It was a dark, dull, dank redbrick house that would amplify both success and failure. It made the pages of the Melbourne Sun sound like sheets of falling metal. It made the failure of Sid's Electrical Suction Sweeper a deafening event, and while this merely sent Sid back into retailing it produced a profound effect on Leah who came to develop many theories about the "Product" (as it was known) while she sat silently in her chair. Inside that echoing house Leah saw that the Product was a thing that had appetites of its own that must be served. Her father was kind, benevolent, but the Product was the real ruler. It was like a queen bee which must be carefully bred, served by workers huddling around it. The Product demanded a market, economies of scale, it cried for these and, should its needs not be met, it would weaken and die as would the workers who had sustained it.

She did not share her theories with her family and was thus astonished, later, to find that they had not reached the same conclusions; she was incensed that the failure of the Product had so little impression on her sisters; she thought them dull because of it.

Yet the crash of the Product only lasted for a month or two and Sid Goldstein had gone on to other successes. He was now rich, he could afford to move into a nicer house. Toorak was not beyond his reach. He could have paid cash for a house you could sing in, a house where you could tell stories and be extravagant with words, a house that did not insist you remove your noisy shoes at the door. Now Sid, as we will see in a moment, was a rational man, but he was not inclined to push his luck in the matter of wealth; he stayed where he was and kept the suit he had shared with Eddie Wysbraum hanging in its cupboard in the hallway where there was plenty of light for its proper examination.

Sid Goldstein had no time for the god of the Jews, the very mention of which was enough to make his soft dark eyes suddenly harden in temper. Yet I fancy had he only known that the Ark of the Covenant was a powerful electric generator he might have adopted a different attitude entirely, for he was a great respecter of ingenuity. Be that as it may, the god of the Jews was a nonsense to him. A bigot, a pig, the sort of bully one might have found in the service of the Tsar. So although he had been born a Jew and had thought of himself as a Jew he brought up his daughters in total ignorance of what a Jew was. Leah learned she was a Jew at the Methodist Ladies' College. Her mother made some attempt to explain it all to her, but knowing little could not help much. As for her father, he said it was "superstition". He was a modern man, a rational, sensible liberal, but when he visited the suit he had shared with Wysbraum, when he stroked the poor shiny material, when he felt with his long fingers for the tear his friend had made on the second day – a misunderstanding about the workings of cable trams -or when he sought out the place where he had tucked and tacked up the trouser legs for his short-limbed friend, he was not, as he smoothed and touched, a modern man at all.

That Sid, the son of a Minsk tailor, owned fifteen stores, all of which featured high mirror-encased pillars, was one of the miracles of this suit.

But the other miracle was considered (silently, separately) a greater one. And this, of course, was what it had done for Poor Wysbraum.

He had always, Leah remembered, been known as "Poor Wysbraum". "Poor Wysbraum," her mother might say after he had departed, or just before he arrived and the family sat anticipating the amplified sounds of their visitor's high cracked voice. She did not elaborate on what she meant by "Poor". The house did not permit elaboration, and besides anyone could see that Wysbraum was Poor Wysbraum because he was short and dark and ugly, with huge bruised beetroot-red lips far too heavy for his little doe-eyed face, his ears stolen from a bigger man's head, his huge veined hands emerging from his frayed cuffs. He was Poor Wysbraum because he had, it was silently considered, used the suit to take the braver course, the better, more noble course, and had suffered for his goodness.

For Wysbraum had taken fifteen years of his life to become, at last, a doctor. He had given up everything, all hope of companionship, marriage, children, a house, just so he could be a doctor, and, when the time came, at last, on his fortieth birthday, he could afford no more than a new practice in Brunswick where the people were even poorer than he was and could not pay their bills.

When Leah was older she came to resent this description of him as "Poor Wysbraum", found something offensive in it, but when she was a young girl at home she understood the term better, and heard the soft strum of approval, envy even, in the word as well as pity for his loneliness. Later, when she came to analyse things, she did not understand so well and she forgot that it was not just she but all her family who loved Poor Wysbraum who was like food too rich for their ascetic taste, or a scene that was too colourful for eyes attuned to the bleached colours of St Kilda in summer. Wysbraum brimmed with an excess of emotions, angers, fears. He boiled over with stories, his big mouth full of food, while the Goldsteins, quite replete and accepting their headaches without complaint, sat with their hands on their laps and only Sid, their representative, would say: "And then Wysbraum, what happened then?"

You did not need to accompany them on their visit to the suit in the cupboard to know what sort of bond there was between these two men. You could listen to each of them, at table, extol the virtues of the other, and it was Wysbraum, because he spoke more, because he was not restrained by the house, who shouted his praise the loudest.

"An honest man", Wysbraum said, "will always do well. And it is this", he told Sid, "that is behind your success."

"Ah, but it is self-interest."

"Self-interest, yes, of course," Wysbraum would say, eating five pieces of fried fish or ten pieces of bread, not at once, of course, but the Goldstein girls were all counting. "And also self-interest to have your staff paid more than the union demands, and to know their names, but also honest. I drink to your success. It gives me pleasure, Goldstein. If you had been a bad man and done well, then I would be jealous." Lettuce hung from his mouth. "More. I would be angry. But you have behaved honourably."

"A kind man", Poor Wysbraum said, "has more importance in the eye of God than a man with a holy book."

"It is only his way of explaining," Sid said. "Isn't that true, Wysbraum? When you mention God it is your way of explaining your idea. He is not religious," he told his daughters. "Which God?" he demanded of his friend.

"Who knows?" said Wysbraum. "Not me. But He would not be much of a God if He did not say the kind man was the better man." Beetroot from the salad widened his lips and smudged his mouth amiably across his face.

"This is not Jaweh."

"Sit still, Goldstein, be calm."

"Because the fellow is a bully."

"Is a bully, was a bully," said Wysbraum. "I agree. I like you better than Him because you are kinder. Ah," he said, considering the table full of uncertain faces, "never tell jokes at the Goldsteins. The Goldsteins are kind, but they are no good with jokes."

When Wysbraum spoke in favour of kindness no one could doubt his sincerity. So who could have predicted his reaction when Sid Goldstein took it into his head to give away the suit he had shared with Wysbraum?

It was not, as Wysbraum assumed, a premeditated act. One minute Sid was walking on stockinged feet to answer the door and three minutes later he was waving to a stranger who, having come to the door selling shoelaces, was now walking away with the celebrated suit.

Sid Goldstein was not sorry to see the suit go. He did not grieve for it. He meant what he said when he spoke to the young man, whose pale blue eyes slid off the dark ones of the donor, embarrassed at the weight of emotion they contained.