LEONARD KRIEGEL
111
many old men in New York can have lunch with a woman as good–
looking as she is? "How long did it take?"
"For what?" the old man asks suspiciously.
"To pay him back."
"Every cent I gave him." He is becoming more agitated. "Two
hundred one week, four hundred the next.
It
took two years. But I
gave it back, every penny. I would give interest, too. Only he don't take
no interest from another Czech."
"He was my mother's second cousin. We knew he was in America.
That was all we knew." She laughs. "If you knew someone in America
back then, it was magic. You only told close friends. But it was as if you
could look down and there it was, like a gold watch lying in the
street." She sips her coffee, tosses her head back so that her silver blond
curls explode. The old man can smell her warmth. He trembles. She
could have been his daughter. "Like something valuable. Only you
couldn't pawn it, because they would find out. Yet it made you richer,
just the fact that you knew someone in America."
"He was a good Czech," the old man says.
"He was aJew, Willie. I know. I married him."
"What difference? When I needed money, he gave me. You ask me,
he was a good Czech."
The Mexican busboy sits back in the booth and lights a cigarette.
He has finished the pot roast and mashed potatoes and string beans and
he has drunk two cups of coffee and the clock on the wall says he still
has four minutes on his break before he must mop the imitation wood
floor of the coffee shop. The Mexican busboy cannot read English but
he can tell time and he regularly reads
El Diario
each morning at break–
fast.
The Mexican busboy is happy. He is happy because here he is, in
New York, the greatest city in the world - and his stomach is full, he is
smoking a cigarette, he is looking at a painting on the wall above the
last booth. The painting is of a woman with a flowery print dress and
white parasol. The woman stands on a sun-filled beach.
In
the distance is
the blue ocean and there are two sailboats on the ocean and the woman
is very lovely and she is also dressed in a style that pleases the Mexican
busboy. He cannot get over how rich a country this America is, where
an ordinary Greek can buy a painting of a lovely woman on the beach.
He takes another drag on his cigarette, afraid he may explode with
pleasure. He is pleased to be inside a coffee shop in New York working
for a Greek owner. He is pleased to be warm and he is pleased that the
