Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) Read Online Free PDF

said his sister, Amelia “Penny” Sarah Rose Plotkin.
    â€œUnbelievable! Barbarian! Selma the Visigoth! I’m outta here! I’m catching the next train back to Italy.”
    â€œYou’ll be rich. You’re broke, you’re drowning in debt—”
    â€œI’d rather be dead.” Orville struggled to free himself from the soft sofa. “Good-bye and good luck.”
    â€œVery rich,” said Milt, Penny’s husband. “In a year and thirteen days.”
    The three of them had settled deeply into the furniture of Penny and Milt’s sunken living room, a sanctuary on a southwestern theme done all in “biscuit” and “Navajo White,” a beige kiva
.
Plastic vinyl runners protected the white carpet in the high-traffic zones. Penny, he realized, had become almost as much of a neat freak as their mother. At the end of his marriage to Lily, Orville had lived in such a house in New Jersey, complete with—the phrase had become a derisive mantra for him—“clean guest towels for clean guests.”
    Orville, Penny, and Milt talked about the sad event of Selma’s death, comforting themselves that the end was merciful: a massive heart attack while cleaning the kitchen floor in her house on Courthouse Square. It brought back their father, Sol’s, death a decade ago, he, too, felled by a heart attack, again mercifully, after a massive swing in a tight match on the sixteenth hole of the Catskill Country Club, a tricky par three over a brook and up a tough hill to an undulating green. Brother and sister agreed that in the time since his death, their father had mellowed, and both children now had mostly happy memories of him. Sol, the “Toy Store King,” seemed more present in death than he had ever been in life.
    â€œHow rich?” Orville now asked, having climbed up out of the arroyo of the living room to the vinyl runner on the ridge leading toward the door.
    â€œAdding all assets,” Milt said, “almost a cool mil.”
    â€œOkay, I’ll stay.” They stared at him. “A joke. Where the hell did she get that kind of money?”
    â€œIt helps to be the only toy store in town for forty years,” Penny said. “Dad sold a lot of toy airplanes.”
    â€œAnd the Jolly Jews made a killing,” Milt said, happily. The Jolly Jews had been Sol’s investment and poker club. “Y’know how they always say that if you’d of only put ten grand into conservative stocks and waited forty years you’d make a bundle? They did, and they did. And the last coupla years, with Reagan, you’d have to be a chimpanzee to not get rich. It’s like a miracle around here, how the New Yorkers have discovered Columbia. They’ll snap at anything! Especially the artsy-fartsy crowd, setting up antique stores in the danger zones down below Fourth. They come up here to get away from the gunfire and drugs in New York City; we sell ’em a piece of crappy storefront where they can live upstairs and what do they find? Gunfire and drugs!” Milt laughed so hard he seemed to cramp up. “We get a lot of gays. Pretty soon the three meccas for the gays will be ’Frisco, Fire Island, and Columbia.”
    Orville stared at his brother-in-law. The tall body had gotten pudgy now, and the pink Ralph Lauren shirt stretched the polo player over significant male breasts. Milt had always played tennis, and the crisp white shorts were now cutting into legs more flabby than Orville recalled. Milt had been discovered by Selma through the synagogue sisterhood Hadassah. Penny, a senior at Columbia High, was in love with Polonia Scomparza, a nice boy but goyim
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Milt saved the day. He came from Albany, an hour upriver, and was hell-bent on becoming a certified public accountant like his dad. At first, Milt had always seemed braced for pain, yet chatty. Now, around Penny, he seemed pain free but as silent as Sol had been