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would be cheaper, he said, if I kept it short. But I explained the urgency behind my calling you. Prepare yourself, my lucky and talented brother. I have something terrific to tell you.” “Come on,” he said, “what is it? The madame here doesn’t like me hogging the one phone.” “You got a telephone call from someone at Stanford University. You won a creative writing fellowship there for three thousand dollars, this September.” “Oh my god,” he said. “I forgot all about it, which tells you how much I thought I’d get it.” “Listen, though. This woman said because they took so long to select the four fellows, they want your decision right away. If it’s a no, they need to choose someone else in a hurry. I told her I’m sure you’ll take it, but I’ll call you and then call her with your answer.” “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I mean, I’m grateful, and I should be overjoyed, but I’m just beginning to really like it here and I’m learning the language and making friends. Think they’d let me defer the fellowship for a year?” “I already asked her about that possibility,” she said. “She told me you have to accept it now for this year or reapply with completely different supporting material for the next year, though you wouldn’t need to get new references. That’s their policy.” “The madame ’s staring at me. I have to hang up. I guess I’ll take it, then. My feelings are mixed, as you can see, but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. And California should be fun.” “Monsieur?” the ownersaid. “Sometimes,” his sister said, “you have to give up something good to get something better or even comparable. And I’ll fly out to California to see you, which will be a nice break for me.”
    And his next happiest moment? Can’t think of one now, or where he was just as happy or even happier than he was in some of the last ones he mentioned. Maybe, going very far back, when he won the All Around Camper Award at the sleepaway camp he went to with his sisters and his brother Robert in the summer of 1948. So when he was told he won it by the head counselor. Or when the principal of his elementary school—this was in 1949, a couple of months before he graduated—called him and several other eighth-grade students into his office to tell them they’d each gotten into one of New York’s elite public high schools, and one of them got into two and would have to choose, and which schools. His was Brooklyn Tech. He was happy but at the same time a bit disappointed because he wanted to go to Stuyvesant, where Robert was a sophomore at, but he obviously didn’t do well enough on its admissions test to get in. Odd, because he thought the Stuyvesant test was a breeze compared to the one for Brooklyn Tech.
    Any other time? Oh, how could he forget? They were in a little hill town in Southern France, looking at a Giacometti drawing on the wall of a small museum, when he turned to his wife half a year before she became his wife, and said “Let’s get married.” She said “Are you joking?” and he said “I’m dead serious. Here, or in Nice by a rabbi if they have one there or some justice of the peace,” and she said “If I got married again it would have to be in New York so my folks and relatives and friends could come. And I’d think you’d want your family there too. But let’s talk about it in a few months.” “So you’ll consider it then as a possibility?” and she said “Let’s say I’m not rejecting the idea outright, as preposterously as it was presented,” and he said “You don’t know how happy you’ve just mademe. All right. I’ll shut up about it for a few months.” Of course, he hugged and kissed her and then he