“He’s Cousin Faivish. He’s part of the family. And he’s here to stay.”
Even so, we all assumed that he would sell at the top of the market which, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, came quickly. Now Vietnam had been on every front page for the best part of a decade, rivets were sought after, and he could have sold at a profit. But, for whatever reason, Faivish had stayed.
* * *
That evening, as was customary most evenings, my sister Geula sat at the table silently crying. She had quickly learnt to cry without noise and now managed to weep without tears as well. All that was left was a rocking of the shoulders.
“Sometimes, when people climb the career ladder, they drop their friends so that they can find them again on the way back down,” my mother clucked over her.
“There is no down for him,” Geula croaked. “He’s a patent lawyer on Fifth Avenue.”
“Seven months,” my uncle complained, easing his shoes, “How much longer?”
“Give the girl a chance,” my mother scolded.
“Seven months,” my uncle repeated. “It’s time to move on.”
Like actors expected to repeat the same lines night after night during the run of a show, the conversation rarely varied.
My father appeared late looking both unusually tired and unusually pleased with himself. My mother ladled out rice and chicken and looked sideways at him. “What have you been up to?”
“You’ll see in the morning.” And that was all he’d say.
I knew it had something to do with the surfeit of t-shirts. To my father, challenges created by Faivish were akin to a vase of flowers knocked over by a puppy; somehow in character and, if anybody’s fault, the fault of the owner for putting a puppy and a vase of flowers within the same orbit. At least it wasn’t a thousand t-shirts is what my father would be thinking. He had probably convinced himself that the t-shirt order being out by ‘only’ a factor of ten was somehow ‘lucky’. Faivish’s errors, accidents, and omissions were part of the cosmic order.
The next morning on the sidewalk in the front of the shop hung a rail of white t-shirts, twenty or so, screen-printed with the figures ‘$4.99’ across the front in twelve-inch high black blocks. My father had made the pattern the night before and had printed them on the old silk screen press we kept in the basement. The letters were clearly hand drawn, but tried to imitate something more conventionally typographical, perhaps a newspaper typeface. I liked their immediacy, their boldness.