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“Yes. Even better for you.” Albert resumed painting. “And next thing you’ll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance.”
“We could just concentrate on the one.”
“But then I’d be gambling against myself, wouldn’t I? I’d be betting I’m going to die soon, and you’d be betting I’m going to live.”
Ashfield had heard that frequently and was about to give the company line when Ruth placatingly offered, “With old Winslow Homer here so busy, could you just leave the forms for us to fill out?”
Ashfield seemed deflated. “But you won’t know what the premiums would be. I haven’t the basis—”
Albert clacked his paintbrush against his palette and sighed again. “What is it you require, chum?”
Ashfield hurried to sit on the plump arm of the sunroom’s easy chair, got a pencil from his jacket, and placed a fresh insurance form on his knee. “Your full name?”
“Albert Edward Snyder,” he said.
“Spelled the easy way,” said Ruth. “Like ‘snide.’”
Ashfield printed as quickly as he could. “And your birth date?”
Albert said, “Exactly three hundred ninety years after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.”
Ruth said with scorn, “Oh, you are so stuck-up!”
“And you are stupid,” Albert said. “Evidently, so is he.”
Ashfield said, “No, I’m getting it.” Ruth could see concentration in his forehead and his lips humming through the children’s nursery rhyme until he said with achievement, “October twelfth! Eighteen eighty-two!”
Ruth helped out by saying, “He just turned forty-three.”
Ashfield wrote down the birthday.
“Congratulations on your arithmetic,” Albert said. “And now I’m finished with you for the evening.” And he was squinting at his painting as he said, “Would you leave me a form to renew the thousand-dollar policy in case I decide to do just that?”
Ruth took the insurance forms and gave the Prudential salesman one of those It’ll be okay, honey looks.
She found her husband in the sunroom the next morning, fully dressed and ready to leave for the Motor Boating office but examining the problems and successes in his seascape as he finished a cup of coffee. She called upstairs, “Lora! Breakfast!” and then she said, “I agree.”
Albert grinned. “You could stop right there.”
“No, I gave it some thought last night and you’re so healthy we’d just be throwing premium money away on some gargantuan policy. Let’s just renew the cheapest one.”
“Exactly what I wanted to do.”
“Will you sign?” She put the Prudential one-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the front lid of the Aeolian player piano and handed him a fountain pen. Albert bent over to precisely execute his fine signature and was about to give the fountain pen back to Ruth when she lifted the form to another signature block. “You have to sign a duplicate copy for the agent’s files.”
Albert shook his head. “Duplicates. Triplicates.” But he signed.
“Thanks, sweetie,” she said, and kissed his cheek. She said, “Your painting’s the berries.”
“Which means?”
“It’s slang. Like ‘the bee’s knees.’ Like ‘nifty.’”
Albert studied his seascape and said, “I agree.”
She found Ashfield in his Queens office that afternoon and said, “We’re going to renew that thousand-dollar policy we have.” She handed it to him and he found Albert’s signature there. “And my husband has decided on the fifty-thousand-dollar policy, too.” She gave him the form the salesman had started in their house and he saw Albert’s fountain pen signature on it.
“Well, great!”
