The Sound of Bow Bells [antikvár]

What took him by surprise was the suggestion about a telephone answering service. "I don't see why," Rebecca Meissen had said shortly after Sam moved into i6E. "The telephone answering service was practically invented for men like you." This struck Sam Silver as not unlike saying the Union Pacific tracks had been laid down especially for his benefit. It was true enough up to a point, but it was equally true that in the process of opening up a continent the railroad builders had managed to provide something that a great many other people found equally useful. "I'm merely surprised to find that all of a sudden anybody should think it's an essential item in the scheme of my existence," Sam had said. "After all, I've managed to live almost thirty-six years without one." "You didn't live those years in Sutton Crescent," said Rebecca, who, vdth her son Ronnie, had moved from their town house on East Sixty-first Street into the huge apartment house on the East River almost three years before Sam did. The Meissen family, meaning Rebecca's father, brothers, and uncles, had been an important name in New York building construc-