My Aunt Betty married affluence, or so she thought, my Uncle Arthur, who appeared on the scene in a spiffy overcoat and bowler, silent, smoking a cigar. This was the depression and this was a young man with a steady job; this was my grandmother's view, and it won out. Arthur, it turned out, was silent and illiterate and held that same steady job in a dry cleaning plant, at depression-level wages, for the rest of his working life. My Aunt, who slept with her two daughters instead of my uncle, used to make fancy buttons at home for a penny or two apiece from sequins and bits of cloth and metal forms. In an apartment two dark walk-up floors above lived her friend May, whom my aunt believed had the power of the evil eye and was afraid of. The story was that May owned a speak-easy during the depression and was a belly dancer. I'm not sure whether it was my thriving teen-age imagination that saw her dancing in dim light among hookahs and balalaikas or whether that was something some one said. Now, at any rate, she was apparently as poor as my aunt, separated from her second husband, a loan shark, and left with three sons. Betty and May, May and Betty, their names went together like Ben and Rose, my mother and father, or Sam and Annie, my aunt and uncle. They were inseparable, they were partners: every day they played the numbers, betting a few cents apiece, pooling their money and their dreams, consulting their dream book, where everything anyone conceivably could dream--water, clouds, buttons--had its numerical equivalence, dreams from which if you were lucky you could put together a winning combination that paid five, ten, even twenty-five dollars. But this isn't to be mistaken for my Uncle Harry's faith, a view of the universe modeled on gambling. It was exactly what by comparison it appeared to be, mere superstition, a retreat from the dark hallways and tenements of fear and deprivation into the compulsive brightness of hope upon hope upon the smallest hope.