The Return of Marvin Palaver by Peter Rabe

Author:Peter Rabe [Rabe, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4008-0
Publisher: Adams Media
Published: 2011-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

A Problem of High Visibility

Abbie and me, we never had problems. I’m the uncle and Abbie is the nephew, which is different from being the son. But that I don’t want to hear about. The only problem with Abbie, he is an accountant which is almost like having a nebish for a friend.

Such a person has no vision, no daring, no chutzpa of any kind.

I have never understood why a business man, a creative person, has got to have an accountant around, a person who is no artist at all. Two people like that should not even meet, let alone work together.

You may think you hire an accountant so the man works for you? Not in a million years you could be more wrong. You say to an accountant I want this line of figures to show how I spent more than I made, because that’s business. What does my nephew the accountant say? He says: No, because that’s against the laws of the civil code and it’s against the laws of mathematics. Then I say: Are we going to talk business or are we going to discuss juris prudens? Then it goes on from there.

He’s a blood relative of mine from my brother’s side, so he knows how to talk. The trouble is, he talks like an accountant, a man who goes around telling me I shouldn’t make money, if you can believe such a thing.

Speaking of that, how come my nephew the accountant can go and live in Brooklyn Heights with a door man, like a regular Brooklyn address isn’t good enough for the younger generation?

I appeared in my new and sudden ways on the tenth floor of the address where Abbie had his apartment — you should pardon me, it’s a condo — around seven o’clock in the evening, a decent hour for any person that’s normal.

By that time you have had a nice little supper, a little glass of the concord along the way, a mandel broid with the coffee, and it’s time to sit down with the feet up a little, the evening paper maybe, or the TV if you can’t read. So where is my Abbie?

In the dinette by the kitchen the table was laid for supper. There was a candle, already lit, in the silver holder I’d given him after Sarah had died, there were two places laid out, plus the salt and pepper and the dish with the celery sticks to clean the stomach.

Two places meant to me that Ruthy was staying in. She lived there, I knew that, though I never could understand why these young people don’t also get married, but then most evenings she either took classes or sat around in the law library reading books which kept her from cooking and washing and keeping a decent place.

But that’s none of my business, even though I could smell already that the chicken they had in the oven was plenty done, and the vegetables on the stove the same thing.

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