The Roy Stories by Barry Gifford

silk-lined ones that smelled so good with leftover traces of perfume. There was no more luxurious feeling than to nap under my mother’s own sixty-pelt coat.
    By the time the fur business bottomed out, Pops was several years dead—he’d lived to eighty-two—and so was Uncle Ike, at eighty-eight. Pops had seen all of the old-time great ballplayers, Tris Speaker, the Babe, even Joe Jackson, who he said was the greatest player of them all. When the White Sox clinched the American League pennant in 1959, the first flag for them in forty years (since the Black Sox scandal of 1919), he and I watched the game on television. The Sox were playing Cleveland, and to end it the Sox turned over one of their 141 double plays of that season, Aparicio to Fox to Big Ted Kluszewski.
    Uncle Nate and Uncle Louie kept on for some time, going in to work each day not as furriers but to Uncle Louie’s Chicago Furriers Association office. He’d founded the association in the ’20s, acting as representative to the Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, and other civic organizations. Louie was also a poet. He’d written verse, he told me, in every form imaginable. Most of them he showed me were occasional poems, written to celebrate coronations—the brothers had all been born and raised in London—and inaugurations of American presidents. In the middle right-hand drawer of his desk he kept boxes of Dutch-shoe chocolates, which he would give me whenever I came to visit him.
    Uncle Nate, who lived to be 102, came in to Uncle Louie’s office clean-shaven and with an impeccable high-starched collar every day until he was a hundred. He once told me he knew he would live that long because of a prophecy by an old man in a wheelchair he’d helped cross a London street when he was seven. The man had put his hand on Nate’s head, blessed him, and told him he’d live a century.
    Uncle Louie was the last to go, at ninety-four. Having long since moved away, I didn’t find out about his death until a year or so later. The fur business, as my grandfather and his brothers had known it, was long gone; even the State and Lake Building was about to be torn down, a fate that had already befallen Fritzl’s, where the brothers had gone each day for lunch. Fritzl’s had been the premier restaurant of the Loop in those days, with large leather booths, big white linen napkins, and thick, high-stemmed glasses. Like the old Lindy’s in New York, Fritzl’s was frequented by show people, entertainers, including ballplayers, and newspaper columnists. Many of the women who had bought coats, or had had coats bought for them, at my grandfather’s place, ate there. I was always pleased to recognize one of them, drinking a martini or picking at a shrimp salad, the fabulous dark mink draped gracefully nearby.

 
    Nanny
    From the time I was four until I was eight my grandmother lived with us. She slept in the big bedroom with my mother (my father had remarried by then) and was bedridden most of the time, her heart condition critical, killing her just past her sixtieth birthday. I called her Nanny, for no reason I can remember, and I loved her, as small boys suppose they do. My mother was often away in those days, and while I don’t remember Nanny ever feeding me, (too sick to get out of bed for that) or dressing me, or making me laugh (there was Flo for that, my black mammy who later “ran off with some man,” as my mother was wont to disclose; and then a succession of other maids and nurses most of whom, again according to my mother, either ransacked liquor cabinets or ran away à la Flo—anyone who left my mother always “ran off”), I do remember her scolding me, and once my mother was in Puerto Rico, for some reason I’m sure Nanny considered adequate (sufficient to pry her from bed), she backed me into a corner of my room against the full-length mirror on my closet