The Collected Stories

the bathroom. He took off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa.
    Strange, he still daydreamed; he fantasized about unexpected successes, restored powers, masculine adventures. The brain wouldn’t accept old age. It teemed with the same passions it had in his youth. Harry often said to his brain, “Don’t be stupid. It’s too late for everything. You have nothing to hope for any more.” But the brain was so constituted that it went on hoping nonetheless. Who was it who said, A man takes his hopes into the grave?
    He had dozed off and was awakened by a jangling at the door. He became alarmed. No one ever came to see him. “It must be the exterminator,” he decided. He opened the door the length of the chain and saw a small woman with reddish cheeks, yellow eyes, and a high pompadour of blond hair the color of straw. She wore a white blouse.
    Harry opened the door, and the woman said in a foreign-accented English, “I hope I haven’t wakened you. I’m your new neighbor on the left. I wanted to introduce myself to you. My name is Mrs. Ethel Brokeles. A funny name, eh? That was my late husband’s name. My maiden name is Goldman.”
    Harry gazed at her in astonishment. His neighbor on the left had been an old woman living alone. He remembered her name—Mrs. Halpert. He asked, “What happened to Mrs. Halpert?”
    “The same as happens to everybody,” the woman replied smugly.
    “When did it happen? I didn’t know anything about it.”
    “It’s more than five months already.”
    “Come in, come in. People die and you don’t even know,” Harry said. “She was a nice woman … kept herself at a distance.”
    “I didn’t know her. I bought the apartment from her daughter.”
    “Please have a seat. I don’t even have anything to offer you. I have a bottle of liqueur somewhere, but—”
    “I don’t need any refreshments and I don’t drink liqueur. Not in the middle of the day. May I smoke?”
    “Certainly, certainly.”
    The woman sat down on the sofa. She snapped a fancy lighter expertly and lit her cigarette. She wore red nail polish and Harry noticed a huge diamond on one of her fingers.
    The woman asked, “You live here alone?”
    “Yes, alone.”
    “I’m alone, too. What can you do? I lived with my husband twenty-five years, and we didn’t have a bad day. Our life together was all sunshine without a single cloud. Suddenly he passed away and left me alone and miserable. The New York climate is unhealthy for me. I suffer from rheumatism. I’ll have to live out my years here.”
    “Did you buy the apartment furnished?” Harry asked in businesslike fashion.
    “Everything. The daughter wanted nothing for herself besides the dresses and linens. She turned it all over to me for a song. I wouldn’t have had the patience to go out and buy furniture and dishes. Have you lived here a long time already?”
    The woman posed one question after another, and Harry answered them willingly. She looked comparatively young—no more than fifty or possibly even younger. He brought her an ashtray and put a glass of lemonade and a plate of cookies on the coffee table before her. Two hours went by, but he hardly noticed. Ethel Brokeles crossed her legs, and Harry cast glances at her round knees. She had switched to a Polish-accented Yiddish. She exuded the intimate air of a relative. Something within Harry exulted. It could be nothing else but that heaven had acceded to his secret desires. Only now, as he listened to her, did he realize how lonely he had been all these years, how oppressed by the fact that he seldom exchanged a word with anyone. Even having her for a neighbor was better than nothing. He grew youthful in her presence, and loquacious. He told her about his three wives, the tragedies that had befallen his children. He even mentioned that, following the death of his first wife, he had had a sweetheart.
    The woman said, “You don’t have to make excuses. A man is a man.”
    “I’ve grown old.”
    “A man is never old. I had an uncle in Wloclawek who was eighty when he married a twenty-year-old girl, and she bore him three children.”
    “Wloclawek? That’s near Kowal, my hometown.”
    “I know. I’ve been to Kowal. I had an aunt there.”
    The woman glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s one o’clock. Where are you having lunch?”
    “Nowhere. I only eat breakfast and dinner.”
    “Are you on a diet?”
    “No, but at my age—”
    “Stop talking about your age!” the woman