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take every opportunity to punish me.
    And so I found myself in New York, selling cars, and in fact being somewhere other than Indianapolis did do me a world of good, and in fact it was a great thing to discover that I had the capacity to earn my own money. Yet I was still aimless, I had few friends, which was why, most evenings, I would go to the aforementioned public lectures and recitals and poetry readings. And at one of these I met Julia, who was also a regular at such events, but for different reasons. Though from a wealthy family, she had very little cash at her disposal. She lived with her widowed mother, who kept her on a tight leash.
    Some background here. Julia’s people were Bavarian Jews. Her maiden name was Loewi. Back in the 1850s, her grandfather and two of his brothers had emigrated from Fürth to New York, where they founded a fabric-covered-button manufactory. From fabric-covered buttons they moved into hops, from hops into commodities.In New York, I have since learned, the German Jews go to great lengths to distance themselves from their Yiddish-speaking cousins, most of whom arrived in the early part of the century, in flight from poverty and pogroms. Well, by then the German Jews—Julia’s Jews, if you will—were well established. On Central Park West they had their own Fifth Avenue. They even had their own club, the Harmonie Club, right smack-dab in the heart of Manhattan and, more tellingly, right across the street from the Metropolitan Club, its gentile twin, from which it differed only in its conspicuous lack of Christmas decorations in December. A Polish Jew had about as much chance of getting into the Harmonie Club as any Jew had of getting into the Metropolitan Club—and this was understood to be in the order of things. For how else was an immigrant population to prove its entrenchment but by exercising the power to exclude? As a girl, Julia attended German Jewish cotillions. Her brothers rowed in German Jewish regattas on the Hudson. And though there were always other cotillions, other regattas, from which they were barred, and knew themselves to be barred, nonetheless
their
cotillions,
their
regattas were reported right alongside these others on the society page of the
New York Times
. Examples of rebellion or anomaly in the family history were rare. One of Julia’s uncles, a lawyer just out of Harvard, shot himself in the head in his office on a winter morning in 1903. It was assumed that he was a secret homosexual. Another settled in Haiti, tried to organize a coup against President Hyppolite, and was summarily deported, after which he devoted most of the rest of his life to lawsuits against the U.S. government. Finally there was Aunt Rosalie. Before the war, she and her husband, Uncle Edgar, had sailed to France. They were en route to Vienna, where Edgar, who suffered from diabetes, was to consult a specialist, but halfway across the Atlantic he fell into a coma and died. He was buried at sea. Subsequently it was assumed that Rosaliewould return home in mourning. Instead she took a villa in Cannes and married a Swedish tennis instructor. Given the course Julia’s life was to take, you might think she would have looked upon her aunt with admiration, but in fact she despised and feared her. Well, perhaps we all despise and fear those relations whose existence proves that we are not, as we would like to believe, originals.
    Like Harry, Julia was the youngest child. I myself am an eldest child. By nature I am gluttonous, impetuous, indifferent to worldly success—the polar opposite of Harry, who is methodical, abstemious, and enterprising, as well as stoically, humorlessly self-sacrificing. To hear him tell it, everything he has ever done in his life has not just been for someone else’s sake but has required him to deprive himself of a pleasure small or great (though, to be honest, the only thing in which he really takes pleasure, so far as I can see, is self-deprivation). This is often