Family Secrets Read Free

to build on it and then he really makes money. So, my plan is this. Why don’t we buy some land that nobody wants, get it very cheap, and then we build on it?”
    “Why do we want something nobody wants?”
    “Because we have imagination. We see what it could be.”
    “But who would build there, on this land nobody wants but us?”
    “We would,” Adam said.
    “I thought you said that,” Yussel said. “But would somebody want it after we built on it?”
    “Of course. The people who would rent apartments from us.”
    “You mean we would be landlords?”
    “We would be landowners and builders and landlords.”
    Yussel breathed a heavy sigh. “Oy, that takes a lot of money. Where could we get it?”
    “From the bank.”
    “What would we use as collateral?”
    “The land.”
    “What land?” Yussel said. “What is this magic land that nobody sees is wonderful but us, that we will get cheap and that will make us rich men?”
    “Mudville.”
    Yussel’s excited face turned glum. “You’ve been making fun of me.”
    “I’m serious,” Adam said. “We buy a big piece of Mudville. You with all your bad luck, and me, a fixer with no brains, how could anyone do anything but laugh at us? They will sell us as much land in Mudville as we want and think good riddance. And the bank will give us money, not as much as we would like, because they will think we’re fools too, but enough. We won’t be building palaces, you know. We’ll be building good, cheap houses for people who have no homes to live in.”
    “If you say it can be done I believe you,” Yussel said. “I’m willing to put up the money if you do the rest. But I wouldn’t tell anybody. I’d be too embarrassed.”
    “They’ll find out soon enough,” Adam said.
    With a hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket and wet feet Adam got off the streetcar and walked the two blocks to his apartment house. What a story he had to tell Polly tonight! First the story, then the doctor. No, first the doctor, then the story. He walked up the steps to his front door and suddenly there were women all around him—wailing women in babushkas and sheitels, crazy women, strangers, neighbors, all of them weeping and babbling like lunatics. He tried to push his way through them but hands grabbed at his sleeves. He recognized one of them at least, Tanta Yettel, his ancient aunt.
    “Oh, my Adam,” she said, and burst into tears. Her eyes were red as if she had already been crying for hours.
    “What is it?” he said, and the first thought that popped into his mind was that something had happened to his mother.
    “Polly is dead.”

TWO
    The day of the funeral the rain stopped, and Adam thought that life was strange because it was the rain that had started him on his great plan to become a success in life and it was that same rain that had taken his wife away. Afterward the small apartment was filled with friends and relatives. The women brought cakes and pies they had baked, platters of noodle pudding, chicken, beef, potato pancakes, cookies, bread. They sat and stared at each other and tried to think of things to say, and sometimes one or another of the women cried. They had every intention of sitting shiva for the entire prescribed time, and as far as Adam was concerned it was a waste of part of his life. Dead was dead. The dead lived on in the minds and hearts of the living. God had not made heaven and hell, the goyim had, and if they wanted to believe in such things and frighten themselves to death it was their pleasure, not his. Heaven or hell were here, on earth; he had seen plenty of evidence of both. He had seen plenty of devils who were human, without worrying about one with horns and a tail.
    He left the apartment, and the women were sympathetic, thinking he needed to be alone with his grief. He went to the coffee house to find Yussel, and told him what had happened. Yussel was full of sympathy.
    “I’m a bachelor myself, but I feel for your sorrow.”
    “Ya,