As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

born of the fact that Howard rarely went without a girlfriend, though just then he was single.
    Nonplussed, Davy had no answer to that.
    The next day our first piece of mail in fact arrived, a white envelope that hailed, ominously for Davy, from Middletown. We kids were in the kitchen eating lunch when Bec wandered in, holding the thing.
    To Davy’s relief Bec handed the envelope to Nina, who promptly tore it open and read out loud her father’s words: There are so many mysteries to life, Nina. Darwin looked hard, and looked for a long time, and in the end, it seems to me, he figured out one of the biggest of them all. I look forward to talking with you about him—soon enough. “Nice,” she said, folding Leo’s note and tucking it, like a second bookmark, into the thick pages of On the Origin. She nodded before repeating, “Nice.”
    “See? Mail’s fun,” she then told Davy. “Ever get any? Just for you?”
    “I’ve never gotten a letter,” Davy acknowledged.
    Later that afternoon Davy, Nina, and I ran into Sal Baby, known to adults as Sal Luccino, the local Good Humor man—the person who, come Friday of the third week of August, would run his truck over Davy. As we walked on Hillside Avenue toward Sal and his wares we could see that Sal was breaking up a tussle between the Weinstein twins. One of them, Jimmy Weinstein, already had an ice cream bar in hand and despite the tears running down his face had just taken a first bite. The other boy, Arthur Weinstein, had a bloody nose. “If you can stay out of trouble for the next week I’ll give you a free one,” Sal was telling Arthur as he mopped up the blood with a paper napkin. He did this while holding a lit cigar in his left hand. Once we’d arrived at his truck, Sal glanced our way, winked hello, puffed at the cigar, and then resumed his negotiations with Arthur Weinstein. Ten minutes and five bloodied napkins later we at last got our Good Humor bars.
    By late Thursday afternoon, after Howard had come home from Treat’s, clouds gathered and my mother stood on the beach, admonishing Howard and Mark, and then begging them, not to go sailing. “Can’t you two play cards?” she asked almost desperately. “Or help Mr. Weinstein over there with his radio?” But sail they did, out past Bagel Beach, over toward Anchor Beach, where they slid past Signal Rock, then past Crescent Beach then Long Beach, and finally they were beyond Woodmont altogether, sailing through the border of West Haven, which for them was uncharted territory, a place of friendly enough coastal waters but unknown depths.
      
     
    In the photo of Maks and Risel of June 1939 they were sitting at the beach, hand in hand, looking more toward each other than the camera. Earlier that day, following the affixing of mezuzot throughout the cottage, the two had celebrated paying off the mortgage in yet another way. Risel, this time, had the idea. Heavyset and prone to napping, she nevertheless scuttled, breasts and belly jiggling, down to the shore. She was still in her Shabbos dress and her seamed stockings, though she’d taken off her heeled shoes even before the last mezuzah was hung. In her hand were the mortgage papers, rolled and jammed into an empty Coca-Cola bottle, its cap secured with adhesive tape. The tide was out. My grandfather, delighting in the cool but bearable touch of the shallow waters of low tide, the soft ridges of wet sand under his feet, the renewed energy of his typically sedentary wife, followed Risel as she waded out to where the waters were knee-deep. There she stopped, her hem drenched, her stockings ruined, her waist twisted, and with the expertise of a discus thrower she heaved the bottle into the sea. Then she whooped with joy and splashed her husband. But Maks only stood there quietly, a yard or so from Risel, watching the bottle bob as it drifted from them. At last, the bottle gone from sight, he stepped closer to Risel and grabbed the hand that had done the