Min Jin Lee

"Lee’s book is actually a lot more ambitious than Goodbye, Columbus (1959)."

– Michael Scharf in Publishers Weekly

Free Food for Millionaires

Casey Han’s parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. Free Food for Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves and examines maintaining one’s identity within changing communities.

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Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

1. Lee has said elsewhere that she believes everyone is a kind of millionaire because each person possesses innate gifts or talents that make him or her wealthy. What do you think of this idea? What inherent gifts or talents do Casey, Ella, and Ted have? Are they aware of their own gifts?
2. Why did Ella and Ted marry? How does adultery affect their relationship? Is sexual betrayal the reason why they end the marriage? Why is Ted drawn to Delia? Why is Delia drawn to Ted?
3. Does Leah love her husband, Joseph? Does she love the choir director, Charles Hong? How are these feelings different and similar?
4. How does an Ivy League education affect Casey's development as a young woman?
5. What does Joseph want for his daughters and why? Why does he drink? How does he change by the book's end?
6. Casey often makes unpopular choices. Why does she make them? With which choices do you agree, and with which do you disagree?
7. The novel is divided into three sections entitled Works, Plans, and Grace, respectively. What do these title names mean to you, and why do you think Lee organizes her book this way?
8. How does immigration affect Casey's characterization and her goals? How might this book be changed if she were not an immigrant? If she were not Korean? If she had not grown up working class?
9. Casey and Ella have known each other since they were little girls in Sunday school. How does their relationship change throughout the novel? What does Ella want from Casey, and what does Casey want from Ella?
10. When Casey meets Jay again at the Princeton reunion, how do they feel about each other (Book III, Chapter 7)?
11. The book has many scenes that take place in a Korean-American church in Queens. What role does the church serve for the Han and Shim families?
12. How does Sabine's relationship with Casey compare with Leah's relationship with Casey?
13. The bond between Casey and Tina is a strong one, but how do they get along as sisters? What does Tina want from her life? How does she change in the novel?
14. There is a scene where the Han family exchanges wedding presents with the bridegroom's family (Book II, Chapter 9). Why does Leah spend so much money on the gifts? How does this Korean practice differ from American wedding rites?
15. What do you think Casey and Unu will do with their lives? What would you like them to do? In the final image of the book, why do they draw a tree and flowers?

Question and Answer with the Author

How did you choose Casey Han's name? I began this novel shortly after September 11, 2001. And until August, 2007 I lived in downtown New York, not ten blocks from the World Trade Center. After the attack, the New York Times published a series of brief obituaries with photographs of all those who had died. I could hardly read them, but now and then I tried. One day, I opened the section and saw a young Asian woman's face. Her first name was Casey. She was pretty, with a beguiling expression - like someone you'd look forward to seeing at work. She had a Korean surname, and I'd never met a Korean with the given name Casey before. I don't know anything about her except for what was on that brief obituary, but I named my character after this woman who died so close to where I lived. As for Casey's surname, I have been told that there is only one Han family line in Korea, whereas there may be many branches of Kim, Lee, or Cho. The word han can be loosely translated as a uniquely Korean sentiment of lament - an inexpressible anguish or suffering of a people from a divided nation whose national history is one of humiliation and loss. The meaning of han is considered by some to be a national cultural trait, rejecting historical oppression and isolation. That a young woman growing up in America with such enormous freedom and advantages could somehow carry with her this unconscious sense of historical suffering was something I considered throughout the writing of this book. Casey Han and her traditional Korean father have a pretty violent opening scene. It might be helpful for readers to get his perspective on the events taking place. Is there anything you'd like to add about this scene and why it's happening? This scene was difficult to write, because domestic violence is prevalent yet hidden in patriarchal cultures, and to write about it seemed like a betrayal. It was essential to write this scene in an omniscient voice because I wanted to dramatize and personalize the experience of violence for each character in the room. In this scene, the father is the perpetrator of the violence, while Casey is the victim; the mother is present but helpless and the sister keeps to herself. Each character acts out all that he or she cannot express. I think about children who do not have language and who have to hit, bite, or cry. I love the phrase you say to preschoolers: "Use your words." But grown-ups don't always have the words either, yet they, too, have all this feeling. I wanted to show that kind of emotional illiteracy and frustration sympathetically in this scene. The fight between the father and daughter was unfair, but to me it was Casey, the one who was hit, who was in some measure stronger because she had greater power of expression and awareness. Where did you find the inspiration for the book? A friend told me a story about the free lunches given at investment banks after a deal ends. For example, if an investment bank closed a bond offering for a Chinese telecom company, there might be a free dim sum lunch for some of the employees of that investment bank. My friend told me that where he worked, sometimes the wealthiest employees were the first in line to grab a lot of food. I thought this was ironic and funny: free food for millionaires. I had intended to write a short story, but my best friend, Dionne Bennett, a professor at Loyola, said it would make a great novel because I am familiar with this world of Wall Street and New York's complicated class structure. I started this book in 2001 and finished it in 2006. How did you decide to write about Casey and Ella? I quit being a lawyer in 1995 to write fiction. For about five years, there was no relief to the number of rejections I received. It was then I began a short story called "Bread and Butter." It became my first published story, and I was thirty-two years old. The story was about two young women who become friends by accident and about how failure affects each one and their feelings for each other and themselves. They were both Korean American and newly married - one was wealthy, beautiful, and depressed and the central character was poor and unattractive, but possessed enormous confidence and even larger dreams that she could not fulfill. It was really that story and how it was received that gave me the courage to write about friendship - permitting me to render Casey and Ella's dynamic. I have also met the Ellas of this world, who romanticize poverty, and those who escape it. It felt true to me that Ella was drawn to Casey for her energy and desires in the same way she is drawn to Ted and his exuberant ambition. Everyone always talks about how the poor want to be rich, and there is that, of course, but I've also seen the opposite to be true. Do you have any favorite male characters? There are the obvious good guys like Isaac Gottesman or Dr. Shim. I love them for their kindness and wisdom. I adore the rake Hugh Underhill because there is something sexy about his carelessness regarding his beauty and privilege. Nevertheless, I think my favorite male character might be Ted, because his desires were so strong. He may be repellent to some, but I think we all know a variation of Ted in our lives, and whatever they are doing, we want to watch them compulsively. I wanted to see how the son of uneducated cannery workers goes to Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, then Harvard Business School, marries a beautiful doctor's daughter, an heiress's. What would it be like to give him what he wanted and worked for? What would he want next? I found his behavior on the page interesting, because what I learned was that he craved to feel at ease, though it looked as if he was winning every battle smoothly. The person who made him feel this way was Delia, the office "slut." How bizarre, but to me, very true. I believe that Ted could not and would not have chosen Delia unless he had actually lived and experienced the fulfillment of his primary wishes and goals. You've chosen to write this book showing many points of view. Is there a reason why? More than anything, I wanted to try to write novels in the style of the ones I loved. I have always loved nineteenth-century literature from England and Europe, and early twentieth-century literature from America. The books I reread for pleasure almost always employ an omniscient narrator - either a fictive person who knows everyone's thoughts and how the story will be told or the author himself who knows how the story ends and why. There is a godlike quality to omniscience, and it is that I am vainly approaching in storytelling. Also, I think I loved Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Thackeray, Flaubert, George Eliot, Balzac, Edith Wharton, Maugham, Dickens, the Broentes... because they reveal marginal characters as well as the central characters. Perhaps this is important to me because of my own background in which I have felt both marginal and central at different times. Obviously, none of those books featured anyone biographically like me. It's very difficult to share what you learn and speculate only through one point of view. The omniscient point of view lends itself to far greater fiexibility and spaciousness. Though omniscient narration is an unpopular way of storytelling for modern writers, it can reveal how everyone in the room is thinking about the issues and each other and themselves, rather than what they are actually doing and saying. Even the people of the nest character don't speak truthfully or act honestly all the time. It is only in fiction that all the dimensions of personality and behavior may be witnessed. I wanted to have a go at taking it all down. Who are your favorite authors, and which are your favorite books? George Eliot: Middlemarch Charlotte Broente: Jane Eyre; William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair; Sinclair Lewis: Main Street; Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure; Honore de Balzac: Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions; Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina ;Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye; Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Junichiro Tanizaki: The Makioka Sisters . What's the best piece of advice you ever received? How have you applied it to your writing career? I heard in a sermon once that the definition of self-control was to choose the important over the urgent. I think as a writer, it is difficult but necessary to defer gratication and to do the work and to keep doing the work regardless of its prospects. I think John Gardner's advice to writers was very good - basically, not to expect that writing would provide for your needs, but to write anyway if you must. Often, I've wished that I could've had quicker success, greater financial security, more respect, et cetera, as a writer. For nearly twelve years now since leaving the law, I have often felt ashamed for wanting to be a writer and doubtful of my talents. What helped in these moments was to consider what was important, rather than the urgent feelings of embarrassment and helplessness. What was important is still important now: to learn to write better in order to better complete the vision one holds in one's head and to enjoy the writing, because the work has to be the best part. What will your next novel be? I am working on a novel called Pachinko. It is set in Tokyo and its central characters are ethnic Koreans, Japanese, and expatriate Americans. I started this book in pieces long before Free Food for Millionaires, and a story excerpted from the manuscript was published in The Missouri Review a few years ago. The story, "Motherland," features Etsuko Nagatomi, an important character from the book, but the novel's main character is the boy Solomon in the story, who appears mostly as a young man in the novel. Solomon Choi is an ethnic Korean whose father owns lucrative pachinko parlors in Tokyo and Kyoto. Solomon is sent to international schools in Tokyo, educated at universities abroad, then finds work as a trader in an investment bank. Solomon is a romantic character and a highly seductive person. I have been curious about the ethnic Korean population in Japan and their history since college. For me, fiction usually starts with a personal question or actual event, then I try to see the people and how they behave under their circumstances. I am most interested in what people want and what they do in relation to their desires. I have recently moved to Tokyo with my family, so it should be a rich environment for my next work.

On Writing

FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES My parents, sisters, and I immigrated to Queens, New York, in March of 1976. My family was sponsored by my uncle John, a computer programmer at IBM. I was seven years old - two years older than my main character, Casey. Also, like her, I grew up in Elmhurst in a blue-collar neighborhood. We lived in a series of shabby rented apartments for the first five years, and then my parents bought a small three-family house in Maspeth and rented out the other two floors while we lived on the second floor. I learned how to speak English and to read and write in the public schools of Elmhurst and Maspeth, Queens. My sisters and I were latchkey kids. Our summers were spent working in our parents' wholesale jewelry store and hanging out at the Elmhurst Public Library. I could not have articulated it in this way then, but my childhood was continually informed by immigration, class, race, and gender. This book features first-and second-generation immigrant characters, and therefore, I believe that it satisfies the definition of an American story because unlike any other country in this world, America has this generative quality due to its immigration policies and early colonial history. With the exception of Native Americans and descendants of slaves, in the United States everyone's biography is ultimately connected to an immigrant's journey. I was a history major in college, and my senior essay was about the colonization of the eighteenth-century American mind. Quite a mouthful. My argument then was that original American colonists from England and the generations that followed felt profoundly inferior intellectually and culturally to Europeans and those back home in their motherland. That idea has affected how I see my own challenges in America as an immigrant. I am not legally colonized - far from it - but an immigrant is like an early colonist (a word currently out of favor), that is, a person who has come from somewhere else, who learns to adapt to her new land with all its attendant complexities with an overall wish to acquire new "territory." It is an interesting position to consider since I am venturing to make culture - my crayon drawings of what I see and notice - in the form of fiction. I can be critical of how this country works, but I also respect its ideals of rugged individualism, the Protestant work ethic, and the American entrepreneurial spirit. It is easy to criticize America, but from a global perspective this is an amazing country with tremendous openness. This comment has been made before, elsewhere, by many pundits, and I think it is worth considering: Many who criticize America would still prefer to live here rather than anywhere else. Carlos Buloson, the Filipino American author, titled his rich novel America Is in the Heart. To me - another immigrant from a later time - I, too, possess a complex America in my heart. Having said that, if you honestly love any object or subject, you will ultimately need to admit to its flaws in the hopes of some idealized love. We recall America's checkered backstory: the near-annihilation of Native Americans, enslavement of African Americans, Jim Crow legislation, gender inequality, immigration quotas for people from southern Europe, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese Americans, America's reluctance to entering World War II, Hiroshima, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the list continues. And thus, we recognize with both shock and compassion how with every generation, America has transferred its set of insecurities and anxieties to the newcomer. With all this in mind, I wanted to chronicle the personalities and issues that abound in my village of New York in the form of a novel, because I wanted to reveal these images and thoughts to myself and, hopefully, to my reader. I was profoundly affected by nineteenth- century European novels when I was growing up, and in college, I had the opportunity to read American novelists like Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Edith Wharton, among others, who made me realize that what you saw and wondered about should be reflected in a literary work with an eye toward integrating emotion, history, insight, and narrative shape. There are many kinds of immigrants. When I was growing up in Queens, the immigrants were German, Polish, Irish, Greek, Italian, and Hungarian, as well as Chinese, Korean, and Indian. One of the interesting and perhaps obvious aspects of being a non-white immigrant is that an Asian American cannot "pass" as a member of the majority group as long as his or her phenotypical features remain racialized. Simply put, if your eye shape, nose, hair texture, or your physical body type reflect a distinctiveness compared to the ones belonging to the majority group - for good or for bad - full assimilation may not be possible. This can cause all sorts of interesting problems to crop up even in an open place like America. Some have argued persuasively that racial minorities may always be immiscible with the majority. Naturally, this theory may cause consternation to many who wish to be a member of the majority culture with all its privileges and responsibilities. In this book, I handed my characters all sorts of gifts: education, good appearances, talents, strong family structures . . . and I wanted to see what they would do with their ambitions. They also received trials and caused some troubles of their own. Would race, class, immigration, and gender politics affect them? Or you might ask, how could they not? I wanted to know very much what would happen, too. I believe that the dearth of accurate representations of Asian Americans in the media and in the arts has led to a misrepresentation of Asian Americans. Very often Asian Americans are perceived as highly competent, hardworking, and non-belligerent - that being the "positive" image - or they are represented as devious, inscrutable, and megalomaniacal. Whichever way it is done, these images do not fully represent the Asian Americans I know. If an Asian American, or anyone for that matter, is not given a voice and language with clear expression and evidence of feeling, his humanity is denied. What separates us as humans from machines or animals is our ability to feel, to express, to wonder, to yearn, to regret . . . I believe that the absence of accurate reflections is effectively a kind of social erasure with grave psychological consequences. The difficulty, however, is in discussing that which is not seen. In my attempt at the community novel, I wanted very much to reveal the complicated individuals who make up the Korean Americans I know. As a writer, I wanted to place the same demands on my non-Korean-American characters as well. Forgive me for stating what may be to many of you the obvious: A Korean-American man can be romantic, passionate, loving, funny, and he can be troubled, sad, and frustrated. He can be all those things and so much more. A Korean-American woman can have existential questions about her world. He can be afraid. She can be heartbroken. It was extremely important to me that the Korean-American men and women I know and love in my life were given a fair shake in terms of their complexity. I have known Korean men who listen to opera, write poems, worry about losing their hair, and would give every cent in their pockets to their friends. I have seen Korean women ruin their lives through too much sacrifice or self-sabotage. I wanted men and women like that in my story. It is an ever-present concern for me that in our collective wish to succeed and assimilate, we, as Korean Americans, will not make trouble or not say what we think or feel. That silence or deferral until the time is safe permits others to interpret our characters and lives for us. I cannot speak accurately for all Korean Americans. This book is clearly one person's limited point of view. Nevertheless, I love being Korean American, and I love my family, my communities, and my history. This love was a kind of filter and a kind of bias. I wanted to honor what I know by telling it as truthfully as possible - with all its flaws and with all its beauty. My goals for this novel were embarrassingly lofty, but at the minimum I wanted the characters to be imperfect and to be gifted, too, because I believe that is how we are all made. Lastly - but I think, for me as a fiction writer, most importantly - I want to share with you that for all of my life, for as long as I can remember, I have loved to read. A writer is always a reader first. Throughout my life, what has consistently given me great consolation was being able to read. When I studied how to write fiction better, my models were always the books I wanted to read again and again. I hope this book pleases you. Thank you for reading this. It means a great deal to me to have your attention and time. M.J.L. Tokyo, Japan, 2007

Excerpt

COMPETENCE CAN be a curse. As a capable young woman, Casey Han felt compelled to choose respectability and success. But it was glamour and insight that she craved. A Korean immigrant who’d grown up in a dim, blue-collar neighborhood in Queens, she’d hoped for a bright, glittering life beyond the workhorse struggles of her parents, who managed a Manhattan dry cleaner.

Casey was unusually tall for a Korean, nearly five feet eight, slender, and self-conscious about what she wore. She kept her black hair shoulder length, fastidiously powdered her nose, and wore wine-colored lipstick without variation. To save money, she wore her eyeglasses at home, but outside she wore contact lenses to correct her nearsightedness. She did not believe she was pretty but felt she had something—some sort of workable sex appeal. She admired feminine modesty and looked down at women who tried to appear too sexy. For a girl of only twenty-two, Casey had numerous theories of beauty and sexuality, but the essence of her philosophy was that allure trumped flagrant display. She’d read that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis advised a woman to dress like a column, and Casey never failed to follow that instruction.

Seated in the spacious linoleum-covered kitchen of her parents’ rent-controlled two-bedroom in Elmhurst, Casey looked out of place in her white linen shirt and white cotton slacks—dressed as if she were about to have a gin and tonic brought to her on a silver tray. Next to her at the Formica-topped table, her father, Joseph Han, could’ve easily passed for her grandfather. He filled his tumbler with ice for his first whiskey of the evening. An hour earlier, he’d returned from a Saturday of sorting laundry at the Sutton Place drop shop, which he ran for a wealthy Korean who owned a dozen dry cleaners. Casey’s father did not speak to her, and she did not speak to him as they sat together. Her younger sister, Tina—a Bronx Science Westinghouse finalist, vice president of the M.I.T. Campus Christian Crusade, and a pre-med—was their father’s favorite. A classical Korean beauty, Tina was the picture of the girls’ mother, Leah, in her youth.

Leah bustled about cooking their first family dinner in months, singing hymns while Tina chopped scallions. Not yet forty, Leah had prematurely gray hair that obscured her smooth, pale brow. At seventeen, she’d married Joseph, who was then thirty-six. On their wedding night, Casey was conceived, and two years later, Tina was born.

Now it was a Saturday night in June, a week after Casey’s college graduation. Her four years at Princeton had given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic’s closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics. But she had no job and a number of bad habits.

Virginia Craft, Casey’s roommate of four years, had tried to convince her to give up the habit that preoccupied her considerably while she sat next to her brooding father. At the moment, Casey would’ve bartered her body for a cigarette. The promise of lighting one on the building roof after dinner was all that kept her seated in the kitchen—her bare foot tapping lightly on the floor. But the college graduate had other problems that were insoluble by a smoke. Since she had no job, she’d returned to her folks’ two-bedroom on Van Kleeck Street.

Seventeen years earlier, in the year of the Bicentennial, the family of four had immigrated to America. And Leah’s terror of change had kept them in the same apartment unit. It all seemed a bit pathetic. The smoking, among other things, was corroding Casey’s sense of being an honest person. She prided herself on being forthright, though she often dodged her parents. Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend. On the previous Sunday night after having some very nice sex, Jay had suggested, his elbow crooked over his pillow and head cradled in his hand, “Move in with me. Consider this, Miss Han: sexual congress on tap.” Her parents also had no idea that she wasn’t a virgin and that she’d been on the pill since she was fifteen. Being at home made Casey anxious. She continually felt like patting down her pockets for matches. Consequently, Casey found herself missing Princeton—even the starchy meals at Charter, her eating club. But nostalgia would do her no good. Casey needed a plan to escape Elmhurst.

Last spring, against Jay’s advice, Casey had applied to only one investment banking program. She learned, after all the sign-up sheets were filled, that Kearn Davis was the bank that every Econ major wanted in 1993. Yet, she reasoned, her grades were superior to Jay’s, and she could sell anything. At the Kearn Davis interview, Casey greeted the pair of female interviewers wearing a yellow silk suit and cracked a Nancy Reagan joke, thinking it might make a feminist connection. The two women were wearing navy and charcoal wool, and they let Casey hang herself in fifteen minutes flat. Showing her out, they waved, not bothering to shake her hand.

There was always law school. She’d managed to get into Columbia. But her friends’ fathers were beleaguered lawyers, their lives unappealing. Casey’s lawyer customers at Sabine’s, the department store where she’d worked weekends, advised her, “For money—go to B school. To save lives, med.” The unholy trinity of Law, Business, and Medicine seemed the only faith in town. It was arrogant, perhaps rash, for an immigrant girl from the boroughs to want to choose her own trade. Nevertheless, Casey wasn’t ready to relinquish her dream, however vague, for a secure profession. Without telling her father, she wrote Columbia to defer a year.

Her mother was singing a hymn in her remarkable voice while she ladled scallion sauce over the roasted porgy. Leah’s voice trilled at the close of the verse “waking or sleeping, thy presence my light,” then with a quiet inhale, she began, “Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word . . .” She’d left the store early that morning to shop and to cook her daughters’ favorite dishes. Tina, her baby, had returned on Thursday night, and now both her girls were finally home. Her heart felt full, and she prayed for Joseph to be in a good mood. She eyeballed the whiskey level in the jug-sized bottle of Dewar’s. It had not shifted much from the night before. In their twenty-two years of marriage, Leah had discovered that it was better when Joseph had a glass or two with his dinner than none. Her husband wasn’t a drunk—the sort who went to bars, fooled around, or lost his salary envelope. He was a hard worker. But without his whiskey, Joseph couldn’t fall asleep. One of her sisters-in-law had told her how to keep a man content: “Never deny a man his bop, sex, and sleep.”

Leah carried the fish to the table, wearing a blue apron over her plum-colored housedress. At the sight of Casey pouring her second glass of water, Leah clamped her lips, giving her soft, oval face a severe appearance. Mr. Jun, the ancient choir director, had pointed out this anxiety tic to her before her solos, shouting, “Show us your joy! You are singing to God!”

Tina, of course, the one who noticed everything, thought Casey was just asking for it. Her own mind had been filled with the pleasant thoughts of her boyfriend, Chul, whom she’d promised to phone that night, but even so, she could feel Casey’s restlessness. Maybe her sister would consider how much trouble their mother had gone through to make dinner.

It was the water drinking—this seemingly innocent thing. For always, Joseph believed that the girls should eat heartily at the table, grateful for the food and for the care given to it, but Casey habitually picked at her dinner, and he blamed Casey’s not eating on her excessive water consumption. Casey denied this accusation, but her father was on the mark. Back in junior high school, Casey had read in a fashion magazine that if you drank three glasses of water before a meal, you’d eat less. It took great effort on Casey’s part to wear a size six or smaller; after all, she was a girl with a large frame. Her weight also shifted by five pounds depending on how much she smoked. Her mother was thin from perpetual activity, and her younger sister, who was short like their father, had a normal build, and Tina disapproved of dieting. A brilliant student of both physics and philosophy, Tina had once scolded Casey when she was on Weight Watchers: “The world is awash in hunger. How could you cause your own?”

Casey’s water drinking at the table was not lost on her father.

At five feet three, Joseph was compact, yet his rich, booming voice gave him the sound of a bigger man. He was bald except for a wisp of baby fuzz on the back of his head, and his baldness did not grieve him except in the winters when he had to wear a gray felt fedora to protect his head and large lobed ears. He was only fifty-eight but looked older, more like a vigorous man of seventy, especially beside his young wife. She was his second wife. His first, a girl his age whom he’d deeply loved, died of tuberculosis after a year of marriage and before she bore him any children. Joseph adored his second wife, perhaps more so because of his loss. He appreciated Leah’s good health and her docile Christian nature, and he was still attracted to her pretty face and her delicate form, which belied her resilience. He made love to her every Friday evening. She had given him two daughters, though the elder looked nothing like her mother.

Casey drained her water glass and rested it on the table. Then she reached for the pitcher.

“I’m not Rockefeller, you know,” Joseph said.