Act of God

try.”
    “That’s all any of us can do, right?”

    “Hey, what’s this, I don’t see you for a month, and now you’re back inside a week?”
    He was wearing the same vest and suit pants. I gave him the benefit of the doubt on the shirt and cigar. “How are you, Mo?”
    “How am I? Let me tell you how I am. I’m having a Sol Wacht—wait a minute, I already told you that one, right?”
    “Right.”
    “I tell you, John, it’s getting harder and harder to remember these things. The short-term memory, the doctors call it. I’m afraid I’m getting a little senile.”
    “You, Mo?”
    “I know, I know. It’s hard to believe. But I’m losing it enough, my wife’s afraid I’ll have Alzheimer’s for six months before she notices the difference.”
    “Mo—”
    “You still working on that furniture store thing?”
    “Yes.”
    “You know, I gotta give you credit, John.”
    “Credit for what, Mo?”
    “Your thing there. Your case.”
    “I don’t get you.”
    He waved the cigar like a conductor tuning up his orchestra. “When you were here last time, I was struggling for a story, remember?”
    “I remember, Mo. The classifieds.”
    “The what?”
    “The classifieds. You were going through them to—”
    “Oh, yeah. Right, right. The polar-bear skins, they didn’t pan out too good.”
    “And they looked so promising.”
    “Huh, tell me about it. But the lady just had them in her attic all this time. Never did anything about them, only knew they must have been from the former owner who’s dead lo these four and twenty years. No way to trace any of the family. Depressing, isn’t it?”
    “What is, Mo?”
    “Families. What the hell we talking about here? The way families drift apart. Son moves here, daughter moves there, all across the country, even the world, all this Global Village stuff. Not like the old days.”
    “Right. I won—”
    “The old days, the families stayed together. Not ‘nuclear,’ that’s... ‘Extended,’ that’s the word for it. The families used to be extended, John. Three, four generations under the same roof, pooling their money, watching out for each other, taking care of each other the way the family was designed to. When I was growing up in Chelsea ... of course, that brings me back to it.”
    I was beginning to empathize with Mo’s wife. “Back to what?”
    “To my story. John, you gotta keep the thread straight here.”
    “Sorry, Mo. ”
    “The story idea you gave me.”
    “I gave you?”
    “Yeah. The Irish and the Jews.”
    “That—”
    “Did you know the mayor of Dublin used to be Jewish? No, wait a second, that’s not the right way to phrase it. Did you know a Jew used to be mayor of Dublin ?”
    “I’d heard something about it.”
    “Well, he did. And then there’s all this ecumenical stuff, the archbishop of this and the rabbi of that, breakfasts and lunches and—why do you suppose it’s always some kind of food, John?”
    “Beats me, Mo. ”
    “Yeah. I ought to look into that. I had to spend a little time on the old days, unfortunately. Like how Boston was one of the biggest supporters of that Father Coughlin character from the midwest in the thirties or our own Father Feeney, out there on the Common, screaming anti-Semitic stuff at the commuters in the ‘forties. Believe it or not, when I was young, there were lots of neighborhoods you couldn’t go, the Irish kids would chase you, stone you even, yelling ‘Kike!’ and ‘Christ-killer!’ that kind of thing. Fortunately it didn’t happen in Chelsea where I was growing up, but then we were maybe three-quarters Jewish and a lot of nice Italian kids, good families.”
    “I’m glad—”
    “ ‘Course, you still got problems, like that flare-up a couple of years ago between Alan Dershowitz and Billy Bulger over the judgeship, but maybe that’s gonna happen whoever you got on one side versus the other.” He pointed at me with the cigar. “You were saying?”
    “I’m glad you got a good article from it, Mo. ”
    “Yeah. So, you still working on it?”
    “On the case?”
    “Of course on the case. John, maybe you should come over to the house. The way you’re losing track here, you’d make me look good in front of the wife.”
    “Actually, I was kind of hoping I could get into your morgue again, Mo. ”
    “How far back?”
    “Five, maybe six years.”
    “Let me goose one of the punks we’ve got outside, can work the computer. Get you a printout. We need an exact