The following is an excerpt from the novella Broken Resolutions:
This happened in the time of Walton.
Ingmar Asaghian was the second son of an Armenian father and a Swedish mother, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate who had spurned law school to work in the renting office of the family rooming house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Since childhood he had listened to his mother’s stories about how his aunt, her older sister, was a great and saintly woman. She told how Auntie Eve had come in steerage from the poultry and timber farm outside Stockholm owned by their drunken father and made a success of her life first as a nurse and then in the restaurant business and then bought this thirteen-story building and converted the apartments to rooms, and how she sought to make it a way station for missionaries and a permanent residence for other Christian folk. The rooming house fell on hard times and the bank threatened to foreclose on the mortgage but a businessman named Weill offered friendly assistance. He assumed Auntie’s debts and gave her a lease on the building in exchange for a transfer of ownership. From childhood Ingmar heard stories from his mother about how Weill was cunning and unscrupulous, how he took money from them that wasn’t rightfully his, and how they were powerless over him. “Just one word and he can put us out in the street.” she would say.
Download the full pdf here: Broken Resolutions