He lived most of his life in Miami where he could do all year round, in a more propitious climate than New York's, what he loved most, go to the dog track, the horses, and jai alai. Harry was a bookmaker and always had money. When he was about eighteen or so, he sold newspapers at a stand on the Lower East Side on a street where the "pants" gang hung out. They'd rob a store and leave with the victim's pants, and eventually they killed someone, sending their leader, smoking a cigar and kibitzing, down the corridor to the electric chair. When, to amuse themselves one summer day, they began to throw watermelon rinds across the street at him, Harry dodged and jumped and laughed and gave them ever-changing odds that they couldn't hit him.
This is what stays with me about my uncle, that he threw himself, but lightly, into the arms of Fortune with whom he danced, amused by the warm breeze of life spinning around him, until almost that very end, which was unlaughable but fortunately beyond his understanding.
Probably I'm wrong. I really didn't know Harry very well. But he was devoted to his wife, My Aunt Rose, attached--'uxorious' would have been the word had my father's family read Milton's account of Adam and Eve. But in any event they all found it funny when Harry would sit and hold Rose's hand and kiss her fingers and smile. The one time I saw my Uncle anxious and worried was one night when my Aunt was late getting home. He took me down with him into a beautifully snowy night lit by the warm yellow light of the street lamps and the store windows, where we waited for Rose's trolley to arrive, and after each disappointment Harry would alter the odds that she'd be on the next one with a magical rapidity that at ten or twelve I could scarcely grasp.
My father's family, his cousins and brothers, were all children of immigrants. And all had abandoned the immigrant religion. Only my Uncle Harry, in the permutations of the odds, had found a philosophy to take its place in the new world. Not a philosophy of recklessness but of laying off of bets and evening out and bettering the odds. In about 1948, when television was new, he called my father from Florida with a scheme to beat the odds altogether. It depended on a small time lag between the conclusion of a race in New York and the getting of the results in Miami. Harry was to call while a locally televised race at a New York track was run, my father would give him the winner over the phone, and Harry would lay the bet in Florida before betting on the race was closed. He ended up calling it off: I'm not sure if it was an early failure of faith in new technology or a failure of nerve or a pentecostal illumination about the odds of being caught but this time by an unamused mob.