As I told you about my dad, I felt so close to him! He would've really laughed at that story. He loved humor. Of course, when he chose to tell a joke, it usually finished in a crass phrase in Yiddish, which none of us understood. Dad would deliver the punchline and laugh at it all by himself, invariably ending up in a paroxysm of a cough. I could always count on him catching up to my jokes, though. He would listen to them with a ready smile and shout "Huh!!!" as he understood what was funny. He was quite timid and well behaved, but, as they say in Russia: "In quiet waters the devils abide." It was all in his mind, you see! When a nurse visited him at home, or we met a pretty lady, he would study her with his tiny red rimmed eyes and then start to fawn over her. It was like there was a totally different person inside of him, someone who could act on his love for the fairer sex.
My mother was absolutely opposite of him. Life with her was very emotionally uncomfortable for my father, but she wasn't a fool. In New York both of them had to go to classes in English and American history. Dad and she were in different classrooms, but mom would spend every recess with him. She knew that there were a lot of the lonely women who could make him much happier than she did.
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