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stepfather, Jonas Reiner, a large, humorous man who owned underwear factories, and at the far end my friend’s blonde mother, Ethel.
    Of the mothers of friends, she was the most glamorous. She had the most aplomb and style. She was the daughter of a doctor who, when October 1929 came, called and asked, “Are you broke?”—she was twenty-five years old, married to her first husband, with two small children. She had five thousand dollars to her name and her bill at Bergdorf’s was four thousand eight hundred. “Yes,” she said, “are you?”
    “Um, but I’ve been broke before and I hope to be broke again,” her father told her.
    She was a regal figure to me, affected but smiling, her ash-blonde hair heaped on her head, the silk of her dresses whispering. I never saw her in the kitchen—there was a cook—or with a vacuum cleaner in her hand or even changing a shoe, legs crossed, slipping it off and putting on another. Perhaps there were weekendmornings when, in a peignoir with fur cuffs she might scramble eggs to put on a breakfast tray and carry down the hallway to her husband. She suggested the sumptuous.
    Her son, Wink, was my friend. As young boys, groups of us used to gamble in his room, playing cards. He sometimes brought out five- or ten-dollar gold pieces to prove that he was good for any run of bad luck. I had never seen a gold piece or known they existed. They were prophetic. In time, he became a stockbroker and had a seat on the exchange. Money rolled in. He had a beautiful, extravagant wife and a house in Westchester. That was after the war. We were, strengthened by roots that reached far back, close friends. I was at his wedding and later, godfather to his first child. The money I had in the 1950s he doubled and tripled for me, and I felt myself rising with him, though in a smaller way.
    In years that followed there came the life of men, evenings in uptown bars, confiding everything. I knew about his wife, his brother-in-law, his partners. We went to football games and to Mexico together. The welterweight championship of Mexico was being fought in a huge, ramshackle arena somewhere on the outskirts of Mexico City. We were in the second row with a woman we had met, a blonde who said she was the girlfriend of an ex—Chicago Bears football player. Had he lost a leg or been stricken with cancer? I don’t seem to recall. I do see the vast, surrounding sea of blackest hair, all of it male. There was not another woman in the place and, a little drunk, the one we were with shone like a beacon. The naked calves of the fighters danced level with our eyes and blood flew from cut faces in what seemed to be sheets. From the balcony, beer was being thrown and lighted newspapers. It was round five or six. The chaos was mounting.
    “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. We were packed close. The empty aisle rose towards the rear between banks of men. “I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said again. “Who’ll come with me?”
    Neither of us stirred. I watched as she made her way alone up the aisle, on high heels, her hips speaking clearly, it seemed, beneath the dress. She was the emblem of it all. Row by row every face turned to watch. I was sure we were not going to see her again.
    We walked the dark streets afterwards, however, looking for a cab with her, few lights anywhere and unseen dogs barking.
    At the cockfights we were drinking tequila and licking salt from the back of our hands. Wink had given up looking at the roosters as they were carried proudly around. He read the odds instead, written on pieces of board men bore through the darkness. He held out bunches of money, which they took nodding. It was pesos, it didn’t matter. The cabs were in pesos, the hotel, the wide boulevards skimming past. We were breathing the Latin air, drunk on altitude. The city was a galaxy. The girls came into the room and lined up, smiling. Their teeth were mostly bad. One was Cuban. I had never been to