Miranda began to sob, not because she knew of the Holocaust as Annie feared, but at the thought of so many ugly people. She had nightmares for a week afterward, but no one blamed Cousin Lou. It was impossible to blame Cousin Lou for anything. And in time the story of Mrs. H. became a welcome ritual for the girls whenever they visited Cousin Lou or he visited them.

Lou would pause on those later occasions. He would narrow his eyes and purse his lips, as if he were thinking, thinking, thinking. "Mrs. Houghteling," he would then say, pronouncing both the H and the gh with a hard, exaggerated Yiddish ch, as if he were clearing a hairball from his throat. It was only years later that Annie and Miranda discovered the proper pronunciation was Hefftling. "Mrs. Chech tling," the girls would chant back at him, feeling the word, an ugly word for an ugly soul, vibrating deliciously in their throats. Then Lou would shrug and say, "Well, I must have been a beautiful baby." And Miranda and Annie would always respond, like good congregants, "'Cause, baby, look at you now."

They had heard the story so many times that "chechtling" had become a Weissmann family verb for snobbish behavior. "Stop chechtling, you big prig," Miranda would say if Annie turned up her nose at some outlandish adolescent style Miranda was affecting. "You're just a selfish bourgeois chechtler," Annie would say when Miranda made fun of her brief eighth-grade Maoist phase.

Cousin Lou, who insisted that everyone call him Cousin Lou, was not a subtle man, but he was a sincere one. He had made a great deal of money as a real estate developer, but his true business seemed to be providing food and drink for as large a number of guests as he could manage. Passionately devoted to his adoptive American family, his definition of that family had grown so prodigiously over the years that he could no longer fit all of his family into his house at one time, or even two. "You're like family!" he would say, embracing freeloaders, friends, hangers-on, acquaintances, in-laws, and stray children from the neighborhood. Like many immigrants, he was a patriot, and the frenetic magnanimity of his social activity was, as he saw it, his patriotic duty.