Michael Chabon by The Mysteries of Pittsburgh Page A

guys who work for Uncle Lenny?”
    “Know them?” he said. “I went to the weddings of half of them. Danced with their wives.”
    “Yes, well. I mean some of the guys in the lower echelons.”
    “Why, do you know one? One of the kids?” He looked annoyed. “Where are you hanging around that you’re meeting that kind of kid?”
    “Well, gee, at the Symphony, the Carnegie Institute, the opera, the economics department, you know. Around.”
    “Look,” he said, the blood flowing into his ever-pink face. “You always profess such a disdain for the business of your family. And those are men who, yes, don’t have the education that you and I do, but who’ve been working hard all their lives, who have children and wives, and who make money to give it to their children and wives. And now you, Mr. Academic, you’re hanging around with punks. Greedy little morons who give their money to other greedy little morons.”
    “Okay, Dad, okay. I’m not hanging around with any of Uncle Lenny’s apes. I just asked if you knew them.”
    “Happily, no,” he said, in his best dry voice.
    We fell silent. I looked down from our perch in the highest and most expensive restaurant in Pittsburgh onto the lights of downtown, and the black wishbone of rivers and the stadium on the other shore, illuminated for a night game, and thought about old ball games for a minute or two.
    My father was the moneyman for the Maggio family (the Bechsteins, like the Sterns and all the Jewish crime families, having long since dwindled and been absorbed), but he also served as a kind of liaison between the people in the capital and those in Pittsburgh. Coming to Pittsburgh was pleasure as much as business for my father; he had met my mother at a wedding in Squirrel Hill, and so had a lot of family here; he knew its streets and crazed beltway system and suburbs and golf courses, and was a long-standing Pirates fan. I had been to Forbes Field as a tiny boy, and to Three Rivers Stadium a thousand times. The day I kept track of an entire nine innings in my scorebook, without making a single mistake, he bought me two hundred dollars’ worth of toys at Kaufmann’s, far more toys than I had ever wanted.
    “Pops, I met this new girl.”
    He drained his glass of tonic water.
    “Why do you make a face?” I said.
    “After Claire, why shouldn’t I? I’m sorry, Art.”
    “Sorry what?”
    “Well, I have to confess that I don’t—I don’t trust you anymore. Art, you’ve become a very strange young man.”
    “Dad.”
    “Last time we met, you spoke like an insane person. What was all that nonsense? It was upsetting to hear you talk that way. I felt terrible. I was very shaken.”
    My father had a way of looking as though he were about to weep but was making a superhuman effort to contain his tears, and it never failed to destroy me. I started to cry quietly as I chewed a wet and interminable piece of bread.
    “Dad.”
    “I don’t know what to think of you. I love you, of course, but—look what you’re doing this summer. What are you doing this summer? Working at that ridiculous bookstore. I can’t believe you’re satisfied by that kind of job.”
    “Dad.”
    Now that he really had me going, hiccuping and sniffling, so people turned around from their tables to look at this distinguished father speaking calmly to his wild-haired son in tears; now that he had reduced me to my childhood role and demonstrated to me just how far I had fallen in his esteem, he relented, tenderly, speaking as though I had just wrecked my bike or got beat up at school and he was softly applying the fragrant Band-Aid.
    “Now, what about this new girl?”
    “Oh, Dad,” I said.
    The waiter came with our dinners, and I cried a little bit longer, and we hardly said a word until he asked if I wanted to leave. Then we rode down in the rattling funicular, and I watched the lights in the office buildings downtown grow less and less spectacular as we descended, and my father put