making a show of it, but when he picked up the suits they fit him better than anything else he had ever owned. It came to more than five hundred dollars but when he flinched at the bill, his uncle said, “It’s not an expense; it’s an investment.”
He moved out of his mother’s house, renting an apartment upstairs from the weekly paper; every Tuesday morning at three, the roar and vibration of the press shook him from his sleep. He bought a car, a four-year-old Ford Maverick. “Buy American,” his uncle advised. “A lot of these guys fought in the big one and wouldn’t like to see you pull up in a piece of Jap crap.” Despite his car, his uncle still picked him up in the morning because it made little sense for them to drive separately, since they were going to the same bakers and grocers and purchasing agents’ offices.
On the first Monday in April, his uncle brought Edward Everett to his house so he could begin teaching him the bookkeeping part of their work. Edward Everett had never been to his uncle’s house—not this one anyway. When his father was alive, his uncle had lived not far from them, in a modest three-bedroom place on a tree-filled lot. Some years before Edward Everett began working with him, however, he had bought ten acres that had been part of a prosperous dairy farm that once belonged to the district’s congressman, who had to sell it to pay legal bills when he got into trouble for skimming campaign contributions for a D.C. townhouse for his mistress. Edward Everett’s uncle and aunt had built a sprawling ranch house on the property: three bedrooms, three full baths, a large dining room with a vaulted ceiling. His uncle’s office was at the back of the house, where a large picture window looked out onto a pond the congressman had stocked with trout.
It was after seven in the evening and the sun was setting on the other side of a windbreak of maples on the far edge of the pond. Three ducks settled onto the water and paddled lazily. Edward Everett could hear his aunt in the kitchen, making dinner: the creak of the hinges on the broiler as she opened it to turn the steaks they were going to eat, and then the juices of the steaks sizzling. As she worked, she sang a song quietly but still loud enough that Edward Everett could make out that she didn’t know many of the words: “The moment I dada before I dada dadada, I say a little prayer for you.” At his desk, Edward Everett’s uncle leafed through a thick red-and-black ledger, each page a neat line of names and columns of quantities, dollars and dates. His uncle invited him to sit in his leather chair to enter the day’s orders and gave him a fountain pen, a gold-and-tortoise Visconti that weighed more than any pen Edward Everett had ever held. He took his time, as if he had never written a letter or a figure before, making each stroke deliberately, nervous about ruining the precision of the other lines on the page. The totals staggered him: he knew they had been selling what he considered a lot of flour but, adding the figures, he saw that their sales over the two and a half weeks recorded on that page approached fifty thousand dollars.
“Hon, I’m making a Manhattan for myself,” his aunt called from the kitchen. “Can I make one for you and Ed?”
“Sure,” his uncle said, not waiting for Edward Everett to answer.
Edward Everett’s aunt brought the drinks to the office and they sipped them, his aunt and uncle side by side on a leather couch, Edward Everett in a matching upholstered wing chair. His aunt and uncle chatted but Edward Everett didn’t really listen, catching only snatches of their conversation: a banquet at which his uncle was going to receive some sort of award from the diocese for fund-raising, a friend who’d had quadruple bypass surgery and who, three days out of the hospital, was already smoking a pack a day. His aunt, who was heavy with a round face, was not what he would think of as an attractive woman, but it was obvious his uncle loved her by the way he touched one of her plump knees to make a point or when he laughed at a story she told him about a misunderstanding at the butcher’s.