Three Balconies Read Free

struggle broken up by a passing salesman. And in the years that followed, the boys circled each other warily, at a discreet distance, as if probing for a soft spot in the enemy lines. Working as a waiter one summer, Bobby filled out his slender frame and returned from the Jersey shore, anxious to display, if not actually flaunt his newly muscled body in the neighborhood. He headed immediately for the playground; alarmingly, there stood Timmy,
calmly dribbling a basketball, towering over every boy in sight, including Bobby.
    And thus they traded physical advantage, Bobby nosing ahead several summers later, Timmy drawing even the next – until both went off to college, Bobby to nearby Hofstra, Timmy, with the aid of a divorced father, to far-off Claremont Men’s. Then came the Korean War for both young men. Returning home on a brief leave, Bobby proudly strolled the neighborhood streets as an Air Force lieutenant. Coming toward him suddenly was Timmy, a Navy ensign. Both men were flustered and lowered their eyes. Then, if such a thing were possible, they glared at each other shyly. Suddenly, with no words being spoken, they fell into each other’s arms in a communion of tears and an undeclared promise of everlasting friendship.
    They spent the afternoon together, speaking of failed romance and future glory.
    â€œI never meant that remark I directed at you,” said Timmy at one point. “It was just something I heard around the house.”
    â€œI gathered that,” said Bobby, who hadn’t.
    No sooner had the friendship been established than Timmy, after his discharge, moved to the West coast, where he studied medicine at Stanford. He became wealthy, not in private practice but as owner and administrator of a thriving group of emergency clinics. Along the way, he married a prominent Jewish oncologist. As a testament to his love for Rebecca Glassman (and as a condition of the marriage) Timmy had completed an arduous eighteenmonth conversion to Judaism. (Both bride and groom had retained their names – Glassman and Flanagan.)
    Bobby, in the meanwhile, had remained close to home. A high school teacher of Social Studies, he had married a woman who taught the same subject, barely noticing that she was Catholic. He loved her virtually on sight. That was enough. As for his own connection to the Jews, he had never, since his bar mitzvah, set foot in a Synagogue. When pressed to the wall, he would describe himself, obnoxiously, as a “bagel and lox Jew.” Slightly aware that he
was being a renegade, he took occasional positions that were contrary to the best interests of Israel. On a brief trip to Jerusalem, he and his guide, also secular, posed wearing t’filn at the Western Wall, but only, to the best of his knowledge, as a lark.
    The two friends called one another from time to time – and always, sentimentally, on New Year’s Eve. They concentrated on major developments, Bobby’s knee operation, the birth of Timmy and Rebecca’s son. Thus the friendship, slender but unwavering, was kept alive.
    The years flashed by – and then one day, Kate and Bobby received a handsomely engraved invitation to the bar mitzvah of Samuel Benjamin Flanagan, son of Timothy Aloysius Flanagan and Rebecca Sylvia Glassman. Timmy enclosed a handwritten note saying that a hotel room had been reserved in Bobby’s name.
    â€œI’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that you can see your way clear to make it.”
    Since no mention was made of airline tickets, Bobby assumed he would be expected to pay for them – his friend no doubt taking it for granted that Bobby had prospered over the years – just as Timmy had with the Flanagan Clinics. This was not the case. Despite their combined Board of Education salaries, Bobby and Kate barely kept their heads above water in financially punishing Manhattan.
    Bobby and Kate discussed the dent a trip would make in their frail bank