Mack Grunch had told me that he laughed so hard when he read my profile of Izzy Aronowitz that he busted a couple more veins in his nose, and now he’d gone for another one of my oddball ideas, a story about Dan Kamminski, an old friend of Uncle Jerr’s, whose job selling beer at Knicks games had started in 1957 and ended last week when the cops busted Kammi for booking bets on the games with fans as he passed them a cold one. The gifts, which were on the quilt amid scraps of wrapping paper, included a burgundy-leather-topped lapboard so I could write in bed, and a Webster’s dictionary and thesaurus bound in the same burgundy leather. I’d bought Glenna a handmade, scarlet silk Spanish shawl with an ivory fringe from Eartha’s, after reading in New York magazine that it was the hippest boutique in the city.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Robin, who was going to spend her Christmas break at an extended-Blumberg-family reunion in Atlantic City, had ordered pizza for the three of us. Glenna and I went down and ate with her in the living room.

We were finishing our pizza when the front door opened, and Biff stamped in, the crepe soles of his L.L. Bean boots squeaking wetly on the pine floor. It was below zero outside, so Biff’s garb could only be categorized as preppie macho: a muddy-patterned tweed sports jacket, a white, button-down shirt, khaki chinos, and, in his solitary concession to the arctic weather, a Black Watch plaid scarf coiled around his neck like a Scottish python, an image that I relished contemplating.

Robin said, “Will somebody take me to the movies? I want to see Funny Girl. It’s playing at the Riverdale Cinema.”

“Can’t,” Biff said, turning on the television to Channel 13—the public TV station—and plopping down in the wing chair. “There’s a program on about polo. We’ve got to catch it.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t hurt to learn.”

The BBC production opened with helmeted gentlemen galloping up and down a field on ponies and smacking a wooden ball with mallets, while the narrator, with an upper-class British lisp, recounted the history of polo from its origins in Persia to its spread to India, where, in the nineteenth century, the game became popular with British army officers who took it home to dear old England.

“Along with ninety new strains of VD,” I added.

Robin didn’t react; she was reading the movie listings in the local paper; but Glenna whacked me playfully in the ribs with her elbow. Biff glared in my direction.

When the program paused partway through so the Channel 13 fund-raisers could make their pitch, Biff said to me, “Play much polo, do you?”

“Used to,” I said. “After school behind Meyer Levin Junior High. But I kinda thought it’d be more interesting if the players hit each other with the mallets.”

Robin and Glenna laughed, which twisted Biff’s nose out of joint.

He responded by launching into an ultratechnical soliloquy about a patient of his in her last trimester who had developed uremia. Predictably Biff segued into addressing me like an imbecile.