Summary
Scene 4 begins with another letter from Eddie, in which he tells his sons about how some people in the South are polite and educated, while others are not. In Grandma's apartment, it is midnight and Jay is looking for Grandma's money downstairs in her store. As Arty urges him to get back into bed, the boys' Uncle Louie enters and tells them to go back to sleep. Turning on a lamp, he greets the boys warmly, hugging them and remarking on the fact that Jay has gained weight since Bella started cooking for him. He notes that they were breaking into the ice cream store downstairs, telling the boys that he's been down there since his mother closed it up, waiting for her to go to sleep. "Nothin' sweeter than danger, am I right boys?" he says.
Louie tells the boys that he and Eddie used to sneak down to the ice cream store all the time. He tells them that Eddie always cried in remorse after stealing, but he never did, and that Grandma respected it because it showed that he could take care of himself. He then tells the boys that he has to stay at Grandma's for a few days while someone paints his apartment. When he takes off his jacket, he reveals that he's carrying a pistol and the boys are mesmerized.
Making excuses, Louie tells the boys that the gun is a friend's, before shortly revealing that it is indeed his gun. He tells them, "I'm a bodyguard for a very prominent and distinguished political figure." When Arty calls him a "henchman," Louie gets very upset and tells him to never use that word again. He then offers the boys a job working for him for $5 a week. He has them guess which number he's thinking in exchange for a $5 bill. When one guesses 3 and the other guess 7, he tells them he was thinking of 37 and hands them a dollar, before asking Arty if he can drive. When a $5 bill appears in Arty's pocket, he asks Louie how he did it, and Louie replies, "These fingers were touched by genius. I could have been a concert violinist, but the handkerchief kept fallin' off my neck." He tells the boys that the money is for their silence; if anyone comes asking after him, the boys are supposed to keep quiet.
Arty tells Louie that there were two men—one with a broken nose the other with a Betty Grable tie—looking for him the other day. He tells them to keep quiet about his being there, that some men are mad at him about seeing a woman he wasn't supposed to see, then tells the boys he'll bunk up with them. Before going into the bathroom, he tells the boys not to touch or look in his bag.
Arty loves Uncle Louie, but Jay thinks their dad wouldn't want them keeping his secrets. All of a sudden, Bella comes out of her bedroom and asks the boys if they've thought about what she should tell Grandma. They tell her they haven't and she goes back to bed. When Louie gets back he tells them that they shouldn't get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, because he doesn't like to be woken up. Just as he falls asleep, Arty tells Jay he has to go to the bathroom, and Jay urges him to "save it."
Act 2. A letter from Eddie, in which he tells the boys he has been in the hospital for exhaustion, and recalls an awful mustard soup that Grandma used to give him when he was sick. Arty reads the letter sitting in bed with a bathrobe on and a comic book. He has a fever.
Jay brings him a bowl of mustard soup, and Arty doesn't want it. Arty then tells Jay that Louie is taking a nap in Aunt Bella's room and Jay mentions that one of the men that's after Louie called the house and said "Friday night the dance is over," implying that they plan to kill Louie. The boys fret that maybe the mobsters will try and kill them too, when suddenly Grandma enters and scolds Jay for taking so long delivering the soup. She then ushers Arty out of bed, telling him that his fever will clear if he stops lying around. He protests that his mother used to let him stay in bed when he had a fever, but Grandma reminds him that he's not in his mother's house.
After Grandma forces Arty to eat the mustard soup, Arty talks back, saying, "You just want me to be miserable because somebody made you miserable in Germany. Even Pop said it...Well that's not my fault. Take it out on Hitler, not on me." She leaves.
Louie comes out of the bedroom and tells Arty he has "moxie" for standing up to Grandma. Arty delivers the message from the mobsters, but Louie isn't intimidated. When Arty complains about Grandma, Louie comments on what a difficult childhood she had and the fact that she was tough, but she commanded her children's respect. He tells Arty that he ran away from home 12 times when he was a kid.
Analysis
In this section of the film, the two boys start looking for their grandmother's money so they can send it to their father. After Bella makes the mistake of revealing that Grandma has a large stash of cash, Arty and Jay become intent on finding it, so that they can spare their father from having to work. They search for it, with a naive belief that they can "borrow" it and pretend it is an inheritance from a Polish relative. The presence of money in Grandma's apartment becomes the dramatic center of the narrative, and the audience watches as the two young men try and find it.
We are also introduced to another of Jay and Arty's eccentric relatives in this section of the film. One night while they are searching for the money, Uncle Louie, a mobster in a fedora, comes into the house and greets them warmly. Louie's defining characteristic, as he tells the boys himself, is that he is remorseless and able to tell a lie. He relates a story about the fact that he and Eddie used to steal ice cream from the ice cream parlor downstairs, and he insists that the only reason Eddie got in trouble was because he felt remorse about his wrongdoings. "Yeah, me and ma used to love to put on the gloves and go the distance," he says of his staring matches with his mother, an anecdote that gives us a hint about Louie's capacity for criminality.
Louie's presence in the play only heightens the comic dysfunction of the family. Between a cane-wielding vindictive German grandma and a mentally handicapped Aunt Bella, it had seemed like Arty and Jay had enough stress to deal with, but the arrival of Louie, a mobster and a crook, creates for even more difficult times. The irony lies in the fact that while Eddie thinks he has put his children in safe hands while he's away earning money, they are in bed with Uncle Louie, the gangster, who is armed and being pursued by some vengeful gangsters. The play heightens this dark comedy by including a voiceover of one of Eddie's letters right at the end of Act 1, in which he says, "Thank God you're in good hands."
The play is notable for the way it blends the comic and the dramatic. One moment, the characters are engaged in some humorous antics, and the next they are processing difficult challenges. The dynamic that sprouts up between Arty and Jay and their extended family is undoubedtly funny, but it is also marked by more serious matters, like the news of their father's failing health on the road. Playwright Neil Simon puts morbid realities next to laugh-out-loud situations, and the contrast helps the audience or reader to invest in the characters' plight. The ability to make light of darkness while also maintaining a sense of gravity and import is a defining characteristic of the play, and of Simon's work more generally.
A major theme that emerges around Grandma is the fact that she demands respect but not love. Given her own difficult upbringing, she perceives all of her offspring who were raised in America as being spoiled in some way, and has no patience for any complaining. As Louie tells Artie, she doesn't complain and she doesn't like when other people complain. Louie also tells him that Grandma earns people's respect by being so tough, and she has no interest in earning their affection. Arty, having come from a loving and emotionally honest household, doesn't quite understand this lesson, but listens intently as his criminal uncle tries to explain.
