Old Mrs. Mokkeh shook unbelievingly and came down a step, her nose wart twitching and sensitive as an insect’s antenna.

“And this baby boy,” my mother sang, pausing to kiss her fingers before extending them to Mrs. Mokkeh, “what a glorious child may he be! Glorious? No. Magnificent! Such a wonderful baby boy no one will ever have seen before. The greatest rabbis coming from all over the world only to look upon him at the bris, so they’ll be able to say in later years they were among those present at his circumcision ceremony eight days after birth. So beautiful and clever he’ll be that people will expect him to say the prayers at his own bris. And this magnificent first grandson of yours, just one day afterward, when you are gathering happiness on every side, may he suddenly, in the middle of the night—”

“Hold!” Mrs. Mokkeh screamed, raising both her hands. “Stop!”

My mother took a deep breath. “And why should I stop?”

“Because I take it back! What I wished on the boy, let it be on my own head, everything I wished on him. Does that satisfy you?”

“That satisfies me,” my mother said. Then she pulled my left arm up and began dragging me down the street. She walked proudly, no longer a junior among seniors, but a full and accredited sorceress.

Afterword

When, in the late nineteen sixties, Ballantine Books decided to do a five-volume simultaneous publication of my work (four short-story collections and one new novel) my then agent, Henry Morrison, told me that the head of the firm was troubled by something and wanted to hear from me.

I telephoned Ian Ballantine, who pointed out that we might be facing some length problems in the collections. “Could you give me another group of your short stories,” he asked, “stories of different lengths so that, if needed, I could pop this one or that one into a given collection to make certain that they were all of pretty uniform length?”