Illywhacker

He did not tell the young man that he had slipped a ten-shilling note into the pocket of the suit. He did not tell his family that the suit had gone. Neither did he communicate this to Wysbraum until he was, once again, seated at family lunch, devouring roast potatoes which were cooked in excessive numbers in deference to his appetite.

He waited for Wysbraum to begin his final appreciative scrape of the plate, watched the bread being torn, the plate wiped clean, and the gravy-smeared bread despatched into his friend's gaping mouth.

"Wysbraum," he said, when his friend had folded his napkin and threaded it untidily through the silver napkin ring. "Wysbraum…"

Wysbraum smiled at his friend and patted his stomach.

"Wysbraum," Sid Goldstein said with much emotion, "the suit is gone."

Wysbraum blinked. He pulled the napkin out of its ring and opened it slowly, peering at it as if it contained a tiny pearl he was anxious not to drop. "Gone?" he said, and blinked again.

"I gave it," Sid said.

"Gave it?" Wysbraum said incredulously, holding up the napkin to show there was no pearl. "You gave it. To whom did you give it?"

"To whom. A stranger," he smiled. "A nobody. A young man with no money and no suit. I said to him, this is a lucky suit. It was lucky for Wysbraum and I, and now it can be lucky for you."

Wysbraum did not move, but his big hands held each end of the napkin like a paper bon-bon he might tear apart with a bang.

"You had no right," he said quietly, placing the napkin gently on the table.

"Ha ha," said Sid. "Dear Wysbraum."

"Not joking," Wysbraum said softly. "You had no right." His tiny dark-suited body bent over the large white plate and he placed two tight fists on either side of the plate, in the places where the knife and fork should rightly sit.

"I told him our story," Sid said softly. "Maybe, who knows, he will be lucky too, and then," he spread his pale hands, "when he passes on the suit he will pass onhis story as well."

But Poor Wysbraum, the Goldstein girls saw, was not interested in this fancy. They watched in silence as he squinted his eyes as if to keep out an unpleasant light. Wysbraum's hands uncurled and fluttered anxiously. They took the bread-and-butter plate and stacked it on the dinner plate. They snatched the dessert spoon and placed it on top. Poor Wysbraum shook his head. He rose. He carried his plates and cutlery out into the kitchen. The Goldsteins regarded each other in silent misery, like animals who are unable to express pain. They could hear him clattering out there, but no one moved. The house took the noise of his washing up and blew it up to fifty times its size. The Goldsteins listened to the noise and their frowns deepened and their pale hands began to press hard down into their laps.

Poor Wysbraum emerged at last, holding a tea-towel in his wet hairy hands.

"You," he said to his friend with a great shaking voice. "You have all of this." His great lips trembled to hold the weight of his smile as he indicated (waving his tea-towel like a flag) the house, the wife, the three girls. "Past, present, future." The lips quivered but he did not drop the smile. "You have a history. You deserve it, my friend. Well done."

There was a silence while they waited, all of them, for the house to stop thundering.

Wysbraum did not see the girls. He did not see Edith. He saw only Sid Goldstein. It was in his direction he, at last, threw the tea-towel.

"You have given away my history," Poor Wysbraum shouted before he fled the house trampling on the eardrums of his hosts with his shocking oversize black boots.

The Goldstein women considered the desolate eyes of Goldstein pere with emotions that Leah at least, when she was older, was to recognize as grief of the order one feels in the face of death.

8

That Sid Goldstein then remade the missing suit himself by hand, that he rubbed miserably at the fabric with pumice-stone, rubbed for hours on end to make it shine, that he laid the nap with lard and onion dissolved in gasoline, that he lovingly counterfeited the tear Wysbraum had made falling off the cable car twenty years before, that he shortened and lengthened the trousers almost as many times as he had in the days when he shared the original, that he occupied himself night after night was all known to his family who quietly observed his thin frame bending over the fabric, saw every silent stitch without feeling it necessary to make any comment on the melancholy hobby.

The girls were all at the Methodist Ladies' College that year, and they sat at the dining table with their homework. They knew, surely, that their schoolmates' fathers did not counterfeit suits. Would Leah have invited home her schoolfriends to witness this? She claims the question is a nonsense: she had no friends.