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A short story by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

Hanna flew in from New York that morning; Michael from Moscow in late afternoon.  She should have known he would not like the hotel she had booked, discovered on a previous trip to Amsterdam. He found it too quaint, too plain. She was at fault, as always.

Sex was disappointing; both were exhausted from travel, so they gave up on sex and set out to find drinks and dinner.  Across from the hotel was a little café with outdoor tables facing the canal full of colorful, flower-planted barges. They got a little high on two genevers and strolled the pretty tree-lined street, Lindengracht, finally settling on a busy steak-frites place.

After dinner, they crossed an iron bridge to the area where, Hanna had been told, they’d find the grass bars. There were a lot of them, with names like Tabu, Jungle Joint, L.A. Lounge. They were all crowded with Africans, Asians and Americans. Each had a prominently-displayed dope menu.  They bought a quarter ounce of Thai stick.

Back at the hotel, they sat on straight chairs by the window, looking out at the dim canal and the warm lights in houses across the water. Soft voices drifted up on the summer air from the barge decks.

They smoked and talked and finally made love. It was beautiful now, thanks to the grass. Maybe, Hanna thought hopefully, this time they would really have a good vacation together.

 

But, early next morning, Michael was off on his own for his daily run.  Hanna breakfasted in the hotel dining room, then took a cab to the Van Gogh Museum.  He was still out when she got back. There was a note from him at the desk.  “I’ll meet you at the café at six.”

She always did a lot of waiting when they traveled together.  Her normal energy and spontaneity withered and she was transformed into a patient statue fixed in a slow flow of time. He was constantly late, a practice Hanna had recognized from the start as intentional, a display of power. She despised herself for tolerating it.

 

But, Michael’s being twenty years younger than she gave him a clear advantage. No woman his age would have stood for his behavior. Still, however embarrassed by her weakness, she remained helplessly in love with him… his elegance, intelligence, blue-eyed beauty and talent in bed. She spoiled him shamefully.

The days of their week together slipped by.  He went his own mysterious way for part of every afternoon.  She knew he loved to be alone, to cruise women, to fantasize about adventures he never really sought. The truth was that he flirted and followed but didn’t connect. The movie in his head was what mattered. He loved the attention, the possibilities he need not pursue. Besides sex with Hanna was the best he’d ever had. Why look for more?

When he returned to their hotel, excited, Hanna awaited him, showered and languorous, perfumed and hot. She knew exactly how to please him. Their love-making was still ecstatic, even after fifteen years. What could be better than that? Afterward, high and satisfied, they wandered the summer streets, loitering in cafes, dining deliciously.

On the fourth day of their stay, the cafe across the street threw a party. The cobbled square was filled with tables and chairs. Michael roamed through the crowd taking pictures; a drag queen sang on an improvised stage. Hanna sat alone in a pretty flowered dress, wearing the amber necklace he had brought her from Russia, drinking gin after gin.

At some point, a little German woman pulled up a chair next to her.  “You are beautiful,” she said, kissing her neck and stroking her hair.  Michael, returning, was thrilled. He loved it when people came on to her.

He bought drinks for both of them and wandered off again into the crowd. This time he returned with a slyly pretty young girl who said she was a Gypsy.  She flirted with everyone, especially Michael, handsome in his navy blazer, white shirt and Hermes tie. Drunk as she was, Hanna saw clearly that this girl was trouble. And then things began to blur.

Some time later, she woke up in her chair in the empty square. The café was closed. Pale light from a streetlamp drew dark circles on the cobbles.  A few feet away, the heavy wooden door of the hotel was locked. A tiny red bulb illuminated a placard which said, “For entrance after 10:00 PM ring bell.”

Where was her key?  Michael had it!  The silence of the street was intimidating; she was starting to feel cold. At her touch, the bell clanged harshly.  She was sure all the darkened windows above her would light up, revealing her pathetically alone in her skimpy dress.

At last, the hotel proprietress came clumping down the stairs in a nightgown.  She grumbled angrily.  “Where’s your key?”  “My friend has it.”  “And where’s he?” she demanded.  “I don’t know.  Maybe he’s upstairs, asleep.”

Hanna climbed the narrow steps, behind the furious hotel keeper, who mumbled to herself in Dutch.  The ceiling light was horribly bright and she switched it off at once.  The room was empty.  Pain seared her mind. Michael must be somewhere with that girl.

He had never done anything quite so awful before.  To leave her alone in the street in a strange city! “That does it!”, she said aloud, tears gushing from her eyes as she dropped heavily onto the hard bed.

Soft voices floated up from the quay; couples on their way home. Hanna imagined them stopping to kiss in dark corners. Mercifully, she passed out almost at once.

At dawn, Michael had not returned. His passport, toothbrush and clothes were there–lying peacefully where he had left them the night before. She packed her canvas bag and headed down the stairs to the brightening street. She walked for blocks, hungover and shaking, until she found a cab and took it straight to the airport.  Tears rolled down behind her dark glasses.  The cabdriver kindly pretended not to notice them as he carried her bag into the terminal.

Later: Over the Atlantic, Hanna relaxed in her window seat gazing dully out at the glowing sky. Disturbing images streamed through her mind.  Michael in bed with the gypsy girl; Michael being robbed and beaten; and, strangest of all, Michael’s body, Hermes tie trailing, floating lazily down the canal.  And, closing her eyes, she smiled, as the plane droned steadily on through the golden clouds.

 

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling is the author of the story collection, NOTES OF A NUDE MODEL & other pieces. Her new book, ABROAD; an expatriate’s diaries, is due out in Spring 2014.

A memoir by Elaine Greene Weisburg

When my husband’s company sent him to work in Rome for two years we only had six weeks to move ourselves and our two boys out of our apartment and summer cottage. I was so flustered by the sudden onslaught of organizational demands that when I was packing my clothes and found that a few inches of the hem were down on my favorite skirt it was too much for me to cope with. I picked it up, exited my apartment, walked down the hall, and dropped it into the incinerator.

Nevertheless, during those six frantic weeks my husband and I were taking nightly Italian lessons on our record player. All I can remember from those lessons was the voice of the male teacher sounding out names:  ElizaBAYta, SebastiAHno. There was more language instruction on our ship, the Cristoforo Colombo. They were taught in First Class but we in Cabin Class were allowed to attend. The teacher was a beautifully coifed and dressed aristocrat. She taught her class various politenesses: buon giorno, buona sera, prego. And she told us how and where to shop, the main interest of my classmates.  She taught us the all-important “Quanto costa?”  (How much costs) which I later learned can be said more elegantly: “Quanto ci vuole?” (how much is asked for this). And let me tell you, speaking Italian elegantly was a major goal of mine.

I said goal, not achievement. No adult Anglophone who lives with fellow Anglophones will ever speak Italian like an elegant native. My husband and I persisted though; we had persuaded our favorite Berlitz teacher to instruct us at home two evenings a week and kept that up until a few days before we left Italy.  I also took some classes in grammar, Dante, and art history at an academy for foreigners not far from where we lived. There I met several young women from England and Holland who were learning to speak fluent Italian in a year and I got one of them to tell me how they did it. The main rule is never to speak your native language. Go fulltime to a school that is conducted entirely in Italian. Room with an Italian family that is willing to talk with you. Socialize only with Italians, and find an Italian boyfriend.

When I heard other Americans express themselves solely in infinitives I would be filled with pity and scorn. If I wasn’t sure of the correct grammar or vocabulary, I would say nothing. Sometimes I would sit down with my grammar and my dictionary and write out what I would later say to someone like the managing agent of our apartment or the claims adjuster of a bus company. I succeeded in getting a settlement from the latter after a bus had slightly damaged our small station wagon. But I did my most serious preparatory work when I was summoned to an interview with a police commander in our quarter. This is how it happened.

When we moved into our apartment in a late fifteenth-century palazzo in Old Rome, the space had been newly refurbished. It could have been unoccupied for a hundred years, I suppose, or more. The ceilings were so high that the owners had been able to insert a partial second story over the kitchen for a maid’s room and bath accessed from a downstairs utility room. To hold open the door to the utility room we found in place a heavy old bullet-shaped metal object about 14 inches long.  We didn’t pay much attention to this door stop and rarely saw it until our second New Year’s Eve in the palazzo when Gisela, our maid, mentioned it to us.

On our first New Year’s Eve, we had learned about a surprising Roman custom. At the stroke of midnight, people threw unwanted possessions out of their windows and onto the piazza or street: a broken chair, an obsolete record player, remains of a depleted set of dishes. By morning all would have been swept up. To me it sounded like fun—like the places in Sweden I have heard about where people go to buy imperfect china and smash it on the spot.

On the second New Year’s Eve, before leaving for a night off, Gisela saw fit to tell us that the “bomba,” as she called the door stop, had always frightened her and asked whether we had to keep it. I don’t know whether she was hinting that we throw it out the window, but I think I might have done it. My husband, always blessedly sensible, firmly nixed that idea but was willing to put it outside our apartment door with the nightly garbage. This we did.

The next morning our elder son woke us urgently—we were trying to sleep in. “Two carabinieri were ringing the bell. They want to see you.” I left my drowsing husband and rushed to the door. There they were in their beautifully tailored black uniforms with the red stripe down the outer seam of their pants, white bandolier, and plumed three-cornered hat. “Do you know who put the bomb outside your door?” one of them asked. I said it was I and explained that we had found it in place when we moved in and threw it away because our maid was afraid of it. That was easy Italian. My manner was also easy, too much so. My what’s-the-big-deal attitude was displeasing to the officers and they were stern when they told me I was to appear at their headquarters in the nearby Piazza Farnese five days hence. The captain will be expecting an explanation; meanwhile the army would be testing the device.

And I would be thinking sober thoughts. This was the Sixties and it was common knowledge that random unexploded weapons from the war were still killing unlucky farmers and children who were usually the ones disturbing them. This knowledge was behind the little speech I had composed and rehearsed. Appearing before the police commander as a well-dressed young signora with my hair freshly styled, which counts in Italy, I began with words that touched on the history of my country. I said we were blessed not to have had a war on our land for a hundred years and so I never had to think of such a danger before. I said I did not know before the carabinieri spoke to me what a bomb looked like. “Non sapevo, non sapevo,” (I didn’t know, I didn’t know) said I, suddenly close to tears in my grammatically correct remorse. I ardently apologized.

The captain accepted my apology and had one more thing to say. For my information, the army had found that the bomb was carica. That word was unknown to me but I was not going to admit it, so I responded to his very serious face as he gave me the news. O Dio, che peccato !(O God, how terrible). And the interview was over. There were no smiles on either side. I looked the word up as soon as I got home and learned that it meant, as I assumed, charged, armed, loaded. This bomb that the Countess Desideria Pasolini, haughty owner of the building, left in a flat rented to a couple with young children, children whose innocent foolish American mother actually thought of flinging it to the cobblestones from a fourth floor window.

 

Elaine Greene Weisburg began to write personal essays only after decades of design reporting and editing. The first time she typed the word “I” she thought the roof would fall in. 

A memoir by Elaine Greene Weisburg

My mother at the keyboard would sound like a player piano with that steady driving beat. At parties they wouldn’t let her stop.  She could also sing the lyrics. “I’ll be down to get you in a taxi, Honey, You better be ready ‘bout half-past eight.  And, Dearie, don’t be late, I want to be there when the band starts playing.”  I hoped that another of her favorites,  “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, Honey,” could be the recessional at her funeral but the hired organist didn’t know the tune.

Bessie Katz was probably talked about in her Brooklyn neighborhood because of her car, a red Stutz Bearcat which her parents had given her in 1915 for her sixteenth birthday. I have some old snapshots of her driving the car while wearing a raccoon coat. She may have been the child of immigrants, but she was a thoroughly American girl. I always look for a Bearcat at classic car shows, and if I find one I always tell the owner about my mother. Sometimes she would be seen buzzing around town in the sidecar of John Fitcallo’s motorcycle. He was the family chauffeur who lived over the garage and took my grandfather to work in the Pierce-Arrow every day across the Brooklyn Bridge. He also drove the family to and around Saratoga during their summer vacations, encountering in his off hours a surprising number of pretty girl  “cousins.”  So my mother told me years later, still amused.

I don’t think there was a romance between Fitcallo and his boss’s daughter but he did egg her on in a big-brotherly sort of way. It was he who dared her to go up in an airplane when she was still in her teens (she went). Of the three sisters in the family, my mother was the one most avid for fun and new experiences, whether it was deep-sea swimming or going to the jazziest new nightclub. When my father nicknamed her Good-time Charley it stuck; my husband always called her Charley.

It took Bessie five years to finish high school (trouble with Latin) but she treated that as a joke and was very smart. Her assessments of my friends sometimes surprised me with their accuracy. She read people like a novelist and could tell you who was selfish, kind, honest, stingy, untrustworthy… and on short acquaintance.

After high school Bessie took a few extension courses at Columbia and then attended secretarial school. She got a job demonstrating the use of the typewriter but her father easily persuaded her to turn it down so she could join the family at Saratoga. She lacked the work ethic that governs my generation until much later in her life.

My parents “met cute” as they say in the movie business.  It was late one spring night and Bessie was driving some friends around in her Bearcat when they passed my father’s two-story house. He slept upstairs on a screened sleeping porch and one of the passengers asked my mother to stop the car so they could surprise him. Harry Greene came down, looked the scene over, and lit a match so he could see the driver’s face. This often-told encounter captured my imagination as a girl and I pictured it:  she sparkling, he quietly mysterious in the flare of light. They fell in love and married on her twenty-second birthday at the Savoy Plaza, which stood among the grand hotels around 59^th Street and Fifth Avenue. Many of the women guests wore  “headache bands,” a headdress involving a broad ribbon around the forehead often sprouting a fancy feather or two at the side–part of the Flapper uniform. This can be seen in a panoramic photograph of the wedding guests at their dinner tables. I forget which couturier made my mother’s wedding dress but she told us more than once about buying some of her trousseau in the children’s department; she was just over five feet tall and weighed 89 pounds.

Bessie’s privileged youth was no handicap when the Great Depression demanded thrift, self-denial, and clever management. She still dressed my sister and me nicely and managed to find two dollars a week for my piano lessons while on a forty-dollar budget. We never heard a word about money worries.

My sister and I were quiet, obedient children, only occasionally driving our probably bored housewife-mother to yell or, rarely, to slap one of us on the forearm. I remember pink finger marks from her hand on my skinny white arm, and also remember pinching the marks to make them last longer so I could show her accusingly.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

A few years after my parents’ nest was empty, my mother became a part-time baby-sitter for her grandchildren, my sister and I delivering the first two only four days  apart. She gave us each a day off a week and our kids an additional loving parent. Graduation from a crib to a bed was celebrated with one of her perfect handmade afghans, no two alike; college meant another afghan each. They last, these pieces of family folk art, and have become heirlooms to be lent around and passed down.

After the last of her four grandchildren went to school, Bessie got her first job. She was sixty-five. She became a general assistant at the Art Nouveau gallery of her best friend since childhood, Lillian Nassau. Bessie was often in charge of the door buzzer and is famous in the shop and the family for refusing to let in a grungy fellow who turned out to be the then super-star musician Paul Simon. She did know enough to admit Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, all four Beatles (one at a time), Barbra Streisand, and numerous decorative arts curators. She is the only one in the family who has looked into the barrel of a gun in the hand of an actual criminal. The shop’s Tiffany lamps and Remington bronzes were the loot, never to be seen again. “Already on a plane,” said Volpe the renowned NYPD “art cop” an hour or so after each armed robbery, for there were two.  Lillian’s son Paul was running the gallery the second time, and when the gunman said  (his actual words) “This is a stick-up,” Paul and my mother rolled their eyes at each other.

After she turned 85, my mother, widowed five years and still working, told me she would love to go to Europe once more. She had made several overseas buying trips with Lillian when they were in their seventies. I liked the idea. We decided on a week in London, one of her favorite cities, with a few side trips. My husband thought it should be ladies only and I agreed. One of my nieces decided to join us. Separate rooms and separate checks all around for three generations in true harmony. It was one of the best things I ever did, especially because three months after we got back, a sudden vicious cancer struck my mother. Two months later, she was gone.

I have another memory that I replay sometimes when thinking about family life. It was the night before my wedding and my parents and I were sitting around in the living room with nothing more to do. I had never lived on my own, not even during college, so marriage was a bigger step for me than it is in these days of cohabitation. Although I had not planned to make a speech, I began to tell them what I was feeling. I told them I was happy to be getting married, but that I was sad because it meant leaving them. I told them how much I enjoyed being their daughter, and that I didn’t know how to repay them. My father said “You’ll repay us by doing the same thing for your children.” He made this a completely rounded and unforgettable conversation, and I am forever pleased to think I must have made them both very happy that night with my spontaneous, heartfelt tribute.

Everyone should have a daughter like me.

 

Elaine Greene Weisburg began to write personal essays only after decades of design reporting and editing. The first time she typed the word “I” she thought the roof would fall in. 

A memoir by Lynne Schmelter-Davis

I had just returned from a week of visiting my grown sons in California when my friend, Elaine, called to ask, “Did you have a good time out there?”

I decided to answer truthfully.  “It’s hard to have fun when you’re walking on eggshells, biting your tongue and bending over backwards.”

Elaine understood.  She had grown children as well.  “I heard you got some good news while you were there,” Elaine said.  “Didn’t your youngest son announce his engagement to that woman you like?”

“Yes.  The engagement got me some nachas.

“Nachos?”  Elaine asked.  “Your son gave you nachos?”

“No, NOT nachos that you eat, but nachas that you get.”  Elaine wasn’t Jewish.

I explained:  “Nachas is a terrific Yiddish word that has no equivalent word in English.  Nachas means joy but not ordinary joy.  It’s a special kind of joy that you can get only from your child.   If you get a raise or a new car you might be happy but there is no nachas there.  If your daughter gets accepted into her first choice college you get nachas.If your child receives a doctoral degree you get NACHAS!It’s been said that your child having a child is a SUPER-NACHAS event.”

Then I told her, “The Queen of nachas is Mrs. Spielberg.  No, not Steven’s wife but his mother.  Did you see the Oscar show when he won the Best Director award for Schindler’s List?  He stood up there holding the golden Oscar statue and said,  “I owe this all to my mother.” Then the camera showed Mrs. Spielberg beaming in the audience.   Both Elaine and I took a moment to reflect on this wondrous occurrence.  Elaine now understood nachas,and furthermore wished for some for herself.

 

Sometimes I admit to feeling intrusive, or even in the way, especially if I would like information.  Once I asked my oldest son and his girlfriend if they were planning to visit for the upcoming holidays.  The girlfriend answered, “Douglas and I are not accepting questions at this time.”

Huh, I thought.  Must questions be submitted ahead of time?

 

I am often reminded that I must not cross boundaries, as in a cautionary warning from one of them, “Boundaries, Mom, boundaries.”  But we evidently did not have the same concept of what exactly constituted a boundary.   One time my middle son, while he was in high school asked me for twenty dollars as he was leaving the house to go out with friends.

I said, “Twenty-bucks?  You got your allowance so how come you want twenty dollars now?”

His response:  “I need to buy condoms.”

I think now I should have said, “Boundaries, son, boundaries.”

“You said I shouldn’t use lack of funds to keep me from using protection at all times,” he said.

I gave him the money.  This is the same son who called me a decade later with news of a wonderful promotion at work and a big raise (nachas for me!) and so I said, “Wow, that’s great,  I’m so proud of you.  What will you be earning now?”

He answered,  “I’m not comfortable discussing that with you.”

I wanted to say that I wasn’t comfortable carrying you for 9 months …not to mention the potty-training and waiting on line in the cold to buy Rock-‘em-Sock-‘em Robots, the must-have toy of 1976.

I know several parents of grown children, who are sending checks to help them, especially during this endless Great Recession.  Some are assisting in the support of grandchildren or are helping to pay for their children’s divorces.  It seems that checks do not release us from the boundary rule or mean that our children will call more often.  I haven’t spoken to my grown kids on the telephone in weeks because they are so busy.

Sometimes my generation is called The Sandwich Generation because of having to care for grown children as well as elderly parents.  Sure, this can be tough. But I think a better name for those of us old enough to qualify for a discounted subway fare is the “Gumby Generation.” We have to be super-flexible all the time.   No matter what happens, we may NOT say, “I don’t approve,” “Do not do that,”  “Take my advice.”   Of course we could say anything we want but the consequences will not be worth it.  We want peace.  We want harmony.  We want to be loved into our golden years.

Your daughter got engaged to the daughter of your best friend?  Mazel tov!  Some call this faux nachas.  You must show joy. Your single daughter, age forty, has informed you that she made a withdrawal from her local sperm bank to become a mother?  Be happy about your impending grandparenthood.    It’s not about you.  It’s about them.  You can’t let on by word or look that you might be disappointed or sad.  You can talk to your trusted friends or see a therapist.  Or both.

A special challenge is stepchildren.  Can we get nachas from a stepchild?  This is a rabbinic question that I will not try to answer except to say that if the stepchild has not spoken to us for over a decade the answer is definitely “no.” If, however,  our own child has achieved something outstanding and we are in nachas heaven I would think that our spouse who is not the child’s parent could enjoy some reflected nachas.  What about boundaries with stepchildren?  For them the boundaries are so high and wide it is best to stick to the following topics only:  the weather (if it’s nice), how smart they are, how good they look, and how happy you are to see them.

Finally we come to grown in-law children or the significant others of our grown children, half-children or stepchildren of the same or different genders, religions, races and ethnicities.  Embrace all of it.  Do not count on nachas.  Let’s  forget about our parents and grandparents spinning around in their graves.  Focus on how little time we have left on earth. Do we want to spend this time meeting with lawyers while trying to decide who gets excluded from our will this year or would we rather feign a modicum of senility and appear vaguely pleased about everything and get invited to all family events     There are many books about baby-and -child -care.  Schools run programs on parenting your teens.  There are even books on how to be a good grandparent.  But no author wants to be the Dr. Spock for thirty, forty, and fifty-plus year old children.

Dr. Spock had it easy because he was able to tell us that as parents we were bigger, smarter, and could trust our instincts to do the right thing. None of this is true for parenting grown children.  At the book store the self-help section goes from “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” through  “Being the Mother-of-the-Bride, and then it ends.  Next comes “How to Care for Your Aging Parents.”

We are set adrift with no guideposts or encouraging words.   It will take plenty of good luck to get through this last parenting task well.  And those of us who do it really well might even get rewarded with unexpected nachas, like our child winning a great award and telling the world that that the achievement was all due to us.

 

Lynne Schmelter-Davis was a college professor of psychology for several decades, and she is the mother of three sons and two stepdaughters. Although she has retired from teaching, the parenting of grown children goes on, and on, and…

A memoir by Steve Reichstein

On a day off from my duties as a camp counselor I hitched a ride into D.C. I wanted to visit the Capitol and experience what it was like to see Congress in session. I didn’t know who my Congressman was but I knew Senator Lehman represented New York State. The only things I knew about him were that he was liberal, wealthy, interested in the arts and had a reputation of doing good for the state. A Capitol guard informed me that I would need to obtain a pass from my senator’s office in order to sit in the Senate chamber. “Take the elevator to the third floor,” he said. Exiting from the elevator I didn’t know which way to turn.  Puzzled, I approached a short, rotund man smoking a cigar striding past the elevator.

“Excuse me sir. Could you tell me which way is it to Senator Lehman’s office?”

“Are you from New York?”

“Yes, he’s my senator.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and extended his hand.

“Son. I’m Senator Lehman. What can I do for you?”

This man was not tall, he was not slim, he was not distinguished looking and he had an uncultured, New York, accent!

“I’d like to get a pass to watch the Senate, sir.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Eighteen next month.”

“Hmm, well, you can’t vote yet, can you?” he said as he reinserted the cigar.

“Anyway, see my secretary, first office down the hall on the left. She’ll write you a pass.” Taking a long puff, he strode off.

The public gallery was nearly empty. I took a seat in the first row. I listened to a desultory speech and was about to leave when three men entered the floor of the Senate chamber and began to converse. The acoustics were good and I could easily hear their conversation.

“You’re not going to keep us in session all night, are you?”

“It can wait until tomorrow, can’t it,” the second speaker chimed in.

There was a pause as the third man looked down at the other two, caught their eyes and, with a bit of a drawl said, “Well, gentlemen, it’s important to me and important to the country so unless I have agreement from your party to take a vote, we’ll just have to remain in session until everyone has done their homework and is ready to vote on it.”

It suddenly dawned on me who these three were—I’d seen them on television and in Life magazine. I leaned forward.

“But if we are good boys and agree to vote on it now, you wouldn’t keep us after school, would you?” said Republican Senator Dirksen of Illinois, kidding, in the voice of a pleading schoolboy.

“Yes, teacher, please, pretty please,” jovially joined in Republican Senator Mundt of South Dakota.

“Gentlemen, you do your part and I’ll do mine and we’ll be out of here shortly.” And with that, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Johnson placed a hand on the shoulders of his two colleagues and, smiles all around, they left the chamber. Five years later Johnson would become John F. Kennedy’s vice-president and three years later, following JFK’s assassination, he’d become the 36^th president of the United States. And in 2003, when the biographer Robert Caro wrote a book about Johnson, Master of the Senate, I remembered the moment I had witnessed—and understood the appropriateness of the title.

 

Steve Reichstein likes to express himself through writing, a medium that enables him to focus, shape and craft his stories without the constraints of time.