Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty

oilcloth. Sometimes, while cooking, Lena had to pause to break up a spat between Sylvia and Lee; the apartment was small and hot, especially in summer, and tempers grew short. Lena refused to let brother and sister go to bed angry with each other. After dinner, she would often say, half in Yiddish, half in English, that she could use a little ice cream. She’d give Joey a dime and send him off to a nearby soda fountain, with instructions to return with a pint of Golden Glow. The family gathered around the carton and ate all the ice cream on the spot, because they had no refrigerator. These moments were immensely satisfying to Joey. As an adult, he would look back and realize that, on some level, he had already learned not to want more than he could reasonably hope to have. What he had was blessing enough: the Jewish concept of dayenu . A pint of ice cream was plenty.
    When fall came, Sylvia would sit near an open window in the evenings and do her homework by the light of a streetlamp outside, to save electricity. In the spring and summer, the family rented space to a succession of boarders. The children had to squeeze together in a single room; sometimes, one of them slept in the kitchen. One summer, one of these boarders played classical music every night on the family radio. Joey discerned familiar melodies in some of the performances. With a shock, he understood that playful echoes of Tchaikovsky popped up in big-band tunes such as “My Blue Heaven” and “April Showers”—songs he had heard in the afternoons on “Your Hit Parade.” Without his full awareness, his keen ear had revealed to him some of the secrets of art: the richness of tradition and the impulse to play against it—variation, improvisation, and parody.
    He was a precocious reader. Often, after dinner, every member of the family opened a book. Early on, Joey read the Rover Boy series and the tales of Tom Swift. An older cousin on his father’s side, a man named Nat Siegel, who worked as an accountant in the city, brought him books.
    For a while after Isaac’s death, family drop-ins were regular. Many of Isaac’s relatives lived in the city, and Lena remained close to them. She welcomed their care and concern, and Sylvia seemed to enjoy their visits, but Lee usually withdrew whenever his father’s people came around. His aloofness embarrassed Lena. Though normally courteous and polite, he had inherited his father’s reserve. His transition to his new country had been difficult. Years later, in a letter to his little brother, he would recall how the “goyim-Irish” in Coney Island used to call him “Jew-boy.” “I was told [by my playmates] to lie on the ground, open my fly[,] and reveal [my] penis and then all the goyim kids would spit on it,” he wrote. “I raised no objection—that said I was a good kid and then I would be allowed to play with them.”
    These experiences, as well as his naturally gentle temperament, pushed Lee beyond self-effacement, toward self-contradiction. At the end of a long day, he would simultaneously affirm and deny he was beat. He would complain about his tasks yet insist they weren’t so bad. In these small ways, he implied nothing was what it seemed, and no one really knew him.
    His behavior intrigued Joey as much as the laughter and speech of the big, loud people (strangers, though family) who came to see his mother. He would linger in the living room doorway, listening to the group tell affectionate stories about someone called “Itchy.” It didn’t occur to him until he was an adult that Itchy was a nickname for his father—a variation of Yitzak, Yiddish for Isaac (the name means “he who laughs”).
    Did he miss his father? He wasn’t sure. Had he known the man? No one asked him what he felt. Lee was now largely in charge of him, correcting his behavior in company, seeking his help with errands, but Lee