Every House Needs a Balcony by Rina Frank Read Free Book Online Page A

here, a cobbler there, a café and a real estate office. Father was paid no money for this work but was rewarded in other ways, such as free movie tickets or ice cream for his girls.
    Our dream was for Father to have permanency. To us, permanency was a word that held promise, and smelled of money; we loved our father so much, but knew that without permanency it was hard to rely on him—and the guy suffered from an excessively good heart. It just spilled out of him in all directions, and he was quite prepared to give away everything he owned—except his daughters—if it would help the human race. He was charming and charismatic and very, very funny. And everyone loved to spend time in his company.
    With his black hair and slanting green eyes that dipped slightly at the corners in a kind of self-conscious sadness, my dad was an extremely good-looking man. It was no coincidence that my sister thought he resembled God. He bestowed his green eyes on me; Yosefa, whom I called Fila, got their slant. We both inherited the sadness.
    In Romania they had owned a movie theater—Nissa—near the Cimigiu Gardens. Back then Mom and Dad hadbeen important people, especially since they got to see all the movies and were familiar with all the actors. At home they spoke about Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra as if they’d been to school with them. In a way they felt some kind of patronage over the shining Hollywood stars, since without their movie theater, the people of Romania would have never been exposed to all that glamour.
    Before the war that began in the late 1930s and came to an end in the mid-1940s, when he was twenty, Dad and his brother-in-law Herry did odd jobs in Bucharest.
    They went from house to house and always found some broken gate or peeling plaster, crumbling paint or a wobbly table that needed fixing. Dad, with his honeyed voice, had no trouble persuading the Romanian housewife to prepare a surprise for her husband, who, on his return home, would find it stylishly renovated and revamped to the glory of the Romanian nation, and all in return for such and such a sum of Romanian lei and a cooked meal for two. The women were captivated by Father’s smooth and charming tongue and Herry’s skilled hands, and as the result of an aggressive marketing campaign of an intensity that was rare in those days in Romania, Father and Herry found themselves with a reputation for being efficient and reliable odd-job men.
    One day they entered one of the more elegant buildings in Bucharest, and a very beautiful woman opened the door to them.
    â€œWe’re in the odd-job business,” Father said and looked at Mrs. Dorfman with his piercing green eyes.
    â€œI have nothing in the house that is out of order except my husband,” replied Mrs. Dorfman.
    â€œI’d be happy to mend your husband,” Father told her and smiled a smile that melted her heart. He entered the house, his brother-in-law Herry dragging behind, and she led them to a dark room, where her husband, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, sat in a chair, his head drooping on his chest.
    â€œSince you are here already, you can help me take him to the lavatory. It’s quite difficult to do on my own,” Mrs. Dorfman said to my father and gave him a cheeky smile.
    For two months, Father would drop by every evening after finishing all his odd jobs and help her take her sick husband to the lavatory.
    After two months, Father persuaded Mrs. Dorfman to take him on as an active partner in her movie house, he being the only one who could save the business from bankruptcy, because her husband’s illness had forced her to stay home to care for him.
    Mrs. Dorfman, who was a very pretty woman, was a member of the Romanian aristocracy. She was a devout Catholic and came from a very well-connected family in Romania’s high society, with close ties in high places. Mrs. Dorfman took on Dad as a business partner and as a