The phone rang. It was down the hall in the living room, but Max Arnold could hear it from his bed. He would not answer the phone now, at six in the morning, or ever again:  he had had enough. Turning to the wall, Max closed his eyes against the noise. They shouldn’t call so early to an old man like me.  

The phone kept ringing. Max remembered the chubby man from synagogue. Herman could sing louder than the phone rang.  

Last Saturday, as the Torah was being carried through the synagogue, Herman had sung the Etz Chaim with such emotion that it sounded to Max as if he were imploring God on Yom Kippur. On the last four triplets, the man’s strong voice rose in an unexpected harmony. The final sob was thrilling. After the song was over, congregants glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. Yet the man’s singing had moved Max deeply.  

The ringing would not stop. Max went into the living room and picked up the phone.  

“Max,” said a woman with a hoarse voice. “Max,” she repeated, and cleared her throat.  

Her voice sounded familiar, but she wasn’t Henrietta, the person he did not want to talk to. He sat down in his corduroy armchair.  

“Apologies for calling you so early,” she said. This woman talks nicer than Henrietta, Max thought.

“I was awake.”

“This is Natalie Herris,” she said. “I should have told you right away—but—but I had a bad night.”  Max was surprised. The president of the company where he worked had never called him at home or told him about her life.  

She continued. “I want to ask to you about that government man you spoke to yesterday.”  

“All right.” In the past week, he had talked to more people than usual. There was Henrietta, Leon and his son in the lobby of their apartment building, Herman, and the government man. Max pulled onto his lap a folded blanket that he kept on the coffee table for Shabbos naps. He would talk.

“Not on the phone. Could you come to the office by eight o’clock?” she said.

“Ok.” He’d have to leave earlier than usual to get to 31st Street by eight.  He hung up the phone, put the blanket back on the table, and sat there. To say the morning prayers now, after using his mouth for an ordinary conversation, would spoil them.    

He took a shower and when he dried himself, noticed the wrinkles in his thin thighs that were once so strong. That’s how things are.    

He put on a robe and shaved. To get to his upper lip, he made a long face in the mirror andglimpsed his grandfather’s expression when zaide was thinking of a clever or punishing thing to say. That was in another country, decades ago.

Shaving finished, Max returned to his white-walled living room. After the shower, he felt that the day could start again, and he began his prayers facing the eastern wall where he kept the shelf of Yiddish books he’d picked up from synagogue book sales.  Yet while he heard himself singing, in an old-style Ashkenazic accent, Max felt pressure to hurry and get to the office soon.  

After his prayers, he dressed in his usual short-sleeved shirt, wool trousers, and because it was winter, a heavy sweater.  He opened the fridge and looked in. The four navel oranges on the top shelf were bathed in the interior light. A box of blueberries was at the forefront of the second shelf, with gleaming red strawberries in a plastic box behind them. When he moved it, the Romaine lettuce bristled against its plastic package on the bottom shelf, next to cucumbers, a bunch of radishes, and three sturdy carrots. These are the things that matter, Max thought, and he was glad to have all this food.  

Max watched the cream of wheat bubble on the stove and thought of kugel made with noodles, sour cream, and pitted tart cherries. When he ran into his neighbor Leon the other day, Leon had bragged about the cherry kugel his son, Barry, was going to bake for his wife’s homecoming from the hospital. Max could taste it: straight from the oven, with the cherries and sour cream oozing between the noodles the way his mother made it. An uncle had once warned her that the white cloth she put on the table would get stained. “Never mind!” She was excited as the guests came towards the table where the enormous kugel sat, fragrant and steaming.  

He poured his hot cereal and a handful of washed blueberries into a milchich bowl, and then remembered the phone in the living room. It must not ring again! He took the receiver off and laid the side with holes against the blanket. Then he covered it with last week’s Forvertsnewspaper and went back to his breakfast.

In a few seconds, the phone emitted a pulsing noise, a kind of backwards alarm. It would be better if he didn’t have a phone, but the phone company might make trouble if he unplugged it.  Max continued to eat.  A man’s urgent voice came out of the phone.  

“It appears there’s a phone off the hook. Please hang up.”  

It was the voice he’d heard two days ago, when he had taken the phone off the hook to stop Henrietta’s calls. Then the voice had alarmed him, but now he’d figured out where it came from. It was a robot.    

Max crossed the room to the windowsill where he’d put his new green plant, the silent witness to his troubles. The soil was still damp from the first watering when he brought it home on Sunday.  

Max saw that the sky was white. It might snow. White particles were flying through the air.  If it snowed, the trip to the Bronx this evening might be postponed, he thought, as he wound his blue scarf around his neck. Good: he’d heard that the Bronx should be avoided. He had never gone to the Bronx to visit his aunt Malka and last week, she had died. His aunt’s friend and neighbor, Henrietta, called to insist that he come uptown to get his inheritance—a box. She interrupted his protests by reading from the letters he wrote to Malka.  

“’Dear Aunt Malka, I can’t visit you because I don’t take the subway.’ You wrote that?” the sarcastic Henrietta asked over the phone. He did not want to tell her how Malka treated him when he arrived in America.  

Henrietta called repeatedly until he said. “Okay, I will come to the Bronx.” 

He buttoned his coat. Hoping for a snowstorm that would give him a reprieve from Henrietta and the Bronx, he left his apartment for the walk to the office.  

Outside, with the cold air blowing against his face, he walked south for two blocks on First Avenue, passing his supermarket and the restaurant with dark glass windows for U.N. diplomats.   At the next corner, a plume of white smoke rose up next to a Con Ed truck, and Max turned west to avoid it.  

Today was February 15.  He had come to New York on this day, in 1951, twenty-six years ago. And on the day of his arrival, after all that had happened to him, he had expected to find comfort at his aunt’s home. His mother’s sister, he had imagined, would want to cook for him, give him clean clothes, and show him the way to earning a living in his new country. He would surprise her with his English and his knowledge of Polish accounting, which had to be universal. He’d get a job quickly…But it had not happened that way.  

He’d trained himself not to think of these things. He leaned against the wall of an office building, steadying himself with a hand flat against the rough limestone façade. If he lived nine more years to 70, he would have spent half his life in New York, half in Poland. But Poland had made him.

“How was Poland?”  

After services last Shabbos, he’d gone into the shul’s cloakroom off the lobby, where a tall man shouted at a shorter man having difficulty unwinding his scarf from a hanger: 

“How was our Poland?” insisted the tall man.

“Don’t shout,” said the short man.  

Poland! Max had thought. Could you go back to the land of the dead?

The man who had returned to Poland began to put on his coat and scarf. Both men moved aside, leaving a space for Max at the coat rack. Max took his coat from the hanger very quietly so that he could hear the answer.  

“I walked on the old streets.”  

“They’re letting Jews back now? They need the tourist money, huh?”  

“Yeah.”  

One of the synagogue officials stepped into the cloakroom to remind the men about a special kiddish. The two men who had been talking sighed as if they really wanted to leave but hung up their coats again.  

“What about him?” The one who had returned from Poland nodded at Max, who was buttoning up his coat.

“He don’t socialize,” answered the other, and they left.  

# # #

I should remember this room, she thought, in case I go to jail.  

Lying awake in bed, Natalie Herris moved the comforter from the side of her face. She wanted to see the rectangle of light from the bathroom that shone on the garnet-colored wall.   Then she listened. Despite the velvet drapes on the bedroom windows, a siren became audible. The sound grew intense and then passed. They’re not coming for me, no, they couldn’t barge in here on Riverside Drive. She turned on her side.

Her husband grunted in his sleep. Rest, Oscar, Natalie thought. We may not be sleeping here much longer, or together.  

It was 5:30 when Oscar went to the bathroom. After he lay down again, he said, “It’s early.”

“So sleep.”  

She left the bedroom for the kitchen, made coffee, and brought it to the banquette.  Sitting with the warm mug between her hands and the steam rising to her face gave her a moment’s comfort. She saw the hands on the grandfather clock jerk to the next minute and the next. When they reached the time she had chosen for making a call, she stood up.

With the phone in her hand, she told herself, be brave!—as she used to think decades ago, when she was a tomboy. She called Max Arnold, her Company’s bookkeeper, at home, to tell him to meet her at the office as soon as possible. He agreed, and she went to her daughter’s empty bedroom to dress.  

Natalie chose a white silk blouse and black velvet pants, a combination that, she

thought, should make her feel strong. Yet an exhausted woman was reflected in the closet mirror. She stepped closer to examine her face. The dark area under her brown eyes and her gray hairs made her seem older than

47 years. Combing her hair with her fingers, Natalie brought some brown strands forward to cover the gray.  I must save myself, she thought.  

Oscar slept. Wrapped in her long coat, Natalie left the apartment and headed east on 82nd Street to Broadway to look for a cab. A police car sped up on the opposite side of Broadway, its siren screaming. When a cab pulled over for her, she had to shout the address of Juno Real Estate

Company as she got in.  

“31st and Seventh Avenue.” It was warm in the cab.  She closed her eyes and leaned against the seat, wanting only a quiet drive.  

At 70th Street and Broadway, the cab came to a stop. “Damn,” said the cabbie, matter-offact. Natalie looked around.  The car behind them honked, but instead of answering the challenge, the driver turned up the radio and listened.  

“Hear that?” He turned around to her.  

“They’re arguing about calling Georgia the ‘peanut state’ or the ‘peach state’!”  

“That’s because the president’s from Georgia.” She watched her driver eye a car trying to enter Broadway. The other car came so close that the cabbie pressed the horn. The man in the other car theatrically threw up his hands.

“Peanuts or peaches—how about fixing the traffic!” said the driver.

They inched along, red light after red light, until Times Square, where the cabbie broke free of traffic by taking Ninth Avenue. The near recklessness of his speeding thrilled her. They raced past tenements with rusty fire escapes, stores covered by metal gates, and doorways where litter collected.  On the sidewalk, a man with a plastic garbage bag across his shoulders looked around, goggle-eyed, as if he had never seen this world before. She turned back for a second chance to see his open-mouthed wonder, but they were already too far away.  

The cab turned left without slowing down, barreled north one block, and slowed to a stop at the corner of 31st Street. The ride was over.  

Natalie entered the mysterious dark of the office building’s lobby. Leaving the elevator at the 10thfloor, she unlocked the glass doors to the Company’s reception area, where the dingy white vinyl couch and dog-eared magazines scattered across a low table were evidence of the Company’s hard times.  Last year, the City had been saved from bankruptcy, but people were still fleeing New York and the Company’s occupancy rate kept falling.  

In her office, Natalie hung up her coat and shawl on the back of the door.  On an impulse, she leaned against her wool coat.  The feel of wool against her cheek comforted her, as if she were hiding in grandfather’s closet, forty years ago, when he was president of the Company. With her back to the long room behind her, she could avoid the folder with Juno’s dismal earnings report for the previous year on her desk. As president, she had learned that the City’s problems had become the Company’s problems, but lately her own problems were more pressing.  

At the sound of footsteps, she stepped back and opened her door.  Bundled in a thick coat, hat low around his ears, Max was hurrying down the hall.  

When he came into her office, Natalie sat down on the sofa and patted the seat next to her as an invitation for him.  No, he could not sit next to her. He must have religious reasons for that, she thought. He carried a chair to within three feet of the sofa, too distant for the confidences that she hoped for, but she accepted it. The translucency of the skin on his forehead and his pale arms sticking out of a white short-sleeved shirt made him seem otherworldly.

She thanked Max for coming to the office early. His solemn nod made her despair of getting anything out of him.

She smiled, hoping to relax them both. “What did the man you talked to yesterday say?”  

Max cocked his head to one side. His neck’s as pale as a naked bird, Natalie thought.  

“I don’t know.”

“You did meet him?” The way to do this, Natalie thought, was to sound friendly, not demanding.  

“I didn’t understand him.”

“If you tell me what he said, I might figure it out.”

His face was blank. Oh, she could take that old head and shake it, shake it! He’s my employee, he should talk to me.  

“I said yesterday—he is assistant attorney.”

“Yes,” Natalie said, “Assistant district attorney. But why? What did he want?” Max made a gesture as if remembering something, and she caught her breath.  

“Come,” he said.

She followed Max down the hall to his office. Four file cabinets stood against a side wall, and he stepped between them and his desk to pull a flimsy piece of paper out of a drawer.  

“This, the man wanted to see.” He turned the paper around so that she could read the heading. She was frightened as soon as she saw the block letters on the invoice: ER, for Evelyn Roofing.  

Max leaned forward so that she could more easily take the invoice from his hand.  

My god, she thought. How could they know about this?  

“No, I don’t want to see it,” she said, and Max put the paper back into the drawer.  

Natalie returned to her office and stood by the window, bewildered.  She ran her fingers through her fine hair. Some strands remained standing, as if themselves in fright.  

She looked at the Art Deco goddesses at the top of the brick building across the street. Their faces were blurred from decades of watching the city in rain and sun. At the top of the next building, carved flowers were outlined in soot. Low clouds covered Manhattan.

There were shouts on the street directly below her window. Looking down, Natalie saw three men unloading tall boxes on to a wooden pallet in front of her office building. A box was about to fall, and one man shouted to another who caught it.

Do they enjoy their job? Are they used to it? Maybe they wouldn’t know what to do without work. The man who caught the box staggered back under the impact.  

# # #

Back in his office, Paul Gartner slapped the invoice face down on his desk.

He shouldn’t have asked Max about it. Yet he did ask. He recognized his fault: he had to know things. Knowing things was his need and habit—it was how to be a real macher, as his elderly uncle would say, thickening the ‘ch’ in admiration for such men. At 49, after four years as vice president of the Company, Gartner was still driven to be a macher of Juno Real Estate’s success. He wanted to be the one to turn the Company’s finances around once and for all. To do that, he needed to sell the 99th Street building, not tar its damn roof as the invoice said.

Six foot one, in a suit of wool and silk, Gartner allowed himself a New York bluntness, a mixture of cynicism and mockery, especially to make a point. When Max had held out the invoice by his fingertips, Gartner said, “What’s the matter, does it stink?” In a glance, he saw that it might stink and took it to his office.  

Now he leaned back in his desk chair, letting it dip towards the window behind him. He’d rather work on problems you could walk around, talk about over the noise of saws, drills, or sanders. Not problems caused by a piece of paper.  

There were two possibilities for action in the next hour.  He could examine the invoice. Or, since he had to do something about the fight in the loft, he’d need to get the instigator into his office. He tapped his fingers on the armrest of the chair, humming a tune that was often in his mind, Monk’s Well you needn’t.  

For the moment, Gartner looked past the neat stacks of folders on his desk and through the open office door to his secretary Jessica, who wore a faded blue flannel shirt as if still in college. Gartner thought, as he had done before, that Jessie was a smart girl but should dress better. At Park Avenue Realty, where Gartner worked before coming to Juno, the owner’s three daughters would have marched any secretary in plaid flannel to Bloomingdale’s for a makeover.

Gartner couldn’t figure out how to tell her to dress better without sounding mean, so he kept the notion to himself.

He closed his eyes to think of his other life, outside the office.  

This morning, while sitting in his ugly living room—as Dorie had called it—he’d told himself that he should learn to be tender. The word itself, tender, felt like a prized, rare thing you might see in a glass case. He wanted to be tender: could he? She deserved good things. To give them, he would need patience.  

Outside his office, Betty was telling Jessica about the secretary who’d just gotten engaged. Gartner opened his eyes and sat up. Engaged leads to enraged: the bitter rhyme he’d coined still played in his head.  His ex-wife had slammed the door. The salmon he cooked for her got cold on the plate. He’d sat alone, with a record that nobody wanted to hear going round the turntable.

Betty leaned into his doorway. “What do you say about Helen’s engagement, Mr. G.?”  

“Nice, for Valentine’s Day,” he said so that she would leave.

He turned over the invoice, which was more mysterious than Tim Sheridan’s reasons for starting the fight. Gartner told himself that he’d get to Tim in a little while and read the invoice.   It was dated January 25 and stamped Paid on January 31. He flipped the pages of his desk calendar back to January.  There was a weekend between January 25th and the 31st: if the invoice had been mailed on the 25th, it wouldn’t have arrived at the Company until the 30th. It was paid the day after it was received. That could have happened only because Natalie told Max to pay it.    

It was also in January, maybe a week before the 25th, when he’d been sitting with Natalie at the table in her office, reviewing the Company’s finances. He had brought her a list of pros and cons for selling the 99th Street building.  There were four pros to the one con, which was, “selling will reduce the Company’s stock of buildings.” She had stood up when he said that, and at the same moment, there was a sudden flood of January sunshine through the office windows.  Standing in that light, she seemed compact, distinct, and separate: a slight figure in a blue pantsuit who wielded all the power.  In an emotional voice, she said she’d never sell a single Company building. The fickle sunshine faded and in the shallow light remaining, she became her ordinary self. Yet a change had taken place. They were no longer comrades-in-arms to save the

Company. “A single Company building—” the phrase excluded him. She hadn’t said the usual “one of our buildings.’  

Remembering that, Gartner felt the need to get up and move. He crossed the room to his bookcase and reshelved a paperback by Saul Bellow that he’d given up as too wordy. He straightened the hardcover biographies of New York power brokers that had fallen against each other.  There had been a fight in Henry Clay Frick’s office too. An anarchist tried to kill Frick by shooting him and stabbing him.  Maybe, Gartner thought, he should consider himself lucky that Sheridan and Dan used their bare hands today.

Strange, Gartner thought, that Dan got involved in a fight. Dan was a good worker though he wore his shirts open to flaunt a hairy chest, which made Gartner feel like a square in his shirt and silk tie. He had promised Dan a promotion, but this afternoon he’d have to tell Dan that the Company could not promote staff who used their fists in the office. That would be an unpleasant meeting.  

Anxious, restless, Garter stepped out of his office and glanced at the yellowed front page of the Daily News that Jessica had ripped out in October 1975 and pasted on the wall above her typewriter.  

She saw where he was looking. “Does that bother you?”  

“No, Jess. Never take that down.”  

“Yeah, that’s how I feel too.”

They both looked at the newspaper page: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

“I don’t know why I want it there, but I do,” she said. 

“I know,” he said. “We were angry when he said that. Now there’s humor in it.”

“Humor?”

“Yeah. Ford’s gone, but New York’s alive and kicking. We’re still here.”  

“Ah,” she said. “You’re right, boss,” she added in a friendly way.  

It was good that he hadn’t told her what to wear, Gartner thought. 

Gartner went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water and thought.  If Natalie had authorized the quick payment of the invoice, she must have known that would raise questions.    

This morning, she hadn’t tried to stop the fight. He had already run into the loft, shouting to Dan and Sheridan to cut it out before he realized that Natalie wasn’t with him. Usually she liked to direct things, yet this morning she was hiding at the back of the loft. Maybe the problems with her husband had changed her.  

He leaned against the kitchen counter and told himself that there was something else off about her today. Why had she hidden  that plaster owl on her desk as soon as Mannheimer walked into the room?  

If she is hiding something—Gartner thought—it’ll come out. It always does.  

When he was ten, a few months before his mother died, she’d driven him and a friend to the riverbank to teach them how to skip stones. Wrapped in sweaters and a scarf, with strands of her hair coming loose from her bun, she bent by the river to choose the best pieces of slate and then stood sideways to spin the stone onto the surface of the water. It skipped, once, twice, thrice—four times! With an arm outstretched, she seemed to him like a goddess from one of his picture books.  His friend caught on right away, winning praise, but he couldn’t do it. His mother tired quickly and soon was trudging back up to the car, the friend behind her. While he was alone, Gartner skipped a stone once.  

“I did it three times!” he shouted as he ran up the riverbank to them.  

That night, lying in bed with her face lit by the lamp on her night table, his mother watched him come into the room.  He knew that she had not heard him skip a stone three times when they were at the river. 

“I’m sorry, mommy!”  

“Sshh, no need to impress me,” she whispered, stroking his arm.

Gartner rinsed his water glass. His mother’s love had been so pure and without resentment. If only he could find the source for that in himself. He shook his head for thinking about love at work. As he left the kitchen, he glanced at the lunch table where something red had caught his eye. It was a paper Cupid, left over from Valentine’s Day. Good for Helen, he thought. She got her diamond engagement ring. 

God bless the child that’s got his own, he remembered—That’s got his own.  

In the hall, Gartner saw Max walking a few feet ahead of him. He didn’t want to talk to Max about the invoice and slowed down. Another few seconds, and Max disappeared around the corner.

Gartner felt a hand on his back.  Only one person at the Company would touch him like that and only if no one was nearby. He turned his head and saw Dorie grinning at him —but down the hall behind her, someone came out of the Accounts Payable office. She took her hand off him and went into her office, while he continued to his.  

Gartner returned to his desk, pulling out his swivel chair quickly. The movement of the chair made a breeze that sent the flimsy invoice to the floor. He thought he could roll the chair’s wheels over it. He could crush it—it shouldn’t have happened. But Max would be offended by the tracks on the paper, Gartner thought and picked it up, putting it face down on his desk again.  He sat down to read the payroll processor’s contract that Mannheimer’s secretary had left on his desk. As he read, Gartner’s mood lifted.  The language that Mannheimer had wanted to be changed, had been changed, but—Gartner turned back to the third page—they should have insisted on that last concession. He’d ask Mannheimer about it at lunch. He was pleased with the improvements. Neither fistfight nor invoice will keep me from my appointed rounds, he thought.    

He could have become a lawyer if he had been willing to sit still. After college, as a clerk in the law firm of one of his father’s friends, he carried papers or looked for cases in big-bellied books.  In the tense quiet of those rooms, the three partners seemed faded, like paper, with skin as transparent as the onion skin pages of the law books.  “It’s the effects of paper on man,” he had decided. He wouldn’t be a lawyer: he was strong, he sweated, and his voice was too loud for the law chambers. His father, a doctor, despaired that Gartner’s lack of sitzfleisch would keep him from a profession—but Gartner couldn’t sit still then, and he’d rather not sit still now.  

Gartner put the contract aside to write a note to Tim Sheridan, setting a meeting for tomorrow at 9 am sharp, knowing that Sheridan never came to the office that early.  With the note in hand, Gartner went to the loft to see how things were going now. Staff talking to clients on their phones turned around at their desks to look at him.  He approached Sheridan’s desk, steeped in a fog of cigarette smoke. Sheridan was on the phone, facing the other way. Gartner walked around Tim’s chair and handed him the note. He turned and left, coughing, and halfway through the loft, he and all the staff heard Sheridan’s self-pitying wail.  

“Nine am sharp! He knows I can’t get here at nine am sharp!”  

“You better if you wanna keep your job,” someone said.  Satisfied everyone knew that the Company was going to address the fight, Gartner was almost out of the loft when he saw the blond wig on its stand.  

“You holding a séance with this thing?” he asked Robin, whose desk was closest to the wig. She had pulled her dark hair into a high, tight ponytail that made her eyes larger than normal.  

“The killer targets brunettes, Mr. G., so we take turns wearing the wig when we go on dates at night.”  

“He doesn’t like women with dark hair, but you can’t say he likes them with blond hair,” Milena came over. “Maybe a killing man likes nobody.”  

“I’d move upstate if I had the money to get out of this city,” threatened Lizzie, who still had glitter on her eyelids from another of her late nights at CBGB’s.  “It’s safer up there.”

“Borr--ing,” said Milena and Robin at the same time.

Gartner turned away from their naivete. He had lived upstate when his mother was alive, and he didn’t miss it. Even though this morning on his walk to the subway, he’d tripped over the long chain that connected a beaten-up garbage can to a brownstone’s fence. Even though, when he’d turned onto Broadway this morning he’d noticed the grayish mist made the facades of the pre-war apartment buildings appear dirtier than before.  At that early hour, Broadway’s stores were hidden: the mystery bookstore, the brassiere shop, the shoe repair-and-watch battery joint were locked up behind metal gates smeared by graffiti. But the deli was open, and he saw through the window that the angry married couple was already standing with arms crossed at opposite ends of the counter.  

A smell of litter and decay rose from the damp streets and trash baskets. This morning, New York had never seemed so dirty, so surprising in its ugliness and its fear. Yet Gartner loved this dirty city. New York contained all of the human world. Strangers crammed together here, for one reason, he’d thought as he ran with them down the steps to the 86th Street subway station. People would rather live with each other than live alone. When he left his apartment, he too could pretend that he wasn’t alone.  

# # #