It usually turned out well for him because either he liked the right people or there were only a few wrong people in the town.
Alfred wanted to invest in my father's hotel and advance enough money to build a larger place.
It was a very tempting offer.
My father would have done it if it hadn't been for my mother, who had a fear of being in debt to anyone -- even Alfred Alpert.

In spite of his being well liked there were a few people who were very careful about Alfred.
They had my mother's opinion of him: that he was too sharp or a little too good to be true.
One of the people who was afraid of Alfred was his own brother, Lew.
I don't know how and I don't know why but the two stores, the one in Margaretville and the one in Fleischmanns that had been set up as a partnership, were dissolved, separated from each other.
Everything was all very friendly, except when it came to Harry, the youngest brother.
Alfred, who was a good deal older than Harry, had treated him like a son, and when Harry decided to stay in business with Lew instead of going with Alfred, Alfred looked on the decision as a betrayal.
From that day on he never spoke to Harry or to Lew, or to Lew's two boys, Mort and Jimmy.
The six miles between the towns became an ocean and the Alperts became a family of strangers.

Time went on and everybody got older.
I became fifteen, sixteen, then twenty, and still Tessie Alpert sat on the porch with a rose in her hair, and Alfred got richer and sicker with diabetes.
It was in the spring of the year when he took to his bed and Tessie and Alfred found out that they didn't know each other.
They were like two strangers.
The store was their marriage, and when Alfred had to leave it there was nothing to hold them together.
Tessie, everybody thought, was a strong woman, but she was only strong because she had Alfred to lean on.
And when Alfred was forced into his bed, Tessie left the front porch of the store and sat at home, rocking in her rocker in the living room, staring out the window -- the rose still in her hair.
Tessie could do nothing for Alfred.
She couldn't cook or clean or make him comfortable.
Instead she waited for Alfred to get better and take care of her.

Spring was life -- and Alfred Alpert in his sickroom was death.
Alfred knew that, too.
I remember him pointing out of the window and saying that he wished he could live to see another spring but that he wouldn't.

Alfred began to put his affairs in order, and he went about it like a man putting his things into storage.
My father, who liked Alfred very much, was a constant visitor.
One day Alfred told him that he had decided to leave everything to me.
My father, a wise man, asked him not to.
He knew Alfred liked me;
if he wanted to leave me something let it be a trinket, nothing else.
By leaving me everything he wouldn't be doing me a favor, my father told him, and he didn't want to see his daughter involved in a lawsuit.
He didn't want Alfred to leave me trouble because that's all it would be, and Alfred understood.

Alfred was getting too sick to stay in his own home.
The doctor wanted him in a hospital;
the nearest one was forty miles away in Kingston.
The day Alfred left his home and Fleischmanns he gave up the convictions of a lifetime.
He sent me for Meltzer the Butcher, whom he wanted not as a friend but as a rabbi.

Meltzer knew why I had come for him.
Solemnly he walked me back to Alfred's house without a word passing between us.
He entered the house in silence, walked into Alfred's room, and closed the door behind him.
I sat down to wait, and I watched Tessie Alpert, who hadn't moved or said a word but kept staring out of the window.

For a few minutes there was nothing to hear.
Then Meltzer's voice, quiet, calm, strong, started the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
I could hear Alfred's voice a few words behind Meltzer's like a counterpoint, punctuated by sobs of sorrow and resignation.
There was a finality in the rhythm of the prayer -- it was the end of a life, the end of hope, and the wondering if there would ever be another beginning.

Meltzer stayed with Alfred, and when the door opened they both came out.
Alfred was dressed for his trip to the hospital.
The car was waiting for him.
Alfred, leaning on Meltzer, stopped for a minute to look at Tessie.
She didn't turn away from the window.
Alfred nodded a little nod and went out through the door.

Outside, his brother Harry was waiting for him -- he had come to say good-bye.
Alfred walked past him without a word and got into the car.
Harry ran to the side of the car where Alfred was sitting and looked at him, begging him to speak.
Alfred looked straight ahead.
The car began to move and Harry ran after it crying, "Alfred!
Alfred!
Speak to me".
But the car moved off and Alfred just looked straight ahead.
Harry followed the car until it reached the main road and turned towards Kingston.
He stood there watching until it had gone from his sight.

I went to visit Alfred in the Kingston Hospital a few times.
The first time I went there he asked me to bring him water from Flagler's well -- water that reminded him of his first days in the mountains -- and before I came the next time I filled a five-gallon jug for him and brought it to the hospital.
I don't think he ever got to drink any of it.

The jug stayed at the hospital and the water -- what can happen to water?
-- it evaporated, disappeared, and came back to the earth as rain -- maybe for another well or another stream or another Alfred Alpert.

12 "where is it written"?

Mr. Banks was always called Banks the Butcher until he left town and the shop passed over to Meltzer the Scholar who then became automatically Meltzer the Butcher.
Meltzer was a boarder with the Banks family.
He came to Fleischmanns directly from the boat that brought him to America from Russia.
He was a learned man and a very gentle soul.
He was filled with knowledge of the Bible and the Talmud.
He knew the whyfores and the wherefores but he was weak, very weak, on the therefores.
Banks the Butcher took Meltzer the Scholar as an apprentice and he made it very clear that a man of learning must be able to do more than just quote the Commentaries of the Talmud in order to live.
So Meltzer learned a new trade from Banks, who supplied the town and the hotels with meat.

Banks had a family -- a wife, a daughter, and a son.
The daughter, Lilly, was a very good friend of mine and I always had hopes that someday she and Meltzer would find each other.
They lived in the same house and it didn't seem to be such a hard thing to do, but the sad realities of Lilly's life and the fact that Meltzer didn't love her never satisfied my wishful thinking.

Banks the Butcher was a hard master and a hard father, a man who didn't seem to know the difference between the living flesh of his family and the hanging carcasses of his stock in trade.
He treated both with equal indifference and with equal contempt;
perhaps he was a little more sympathetic to the sides of beef that hung silently from his hooks.

Lilly Banks and I became friends.
She was the opposite of everything she should have been -- a positive pole in a negative home, a living reaction of warmth and kindness to the harsh reality of her father.
And Lilly's whole family seemed to be an apology for Mr. Banks.
Her brother Karl was a very gentle soul, her mother was a quiet woman who said little but who had hard, probing eyes.
For every rude word of Mr. Banks's the family had five in apology.

Every chance I got I left the hotel to visit Lilly.
I was free but she was bound to her duties that not even the coming of Meltzer lightened.
She had to clean the glass on the display cases in the butcher shop, help her brother scrub the cutting tables with wire brushes, mop the floors, put down new sawdust on the floors and help check the outgoing orders.
When these chores were finished, only then, was she allowed whatever freedom she could find.

I helped Lilly in the store.
To me it was a game, to her it was the deadly seriousness of life.
I wanted to help so that we could find time to play.
And Lilly allowed me to help so that she could have her few little hours of escape.

When the work was finished, we would walk.
The road past the butcher shop took us along the side of a stream.
It ran north, away from the town and the people, through woods and past the nothingness of a graveyard.

Lilly preferred the loneliness of that walk.
I would have liked the town and the busyness of its people but I always followed Lilly into the peace of the silent and unstaring road.

It wasn't hard to understand.
To me Lilly was a fine and lovely girl.
To people who didn't know her she was a gawky, badly dressed kid whose arms were too long, whose legs were a little too bony.
She had the hips of a boy and a loose-jointed walk that reminded me of a string of beads strolling down the street.
And she had the kind of crossed eyes that shocked.
It was unexpected, unexpected because Lilly walked with her head bent down, down, and her mark of friendship was to look into your face.
I accepted her crossed eyes as she accepted my childishness;
childishness compared to her grown-up understanding that life was a punishment for as yet undisclosed sins.
We were almost the same age, she was fifteen, I was twelve, and where I felt there was a life to look forward to Lilly felt she had had as much of it as was necessary.

When we went for our walks Lilly's brother would come along every once in a while.
Karl was an almost exact copy of his father physically and it was strange to see the expected become the unexpected.
This huge hulk played the guitar and he would take it along on our walks and play for us as we sat alone in the woods or by the stream.
Karl played well and his favorite song was a Schubert lullaby.
He spoke no German but he could sing it and the words of the song were the only ones he knew in a foreign language.
The song, he said, was called "The Stream's Lullaby", and when he sang, "Gute ruh, Gute ruh, Mach't die augen zu," there was such longing and such simple sadness that it frightened me.
Later, when I was older, I found the song was part of Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin.
And even hearing it in a concert hall surrounded by hundreds of people the words and the melody would make me a little colder and I would reach out for my husband's hand.

The brother and sister seemed to be a sort of mutual-aid society, a little fortress of kindness for each other in a hard world.
I felt very flattered to be included in the protection of their company even though I had nothing to be protected from.