Son of a Smaller Hero Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
Digest?
Noah says. Pish-pish. I’m smarter than you think. I play it safe. Besides, look, not that I … But how long is Paw gonna … Well, you know. He has to leave the business to me … to us.…”
    “You could start out on your own. Look at Max.”
    “Max? You should have half of what he owes on his factory. As soon as the slump comes bang goes Max’s credit. That’s a proven fact. I’m not so dumb.”
    “Excuses and excuses. You …”
    “HEY ! Here’s one for you, ADLER. YOU LISSN’N, ADLER ? This here guy meets his old pal, Cohen let’s say, who manufactures brassières. Hey, Cohen, he says, how’s business? Looking up, Cohen says.…”
    Wolf pretended not to hear. He turned to Leah. “Why can’t I do anything right? Do I beat you? I drink? I go with other women?”
    “I wouldn’t pester if Noah was with us. If – if Noah thought that I was sick he would come back. He loves me like anything.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Go. Go to the movies. There would be another flood as sure as I’m sitting here if you missed a double-feature. Go play cards. I’m going to lie down with a book.”
    “ADLER. YOU LISSN’N? Answer a man a question, eh?”
    Wolf retired to the den. He was a short, skinny man, and his head was crowned by a mass of black curly hair which was forever in need of cutting and always falling over his forehead. When he was nervous or afraid he pushed his hand through his hair, looked at his hand, then pushed it through his hair again. But he was seldom nervous or afraid in the den. The den was his. Wolf wore glasses. When he hadto contend with the big drunken Irishmen who came into his office, haggling over prices with them, when he talked back to Leah, or when he was about to ask his father for more pay, he had a trick of wiggling his ears and raising his eyebrows and making his glasses go up and down on his nose. That way, if the others took what he said in the wrong spirit, he could always reply that he had been joking. He worried a lot, but the den was his. It was a clean, well-ordered room with many shelves and a nice smell to the wood. One corner was devoted to his hobby. Woodwork. That wall was lined with tools. The cabinet, which had been nailed to the wall, had many drawers. The drawers were all labelled and contained various sizes of nails, screws, and blades. He had made the cabinet and workbench and tool-chest himself. He knew a lot about construction. Whenever he visited a house that was new to him he asked for a glass of water and set it down on the floor. Later, he would glance at it surreptitiously. That’s how he could tell whether the foundation had settled in a level way. One wall of the den was completely taken up by his bookshelves. Here he kept his old copies of
Life, Popular Mechanics, Reader’s Digest, True Crime
, and several volumes of scrapbooks. One series of scrapbooks contained his record of the war years, another his collection of data on coins and stamps clipped from the pages of various Montreal newspapers. Most of the drawers to his desk were locked. His diary was kept in the bottom drawer, which also had a false bottom where he kept personal papers and letters. Except for prosaic entries, such as family birthdays, dates of operations and graduations, the diary was kept in a code of his own invention.
    Very often Wolf would lean back in his chair and brood about how much money there must be in the locked box that his father kept in the office safe. That box was very important to him and represented many things. Other times he would worry about the possibilities of another depression or of Noah doing something that would get him in trouble with his father. A depression would not besuch a bad thing. A small one, anyway, would certainly fix bigshots like Seigler and Berger who had made a lot of fast money on the black market during the war years. From time to time he fiddled with various ideas for household gadgets. And then there was always the