IN DECEMBER, WHEN America finally entered the war, Rhoda kept telling friends that it was a relief; it meant, at least, that something was happening to stop more Jews from being killed. At home, her own uneasy opinion was that Leonard, as an overage father, shouldn’t go unless he had to. Still, when Hinda’s Stanley left, Rhoda was shy to mention Leonard’s name in front of her friend, as though his continuing presence were a guilty secret. Listening to the news one evening, Leonard announced, with the sober phrasing of an expert giving disturbing testimony, that the Navy was the most intelligently run branch of the service, and the next day he went down for the physical exam, never guessing the outcome: rheumatic fever in childhood disqualified him. When Rhoda heard the news, she was overcome with a deep and bride-like flush at the wonder of his maleness, the span of his chest and the hairs on his arm: the luck of having a man to live with. They did not celebrate but sat quiet over dinner, softly and companionably dismayed in their plenty, like tourists who feel themselves fat in a land of beggars.
The war did not change their lives so very much. Though among her friends she made weary references to “these grim days,” Rhoda’s own part was limited to the tasks of budgeting ration coupons and helping in scrap drives. Leonard did volunteer work for the Red Cross, measuring and labeling medicines.
He was very, very busy, working extra hours in the pharmacy now that the store was short-handed. The store, in which he had a sort of junior partnership, was doing well; the steadiest customers, the old and the sick, had been left behind, with the women who bought cosmetics. Kids with mothers at work came to hang out at the soda fountain, swilling down Morale Builder Malteds and Paratroops Sundaes (They Go Down Easy). By the winter of 1943 business had actually doubled from what it was before the war.
The stream of customers elated him. Rhoda had seen this. He liked the momentum of tasks done rapidly on demand. It was on such a day of capable exercise—sweat stains mottled his blue shirt and showed like highlights through his white coat—that Mrs. Leshko found him at her service across the glass counter, while Rhoda sat on a stool at the fountain. Mrs. Leshko had waited a good ten minutes while Leonard had helped a ten-year-old select a bottle of cologne for his mother and had prepared cough syrup for a woman who worked in a clothing factory and complained of fibres in her lungs. After her wait, the sudden beam of his attention turned on Mrs. Leshko caused her to melt and gush plaintive confession. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I’m an old lady, the walk isn’t so good for me.”
“It just shows you can’t keep a good woman down,” Leonard said. He had learned a little from Rhoda about how to handle people. “I’m very flattered that you came all this way to see me. A pretty face on a busy day, it cheers me up.”
Mrs. Leshko wheezed her breathy little fat-woman’s laugh. She had walked extra, she said, because she didn’t trust the other druggist in town. Last time she had counted the arthritis pills he’d given her, and they were four short. “I can measure them out right in front of you if it’ll make you feel better,” Leonard offered.
“You,” Mrs. Leshko snorted. “You I wouldn’t question. If the whole world was like you, there would be no wars.”
Mrs. Leshko continued talking to him as he went behind the partition to fill her prescription. “I need some candy also. My nephew on a ship—it must be very boring, he writes to his old aunt even—he wants me to send him some sourballs. Five pounds.”
Leonard walked to the candy counter and scooped out the little hard candies, dusty with their own sugar, into a paper bag and weighed them. “For you and the Navy, that’s fifty cents. And two dollars for your medicine.”
Mrs. Leshko was suddenly at a loss. The difficulty of getting this flimsy wrinkled bag into the mail and overseas hit her as an unexpected and bitter disappointment. She wanted a box, she needed some twine—“It’s not so easy to tie a knot when you’ve got arthritis”—and she began to whimper.
“Mrs. Leshko,” Leonard said, “if you give me the address, I’ll pack it for you. It’s all right.”
The old woman was actually crying, thin short sniffs and gasps; tears leaked from her rheumy eyes. Leonard seemed appalled; he could not have been more uncomfortable if she had suddenly lifted her dress and revealed her grayed and withered private parts—for wasn’t she, in flaunting her suffering, displaying all the quivering intensity of the most private part of all, the soul? Leonard was an agnostic, but he believed in the soul.
He offered Mrs. Leshko his handkerchief, and she gripped his hand. “When he was little, his mother used to leave him with me when she went to work; he was such a sweet little boy. He called me Aunt Beffie, he couldn’t say Bessie. You know how they are when they’re learning to talk.”
“I know,” Leonard said.
“Oh, God,” Mrs. Leshko wailed. “You have one of your own, I forgot. Be glad she’s a girl. How old is she now?”
“Two and a half,” Leonard said.
“They grow up so fast. What is she doing—walking, talking? What does she say?”
“Well, not much, actually. Mostly she just says ‘dish’ and ‘dat’ and points to what she wants. A woman of few words.” Rhoda saw he was trying to be very concrete, by way of shifting the subject.
“You’re kidding. When Arthur was that age, he knew a whole nursery rhyme by heart. Even my Marion, not a genius, could say a full sentence.” Mrs. Leshko was feeling better, braced by a glimpse of superiority, a vision as sustaining as any philosophy. “It’s nothing to worry about. They all learn some time. When my Marion took so long to get toilet-trained, my husband used to say, Well, you never saw a bride under the chupa with a load in her pants.”
“I’ll remember that,” Leonard said, and in the genuine pleasantness with which he said this, he showed himself to be, after all, truly different from Rhoda.
“She’s just keeping things to herself,” Leonard would reassure Rhoda. “In her mind she’s composing War and Peace.” Suzanne’s failure to advance into speech was not troubling to Leonard. She seemed to understand everything that was said to her, and in the quiet with which she absorbed the words of adults was a sort of composure which Leonard found appealing. She was a robust child, big for her age, with a square face and curly hair. She was slightly cross-eyed, which contributed to her brooding look; often she seemed to be watching something just over his shoulder when he spoke to her. She was not hard to satisfy, tolerating substitutions when a thing had to be taken from her, and when she played with her toys she chuckled to herself.
She had actually been noisier as an infant, when her crying had seemed to penetrate the walls of the house. For a while she had jammered in high shrieking chirps, so that Leonard had called her “our canary.” Rhoda had expected her to talk early, so she was especially piqued at having been made a fool of. Recently, Rhoda had come upon her rolling from side to side in her crib, as though rocking herself to sleep, and the sounds she was murmuring, by way of lullaby, which Rhoda at first took hopefully for words, were simply made-up noises, secret and clearly satisfying without her sharing them.
Rhoda’s own family all spoke loudly and quickly, vying for each other’s attention, so that the din at family gatherings was often overwhelming. A clan of story-tellers, both of Rhoda’s brothers could imitate, do accents, stretch a joke until it burst at the punch line—so that telling stories was for them what singing together is supposed to be for some families. For Leonard, speech had a different function; his words were always “well-chosen” he could argue current events like a news analyst, debate religion, even pun with a soft playfulness, but it was clear that the real issues of his life were kept safe from the conversation at the dinner table, although it was never apparent, perhaps not even to him, what these were.
Rhoda had been puzzling for years over the question of whether there was any hidden scorn in his guardedness: there didn’t seem to be, but she wasn’t sure. At the last Thanksgiving dinner he had been especially quiet. Her brother Frank (on leave from an army base in Texas, where he had a desk job) was horsing around with her brother Andy (Andy “commuted to war” at Brewster Aeronautical in Newark). Frank was rather childishly dropping roast potatoes onto Andy’s plate, saying, “Bombs over Tokyo!” while Andy put on his Jap accent and hissed through his teeth, “Okay, you Yankee doodle dandy, do your worst.” He sucked back his lower lip to simulate an over-bite he considered oriental.
Leonard—who argued with great feeling against the Nisei camps in California and hated to hear anyone even use the word “Nip” in front of him—didn’t seem annoyed; he seemed, if anything, faintly amused. But then he was seldom really frustrated when people didn’t agree with him. Other people’s fatuousness didn’t ruffle or surprise him. He seemed regulated by an intense patience.
They had plenty of money now, although there wasn’t much they wanted to buy from the range of goods available. Even the smallest things—lipstick in cardboard tubes instead of metal—seemed designed to last only for the Duration. At times Rhoda found herself mending and substituting, as though they were poorer than they were. She spent hours canning fruits and vegetables—wax beans, purple plums, things they never ate; rows of jars lined the shelves in the basement, which was where you were supposed to put things for safety in case of attack. The whole house had a feeling of plenty lying in wait. There was a spare bedroom ready for the next child, drawers filled with banquet-size tablecloths, never unfolded.
Rhoda felt completely secure in the house, although Leonard pointed out that it had too many doors—front, back, side—plus exposed windows to the cellar on the driveway side, so that it would be easy for burglars to enter. It was a large, substantial house, a bulky Dutch Colonial, and it had been a good buy, but it was old and full of hidden flaws—termites once—and the plumbing was faulty.
“You know how interested Suzanne is,” Rhoda said one evening, as she and Leonard listened to the news on the radio, “in putting the little pail inside the bigger pail and finding the piece for her big wooden puzzle. With all that mechanical ability, do you think she could learn to fix the faucets by, say, maybe tomorrow?”
“The kitchen sink is on the blink again?” Leonard guessed.
“No hot water, that’s all. Mr. Dinger is convinced it’s not serious.”
“Mr. Dinger’s not so serious himself. Last time he fixed everything fine except that the cold water faucet was on the hot line and vice versa.”
“You got used to it, didn’t you? I admit—he’s a lovely man but as a plumber he is not wonderful. Anyway, he’s coming tomorrow to take the place apart—we’ll be in New York at the play. Your mother’s coming over to stay with Suzanne. Actually, he’s crazy about children, he’ll probably reassure her.”
Leonard’s mother, like many people who are not “good” with children, was slightly afraid of them. She preferred those directly related to her, but even they did not crow with glee at her arrival, and in time they grew bored and demanding in her presence, which alarmed her. Without charm or control on her part, there was no telling what they might do.
A play was generally something they went to see because it was in town, like a relative; Rhoda felt the beckon of cultural events as though they were shopping sales. In this case, the theater had mistakenly sent them tickets for a matinee instead of an evening performance, but because The Three Sisters was a play for which Leonard had a particular affection, he had chosen to take the day off from work. Rhoda was just as glad they were going in the day time; Broadway at night, with all its neon signs turned off to honor the dim-out, was not so cheerful, although you weren’t supposed to admit that. Hinda was going with them, as she often did now, in need of escorts like a dowager or a younger sister. Rhoda’s brother Andy had nicknamed her “the caboose,” which tickled Rhoda.
Hinda was waiting for them at the bus stop, sitting on a bench knitting. She wore a blue wool suit with a sprig of fake cherries in the lapel. She had put on weight since Stanley’s departure, but her appearance was hardly altered by it—she had always had a blurred and peachy attractiveness, the relaxed flesh of a pleasant person. “We’ll have to report back to Stanley,” Leonard said as they kissed hello, “that you really are stickin’ to your knittin’, kitten.” Hinda laughed and put her needles and yarn away, modest as though she’d been caught reading a letter.
They were silent through most of the bus ride to the city. Leonard had brought a copy of the play with him so that he could review it before seeing it. He was odd about his books; he wrote his name formally in all of them—Leonard S. Taber—so that even the ones he’d never gotten to read became his in a way that led Rhoda to shun them, approaching them only to dust them once they acquired the gravity of his signature. She read actively herself, always before bed, but as a form of light refreshment, magazines and best-sellers. She could remember as a girl having wept over The Mill on the Floss, but that passion was merely comical to her now.
Hinda had the seat near the window; in profile her face was more imposing than Rhoda tended to think of it, and her unguarded expression was grave and inwardly absorbed. She had been “very good” about Stanley’s being gone, although occasionally she did things Rhoda thought were silly, like sending him locks of the children’s hair or saving menus for him from restaurants she went to. She was immensely fond of her husband, almost doting. He was a good-looking man, a sharp dresser, not too bright, often sour and sarcastic in his opinions, but never unkind to Hinda; his worst fault in marriage was that he spent money too freely.
Hinda never complained about managing without him, but she had fits of indecisiveness. She had taken to visiting Rhoda’s mother (which didn’t surprise Rhoda—Hinda’s own mother was a notably useless person). Rhoda’s mother, who believed any activity was good, had talked Hinda into being a bookkeeper for the temple’s war-bond drive. Outwardly Hinda was still fresh and placid, only in her calm there was something a little dreamy and distracted, where a darkening knowledge had brought her into contact with larger forces, and marked her, even in Rhoda’s eyes, with an altered stature.
Through the bus window, Rhoda looked out at the Jersey flatlands, muddy with melting snow; ahead, the city’s buildings were coming into view from across the river. “Look how clear it is,” Hinda said. “You can see the whole Manhattan skyline.”
“It’s always clearest in the cold,” Rhoda said.
The bus went down into the dark of the tunnel and emerged suddenly into a daylight heady with noise and traffic. They walked east across Forty-second Street. Times Square was clogged with soldiers and sailors, slow-moving groups of boys with nowhere to go. Along the curb, at her own pace, a girl with a long, straining neck walked in the characteristic gait of the cerebral-palsied, one leg scissoring behind her as the other veered with the knee bent to bring her crookedly forward, bent wrists jerking in the air.
“Don’t get lost,” Rhoda said to Hinda. “Stay by us.”
“I forget about the city when I’m not here,” Leonard said. “We should come in more often. Everything is here. Everything. It’s one of the great cities. Chekhov’s Moscow must have been like this.”
They had turned onto Forty-fourth Street from Broadway and were out of the congested area now. Near them a very elegant woman in a turban and an ocelot coat with wide sleeves was carrying, of all things, a bag of groceries. Rhoda was amazed that anyone lived around here, especially someone like that. Why live so close to raw, milling crowds when you could afford not to? Leonard could go on about the city’s endless variety, its range of possibilities like a great playground for the enquiring mind. Rhoda liked coming into the city and she considered its proximity one of their advantages, but it did not draw her to it any more than a trip to a planetarium would have made her long to live on Venus.
They were early for the play—Leonard was rigorously prompt—and they sat in the theater, mouthing small talk to each other in respectful whispers as the seats filled with ticket-holders, women mostly, stepping gingerly in their high heels on the carpeted steps. Rhoda turned to say something to Leonard, and she saw he had picked up his book again. “Doesn’t it hurt your eyes to read in this light?”
“Yes,” he said, “it does.”
“So put the book down, it’s rude.” He was about to give her a sharp answer when the theater went dark.
The play began. Three actresses in high-necked dresses were pacing back and forth or reclining in uncomfortable languor on a sofa, complaining of this and that, wistful and helpless. Their listlessness made Rhoda feel out of temper with them. Leonard was laughing—the army doctor had just stood up and declared, “You said just now, baron, that our age will be called great, but people are small all the same. Look how small I am.” Rhoda smiled, won to a certain amusement by Leonard’s enjoyment. But all that sighing: no wonder there had been a revolution in Russia. When one of the sisters asked, “But what are we to do?” Rhoda wanted to say, “Oh, go take a walk around the block.” By the end of the second act, Rhoda knew they were never going to get to Moscow. Leonard said, “You’re right,” and it was odd to her that he found this thought satisfying.
He was awash in a rapturous melancholy, whose form Rhoda could recognize and follow, as one follows a tune—what she could not understand was how it was uplifting. She wanted dimly to partake of it. When the curtain went down, Leonard applauded for a long time; he seemed to want to stay in his seat, to retain the sensation produced in him by the play. Outside the theater, Rhoda said, with a deliberate brashness, “Well, that was a puzzler.” Neither Hinda nor Leonard answered. “It just goes to show you,” Rhoda went on, “what nothing lives they led then. It’s a period piece.”
“Some people still lead nothing lives,” Hinda suggested lightly. She had been crying in the last act and now her face looked peasant-red in the wind. Rhoda didn’t expect any elucidating analysis from Hinda, who was something of a simpleton.
But Leonard was irritated. “A period piece,” he snorted. “Who taught you to spoil a great thing by giving it a name like that?”
“So what did I miss, so what’s the message?” Rhoda said. Did they do anything, the characters, except walk around the stage complaining? Was it so crass of her to shrivel her nose at failure?
Leonard said if she didn’t want to hear about failure, most of world literature was closed to her. “I know,” he said, with an unusual and peevish bluntness, “you’re not that dumb.”
“Excuse me,” she said, but kept quiet after that.
When they returned to the house, the kitchen was a mess of old, encrusted lengths of pipe, Mr. Dinger’s smeared footprints, his toolbox surrounded by its issue of assorted wrenches, and the damp, mineral smell common to cellars. Neither Mr. Dinger nor Suzanne was anywhere in sight. Leonard’s mother, who had been napping on the couch, explained that the plumber had gone to get more parts and had taken Suzanne with him, to give her the treat of riding in the truck. “She likes him,” Mrs. Taber reported. “She was following him around, and he had her handing him his tools and everything. I stayed out of the kitchen most of the time.”
Mr. Dinger arrived shortly after, carrying a cumbrous and undoubtedly very expensive stack of metal pipe; Suzanne was behind him, gripping a small paper bag which—she showed them—contained screws. “She’s a good girl,” Mr. Dinger said. “Very helpful. And she loves trucks. She was pointing them out all along the way on our little ride. But you better be careful what you tell her. She thinks you went to New York to pay your bills.”
“We saw a play,” Leonard said.
“That’s it—play, not pay. I’m a dumbie for not knowing. Right, Suzy?” He winked at the little girl and made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth.
Suzanne sat on the floor as the plumber crawled under the sink, twisting his body like a mechanic’s under a car. She did not come forth with any bursts of conversation, but watched him with the same quiet absorption she usually showed in her playing. “So what is this great vocabulary you’re keeping tucked under your belt?” Rhoda said, tickling the child under the chin, but Suzanne only wriggled.
That evening Rhoda tried her luck. “No more dish and dat,” she said, as Suzanne tried to grab a piece of cut-up banana from across the table, grunting her pronouns of request. “Say, I want a banana, please.” Suzanne said nothing; she was already eating the banana, and she gazed at her mother with a cross-eyed squint above the soft, smeared mouth.
But later, when Suzanne was dressed for bed and had been kissed by her father and was being led to her crib, she turned—just before being lifted and lowered into that nightly confinement which was no idea of hers—and said, “Wanna drinka wawter.” “Say: please,” Rhoda said. “Peese,” Suzanne said.
“That’s better,” Rhoda said, and brought the little girl her own enameled metal cup filled with water; she wanted to call Leonard to come and hear, but she hesitated to make a fuss—Suzanne had, after all, only done what she was supposed to do.
“That kid could talk all along,” Rhoda told Leonard, who chuckled appreciatively. “It makes me angry. How could she be so young and still keep secrets?”
By the next day Rhoda had tempered her response of mingled resentment and elation—the sting suffered by those who hate surprises and have just been pleasantly surprised—so that the incident was largely comical. She told the story to friends with that style and relish for which she was well known, and with a touch of the aggravated admiration she usually reserved for her husband.
Rhoda now had a “girl” to help her out one day a week—and she liked to repeat Maisie’s proverb, “The Lord gives them to you when you’re young because that’s the only time you can stand them.” By such translations into the jokes of co-workers, Rhoda took Suzanne’s developments; and like a clerk who waits for a promotion, she watched—with a level of interest and an eye out for the future—because they were planning, in a year or two, another one.