When he got home he ate while Ada dressed. They were going to Hartsdale to their daughter, who was having a card party with her husband’s parents, some friends, and the Melnicks from their old building in Washington Heights.

Ada had put on a soft wool dress, in the new sleeker style, and he thought how slim and pretty she still was, and he told her in Yiddish that she looked so good he’d fuck her if it was earlier, and she smiled as if she believed him. But he was sixty, tired, and still cold and he was glad it wasn’t earlier. She bent to put on her boots, the dress caught in the crack of her behind and he wondered if she was glad, too; if they were both getting old.

He’d been in Theresienstadt from 1940 to 1945. The Nazis had taken that five years and probably another five at this end. Too much abuse, Dr. Frank had told him. “The body’s not meant to take it. I know some live to be eighty, ninety, but most . . .” He’d looked at the lines on the first EKG. “Well,” he’d said, “we’ll see. We’ll see.”

“That’s for sure,” Garfield mumbled, and when Ada asked him what he said he kissed her cheeks and answered, “Nothing, nothing.” Her English was terrible and even her Yiddish wasn’t so good. But in Russian his wife was a poet, a marathon talker. Every month when they got the phone bill, he was grateful that more people in Riverdale didn’t speak Russian.

When they got home from Hartsdale, Ada went to bed and he went into the kitchen and filled a large lunch box with a jar of creamed herring, a small hard salami, butter cookies, a container of ikra baklazhan,§§ a slice of halvah. Milk and meat all mixed up, but he didn’t care. No one would see but Meyer, and Meyer didn’t care either. In the morning he filled two Thermoses, one for himself for the drive back and one with a cranberry drink that Mrs. Rostov made.

When he got to Ossining he had to wait ten minutes while the guard, Carver, examined the contents of the lunch box. Carver opened the Thermos flask and sniffed. “Cranberries?” he said. Garfield nodded.

“God, that smells delicious.” He paused delicately.

Garfield said, “You can’t have that, Meyer’s waited for a month for that stuff. Next week get some more.”

“Sure do appreciate it, sure do.”

“You’re a shnorrer, William, a real shnorrer.”¶¶