Western Alliances by Wilton Barnhardt EPUB & FDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Wilton Barnhardt
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Satire Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
New York System
Upon reflection, it was an ingenious way to keep a bright six-year-old
occupied and out of one’s hair, to set down The Wall Street Journal or the
business section of The New York Times before him, select a crayon of the
day with much pretended interest and debate as to the color’s importance,
and task the child to circle each and every instance of his father’s name
appearing in the pages. And won’t Daddy be proud when he gets home?
Roberto Costa, for uncounted hours, scanned the pages concerning
foreign exchanges and dividend rollovers and pork-belly commodities in
hopes that his father might be quoted—since his father knew everything,
and American business could hardly function without him. There were
datelines from Frankfurt and Strasbourg and Brussels and an array of less
pronounceable locales from where his father, one minute in the door,
suitcase in the foyer, would empty into the designated bowl his pocketful of
foreign coins for his son’s collection. The unrivaled treasury of coins would
make for a definitive show-and-tell at school. (One day, from a park bench
in western Russia, Roberto would determine that his numismatic show-andtell was the first in his series of ambitious international projects that would
not be seen to completion.)
By his eighth birthday, the jig was up. Roberto had figured out that only
the headlines featuring BONDS or MUNICIPALS led to the possibility of a
paternal mention. Still, what joy to find Mr. Salvador Costa quoted and to
take the crayon and fill in the circles of the a’s and o’s, create a halo around
his own last name. Then how, lying in his bed, Roberto would fight to stay
even half-conscious, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00 p.m., attuned to the percussion of
the front door opening and gently closing. His pages had been placed
specially on the foyer lamp table next to the outgoing mail so his mother
wouldn’t forget to present his work … which she invariably failed to do.
Gratification often waited until breakfast the next morning:
“You found me again, Bobby!” his dad would say, waving the
illuminated manuscript, before reading the article, before grumbling, “I see
they misquoted me as usual.”
“You gonna fix ’em, Dad?”
“You bet I’m gonna fix ’em.”
As an adult, Roberto Costa now understood that the name-finding
exercise was emblematic of his mother’s approach to child-rearing, a chore
usually delegated to house cleaners and nanny services, but when minions
could not be found, when no one could be drafted, anyone, anyone at all, to
give her children a hint of supervision, there was always the Wall Street
Journal assignment.
He had never entirely given up the exercise. Throughout his twenties, in
some European train station café, in a Florentine piazza or a Viennese
coffeehouse, nursing a too-pricey miniature soda, he would check the
financial part of the International Herald Tribune and fill in the o’s and a’s
for a paragraph, hoping for a spark of childhood joy.
“I am also starting to have the thought,” Liesl said quietly in English,
darting a glance to their fellow train passengers, “that you have not to have
been so … so honest with your Liesl. I think…” She studied a sleeping
businessman and then a stern, skeletal, middle-aged man reading a thick
novel. “I think that you are a very rich boy.”
He said nothing.
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