Mort Zachter's childhood revolved around a small, struggling shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side that sold bread and pastries. His was a classic story-a close-knit, hard-working family struggling to make it in America.Only they were rich. Very rich.At age thirty-six, after struggling to work his way though night school, Zachter discovered that his bachelor uncles, who ran the shop, had amassed millions of dollars in stocks and bonds. As he starts to clean out their apartment, Zachter discovers clues to their hidden lives that raise more questions than they answer. And in the end, he comes to realize that although he may not understand his family-and maybe never will-forgiveness and acceptance are what matter most.

Mort Zachter is currently working on a book about baseball legend Gil Hodges

Remembrance	p. 1
Awakening	p. 3
Waiting for Cohn	p. 8
Lindbergh Made It	p. 17
The Store	p. 26
The Store Revisited	p. 35
A Night on the Town	p. 41
Close to the Edge	p. 51
The Food-Stamp Seders	p. 61
Money Talks	p. 67
The Millionaire	p. 78
Sleeping on It	p. 83
Keeping Florida Green	p. 88
Generations	p. 99
Learning to Fly Low	p. 103
Counselor Zachter	p. 113
Charity	p. 118
The Excavation	p. 122
A Tale of Urban Renewal	p. 128
Artifacts	p. 132
Curtain Call	p. 138
Fruitcake	p. 143
Singing in the Rain	p. 153
Ancestors	p. 156
The Call	p. 162
The Lamp	p. 167
Coda	p. 170
More About the Author	p. 177
More About the Book	p. 181
Extras	p. 187
Acknowledgments	p. 195
Author's Note	p. 196
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Dough
A Memoir

Chapter One

Awakening

1994

I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be a mistake to offer me the position.—Mark Twain

On a sweltering August afternoon, the clatter of jackhammers blasted through the open dinette window. I sat in the hallway next to the only phone in my parents' Brooklyn tenement. Their apartment had no air conditioning—never did, never would—and my backside stuck to the vinyl seat cover of the telephone chair. The black rotary phone rang. I looked down at the dusty piece of history and imagined Alexander Graham Bell calling from the great beyond. I picked up the receiver, which felt heavier than I remembered. "Hello."

"Hi, Mr. Zachter, it's Bruce Geary."

The voice was old but quite lively. Mr. Geary sounded Irish, but I had no idea who he was.

"Yes." I was Mr. Zachter, just not the Mr. Zachter he thought he was talking to.

"There is a million dollars in the money-market account. I suggest you buy a million dollars worth of treasuries to maximize the return."

I was hearing things. No one in my family had that kind of dough. The heat had gotten to me. It must be a misunderstanding. A practical joke. I stared at the river of stains running down the walls from the ceiling. When I had lived here as a child, sleeping in the dinette with my head next to the Frigidaire, the upstairs apartment bathroom had leaked. Some things never change.But some do.

"Hello, Mr. Zachter, are you there?"

"Yes. This is Mort Zachter. My dad is in the hospital. He had surgery for colon cancer and won't be home for a while. Who are you?""I'm your uncle's stockbroker, known him forty years. I've been working with your father recently."

At that moment, Uncle Harry, who had moved in with my parents two years before due to his dementia, sat in the living room, slowly sinking into an upholstered chair with broken springs, his feet resting on a well-worn patch of carpet. His uncombed hair was more yellow than gray, his face paper white; his eyeglasses rested on the tip of his nose, but his eyes were vacant. He needed a shave.

"Mr. Geary, did I understand you correctly? Did you say my uncle has a brokerage account with a million dollars in the money-market fund?"

"Yes."

I let that settle in for a minute. I didn't know how to respond. Growing up I had felt poor—not a homeless, hungry, dressed-in-rags poor, but a never-discussed sense that we simply couldn't afford better. Not better than our one-bedroom apartment, not better than vacations in Art Deco dives on Miami's Collins Avenue only in the summer, and not better than view-obstructed seats behind a pole at the old Yankee Stadium. At thirty-six, I knew lives of not-better-than plus a million dollars didn't add up.

Mr. Geary broke the silence. "Would you like me to send you the papers to get signed giving you power of attorney over the account?"That was a loaded question if ever I heard one. Would I like financial control over an account with a million dollars?

"Yes, Mr. Geary, you could mail us those papers."

Mr. Geary assured me he would mail the papers out that day. I hung up and staggered to the dinette. Uncle Harry slept there now. The ancient Frigidaire that mom had defrosted by hand every few weeks when I was a child had finally been replaced by a self-defrosting ge. I perched on the edge of the bed, across from my old wood-laminate desk. A deep, jagged crack in the side of the table top ran above one of the legs. One false move and the leg would break off. When I was a child the table was whole.

Back then, the first thing I would do when I woke up was look out the dinette window. The early morning sunlight would filter through the coarse green burlap Mom had sewn for a curtain. Below our second-floor window was the cement courtyard where I had played stickball, baseball box-ball, ring-o-levio, and the other street games of Brooklyn. In the fall, the wind would rustle through the leaves of the ailanthus trees that grew in a fenced garden in the back of the courtyard, fertilized by little more than rubbish. Best known as the tree of heaven, the ailanthus thrives in poor neighborhoods; it requires only water and sunlight. I would watch the twisted blades of its seeds spiral down like airplane propellers. I loved to pick up those fallen seeds, split them open at the sticky end, and attach one to the bridge of my nose like a rhino's horn. Yet whenever I plucked one of those bright green leaves and crushed it in my hand, the rank stench it gave off had reminded me of the smell of the monkey's cage at the Prospect Park Zoo.

Mr. Geary's call left me pondering a different shade of green. No one in his right mind establishes a brokerage account and keeps a million dollars in the money-market portion of the account. Although I had never owned a brokerage account in my life, as a cpa I knew that people kept most of their investments in stocks and bonds—not in their money-market account. The whole business made no sense. Not unless Uncle Harry had more millions invested in stocks and bonds.

And that couldn't be the case. My two bachelor uncles had made my parents look rich. Uncle Harry and Uncle Joe had lived like paupers in the Mitchell-Lama housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side. They drove a twenty-year-old Buick that had been rear-ended and looked like a giant accordion. For years, they frequented the deeply discounted dental clinic at nyu, where interning students treated them. Well into the Reagan administration, they wore suits dating back to the New Deal. Yet they owned a brokerage account with at least a million dollars in it? Could they have made millions selling day-old bread? Were they cheap, crazy, or both?

Excerpted from Dough: A Memoir by Mort Zachter
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