After hesitating for more than a week, Kuperman decided to call Judith Neeley. He wasn't sure why. At his age, the blood didn't run as fast as once it did. He was no lady killer. He didn't think of himself as lonely. During the day he made his business calls, worked with his nephew Stuart at the warehouse, made his own dinner or brought home Chinese, read the Trib, watched news shows on television, and was usually in bed before ten o'clock. His health had held up. He figured he had nothing to complain about. 

Still, here Kuperman was dialling up the number of Judith Neeley. "Yes," she said, "of course I remember you. Faye introduced us at the mall."

Feeling like a high-school boy, Kuperman heard the hesitation in his own voice as he asked her if she would like to meet one evening for dinner or maybe a movie. 

"I don't go to the movies much any more," she said. "But I have two tickets to a chamber-music concert at De Paul this Sunday. Would that interest you?"

"Yes," Kuperman heard himself say, "it would, a lot." 

That Sunday, Kuperman wasn't sure what to wear before picking up Mrs Neeley. He wasn't sure, either, what a chamber-music concert was, and his nephew Stuart, who had gone to the University of Wisconsin for three years, was no help. He decided on a business suit and one of his quieter ties. He wasn't really clear about why he was putting himself through this. At least, he told himself, he didn't have to travel far to pick up this broad.

On the way to the concert, Mrs Neeley — she asked that he call her Judy — told him that her husband had been a lawyer working in a small firm with three Jewish partners. Neeley was Irish, but he had gone to Sullivan High School, where the kids were mostly Jewish, and he had become, as he liked to say, an "honorary Jew." Over the years he had acquired more Yiddish words and expressions than she. Her parents, who had departed Austria in the early 1930s, weren't happy when she married Ned Neeley; her mother warned that some day, in anger, he would throw her being Jewish in her face, but she was wrong; it never happened. Her late husband hadn't any interest in music — he used to say that his musical education ended with "Does Eat Oats and Mares Eat Oats"-and he didn't mind her going off to the Symphony and the Lyric Opera (she was a season subscriber to both) with lady friends. 

Kuperman didn't say much about his own wife. Miriam had in fact been a bookkeeper in a firm he did business with, a thorough and well-manner woman, pretty, five years younger than he. After marrying Kuperman, she stopped working, raised their daughter, cooked, kept house, had her special charities — the Jewish Home for the Blind, Hadassah, a cancer foundation named after her friend Edie Weitzman-played cards. She left Kuperman alone; never gave him a hard time when he needed to work extra hours or go down to the warehouse on weekends. Kuperman never cheated on her; the thought that she might have cheated on him was not possible. Before she died, she thanked Kuperman for giving her a good life. Did she have her own unspoken yearnings? Would she have preferred another kind of life? While she was alive, Kuperman neglected to ask.