A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell

wife, and no girl in her right mind would have him.
    No one, however, bothered to ask Father his opinion, which he bothered to reveal to no one. Even then, he was an expert at effacing his true self. A lifelong invalid, he knew how to build a wall out of his symptoms and to hide himself behind it. Of course, he would never act against his parents’ wishes, but the truth is, he never stopped praying for a bride.
    IT HAD BEEN arranged for him to meet one last girl, and Grandfather Sammelsohn had been unable to send a letter in time to prevent her family from coming. They’d already begun the arduous trek from her town to his. (As Father was too ill to travel, the girls and their families came to him.) Grandmother Sammelsohn felt that canceling the tête-à-tête after the pains Mother’s family had taken in getting there would be unseemly. “They’ll come and go quickly enough,” she said. “What difference does it make? One look at Nosn and they’ll be out the door.”
    They waited one day, two days, three days for the girl to arrive, accompanied by her father and, no doubt, an uncle or two. They’d play out the charade one last time, their hearts no longer in it. Though they urged him to return to his bed, Father insisted upon waiting for their guests in his chair in the parlor, slouching with his legs pulled up high before him, his knees like doorknobs inside his best pants, a folio of the Talmud spread across his lap, his hair long and lanky, the odor of sickness hovering, like a rain cloud, almost visibly above his head.
    The clock ticked loudly in the otherwise silent room. At last, they heard the rumbling of a coach approaching, then stopping at their door. Concentrating on his blatt of Gemara, Father listened to the clicking and clacking of passengers as they disembarked and the trill of his mother’s voice as she welcomed their visitors into the hall. Father slouched farther into his black leather chair. One foot on its cushion, he crossed his legs, and his knobby knees were now higher than his head. (He was so thin hisangular bones scraping against his clothing wore out the fabric in half the time it normally took.)
    “Alter Nosn!” his mother calls in to him.
    Pretending to be engrossed in his studies, Father pretends not to hear her. She enters the room with the small party of guests in her wake: my father’s uncle, the girl’s father, the girl’s uncle, and the girl herself.
    “Oh, look, he’s studying,” Grandmother Sammelsohn says, as though explaining a diorama in a museum. “Lost in thought. That’s our Alter Nosn, I’m afraid.”
    Father stutters out a chain of syllables and looks up from his book, blinking at them, as though into new light. Unlocking his long body from the chair, he stands, waiting for what he knows is coming next: ill-concealed disgust, quickly minted excuses, a hasty retreat from the room. Everyone avoids looking at one another until the girl’s father, seizing the moment and putting the best face on it, offers Alter Nosn his hand.
    Careful not to smile, lest he reveal the rickety picket fences of his teeth, Father places his hand, a cold dead fish, into the older man’s hand. (Years later, we would laugh at how Grandfather Horowitz reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and wiped his palm.) Everyone waits for the inevitable: the inevitable desperate looks between father and daughter, the inevitable noticing of the clock, the inevitable remarking on the lateness of the hour, the inevitable remembering of the pressing appointment, their inevitable and immediate departure.
    Grandfather Sammelsohn clears his throat and is about to speak, when my mother says, “I fear it may seem rude” — occasioning knowing looks from every side — “but the long trip by coach has left us parched.” They lean in: this is something they’ve never heard before. “And I do so worry over my father’s health” — ah, here it comes, here it comes now, bring their coats, their