For the first month after they left his parents’ apartment they couldn’t find any other place to live in New York but a single room in a halfway house. To pay for their room and board he did odd jobs for the woman who owned it: washed dishes, bussed tables, painted rooms, applied some sulfuric acid solution to the five flights of marble steps to take out the stains in them from about fifty years. Then they got an apartment and the woman claimed they owed her eighty dollars in back rent and he said he’d worked off the entire four weeks’ room and board and she even owed him some dough for all the hours he put in at minimum wage and the woman said she’d take him to small claims court if he didn’t pay and he said “Okay, I don’t want any trouble or bad feelings between us, I think you’re wrong but I’ll come up with the money some way,” and back in the room Evangeline said “Like hell we’ll pay. What do I have to do, teach you how to talk back and get what’s due you? Your father, for all his ugliness to Brons and me and his cheap picayune ways, would have known what to say: ‘Eat pig meat, you bloodsucking bastard, and all the junk carts you rolled in on.’ Because she’s cheating you blind. You worked hard, at slave wages, scarred your fingers through the gloves on that lethal acid and maybe your lungs too, when she could have got a much safer but more expensive cleaner. She knew a jellyfish when she caught one but she’s not going to bulldoze me,” and he said “Better we go along with it than risk a court case and have to pay double, is what I heard those judgments against you can be,” and she said “Horsecrap. This is what we do,” and they told the woman they’d pay the day they left, “Say around eleven or noon we should be all finished,” he said, and Evangeline asked an actor friend to drive by at six that morning, there was a blizzard going, ten or so inches already and the actor was an hour and a half late and could barely get his car down the street through the snow, the woman was shoveling a path on the sidewalk and she said “Mr. Bookbinder?” when she saw him carrying some things to the car and he said “Just loading up for the first trip, Mrs. M. I’ll see you when I get back, if I can make it in this snow,” and she said “No funny business now. I’ve seen all kinds, you know,” and he said “Don’t worry, I’m leaving my family behind as collateral,” and after the car was packed and the actor was at the wheel and the motor was running he went back to the room and said “This is terrible, and really bad for the kid to see, let’s just pay her,” and Evangeline said “No, we’re going. Just keep walking and I swear, if she tries stopping us I’m going to push that woman, I don’t care if she slips and breaks a leg,” and he said “No pushing,” and they left the building and started down the long stoop, which Mrs. M. had just cleared but it already had what seemed like a half inch on it; she was at the second-story window and threw it open and yelled “You come back here, Bookbinders; I’ll have the police after you by the time you get there,” and as they drove away he said “Let’s go back; I’ll write her a check. It’ll be my money, not yours. She’ll find us through our new phone number and we can be thrown in jail for beating out on the rent. Or I can — you, they’ll say you’ve got to take care of your boy,” and she said “She’ll never chase after us for eighty smelly bucks. And serves the greedy yid right — I wish she had come at me and broken a leg,” and he said “She isn’t Jewish; what is it always with you? This is New York; you’re not in the foothills. And she’s Irish or something, maybe Welsh or Scottish, judging by her name. What’s Macreedy?” he asked the actor and the actor said “Could be anything like you said but not Italian,” and she said “Jewish, don’t tell me. Maybe not the name, but she is. Macreedy’s probably her husband who ran away from her like us, and in a hateful snowstorm also, but thirty years ago. Or she took the name out of a phonebook so she wouldn’t be known as Jewish. But who can’t see what she is by that big flabby nose and the Shylock way she treats people, pound of your foreskin or half pound of your balls,” and he said “I don’t know who I dislike more now, you or her. I’m sorry, Brons, and I’m sorry, whatever your name is, driver, actor,” and the actor said “Go ahead, say your spiel, don’t mind me. What I’m doing today’s a favor I owe Ev, so what’s between you’s between you,” and he said “Why, what’d she do for you?” and the actor said “Another favor, friend to friend, but enough for me to stick my car’s neck out in this blitz. Gray,” and shook Gould’s hand and Gould said “Gould,” and to Evangeline in back “Anyway, you’re going to have to tell me you know how wrong it is what you said about Mrs. M. and that particular religious thing in general,” and she said “You don’t know what you’re talking about now, so why should I?” and he said “You mean you’re saying you don’t know what I’m talking about,” and she said “Yes, subject closed.”
