It was one of the features of apartment life in the city that Charlie had always found amusing. Most of the apartment buildings on Park were cooperatives now. His mother no longer rented the apartment, but was a shareholder of the building. And the shareholders elected a board which had the right to vet anyone trying to buy in. So if you wanted to sell your apartment to someone whom the other people in the building thought undesirable, the board could refuse to let you complete the sale. They might give reasons. They might not. But the unspoken rules were generally understood.

“It’s absurd,” he said. “We’re in the 1950s, for God’s sake.”

“There are plenty of buildings that do. On the West Side, anyway.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re not planning to marry her, are you?”

“No.” He was quite taken aback by the idea.

“They’d take you out of the Social Register, you know.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, I believe they would. They don’t mind people being poor,” said Rose, “but they care about who you marry.”

“Damn the register.”

“Anyway,” she said, matter-of-factly, “you really can’t afford another family, can you?”

Another effect of the relationship was Charlie’s realization that he didn’t actually know much about Judaism. He had Jewish friends; he might go to a wedding or a funeral. The Jewish wedding service, apart from the chuppah and the breaking of the glass, didn’t seem so different from a Christian wedding, as far as Charlie could see. The familiar Christian blessings were clearly taken straight from the Hebrew tradition.

But beyond that he knew very little. Sometimes he’d ask Sarah about her family life, and about Jewish customs. He became quite curious.

It was late in March when Sarah suddenly asked him:

“Do you want to come to a Passover Seder?”

“A Seder? Where?”

“In Brooklyn. With my family.”

“You mean, meet your parents?” He was well aware that Sarah’s parents had no idea of their relationship. Apart from anything, she had explained, they still imagined, or at least hoped, she was a virgin. The thought of meeting them intrigued Charlie, but also made him nervous. “You really think that’s a good idea?” he said.

“They’d be so honored. Remember, they’ve heard of you as the owner of the Keller collection. My first really important client. They know you’re a big deal to me.”

When the day arrived, Charlie drove over the Williamsburg Bridge, and down through Brooklyn. He didn’t know the borough that well. There were the huge acres of docks all along the waterfront, the endless collections of small factories, warehouses and plants that still made it one of the major places of production in the nation. You knew that, of course, but you didn’t really get to see it in Charlie’s world. He had a friend, a professor, who lived in a large and handsome brownstone on the Heights near Prospect Park; he’d been there a few times. It reminded him of the spacious houses on the West Side, and walking in the huge spaces of Prospect Park itself was delightful. A few miles further east, he knew, was Brownsville. He’d heard there were a lot of Jews there, but the thing he really knew was that it was a dangerous slum area where the gangland killing agency of Murder Inc. had been born. From Prospect Park, however, Flatbush Avenue ran south, so he supposed Flatbush itself might be quite a decent sort of place.