THE THANKSGIVING OF 1952, by an overlapping lack of foresight from different branches of the family, Rhoda and the girls were left without an invitation for Thanksgiving dinner. They had a sour, quiet meal by themselves, clustered down at one end of the long dining room table. The children were not good sports about it, and they quarreled about who would do the dishes on a holiday. Claire spilled root beer on the sofa, which Rhoda had recently had recovered in a heavy, lichen-green damask, which, it turned out, spotted easily.
They were not enjoyable children in general. Claire, at seven, was still too volatile—apt to burst into long hyena giggles, and so skittish that when it rained she ran for blocks because worms on the sidewalk scared her. Often she stared blankly into space with a vague, wincing look. Suzanne, still a callous bully toward her sister, had occasional moments of mature conduct. She was eleven, a pale, too-tall girl with pink-framed glasses. Rhoda had coached her sketchily on the facts of life; Suzanne asked no questions and claimed that she’d learned about it already from the other kids at camp. She was indifferent to boys, hair-dos, lipstick, and the romantic intrigues plotted by some of her alarmingly precocious classmates. Her main interest this year was insects. She was full of facts about their brief, merciless lives: the efficient composite eyes of houseflies, the cruel mating habits of bees, the vicious internecine battles of wasps. Rhoda would not permit her to keep an anthill in a jar in their room, although twice she caught her trying to hide one under the bed.
The bad Thanksgiving proved to be an apt beginning for a bleak and unpromising new year. All that winter Rhoda did not feel much like going out. The weather was especially bitter and nasty, with hostile, icy winds. When she carried groceries from the car, her thin shoes minced through the crusty snow on the lawn. In the evenings she ventured out to play bridge with Annie or Hinda, or she let couples take her to the movies, but at dinner parties she had no patience for meeting new people; she had ceased, for the time being, to make an effort.
Her brief season of awful dates was long since over. Word had gotten out among her friends of certain sarcastic remarks she had made about the men they had generously supplied for her; they were as insulted as hostesses whose cooking has been impugned. Nothing, they said, or as much as said, is good enough for you.
It seemed to Rhoda that she was only resting, that chances she had passed up would re-emerge in more compelling form: there was plenty of time—it went slowly enough. Only the rapid growth of the children made her feel the passage of months, and she was sometimes alarmed by a certain spinsterish cold-comfort tingeing her habits.
In February she drove back to the house one late afternoon at twilight and saw a strange car parked outside. In the kitchen she found Maisie and Dr. Snyder, the internist with the black glasses who had tended her mother, standing over her father at the kitchen table. Her father had a nasty gash on his forehead. He looked as though he’d been in a fight (not possible, was it?). When he saw Rhoda, he rolled his head and raised his pale fish-eyes to her. “I made a mistake,” he was saying. “I got confused.”
“Oh, Mrs. Taber,” Maisie said. “He fell on the stairs.” It seemed that he had awakened from his nap in his room upstairs and had tried to make his way through the hallway to the bathroom, but the house had grown dark during his nap, and he had turned too soon, and fallen down the stairwell to the landing, where Maisie, hearing faint moans, had found him lying half-conscious in a pool of urine.
“Where were you going, hey, Jack?” the doctor said. Her father looked away from him.
After he had dressed the wound, the doctor called Rhoda aside and explained that it was not serious, but that a man his age could not be trusted near an open staircase. “Better make up a bed for him on the first floor from now on.”
The next day Rhoda’s brothers were there to express alarm, soothe the old man by teasing him, and offer solutions. Rhoda had a great desire to be rid of him for once, but he was so piteous and humble, with the white criss-crossed patch on his veinous forehead, like a bum or a patient in a battle ward. In the end her brother Andy suggested that Rhoda’s screened-in back porch, which they never used anyway, could be walled up and made into a real room, insulated and made attractive with pine paneling.
“You can’t change him, so change the house,” Frank said.
Rhoda had a distinct memory of a bird’s-eye view of the house; she was thinking of the blueprints, which she hadn’t looked at since she and Leonard had bought the place—they had been quite confusing then, but she had looked at them with such excitement it seemed as if a stain of them must still lie pressed under layers in her mind—the twilight-blue with its ruled white lines showing the boundaries of the yard and where the rooms were. The house-plans were still in the attic; she could go get them. “It’s not as if you’re expanding,” Andy said. “You don’t need them. Believe me. Where are you running to?” She would only be closing in the drafty northwest corner, mounting a protective bubble around the erratic movements of her father, within the same space the house already took up.
For weeks Rhoda interviewed contractors, getting estimates, receiving the architectural recommendations of friends. In the muddy days of early spring, a troop of masons and carpenters came, messing the house and busying her days. By May her father was installed in the new room, with a TV set of his own (a hand-me-down from Andy), a studio bed, and a reclining chair made of sticky vinyl. He kept more to himself this way; he had long since chosen to take his meals alone—now he ventured out only between TV programs.
Suzanne was given back her old bedroom, refurbished in pale turquoise. She showed little enthusiasm for the move, aside from picking a surprisingly garish pattern of wallpaper; but the first day she tried (unsuccessfully) to barricade the room against visitors by means of string and a bicycle lock.
In June Rhoda took a course in ceramic sculpture, where she met a big, brisk-looking woman with short gray hair, named Harriet Tuckler. What Rhoda admired about Harriet was her attitude. At the beginning of each class she listened keenly to the instruction, then pummeled the unrelenting clay until the results produced in her a sighing bemusement. “Let’s face it,” she said one night, ready to drape a wet cloth over her uncompleted effort to model a reclining dog. “It looks like a turd.”
“She has great joie de vivre,” Rhoda told people. One week Rhoda admired her tan, and discovered that Harriet often spent her weekends at a resort in the mountains.
“Don’t you put on weight there? I thought they did nothing but eat in those places.”
“This one’s very low-key. It’s not all full of har-de-har types and yukkaputzes, if you know what I mean. They get an older crowd, you should pardon the expression.”
“Go with her some time, for Christ’s sake,” Annie Marantz said, when Rhoda mentioned it. “What the hell have you got to lose?”
Shadyside, on first being approached by car, presented a huge sign with its name spelled out in logs, then a farmhouse, flanked by rows of bungalows. They were all painted white, trimmed with a dark, foresty enamel whose color, Rhoda insisted, was WPA-project green. In the main building the desk clerk, a fat, overeager man, took their luggage and led them to the room they were to share. The place smelled like the summer camp where she sent Suzanne—steamy institutional cooking, fresh pine needles, and clothes left too long in the rain.
They arrived midmorning on a Saturday. Rhoda had bought a new swimsuit for the trip, black latex with a stiff boned-up bust. “Anybody leans on me,” Rhoda said, tugging at the straps, “there’s going to be a whoosh of air.” She tapped at the bust to show it was hollow.
“An empty promise, I’d call that,” Harriet said. Rhoda wriggled and shimmied to show that the suit didn’t move with her. “Oh, you should see yourself,” Harriet said. Harriet, in her red suit with its white cuff across the bust, looked dense and strong; she was barrel-chested, with very little flab on her anywhere. A tight ship: there was something so clean and matter-of-fact in her—she was well into her forties, and had, Rhoda gathered from her stories, been married to a man much older than herself who had died early in their marriage. She seemed completely at her ease in being single. Once they had walked home from their class together and passed a shop window with a travel poster of an ancient, crumple-faced Italian peasant warmly urging them with a chip-toothed smile to come to Sardinia, and Harriet had said, “That’s the kind that usually goes wild to take me out.” It was a thing Rhoda never would have joked about—she had been quite startled. It had given her an odd, tense, cheerful feeling about her own future.
“Do these straps for me, will you?” Harriet asked her now, holding them out to her. “They cross in the back.” Harriet’s back was freckled and broad, damp and leathery to the touch.
In their beach shoes they walked along a path marked by whitewashed rocks to the lake. Rhoda tested the edge of the water with her toe. The lake, although crowded with people fluttering in the water or sitting on rocks at the shoreline, seemed oddly quiet, and Rhoda realized that she was accustomed to the shrieks of children in swimming areas. She lowered herself into the water suddenly, fighting the cold, and began swimming with furious energy; she was not a strong swimmer, but she felt compelled to count laps, beating a vigor into herself. When she stopped for breath, standing in shallow water, a man on the shore crouched down to her and said, “You’re quite an athlete, aren’t you?”
“I’m out of practice,” Rhoda said hoarsely.
“Well, it’s nice to see someone with spirit.” He reached down and they shook hands. From where she stood she saw the loose edges of the man’s trunks, the coarse, bandage-like fabric of his jock strap, and a glimpse of his testicles. They had always seemed to her the least attractive parts of a man. Suddenly she felt miserably discouraged; it was not his fault, but he menaced her privacy. He shifted his weight, showing even more of himself on one side; she tried to keep from smirking.
“You look happy,” the man said. To change her view, Rhoda turned to watch the other side of the lake. A very tall, long-legged man was approaching the edge; he was dark and hairy, and he walked rocking one leg stiffly behind him. “That’s Moe,” the man said. “He caught some shrapnel during the war. But you should see him swim. Watch him now.”
Rhoda could not see how well he swam, for all the splashing; what she did see was that he kept it up. She watched for a while, getting chilly as she bobbed, half-immersed. “Hey, Moe,” the man called out as he finished. “This lady admires your stroke.”
He dog-paddled over to where she stood. “Hello,” he said. “Want to race?”
“Sure,” she said. She felt the attention of the other guests on them. “You better rest first.” He was breathing deeply, staring down at his stomach as it rose and fell.
“I’m okay,” he said. The other man cried out, “On your mark, get set, go!”
Rhoda kicked off, laughing, which made her swallow gulps of water; she surfaced, sputtering. He was way ahead of her; suddenly he stopped, grabbed her shoulder, and pushed her—she was afraid he was drowning her, until he raised her arm high above the water and shouted, “The winner!”
“Well, it was very close,” he said, “but I happen to be a pretty good loser. I’ll buy you a drink later, how’s that?”
Rhoda was blowing the water out of her nose. “It’ll have to be a Coca-Cola for me. I don’t drink.”
“Too bad. If this was really a class joint, they would have some nice Perrier water for you.”
“Two cents plain is the best they can manage here, I’m afraid. How do you know about Perrier?”
“I was in France during the war and I drank gallons of it. Great for a hangover.”
“Mademoiselle from Armentières,” Rhoda began singing in a nasal, kidding voice.
“That was the other war. How old do I look?”
“Est-ce que vous parlez français?” Rhoda asked.
“Some,” he said. “But I can’t say anything clean in it.”
Rhoda stopped rubbing the water out of her eyes. He was not as good-looking as she had thought at first—his chin was too long and his features were so rugged as to be almost homely—but he had a deep, boomy voice, and he was the first man she had met in three years who did not seem to be a fool.
On the other hand, she discovered when he sat across from her at dinner, he was not formally educated. They were seated at a long table of eight people; the waiter had just gotten chicken grease on a lady’s sleeve and someone asked him if he was working his way through college and if he really thought this was a better way than selling encyclopedias. “I often wonder,” the waiter said, dabbing at the stain with ice and a napkin.
“Me, I never went to college,” Moe said. “In fact, I never got past the ninth grade.”
When he was fourteen, he told her, his father—a dapper man who had taught his sons to fish and to box like Gentiles—had left one morning to take the subway from Flatbush Avenue into Manhattan to look for work—“and that was it, nobody ever heard from him again.” Two weeks later Moe was kicked out of school for picking a fight with an Irish kid and winning. His mother, a timid, ignorant woman who to this day spoke almost no English, found him a job in, of all places, a ladies’ specialty store, on the argument that his unusual height would be an asset in reaching the higher shelves. There he spent his days folding and unfolding the merchandise of silk stockings, corsets, and lace-trimmed teddies. (“You can imagine, I almost went crazy—it was like heaven being in there with all that underwear.”) His first girl was a typist who spent all her pin money on blue satin garters; he got her attention by stealing them for her. For this he was fired, but he was then hired by a wholesaler named Rifkin who needed a boy with good muscles. A month later Moe discovered the man was homosexual; he repelled his advances but to Rifkin’s great relief he kept his secret, as he would have guarded the reputation of an adulterous wife who had offered herself to him, and they became friends. Rifkin was making a big splash with a line made from a sleazy artificial silk called rayon. The stuff could not be ironed without melting and came out of the wash looking as though a cat had chewed it, but Moe—promoted to salesman—knew his territory: Brooklyn would go for anything modern. He talked Rifkin into buying up more of the new man-made fabrics; all through the Depression Rifkin Intimate Apparel survived when other businesses went under, because they had a cheaper line of goods. At twenty-one Moe was a full partner. They worked a twelve-hour day; Rifkin spent his weekends in sad waterfront bars, while Moe went to the gym or to the park; he had given up boxing but in summer he liked baseball. Rifkin was “artistic” under his tutelage Moe got to know good music, and, having always read the newspapers, found that he liked history; he worked his way through Gibbon and Macaulay and finally Spengler.
For years he argued with Rifkin that war was inevitable in Europe. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the army; he was then twenty-eight, in perfect physical health, a bachelor with a weakness for baby-voiced blondes. Nothing even in Gibbon prepared him for Anzio.
While he was away, Rifkin (not for the first time) was badly beaten by a sailor he brought home one night. He lost his nerve and at the age of fifty moved in with his mother. In a last act of sense before his spirit broke altogether, he sold the business and put half the proceeds into a bank account for Moe. When Moe returned to the States he bought into a plastics factory; he was now the chief national supplier of the protective bags used by dry cleaners. He still worked a sixty-hour week; he read less nowadays, prone to headaches from a residue of chemical fumes.
“Now you know all about me,” he said. “More than you wanted to know, I’ll bet.” The dining room had emptied out now except for a small group at another table. Some sort of lively Latin music could be heard coming through the windows from across the lake. “They’re starting the entertainment at the barn,” Rhoda said. “We should go in.”
They walked through the moist and breezy night air around the lake to the barn which had been set up as a rustic nightclub. Inside, people were sitting at round tables before a stage, where a couple—available for instruction in the daytime—were demonstrating dance steps. The woman was twirling her skirts, showing her legs; they paused on the beat and struck stiff, dramatic poses. They demonstrated the samba, the rhumba, the mambo, and the tango. “The tango,” Moe whispered, “is a very sexy dance. You lead with your stomach.”
“They taught you that at the gym?” Rhoda winked.
Then a comedian came on and told them all the funny things that had happened to him on the way to work that night, most of which Rhoda had heard before, but she opened her mouth to laugh anyway. A boy singer came out, first attempting perkily to ask how much was that doggie in the window, then softening to a croon as he sang of a love from here to eternity, begged do not forsake me, oh, my darling, and then whispered that most of all he wished them love! He ended with good night, ladies.
When they got up to leave, the night had grown black and chilly. “Look at the stars,” Moe said. “Watch out—you lean back like that, you’ll fall.” The lake made faint lapping sounds in the wind, and there was a constant din of crickets. Fresh, mossy odors were around them. There was something painfully young in all this, and Rhoda felt in her a stirring that was not happiness.
She yawned, and excused herself. “It’s been a long day,” he said. They were in front of the main house. He put his hand on her shoulder, fatherly. “You go up and rest now. I’ll see you tomorrow, yes?”
She passed through the pillared doorway. He was walking away; the tall manly shape of his shoulders loped into the half-darkness. She turned down, the hall and went up the staircase to her room. She felt vapid and tired: probably she wasn’t used to swimming all those laps, she had overdone it. I’ve met someone, she thought, turning the key in her lock, but the prospect didn’t make her feel glad or light. Nothing did: what would? Her strongest desire was for a good night’s sleep. And, really, she had been resting too long.
At breakfast he was sitting across from a black-haired woman in red toreador pants, and there were no seats left at his table. He waved and shrugged as she went by. “Who the hell is she?” Harriet said, pulling herself into a chair. “She looks like a hair-dresser from Canarsie.”
“Maybe that’s the kind he likes,” Rhoda said. “Probably what he’s used to.” Through breakfast she was distracted by a sense of the two of them leaning forward to speak to each other, but it was worse when she looked back quickly and saw they had left.
She and Harriet spent the morning on the hotel’s hilly nine-hole golf course. On the fifth hole they rounded a bend behind an oak tree and came upon Moe Seidman and the woman in toreador pants; three people were with them. Moe had the club high over his shoulder, and the others were watching his ball amble its way across the grass. “Bravo,” Rhoda said heartily from behind him. He saw her and touched his brow in salute.
“I’m not really playing,” he said. “I’m just showing.”
“It’s all right,” Rhoda said. “We’ll wait until you people get through.”
The group was already moving on. “Come on, Moe,” the black-haired woman was calling from behind a tree.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Go ahead without me for a minute.”
“It’s yours, Rhoda,” Harriet murmured. Moe was still standing, watching. “I’m just a beginner,” Rhoda said. She chopped at the ball fast to get it over with, and missed. “As you can see.”
He asked if she minded his showing her, and she consented. Behind where she stood, he put his arms around her and guided her hands over the club. “Relax,” he said. She could feel his belt buckle pressing into her light cotton shirt. She was laughing foolishly, excited by the feel of him, behind her where she couldn’t see. “No giggling,” he whispered into her ear.
He braced himself and, increasing his grip over her hands so that he pinched her knuckles, bore down, drew her arms back, and pushed her into a powerful arc, cracking against the ball, and ending in a sort of pas-de-deux with their arms upraised together. The force of it dazzled her for a minute. “Gawd, you’re strong,” she said, as he let go of her. She shook her hands to show he’d been squeezing them hard.
Harriet was applauding. “Look how far it went.”
“You okay?” he said.
“That was fun,” she said. “Whooh.”
He stayed with them through the rest of the course, letting Harriet trail behind them, until he remembered her and turned to ask her questions. Rhoda did not care about hurting Harriet’s feelings—she cared for very little now except the continuing elation produced by his company, a buoyancy like a sudden flood of relief. She liked him, really liked him. She was remembering what it felt like.
At lunch the Sunday papers had arrived, and after the meal they sat on the lawn in deck chairs reading, littering sections of the grass. Moe did different voices for the characters in the funnies. Brenda Starr he did in a wispy falsetto, the gangsters in a growling bass. “That’s my younger daughter’s favorite,” she said, when he came to Blondie. “Is she blonde?” he asked.
“No,” Rhoda said. “Sort of medium brunette like me. The other one’s fairer.”
“Pretty, like their mother, I bet.”
Rhoda stiffened—she was something, but she wasn’t pretty. “Oh, they’re gorgeous creatures,” she said. Actually, she had forgotten them, which was a measure of her interest in him.
All the next week she was in a state of constant physical excitement, a revved-up restlessness that ate into her concentration; she was like the children before the first day of school. When, on Tuesday, he finally called, her voice on the telephone was simpering and nervous, so cloyingly pleasant that when she hung up she thought, God, how nauseating of me. Already she was homesick for her old ordinary life.
On Saturday she saw Suzanne off to camp early in the morning. All day she felt rushed and expectant. They met for dinner in an odd sort of restaurant he suggested in midtown Manhattan, elegant but Chinese. The red-and-gold décor startled her, hard-edged in its notion of sophistication. He was seated at a table when she arrived; he was wearing a well-cut brown suit, and he looked bony-faced, with a five-o’clock shadow. His expression lifted with pleasure when he saw her, but she had remembered him somewhat differently: less coarse.
He made a point of calling the waiter by name, and he tried to get her to order the most expensive things on the menu. Seeing the strain of his efforts, she felt a touch of pity for him that was not altogether affectionate. “Know who that is over there?” He nudged her. There was a dark-haired, chinless woman at the next table. “It’s Dorothy Kilgallen.”
“I see she’s having the almond chicken, too,” Rhoda said coolly. He seemed disappointed. “Wait till I tell Suzanne,” she added. “She always listens to Dorothy and Dick on the radio.” They could not quite overhear what Miss Kilgallen was laughing at, but a group in a booth caught Rhoda’s attention—two shiny-haired and straight-nosed college girls with their dates, Ivy League types. They were laughing about a practical joke one of the boys had pulled on the maid who cleaned his room at Yale—he had filled his pillow with shaving cream on sheet-changing day.
“Rich kids,” Moe murmured darkly.
Conversation in the room lowered when a silk-clad hostess announced a phone call for Dorcas Feldspar; one of the girls they had been watching got up, smoothing her dress and tossing her head, and followed the hostess.
“Some name,” Rhoda said. “Good poise, though.”
“Kids like that drive me crazy,” Moe said. “They know nothing about the world. Never will. Don’t have to.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Rhoda said. In truth they both felt shabby and envious; the heedlessness of these young people was somehow depressing. Why was that? Years ago, Rhoda told Moe, she and her girlfriend Ellie had saved their money and taken a trip to Europe. On the boat they met and befriended a really nice girl named Alicia Mayhew—she happened to come from a very prominent family but you wouldn’t have known it. “We never felt any different,” Rhoda said. This was a mild exaggeration, but certainly they had not been jealous—of what? They were all equally young, with an abundance of possibilities that could be turned down, like dates; the thought that certain chances never recur had been beyond them then.
Rhoda’s dress, which had seemed very winning when she had chosen it to wear that evening, now struck her as being too short in the hem. Across from them Dorcas Feldspar, with a great deal of rustling and giggling, was resettling herself into her seat. “Move, Tommy, will you?” she said, bumping her friend’s date playfully.
“Nothing will ever happen to these people,” Moe said. “It makes me hate them.”
She thought that Moe was a little too pointedly proud of having been through much, having had things “happen” to him: his war limp, his poor-boy background. Her own true and constant feeling, even with Moe, was that nothing had ever happened to anyone but her.
Leonard’s death had given her—in a reversed and twisted but permanent way—the same sense of superiority to ordinary people that having him for a husband had given her when he was alive. How could she not be susceptible to the feeling that there was something elevating in being a widow? Even the children thought they knew something that put them above their heedless contemporaries—especially Claire. Rhoda had found, in the jewelry box where Claire kept her treasures, a poem written on lined paper in her third-grade printing:
When at night I go to sleep,
I think of thoughts that are very deep.
My thoughts from others I save,
I think of loved ones beyond the grave.
Moe was lighting a cigarette. He had stopped hating the young people in the booth, and he was talking about how well this year was looking in the plastics business. It was actually becoming cheaper to manufacture all sorts of containers, the technology had progressed at such a rate. In the faint boredom with which she followed his enthusiasm over certain chemical processes, she was reminded of how Leonard had gone on about the future of medicine; but Leonard hadn’t cared at all about the money in it, whereas Moe was interested in the money and the power in these things; she liked this about him.
She saw his hands, as he fingered his cigarette; they were very large and long-fingered, but what was remarkable was the nails—they were wonderfully rosy and healthy, with just a line of immaculate white showing above the quick—a miracle of grooming: they were the most well-mannered hands she had ever seen on a man.
“I wish my girls could see your fingernails,” she said. “It might inspire them in the right direction.”
“Oh,” he said. “I get them buffed and all where they cut my hair. They asked me once if I wanted it, and it seemed like a good idea.”
This did not seem effeminate to Rhoda; it seemed to her part of a luxury and a solidity beyond these considerations. For her the one attraction of wealth had always been its thorough and exquisite tending to detail. The satisfaction of this made her want to rest against him. When he reached forward to light her cigarette, his hands smelled pleasantly of lemony soap. He hadn’t done these things just for her, he did them all the time—there was a mastery in it, an acquirement of perfections—and she thought of all the attentions he must pay himself with such unquestioned ease.
At the end of the evening he walked her to the parking lot where she had left her car, and while they waited for the attendant, they embraced. She felt the warm slip of his tongue in her mouth, and she was thrilled, moved by the way he held her fast. “See you soon,” he said, and she repeated it, edging away from him. She was waiting for the clear sense that this was one of life’s high moments, and it did not come. He would never be Leonard. At first she felt unspeakably sorry and bitter, but then, as her car was brought and she slid behind the wheel, desire and a pride in him returned—he was waving to her—and she felt, after all, able to like him.
The next week she spent much time on the phone describing him to friends, embellishing his “points” as though shouting down her vague disappointments; she talked of him so repeatedly she violated her normal sense of privacy, so that when she put down the phone she felt shamed and incontinent. Her friends were excited for her, almost too excited; they were frankly impressed by his money (which she of course had brought up) but when they squealed back over her good luck, it sounded vulgar to her.
Still, to tell them about him was to publicly confirm (otherwise it would have been nobody’s business) that she was part of a couple again, which made her feel full of hard, ordinary strength in a way she had not in years—the enjoyment of long-denied rights. That weekend he took her to the movies; in the dark of their seats she watched his profile next to her in silent satisfaction.
They saw Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn—Audrey Hepburn was a princess who thought that the only way to have a good time was to pass herself off as a commoner. Afterwards, walking toward a steak house he thought she might like, they talked about the spots where the movie had been filmed, and he told her gritty stories about Rome after the surrender, bands of children stealing clothes off drunken soldiers, socks and all. He seemed full of information, an interesting person. There was nothing very difficult about leaning on his arm while walking, asking questions and smiling during the pauses in conversation. She had not forgotten how after all.
The streets were hot and crowded; an old man on the corner tried to talk Moe into getting his shoes shined; Moe steered her past him deftly. When they crossed the street, he switched to keep to her outer side. He seemed very well-versed in this. His height and his physical tactfulness made her feel, in her light summer dress, like another version of herself, smaller and sweeter. His favorite movies, he told her, were The Lavender Hill Mob and Henry V.
They had reached the restaurant; after the fetid smells of the street, the aroma of broiling meat seemed rich and homey. “I hope you’re starving-hungry,” he said, and when she cocked her head and patted her stomach to show that she was, he laughed happily.
They agreed that the next weekend he was to come visit her in New Jersey. By mid-week it occurred to her that it might be best to warn her father that there was a gentleman coming to visit on Sunday. “So when’s the wedding?” he said.
“Don’t get your suit pressed yet.” The girls had just finished supper, and Rhoda was clearing the dishes.
“You’re not getting any younger,” he pointed out. “What I want to know is—is it Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong?”
“Just be friendly when he’s around, okay? Say hello or something.”
“When Mr. Right comes, I’ll say hello,” he said, and shuffled back to his room. Claire was at this moment engaged in dumping into the dog’s bowl a sizable piece of perfectly good meat which she would not eat because she said it was all full of fat and stringy parts. I’m surrounded by purists, Rhoda thought.
She met him at the bus stop with Claire in the front seat. “What a little doll,” he said. Claire had buck teeth and looked more like a mouse than a doll. She rubbed against him in homely sweetness. Rhoda ruffled the child’s hair. “Qui est jolie?” she said. “Claire est jolie.”
“Know what?” Claire was saying to him, as Rhoda drove. “I got my Junior Swimmer’s license.” She held out her arm to show him the red rubber band on her wrist, a badge from day camp. “Isn’t that something?” he said, as she played with his cuffs and then held his hand. He was beaming, as adults did who were not used to the easy attentions of children.
“After lunch we can take a Sunday drive,” Rhoda said, when they pulled up in front of the house. Claire got out of the car and ran ahead, waiting at the front door until Rhoda unlocked it.
In her living room he circled, exploring. “You have so much room here,” he said. She thought Moe himself looked very large and outsized, hedging around the arrangement of her furniture, and when he settled into the cushions of her couch his knees rose above the level of the coffee table. The rose-veined marble table and the green damask sofa, with its woven pattern of curling scrolls and flowers, looked suddenly feminine as he sat at them eating sandwiches, a dog on its haunches in a garden.
Claire, who had been playing in the backyard, joined them for the promised drive. Moe seemed to think he was in the country, despite the presence of supermarkets, branches of New York department stores, and moderate to heavy traffic. He admired the way the tree branches in full leaf met overhead from opposite sides of the street. She showed him the houses in the wealthy section and the reservoir. “You’ve never thought of moving?” he asked.
Rhoda had the same attitude toward the town as toward her possessions; any choice, once made, fixed in her a sense of superiority to those who didn’t have the same. Fifteen years ago she and Leonard had selected the town for its attractive streets and its excellent school system; it seemed to her, as it had seemed then, the most sensible of places.
Moe entertained her with dead-end-kid stories of growing up in Brooklyn. She teased him about his accent. They began talking in mock-Brooklynese. “Holey moley,” Rhoda said. “Whatsa matter wid me? I missed the toin over dere.”
“Over dere, over dere,” he began singing. Then he called out, “Watch out, it’s muddy.” Paved blacktop had given way to a dirt side road; rains had softened the rutted surface. “It’s a treat to beat your feet in the Mississippi mud,” he began singing. He switched to a Yiddish version—it had been a great parody years ago. Rhoda chimed in on the key words—she was laughing so hard she was afraid the car was going to go off the road. In his deep voice, Moe kept lowing like a bull their Bing Crosby pick-aninny ditty in Yiddish. He was singing “fees in der Mississippi schmutz.”
Claire, in the back seat, went wild. She was clinging to the top of the front seat and squealing, “What are you singing? What does it mean?” She had never seen her mother like this. “Teach me the song.” They tried to explain it, but she couldn’t see the funny part. “Oh, you’re just silly,” Claire said, and they laughed harder.
They had stopped in front of her house, by the horse-chestnut tree, whose dropped leaves crackled under the wheels. Claire thrust open the car door and ran to the back of the house, where the dog barked from his run. In the front seat Rhoda arranged her hair in the rear-view mirror; her face had a blurred, wild look, as though she had been crying or kissing. Moe leaned toward her, touched her neck, and whispered, “I love you.”
A thrill of shock went through her—she was sure that was what he’d said—but it was too soon, too easily said, too sloppy. Still, it was nice of him. She squeezed his hand, looking down, demure suddenly. The only thing she could think of to say was thank you.
He was not pushy about physical contact, for which she was grateful. After supper, when Claire went out-of-doors to play, they sat in the sun parlor, smoking cigarettes and letting a hesitation grow between them. For a while he held her in a great comfortable crush and then they necked like teenagers, letting their mouths move slowly over each other’s faces like cats lapping milk. His big hands were not intrusive; when she opened her eyes, he saw and stopped.
When she talked to Harriet the next day, Rhoda described the visit as having been a “great success.”
“I think it’s exciting,” Harriet said. “One trip to the mountains and look what you come home with. It shows the spirit of romance is not dead in this world.” Rhoda had been somewhat loath to dwell on her current triumph in front of Harriet, but Harriet’s enthusiasm seemed genuine. At present she was sitting in Rhoda’s kitchen, patting the dog under the table; she had just come from a morning golf class—she was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length white piqué wrap-skirt, and with her cropped silver hair and her deep tan, she looked, Rhoda told her, “extremely sporting.”
“He loved the house,” Rhoda said, “especially the backyard.”
“Well, coming from the city,” Harriet said.
“I thought I’d take him for a walk around the reservoir the next time.”
“He may be uncomfortable walking too long in damp areas,” Harriet pointed out. “I think his leg might bother him sometimes. It’s three miles around the lake and awfully marshy all through there.”
Rhoda had very happily planned this as their next expedition; she felt a little irked at Harriet.
“So you carry him. A new experience.” Harriet winked.
Rhoda did not want this sort of experience; she wanted her old experience back. Leonard had once hiked ten miles on a trip to Canada.
“Maybe you’ll bring the dog along with a keg of brandy,” Harriet said.
The dog gave one of his groaning yawns as he stretched to stand up. Timmy was getting gray around his muzzle. Harriet scratched him behind his floppy ears. His cocker spaniel breed had gone somewhat out of style. TV shows used collies and German Shepherds, more heroic types. He had been primarily Leonard’s dog, although he hadn’t acted especially depressed or confused after Leonard died. Rhoda remembered, with a touch of disgust at the dog’s lack of constancy, how he had jumped and fawned over Moe on Saturday.
After Moe’s visit to the house they alternated, week by week, meeting in his city or her suburb. Rhoda had never been to his home, a two-and-a-half-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights; he suggested it once, but he did not pursue the topic when she demurred. They saw movies together, he took her to Lili and Moulin Rouge; and one steamy night they went to an Italian street festival where they ate ices, he gambled and lost on the Wheel of Fortune, and she brought back a doll on a long stick for Claire.
Suzanne met him when she returned home from camp; as expected, she was polite but not forthcoming. He liked to spend money on all of them; he bought Suzanne a large coffee-table sort of book on butterflies—as insects went, they were not her favorites, being too commonly appreciated, but she warmed to him a bit more after that. Both children insisted on calling him Mr. Seidman and could not be coaxed into using his first name.
In the fall they went for drives into the surrounding countryside. He had found a roadhouse off the highway—a dark, cavernous place with neon signs in the window; Rhoda never would have picked it. He drank cocktails while the kids ate hamburgers. It was called The Embers, in an attempt at urban wickedness; sometimes the two of them returned alone at night for steaks.
His tastes were not exactly her tastes. He wore, for instance, a diamond pinky ring and heavy gold cuff links. Though he could well afford to, he never traveled—not since the war, if you counted that. He showed sometimes, in speaking of irritations in business, a crudity of language and a raw anger that dismayed her.
He had the long lantern jaw of a gangster. She watched him in restaurants; when he chewed his meal, quietly enough, he worked his back teeth like an animal. She wondered what she had told people about him. She was afraid she had exaggerated herself out of belief. A stiffness, as though she’d been caught in a lie, sometimes stole over her—she was in the wrong time and the wrong place—but it didn’t matter because she had to be there anyway. After dinner they held hands.
That he could speak of loving her so cheaply and so easily struck her as a lapse in judgment, a sign of insufficient depth in his character. He was, as the English would say, “a bit too free.” Still, the words had been said; they existed, as the past did, in sublime finality. In private moments they did come back to her, and she was awash in awe; it was as though she’d awakened one morning to find that she had already slept with him. She could not have been more shaken or more haunted with impression; she was, truly, so startled as to be reduced to girlish gratitude, yielding to self-congratulations and pitiable confusions.
In November she brought Moe to a large party at the Marantzes’. He was surprisingly quiet and shy, a nodding presence at her side. “A good-looker.” Annie winked behind his back. “Nice work, Rhode.” In general her friends were blindly encouraging in this way; he was presentable; it wasn’t up to them to look more closely. What if this is as good as it gets at my age? Rhoda thought. Millions of women had remarried on less. But they were small-minded people.
They left the party at midnight, and as she drove Moe to meet his bus (the trains had stopped running at that hour), he said, “Your friends think highly of you. I could tell that.” The streets were empty; the car’s motor seemed quite loud and disruptive making its way through them.
“I’ve known most of them for years,” Rhoda said.
“What do they think about the idea of your marrying again?”
“Some of them think of nothing else,” Rhoda said, laughing.
“Good,” Moe said. “Very good. I’ve got them on my side then.”
Rhoda realized that in a manner of speaking—a trivial and somewhat corny manner—he was proposing to her; she was making a turn at that moment and she couldn’t look at him. When she did catch his glance, he gave her a slow, meaningful smile. He went on about how pleasant all her friends had been to him; he had only meant to present the question, to disseminate it as information, and not to demand an answer.
The bus was coming—he reached for her and after they kissed he held her in a long treasuring hug which was much more suave and tender than his passing speeches. On the dark ride home, she was painfully lonesome for Leonard, with his natural stateliness and his sense of occasion. It made her slightly hysterical to think in this way. She could go neither backward nor forward. She couldn’t think of any man she knew, including her friends’ husbands, whom she really liked better than Moe.
Once she caught herself telling Suzanne, “Wait till Mr. Seidman gets here. He’ll fix the rung on that chair,” and she knew that she was getting used to expecting him. Suzanne said, “I think we should just throw the chair out,” but Rhoda took this—not as a slur against Moe or his abilities—but as another sign of Suzanne’s attitude lately. She had fallen into an early-adolescent scorn for the décor, the neighborhood, Rhoda’s cooking. But she had too much of a sense of privacy to be rude when Moe was around, which was another reason to welcome his visits. In December, with the weather nasty again, Rhoda suggested over the phone that he spend the whole weekend this next time. “There’s a sofa downstairs big enough for your big feet,” she said.
She had no fixed idea of what she meant him to think. She knew perfectly well what possibilities the arrangement suggested. After all she was “a grown woman” (as she sometimes described herself to Maisie)—direct in her judgments and not squeamish about sex; still, she was, in her own mental conversations with herself, discreet about her own desires. She was not capable of celebrating raw sexual feeling. Moe had, at certain times, evoked sensations long since gone to sleep in her—she was glad to know them again, but when the stirrings rose, they always came up against the limit of her feelings for him and settled back down again. The whole process made her restless and jumpy and desperate. She would have liked to have been hypnotized—sent into a swoon—by the intensity of his affection. She did trust his feeling for her. How could he not be devoted to her, when she was so much more than he was?
He arrived bearing a little leather overnight case like a doctor’s bag, and a gift for her, a book of cartoons he thought would amuse her. Fractured French it was called—“Femme de ménage” pictured a fortyish woman with deep cleavage and the definition, “a woman of my age,” and so on. “Clever,” she said. She was far too weak to dislike anything.
It snowed in the afternoon—which was very pretty and romantic, seen from the windows in the living room—but which kept them indoors. Claire talked them into making fudge with her, but she grew bored when it took too long to reach the soft-ball stage and she ran outside to build a snowman and left them to finish. They stood at the stove, taking turns stirring, sweating slightly over the sugary vapors. They brushed past each other, changing places, and Moe put his arm around her aproned waist. Rhoda felt sticky and drowsy. “What work!” Moe said. He took off his sweater in the heat, lifting it over his arms; there were deep, wet stains on his shirt. He pushed his shirt into his pants quickly, like a child tucking himself up before anyone yelled at him for his loose shirt-tails.
He apologized so profusely for letting the candy burn at the bottom of the saucepan that she began to think he was slightly afraid of her. All day he was full of foolishly fond, melting looks. “I love the way your mind works,” he told her when they were discussing Eisenhower’s foreign policy, while they played honeymoon bridge. And at dinner he said, oddly, “You have copper-colored eyes.” They were simple brown. She had nothing to say back. She murmured at him coyly. At the end of the night she gave him a pile of sheets and an extra pillow and went up to bed by herself.
But lying in her twin bed with the light off, she was surrounded on all sides by the fresh image of the humility of his passion, until the poignance of it pressed on her and drew out her own hungers. In the middle of the night she went to him. It was quite dark in the living room. “Is that you?” he said. They tumbled about, hearing each other breathing hoarse, impersonal gasps. She had expected to think of Leonard, so that when the direct physical memory came upon her, it was not so awful, and pain commingled with arousal: she was heartsick in a way that made her helpless and deeply moved. But across the heated exchange of sensation, as his hands reached to ready her, she had a sudden vision of what sex really was—the blunt crudity of its positioned grappling, the spreading intimacy of its secretions and exposures—so that it became unthinkable with this man, and in the end she stopped him just short of the act itself. They lay perfectly quiet, still bent and folded around each other in a form which was somewhat silly now because it had no purpose. “It’s all right,” he said. She felt like a crazy woman.
Her first thought—when she woke from a shallow sleep—was that she had to get rid of him as evidence of the terrible muddle she had made of everything. She began to slip away from him to return to her own bed, but when she stirred he reached out in his sleep and drew her to him with such resolute need that she was moved once again to melting confusion. She experienced an overwhelming temptation not to think about anything.
It persisted to the next day, and made her sleepy; she had difficulty following conversation, but Moe, who stuck to her side like a puppy, was full of amiable recitation and easily satisfied by smiles and nods. They were sitting having lunch in the dinette—the girls were outside—when she heard him say, “I don’t ever want you to have the idea that I would push you into anything,” and she thought, oh, no, he’s going to talk about it. But he was saying that he supposed she knew he wanted to marry her and what did she think about all that? She thought he must know better, from his business, than to begin a request by apologizing (he had dropped all the devices from his own world in coming to her, so that he approached her unarmed, awkward as a civilian). He had taken her hand, in courtly fashion, and in her embarrassment she looked down at the fingers covering hers—his nails, with their sanded elegance, so different from the hard rawness of the rest of his body, with its forest of hair and the pale shiny scar on his thigh. He seemed so painfully well-intentioned. She wondered if he was reassuring her because he thought she’d had eleventh-hour hesitations about her honor, whereas in fact she cared less and less about these things as she grew older. She gave him the answer he had provided her with. “It’s too soon to tell,” she said. It was the exact opposite of the truth.
He was the most compliant person. In the matter of sex their relationship was to stay at the same stopping-point for the indefinite future. Moe never complained; they developed a slow way of lying together, sweetly comradely, as though a shared fatigue kept them from the edge. The muddle of their truncated contact became completely normal. At times they were even playful with each other, romping.
It did seem to surprise him to find himself in this situation, a grown man. He would get up and hop about, kicking down the cuffs of his trousers, and moaning, “It only hurts when I walk, for instance. Who needs to walk?” He clutched himself in mockery of his own discomfort. It became a sort of family joke between them.
She actually liked him best when he was not around. She felt attached to him by reason of their nebulous but nonetheless factual physical intimacy. She allowed herself to think that she was used to his faults—everyone had faults, didn’t they?—his jokestering, his bad taste, his lack of serious purpose. He was just Moe (Moe-your-beau: one of his lines); and in the guise of fond acceptance she enjoyed, with the perfect languor of an auto-induced delight, the preening of her own generosity.
Just before Christmas they arranged to meet in the city so that they could walk up Fifth Avenue and see all the displays in stores, go window-shopping. At Lord & Taylor there was a wonderful diorama of little mechanical elves busy at their workshop. At Saks there were cool garlands of icicles and blue lights, piles of sweaters in luxurious, nonchalant heaps, and a scene of elegant girl-mannequins standing around a Christmas tree in their jaunty, vacant poses, arms stiff, wearing the most amazing loungewear.
“Look at that one,” Rhoda pointed. It was a dressing gown with an outer layer made entirely of lace, tiers of white over white chiffon. “Now that’s a gorgeous item. It must cost a fortune.”
“It’s Alençon lace,” he said. “You’d look pretty splendid in it. Quite the lady. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had one in your size. What are you—a ten?” He took her by the hand; he was about to lead her into the store—he wanted to buy it for her; Rhoda could not believe it. She drew back, dismayed. She had never worn a thing like that in her life.
“Where would I go in it?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Even if you only wore it around the house. Even if you just looked at it in the closet.”
“What’s the point?”
They walked on without speaking. “Are you sure?” he said. She nodded. He was always wanting to spend money on her, bringing her gifts. There was something infantilizing about having to clap your hands over a boxed set of earrings, and his own puppyish pleasure in pleasing her was not an uplifting sight. But the dreamy beauty of the gown had gotten to her—it was a perfect thing—and he meant well, even in his vulgar and irritating way of always flashing his ready cash, and she took his hand as they walked, attached to him with the faint stirring of regret.
That evening they went to a Turkish night club and watched a belly dancer. She was a young, broad-featured woman who ended her act by leaning into a full backbend, her upraised stomach still rippling; men slipped dollar bills under her costume or stuck them to her sweating flesh. Rhoda, smiling, clapped in time.
Moe saw her to the station (she was taking the train home this time) and kissed her before she boarded, like a war bride going home. In her sense of people watching them she forgot to kiss back; she was feeling both besmirched and flattered.
The night was bitterly cold, and her coat was inadequate. She hugged herself in her seat like a waif. It was too dark to see much out of the windows, she might be going anywhere; there was only one person at the other end of the car, an old man wearing earmuffs, falling asleep against his seat. She was overcome by the melancholy and the sense of being unlucky which overtakes travelers alone at night. But she’d had a good time, hadn’t she? Their times together were like candy, cheaply sweet and insubstantial. She was less than she might be. She thought again of Leonard, a more serious person. Lord Graveairs, she had called him once, after a character in a play. “Laugh,” he would say, “everything is a joke to you.” The train passed noisily out of one station; she saw the street lights reflected in the windows and then she saw herself, with her makeup paled and her lips dry, and she felt shallow and lost and not suited for better things.
Moe’s overnight visits were apparently exciting some interest among the neighbors, but since they’d spread rumors long before he’d ever spent the night and Rhoda had been righteously miffed then, she declined to get nervous now. Her father had spoken to Moe only once; since then he had retired to his room out of shyness. He who was normally so seedy-minded never questioned his daughter’s virtue; occasionally he teased her about her suitor. The children said nothing. Claire was glad of the company; Suzanne slept late and kept to her room till noon; still she had a tendency to know things. My kids, Rhoda thought, don’t ask questions.
Moe still slept on the couch when he stayed at the house. Rhoda, who was a light sleeper, could hear him in the night, padding back and forth to the bathroom. Once, on a windy night in February, she woke suddenly, hearing something at the front door. A train went by, clattering on its track a quarter of a mile away, and then she heard from downstairs a long, low moan, like a ghost in gothic tales. She thought she heard it again, a moaning.
She went down to the living room to find Moe crawling on his belly in the foyer, hitting his shoulder against the front door and rattling it. When she leaned over him, he clutched her with such sudden muscular force his fingers dug viciously into her ribs. She called to him to wake him, and he stared at her stonily until his eyes cleared and his grip loosened. “What was it?” she whispered. She was badly shaken, trying to remember how to calm someone safely. He shook his head. “Sometimes the war repeats on me like onions,” he said.
G.I. humor. He crawled on his belly through enemy fire, she remembered. Apparently it was the sound of the train that had set him off. He sat on the sofa with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “I’m fine,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
Rhoda said, “I wonder if they just changed the train schedule.” In fact she was fairly sure the train went by at the same time every night. It was one of those usual noises in the suburbs, like radiator pipes or rain on the roof; sometimes it woke her. There was no place they could put him where he wouldn’t hear it. She’d often seen the scar on his leg, a pale pink crater with a whitish line trailing off from it like a worm. She had not much cared, except from curiosity, but now he seemed abnormally disfigured, and she resented his taking her with him into disturbance. I need this like a hole in the head, she was thinking.
But the next day he was charming with the children, the night was gone, and it seemed overhasty and unnecessary to act on the basis of freak accidents, things done in sleep.
She was relieved when he asked her to meet him in town the next weekend, at his office in rooms above the factory. Following his directions, she went to an address in Manhattan’s grimy warehouse district at the close of the day, riding up in a rickety freight elevator manned by a leering young fellow chewing gum. The second floor was one huge room with a high tinned ceiling and walls showing heating pipes. People worked at makeshift cubicles partitioned by filing cabinets. At one end a row of women sat typing; behind them was a door with a sign saying THE BOSS; beneath it another sign said, NOBODY, BUT NOBODY, KNOWS DE TROUBLE I SEEN.
Rhoda gave her name to one of the secretaries. “What?” The girl grimaced. It was hard to speak politely amid the typing and the rhythmic chug of the machines from below. “Taber,” Rhoda said.
“Oh, go on in. He’s on the phone but it’s okay.”
He had his back to her when she entered, and he stood gripping the phone receiver and crouching forward as though he were about to pounce at the wall. He was yelling into the phone. “Forget Farber. Farber can go shove it up his ass as far as I’m concerned. You don’t keep your word, you don’t get your orders.” He turned as he heard her—his face was wrenched and hard; when he saw her he put his arm up with the palm raised: the sign to wait. “What are you saying to me? You will not. Not to me you won’t. Farber is a cheap scumbag. He thinks he’s so smart, next time he walks in here I’m going to break his arm and beat him over the head with the bloody stump.” His voice wavered into a high, hysterical note—“I don’t need him and I don’t need you”—and he slammed down the phone.
He kicked the desk. “Punks. I deal with punks.” Rhoda stared at him: he was out of control. Suddenly he reached forward and touched her hand. “Sorry about that. Bad day here.”
“So I see,” Rhoda said, smiling tightly and raising her eyebrows.
“Sorry,” he said again, shrugging. He began pulling papers out of a pile of invoices on his desk; he really was not the least bit sorry.
“It’s all right.” She was still bristling with horror at the violence of the language. She was also a bit frightened, afraid to say anything to him. Her instinct was to stay put and keep quiet, as though she had walked into a bad neighborhood with no protection. What if she’d had children with her? He actually thought it was all right to be like that. Probably it was normal in his world.
A low, pig-like way to behave. She could not stop thinking about it long enough to make conversation with him. He looked up from his desk. “Ready to go?”
“Whenever you are,” she said.
He put on his jacket and they left the office, walking east across town to a small Italian restaurant he knew. It was an unseasonably warm night—the crest of a brief mid-winter thaw—and the air was softly breezy with a foretaste of spring. She was reminded of the summer before when they had met; so it had been—what?—seven months.
They ordered veal and pasta for dinner and the waiter was very jolly because they both knew a few words in Italian. Moe’s accent was surprisingly passable. She did not, at that moment, dislike him; she had already reached the stage of forgiveness, pressed by the knowledge that it was over between them. She couldn’t see what there had ever been; she looked back, as through a tunnel, and saw nothing. She felt inestimably cheapened by the fact that she had permitted herself to hope.
“You liked that little restaurant on Prince Street, didn’t you?” he asked her the next time.
“Oh, I had a really terrific time,” she said. She felt comfortable lying to him now because she was decently sure he didn’t merit the effort it would have taken to tell the truth. He, on the other hand, grew edgier, always touching her hair and telling her how happy she made him, disturbing her in private with tight, tooth-scraping kisses. She would toss her head and laugh. In conversations she took to rubbing his hand reassuringly.
By spring she still saw Moe occasionally but he no longer came for more than a day’s visit. She developed new interests. In April, when the tulips came up in the front yard, she noticed they’d gotten smaller and smaller every year since Leonard had died, because she neglected to dig up the bulbs and store them over the winter. She began to work in the garden herself, putting in roses and begonias around the back, and hosing down the peony bushes to rid them of ants. When she dug in the earth she wore an old, ratty, red flannel shirt of Leonard’s, which hung loose and eccentric-looking over her dress and amused the children enormously. She wiped the sweat off her face so that the soil from her hands smeared her upper lip like a mustache, and she did not care. Not caring had a calming, luxurious effect.
On Moe’s last visit he brought with him a wooden pull-toy for Claire that was much too young for her. She thanked him with such mature resignation that Rhoda mused about what sort of man he was, so weak even children knew they had to lie to him.
They sat on chairs in the backyard to get some sun; a breeze came up late in the afternoon, and Rhoda drew her cardigan around her like a shawl. “I saw Annie Marantz the other day,” Rhoda said, “and she asked for you. She’s crazy about you.”
“Too bad for me you’re not under her influence,” Moe said. “Tell her I’d marry her except she’s already married. I can’t marry you any more, can I?”
She tried to explain tactfully about how she couldn’t, really, as though forces beyond her will kept her from wanting to. He stiffened and said, “Well, I hope I haven’t wasted your time,” and she shook her head emphatically, although that was exactly what she thought.
“Well, that’s good,” he said. He was standing in her garden, a crook-necked, defeated man with a prominent Adam’s apple, wearing a sports shirt whose short sleeves his laundry had pressed too crisply, so they flapped at his arms like creased wings. “My heart,” Rhoda told Hinda later, “went out to him,” expressing, in that generous common phrase, her pity, her contempt.