked. He would not do it. And Tina and Mutt also reneged. Isaac told Dr. Braun the story. As arranged, he came to Aaron’s office carrying the twenty-five thousand dollars for Ilkington in an old briefcase. Aaron, now forty, smooth, shrewd, and dark, had the habit of writing tiny neat numbers on his memo pad as he spoke to you. Dark fingers quickly consulting the latest tax publications. He dropped his voice very low to the secretary on the intercom. He wore white-on-white shirts and silk-brocade ties, signed “Countess Mara.” Of them all, he looked most like Uncle Braun. But without the beard, without the kingly pariah derby, without the gold thread in his brown eye. In many externals, thought scientific Braun, Aaron and Uncle Braun were drawn from the same genetic pool. Chemically, he was the younger brother of his father. The differences within were due possibly to heredity. Or perhaps to the influence of business America.

“Well?” said Isaac, standing in the carpeted office. The grandiose desk was superbly clean.

“How do you know Ilkington can be trusted?”

“I think he can.”

“You think. He could take the money and say he never heard of you in all his life.”

“Yes, he might. But we talked that over. We have to gamble.”

Probably on his instructions, Aaron’s secretary buzzed him. He bent over the instrument and out of the corner of his mouth he spoke to her very deliberately and low.

“Well, Aaron,” said Isaac. “You want me to guarantee your investment? Well? Speak up.”

Aaron had long ago subdued his thin tones and spoke in the gruff style of a man always sure of himself. But the sharp breaks, mastered twenty-five years ago, were still there. He stood up with both fists on the glass of his desk, trying to control his voice.

He said through clenched teeth, “I haven’t slept!”

“Where is the money?”

“I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“No?”

“You know damn well. I’m licensed. I’m a certified accountant. I’m in no position…”

“And what about Tina—Mutt?”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

“Talked them our of it, didn’t you? I have to meet Ilkington at noon. Sharp. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Aaron said nothing.

Isaac dialed Tina’s number and let the phone ring. Certain that she was there, gigantically listening to the steely, beady drilling of the Telephone. He let it ring, he said, about five minutes. He made no effort to call Mutt. Mutt would do as Tina did.

“I have an hour to raise this dough.”

“In my bracket,” Aaron said, “the twenty-five would cost me more than fifty.”

“You could have told me this yesterday. Knowing what it means to me.”

“You’ll turn over a hundred thousand to a man you don’t know? Without a receipt? Blind? Don’t do it.”

But Isaac had decided. In our generation, Dr. Braun thought, a sort of playboy capitalist has emerged. He gaily takes a flier in rebuilt office machinery for Brazil, motels in East Africa, high-fidelity components in Thailand. A hundred thousand means little. He jets down with a chick to see the scene. The governor of a province is waiting in his Thunderbird to take the guests on jungle expressways built by graft and peons to a surf-and-champagne weekend where the executive, youthful at fifty, closes the deal. But Cousin Isaac had put his stake together penny by penny, old style, starting with rags and bottles as a boy; then fire-salvaged goods; then used cars; then learning the building trades. Earth moving, foundations, concrete, sewage, wiring, roofing, hearing systems. He got his money the hard way. And now he went to the bank and borrowed seventy-five thousand dollars, at full interest. Without security, he gave it to Ilkington in Ilkington’s parlor. Furnished in old goy taste and disseminating an old goy odor of tiresome, silly, respectable things. Of which Ilkington was clearly so proud. The applewood, the cherry, the