Part Five

Ben Farber, the lawyer who looked after Sofie Vrebolovich, takes care of everything. He shepherds my mother through the cumbersome laws of New York State, designed to keep people legally bonded even when they no longer love each other. I imagine when the divorce finally comes through, my mother has mixed feelings. “Let’s celebrate tonight,” Ben says as we leave the office. I imagine my father at the other end of the long hallway, looking back at us, at me. I imagine that in spite of himself, he feels a pang of doubt. Regret, maybe.

“Are you happy?” Ben says to me, by the elevator. “No more arguments between your mom and dad. You said you don’t like fights.”

I want to ask him again how a piece of paper can stop people from arguing. Then I recall what he told me about the war in a faraway place. “Armistice,” I say now.

“Silly,” my mother says. “There was no shooting. But, I tell you, sometimes I was so angry—” Her eyebrows go way up. I see where she penciled them over to cover up the gray.

“Mrs. Arnow,” Ben says, “I’d like you and you”—he pulls one of my pigtails—“to be my guests for dinner. And Mimi and Sheldon. Agreed?”

“What’s to celebrate?” my mother says. “To think after so many years, the marriage, is toyt. Dead.”

To cajole my mother, Ben jumps in front of her, his elbow grazing a passerby. “Look where you’re going, moron!” the man barks. “Pardon me,” Ben says, but moving sideways, he inadvertently steps on the shoe of a woman behind him. She yelps, they stagger backwards and collide with two clerks. Papers swirl in the air and spill onto the marble floor. The hubbub brings an elderly guard rushing over, but as soon as he sees it’s Ben Farber, he says, “Ah, the luftmentsh. ”

“His head is in the clouds,” my mother explains, suppressing a smile. I imagine I feel a pang of jealousy when she pinches his cheek. “Why don’t I make you some latkes tonight?” she says to him. “You’re so skinny.”

Ben’s arm cradles her shoulder. “Mrs. Arnow, you would do me a great favor by dining out with me.” I imagine it’s all he can do not to give away his ulterior motive. He wants my mother to meet his recently widowed uncle.

I imagine the neighbors hanging out the window take notice of the black car that comes to pick us up, the uniformed chauffeur who opens the doors and helps my mother and my sister and me in. I imagine my brother sits next to him in the front, and on the way to the restaurant, asks him to stop at the florist. My brother buys an orchid corsage for my mother, which she pins above her bosom. We are all wearing new clothes. My mother’s dress is a yellow silk print with matching jacket. Mine is blue velvet. My sister runs her hand against its nap. “It’s like a dream,” she says, “being able to buy whatever we want.”

My mother’s hand lifts up, then settles in her lap. “Money don’t buy naches.” Pleasure from accomplishments. “Or naches fun kinder.” Pleasure from children.

“You make it sound like all this money is nothing,” my sister says. “It’s brought us lots of happiness.”

“Kineahora, thanks to you know who,” my mother says, meaning Ben.

“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” my sister says.

“Emes,” my mother says. True. “Thanks be to the old lady, oleho hasholem.” May she rest in peace.

“And?” my sister prompts.

“And to my daughter, kineahora.”

“Oh no,” my sister says, “she’s back to the Evil Eye.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Making with the compliments, you can bring the Evil Eye, kholilleh,” my mother says.

“But what is it?”

My brother tries to explain, but I don’t get it. “Whose eye is it?” I ask.

“Anyone’s,” he says. “You don’t necessarily know. Isn’t that right, Ma?”

“It could be anyone,” she says grudgingly, “but let’s not talk ourself into something. Alevai, may Ben continue to be so good to us, and you—” My mother pokes my sister in the chest. “You don’t forget all he does for us—”

“Yes, Ma, he’s a genius, a whiz at investments, as honest as Papa is crooked, he’s the son-in-law you wish you had, if only he wasn’t queer—”

“All right, enough,” my mother says. “Zindik nit.” Don’t complain.

I actually remember some things about the dinner, how it was in a restaurant with dark-paneled walls and brass sconces that held lights with tiny black lamp shades, no bigger around than my mother’s potato pancakes. I remember a white linen cloth, and getting my own menu to read as if I’m already a grown-up. There are other details my mother recalls, and which she will share with me. The rest I have to imagine.

Mr. Farber, Ben’s uncle, is waiting for us, alone at a large round table. Before he stands up to greet us, I see the little bald spot on top. His hair on the sides is gray. The tie, my sister says later, is very expensive, and probably the jacket, though she isn’t crazy about tweed. What I notice are the gray eyebrows, so thick and bushy, they look pasted on.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mr. Farber mumbles. As we take our chairs, he avoids looking at my mother. He knows why his nephew is hosting the dinner. He glances at me sideways, the way my mother does sometimes to see if I’m being good. Turning to my sister, he says, “The mitzvah girl, the lady of kind deeds. What you did for Sofie—”

My sister makes a dismissive sound. “I wish I did a whole lot more.”

“I met Sofie,” I tell Mr. Farber. “Her last name is Vrebolovich.”

My sister gives me a look. She’s told me before not to interrupt conversations, but I hate being left out.

Mr. Farber sits between my sister and mother. I sit between my mother and Ben. Next to Ben is an empty chair, then my brother and sister. Soon a man comes to the table, and Mr. Farber stands up again. He gives my brother a look, and he stands, too. The man is tall, with a big nose, and wild hair that sticks out all over. “Isaac Abrams,” Ben says. “He’s an art historian.”

By the time the caviar and crackers arrive, my mother all but ignores Mr. Farber, spellbound by Isaac’s discussion of an obscure artist, Gabriele Münter. “No one paid her much mind,” Isaac says, “because she was a woman and the mistress of the famous Vassily Kandinsky.”

“And she subordinated herself to him,” Ben says. “He was her teacher before he was her lover, isn’t that so?”

“Fortunately for us, he only influenced her work to a point. She was otherwise under his spell, even when he left her to go back to Russia—where his wife was. Münter didn’t even know he was married until one day he sends for his belongings. She was a great admirer of Picasso’s work. And of course, no one is as blatant, with the penises and vaginas in plain view—”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Farber says prudishly, “I’m not used to such talk with ladies present—”

Ben taps his glass with a little spreading knife that I’m not supposed to call a spatula. “Has anyone besides my dear uncle been offended?” he asks. My brother looks at my sister, who shakes her head, her stare warning him not to say anything. “Uncle Sol, I’m afraid you’re outnumbered,” Ben says.

“This doesn’t offend you, Mrs. Arnow?” Mr. Farber asks.

“In bod zaynen ale glaykh. In the bath everyone is equal. What’s to hide?” she says. “Please, Mister,” she says to Isaac, “you go on.”

I imagine Ben’s heart sinks, thinking of his uncle’s disappointment with the woman who has no modesty, and of my mother’s indifference to his matchmaking.

The meal is lavish. My mother oohs and aahs at all the side dishes, especially the creamed pearl onions and white asparagus. “So much is included!” my mother says wonderingly. My brother starts to tell her about à la carte, but Ben sidetracks him. “Shel, how’re you making out on that car?” Ben explains to Isaac that my brother’s hobby is souping up old convertibles. Their eyes lock, but I don’t know what it means.

Bottles of wine come and go. Ben sneaks me a teeny sip, which tastes like cough medicine. From two glasses of Cabernet, Mr. Farber’s cheeks get red. He tells my mother she has the eyes of a falcon.

“This bird, it’s nearsighted?” my mother jokes. She sips the Cabernet and tries not to remember the last time she drank this kind of wine. In her mind’s eye she sees the narrow bed in the furnished room, then wills the picture away.

“In Egyptian art, the falcon’s eye is not only a symbol of sight but is coupled with the Eye of Horus,” Isaac says, “around which was developed a whole symbolism of fertility.”

“What’s fertility?” I ask.

Mr. Farber does a double take. “How old is she?”

“You can ask me,” I say. “I’m six. I’m in third grade.”

My mother puts up her index finger—a warning to me not to boast. “Go ahead, explain her,” she says to Mr. Farber. I decide she doesn’t know what fertility is, either.

“Being able to have babies,” Mr. Farber says, eager to be part of the conversation.

“Well,” my mother says—her chin juts toward me—“this one was my last. Now is only hot flashes.”

“Is it true what they say—the sex drive disappears with menopause?” Isaac asks. He peers mischievously at Ben.

“Change of life they don’t call it for nothing,” my mother says. “One day you think you’re a woman, good for something besides cooking and cleaning.”

“Good for what?” I ask.

She looks past me. “Just when you’re thinking you’re a really hot number, whoosh, the whole thing goes. You’re a shtekn, a stick. You look at men like they’re behaimehs, dumb animals walking around, some prettier than others.” My mother, on her third glass of wine, cannot believe she is speaking so frankly, but she doesn’t stop. “From the museum, I have all I need,” she says. “Emes. When it comes to the Greek sculptures, ai yi yi. Who can compare?”

“Ah, a Hellenist,” Isaac says. Ben generously explains Hellenist, even as he wonders if my mother is deliberately sabotaging his best-laid plans.

After coffee and dessert, Mr. Farber takes leave of us, singling out my mother. “It was a pleasure, Mrs. Arnow.” A nod but no smile. He stops by the hatcheck to get his brown fedora. The girl titters at something he says.

Ben looks crushed. “I wanted this to be an occasion,” he says.

“What for you worry?” my mother says. “The dinner, it was kosher veyosher.” Perfect.

After a round of liqueurs, Isaac leaves, too, but not before he pretends to send a little smooch toward me. His hand still near his mouth, he turns to Ben. I make a noisy pretend-kiss back. Everyone laughs. When Isaac has gone, my mother says to Ben, “Excuse me for asking, this Isaac, is he more than a friend?” The look on Ben’s face is hesitant. “Bubbeleh,” she says, “such a brain, I could fall in love with him too.” My sister shrinks back into her seat.

Later, in the rest room, I ask my mother a question that is burning in me. “If Ben and Isaac are more-than-friends, are they going to make babies?”

My mother laughs so hard, the tears come, and then I think she is crying for real, but I don’t know why.

I imagine that back at the table, Ben has shared his now-dashed hopes with my sister and brother. In the car going home, my sister asks my mother, “So, what did you think of Mr. Farber?” My mother shrugs.

“Don’t rush things,” my brother says.

“What?” my mother asks.

“Mr. Farber is a widow,” my sister says pointedly. “Ben was hoping—”

My mother sighs. “Feh, I’m a getriknte floym, a dried-up prune.”

“What was Ben hoping?” I want to know.

“What’s to hope?” my mother says. “Love, romance— a nekhtiger tog. Impossible. Maybe the finster yor, the dark time, is ending, but not altogether . . .” There is a silence in the car and for once I don’t rush to fill it. After a while my mother says, “Like the shadow of the Boardwalk, it goes and goes. You’re standing under, so you don’t know what kind of day it is, outside. The sun so bright, it makes you blind.”

“I thought there wasn’t enough room under it to stand,” I say.

“This one, a future lawyer, alevai. So exact.” My mother fans herself. “It’s hot, no?”

“No, Mama, it must be a hot flash,” my sister says. “Tell us about Brighton Beach,” she urges, before she remembers that strange story, how my mother wanted to kill herself.

“The Boardwalk, is like a fever when you’re going. But under, where the sun never is, it can make you so cold. Chills it gives you, even on the hottest days,” my mother says, and then she doesn’t say any more.

After he moves out of our apartment for real, I imagine my father stays in the basement of his brother Yakob’s house in Brooklyn. He is allergic to the two cats—named J.D. and J.P. after the tycoons Rockefeller and Morgan—but by closing the door, my father keeps them out of his bedroom and the closet-sized bathroom. Pluses and minuses, he thinks. On the plus side, the basement has a separate entrance. And his sister-in-law does his laundry in their new washing machine. “You want anything ironed, you send it out,” she says. My father knows he is in no position to complain. He has a radio in his bedroom, and he can watch the swell T.V. upstairs in the living room. From the snacks Lilli makes at night—sandwiches, fruit, rugelach—he fashions most of his dinners. It costs him almost nothing to live, which is good, he thinks, because who knows how much Chenia will ask for alimony, not to mention child support.

On the minus side, my father is sick of the commute to Manhattan. And he’s sick of Trudy’s kid. She’s old enough now to report his visits to Barney, so Trudy has to arrange for baby-sitters and make excuses to her husband why she needs them. My father and Trudy no longer have a place to make love safely. One night they go for a walk by the river and have sex on the grass. My father spends the next few days scratching the mosquito bites on his legs.

He still tries to contact Bertha, but her new phone number remains unlisted. The receptionist at her office says she will give Mrs. Landau the message, but Bertha never returns his calls. At work he daydreams about getting Bertha back. More and more it doesn’t seem so important to get the rush orders filled on time. When one of the men at the Jewish Club talks about Florida, my father wonders if he would like living there.

A few days after the dinner, Mr. Farber calls to invite my mother to a concert. She’s about to tell him she’s too busy, but she wonders what it would be like. Also, she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Even more important, she doesn’t want to hurt Ben. She doesn’t know why Ben has been so good to them. At first he wouldn’t even take money for all the work he did, and now he’ll take only a little, and only when she gets angry. She hopes he isn’t helping just so she’ll take care of his uncle in his old age. Many thoughts crowd her mind when she thanks Mr. Farber for asking, and says yes.

My sister is excited. My brother wonders if Mr. Farber is more interested in our sudden small fortune than in our mother. “You like him, Ma?” he asks.

“To tell the honest truth, I think he’s a mittelmessiger. An average man. He’s no lebediker.” An exciting person, she means. “So nu, we’ll go see what it’s about, this concert.”

When Mr. Farber comes to pick her up, my brother and sister stand guard, like the lions outside the 42nd Street Library. Mr. Farber is bearing gifts, clued in by Ben, I imagine. For my brother, there is a big book on old cars. For my sister, a big book on Impressionist paintings. For me, a big dictionary, a grown-up’s dictionary. He is sweating from the effort of carrying his load.

I stay up with my sister and brother, waiting for my mother to return. Close to one a.m., we think we hear her on the stairs. About to pull open the door, we also hear a man’s voice. We strain our ears but to no avail.

Finally she comes in, flustered when she sees our expectant faces. She waves the program in front of us, as if to prove where she’s been. “What he doesn’t know about music!” she says. “So nice, the hall! A big piano, with a big orchestra. After, we went for Sanka and layer cake and two hours of talking. Oy, I feel so terrible. All the way back downtown, he has to take the subway now. He is edel.” For once, she doesn’t translate.

One concert leads to another, and another. At first my sister and brother are impressed. Then they get suspicious. They ask Mr. Farber questions. They try to be subtle. I ask questions, too, but to show off: “What’s a concert?” “What’s a widower?” “Why do you want to go with Mama?”

I like the way he answers me, with a little teasing. “For what did I shlep a dictionary? Here, you know how to look up words, don’t you?” Or, “Your mama is so beautiful, why wouldn’t my ugly puss want to go with her?”

My sister wonders how long his patience will last.

My mother invites Mr. Farber for Sunday dinner. We are all dressed up to receive him. My sister carefully tracks his eye movements. Afterwards she pronounces Solomon Farber to have a crush on my mother.

“What are you talking?” my mother says. “We’re friends only.”

“Friends or more-than-friends?” I say.

“Friends. Dos iz alts.” That’s all.

My sister reluctantly agrees. Two months into the relationship, according to her intelligence from the peephole, Mr. Farber still only pecks my mother on the cheek.

I imagine my mother believes it would be good for us to have a stepfather, a man who is kind and decent, and so very cultured, yet she harbors doubts. She calls her sister “just to say hello,” and soon she is talking about why she can’t let “what should happen, happen.”

“But he’s a nice man,” her sister says.

“He’s a nice man, but what’s-his-name was also a nice man. I thought. And to tell the truth, I’m not attracted. I’m thinking I have to tell him not to waste his time.”

“Don’t tell him a thing,” my Aunt Ruchel says. “Give yourself a chance.”

Now when Ben calls to advise my mother on her investments, she doesn’t stay long on the line. Each time, Ben asks if she’s seen his uncle lately. And when she says yes, he says, “And so?”

“And what?” She feels guilty for not liking Mr. Farber more. She makes up excuses to Ben why she has to get off the phone. Once I hear her say she has blintzes on the stove. Afterwards she explains to me that lies are sometimes necessary.

“When?” I ask.

“Whenever,” she says. “When you don’t want to hurt someone.”

“I never want to hurt someone. Can I lie all the time?”

“Mach nit kein tsimmes fun dem!”

I already know tsimmes is stewed prunes, but I can’t figure out the rest of it.

“It’s not to make a big deal of,” my mother explains. “Lies and lies. When you’re older you’ll know the difference. Go read a book. A dictionary, I’m not.”

I imagine my brother has given no thought as to what he’ll do after graduating from high school. When Ben tries to interest him in college, my brother says he’s not a student. He feels cooped up in the classroom. He doesn’t say he cares only about cars and girls.

“I wish I was more like you,” my brother tells his friend Donny. “You always got two or three girls on a string. Me, if I really like a babe, I say, Why kid around with someone else?” He hands Donny a wrench.

I am sitting on the stoop near the car they’re working on, with a book in my lap, but it’s more interesting to listen to them talk, especially if they don’t know I’m listening. I turn the page even though I’m not done with it.

Donny steps away from the hood and lights a cigarette. “I don’t get so involved. One gives me static, I got the others, dig?”

“That Liza from the Bronx, whew, some looker!” my brother says.

I know looker means “pretty,” even though the dictionary only says “one who looks.”

“In the dark, what do looks matter?” Donny says.

“And if it ain’t dark?” my brother says.

“Hot dog!” Donny says, and whistles.

The next time I stop reading, Donny is talking about the Navy. “Whatever you’s interested in,” he says. “Engineering, auto-mechanics—”

“Auto-mechanics?” my brother says.

“Swear to God. They train you for a career. On their dime.”

“Officer!” my brother says, in a very serious voice. “Reporting for duty, Sir! Yes, Sir! I’m here to train for ladies’ man, Sir!”

“Don Sheldon Juan!” Donny says. “At ease!”

“Seriously,” my brother says, “to be on a boat, I couldn’t be that long away from girls.”

“That’s what they give you R&R for.” Donny catches me looking at him. “R&R, rest and recreation,” he says, for my benefit. Then to my brother he says, “And don’t forget, there’s the Waves.”

I look up recreation and figure out they’re talking about swimming.

As they leave Lewisohn Stadium one night, my mother looks up at the canopy of stars, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 rippling through her ears. What would it be like, she wonders, to look down at the world from up there? Would everything be so little, so unimportant? Like her troubled heart.

Even before he says the words, she knows what’s coming.

“Next week?” Mr. Farber asks.

“Better not,” my mother says. “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Farber. To know you is a blessing. But from all I went through already, my pulse don’t beat nomore. Farshtaist? To feel something again, I don’t think so. Not for anybody,” she lies. She knows in her heart that the hate she feels for Harry could change in a minute to something else—not love exactly, but extreme wanting.

“I thought the same,” Mr. Farber tells her, “and now I feel myself thawing, if I may say so, Mrs. Arnow.”

“Mister, Missus, this is how we are with each other,” my mother mocks, irritated she’s let things come to a point where she will have to hurt him now. “Everyone’s gone,” she says anxiously, realizing they’re almost alone in the vast, dimly lit stadium.

Mr. Farber takes no notice. “You don’t like my company?” he says.

“Your company I like, but what I can offer you is the question.”

“If I don’t worry, why should you?” he tells her. “Look how beautiful the stars. The moon is cold, but it gives such lovely light.”

A week goes by before Mr. Farber even thinks of calling my mother again, and only because he’s been given ballet tickets by an associate in the importing business. I imagine he dials our number a few times but hangs up before anyone answers. Unused to being indecisive, he sounds out his nephew.

“She respects you,” Ben tells him. “But that could be the obstacle.”

“Since when is respect a drawback?”

Ben thinks of his relationship with Isaac. He admires him so much, it inhibits him sexually. “Chenia needs to see the beast in you,” he tells his uncle.

“I should be a beast? This is the thinking of young people today?”

“Don’t deny your animal nature, Uncle Sol. Chenia’s very passionate.”

“About art, I know. But I’m also getting her to like music.”

“Her love of art, I should say her obsession with art—anyhow, Isaac says it’s sublimation.”

Mr. Farber hangs up, feeling even more confused. He thinks his nephew doesn’t understand because he’s homosexual, but maybe he has a point. After three months, it could be okay to kiss Mrs. Arnow—Chenia—for real. He invites my mother to the ballet.

Ballet. A magical word. She thinks, What’s the harm if she goes? She wonders if it’s like on Ed Sullivan, the dancers flitting so light, like butterflies. “Yes, thank you,” she says to him, “on that evening I’m free.”

Off the phone, my mother tells my sister, “Vera-Ellen I liked in that movie with O’Connor. Different from the Rockettes. Now with television—really, I could live without going. I don’t know why I said yes.”

“Ma! I wish I could go to the ballet,” my sister says, studying herself in the mirror.

“So go, what’s stopping you?” my mother answers.

“By myself ?”

“Go with your friend Suzanne.”

“She studies all the time. She wants to get a scholarship for college. She wants to be a doctor.”

“Mazel tov!” my mother says.

“Medical school costs so much, she might not be able to go. Ma?”

“The answer is yes.”

“If Suzanne—”

“I said yes.”

“Really, we could help her?”

“If she needs? Of course. We’ll talk to Ben to arrange it. And you? What do you want to be?”

“I want to study art, but I could also teach it.” My sister pouts in the mirror, wishing she could look like Marilyn Monroe.

My mother nods but doesn’t say anything, afraid to jinx the future. This is what she’s been hoping for her older daughter, to become a teacher. Alevai.

“And you, Ma, what do you want?”

“To make up my mind for the ballet, to go, not to go—”

“Ma, Sheldon and me, we talked it over—”

My mother’s stomach muscles tighten. “What?”

“If you want to marry Mr. Farber, we think it’s all right. I don’t think Devorah would mind, either.”

“The little one would drive him crazy, kholilleh,” my mother says. “Anyway, I hardly know the man. Oy, look at the dust on those books!” My mother gets the feather duster and swipes hard at the bookcase, from right to left, left to right. Soon there are clouds rising over the living room.

On the long subway ride home from work, my father thinks how he’d like to stretch out on the bed and take a nap. He’d like to dream of something besides women who can’t even sew straight seams, women who double-count their piecework to get more pay. Gershenfeld is getting so stingy he even keeps track of how many pencils and erasers he hands out.

At home, my father finds the cat sitting on his bed as if it’s a throne. Irate, he scoops it up and flings it outside. The cat lands on a small, sharp rock. Its high-pitched yowl brings Lilli out of the bathroom, where she’s been cleaning. “What have you done to J.P.?” she cries. The cat eludes her grasp and leaves a trail of blood. That night my Uncle Yakob steels himself and asks his brother to find his own place.

“You’re right,” my father says.

Surprised, my Uncle Yakob says, “I wish you well, and so does Lilli.”

“The cat, it’s okay?” my father says.

“The vet gave J.P. some stitches. He’s on the mend.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

Uncle Yakob doesn’t ask.

Over his wife Vera’s objections, Arthur Vogel asks my father to stay with them until he figures out what he wants to do.

Before my father moves, he buys a box of Cuban cigars for his brother and a bottle of Chanel No. 5 for my Aunt Lilli. He buys a big fish at the fish store and has it boned for the cats. He can tell by the way Yakob nods at the gifts that he’s made an impression. My father notes this new feeling in himself: satisfaction.

In the diner on Dyckman, Vera Vogel tells my mother, “It’s only a temporary situation to have Ruben live with us. And we’re not taking his side.”

“How can diner be a place?” I ask. “I bet it’s ‘one who eats.’ ”

“Finish your cocoa,” my mother says. “Go on,” she says to Vera.

“I forget.” Vera smiles at me. “You’re still wearing the locket.”

“You gave her so beautiful,” my mother says. She touches her neck.

“Where’s your necklace?” I say, remembering the gold heart with the middle part missing.

“I lost it,” my mother says, with that voice that means she doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bickford’s?” I say. I have a flash of my mother throwing something before she threw the glass at Peter the Wolf. Was it the necklace?

“Anyhow I don’t have to be concerned with how Ruben’s getting along,” my mother says, wondering why he didn’t go to the rich lady with buckteeth.

As if reading her mind, Vera says, “Bertha’s putting him through hoops, that one. ‘Yes, Bertha,’ ‘No, Bertha,’ ‘I’ll lick the floor for you, Bertha.’ Oh, now I’ve said too much. She refuses to see him.”

My mother shrugs. “Alevai, he should be well.” Anyhow, she cannot take in the import of Vera’s words, not when she is preparing to tell Mr. Farber—Sol, she corrects herself—it’s over between them. Not that there was anything, she thinks, but maybe in his mind . . .

“Where are you?” Vera asks.

“At the ballet,” my mother answers. “Tonight I am going with my friend Mr. Farber.”

Vera’s eyes light up. “Oh, you didn’t tell me you’re keeping company.”

“Keeping company,” my mother says. “That’s a good expression.”

For weeks after the performance, my mother rhapsodizes: “This Metropolitan Opera House, with the balconies going up and up to the sky, ek velt, out of this world. Downstairs, the men in tuxedos—one, he’s in a mink coat, ai yi yi— and all the women, gloves to their elbow and such skinny dresses. Even before the dancers come out, I never saw, oy, anything so beautiful—” She rhapsodizes over the ballet: “And on the biggest stage, the pink gauze skirts like flowers; the love duet”—as she calls the pas de deux that made her cry—“how you can see every muscle of the men, their thigh, their tokhes, even.”

“I want to see it too,” I say. “When are you taking me?”

Meaning only to amuse him, my mother mentions my nudzhing to Mr. Farber. Soon the three of us are going to the ballet. “Swan Lake. There’s a prince—” Mr. Farber starts to explain on the subway.

“I know the story,” I interrupt.

“Excuse her, her sister already read her,” my mother apologizes. When Mr. Farber says to her, “But I want you to know the story, too,” she doesn’t say I told her what I learned. She listens to the whole thing. Then she nods when he says, “You’ll like it.”

His presentation is so matter-of-fact, so plodding, neither of us is prepared for the ineffable beauty. We are so rapt, we nearly forget to breathe. Once, Mr. Farber rattles his program and my mother hisses, “Shhh!”

As soon as the curtain comes down at the end, I say, “I want to see it again. Take me.” My mother doesn’t even correct my bad manners. “Me, too,” she says.

At home we hold my sister captive as we try to explain what it was like.

“The best part,” my mother says, “is when the swan it’s dying. This one,” she says about me, “I see the elbows going up and down, in sympathy. She don’t want the swan to die. I don’t want the swan to die. A tear dribbles down my cheek.” She doesn’t say that she felt Sol’s hairy knuckle gently shmearing the tear over her face. She doesn’t say that this is the moment she thinks with him there is a future.

have you, don’t I! Don’t I?” She kneels down and low-What do I need him for?” Bertha asks her dog Silvey. “I ers her head practically to the Turkish rug to rub noses with the terrier. “Yeeess,” she purrs, “I have my Silvey dear.”

She rises and puts a linen hankie in her evening bag. In the mirror over the credenza, she primps and purses her lips. “It’s all your fault,” she tells the dog. “I just had to show you to Arthur and Vera. Yes, Sweetheart, Mama did.”

She recalls ringing the Vogels’ doorbell, with Silvey in her arms. How the door opened, and how it took a moment to register what she saw. It wasn’t Vera or Arthur. It was Ruben. How could she have known he was there? All she’d wanted the moment before was to show the Vogels her new dog.

She recalls the long, silent moment that passed between her and Ruben, how he stroked the dog’s withers, how she set the dog down, what the smell of his talcum was like as she buried her face in his shoulder . . .

“What do I need him for?” she asks Silvey in the mirror. Every day she asks the same question. Every day the answer seems to her further away.

“If I worked at night, we could see each other during the day, when the kid goes to school,” my father says to Trudy on the phone.

“Mmm,” Trudy says as she buffs her nails. “Did your boss go out?”

“He’s in North Carolina. I do his job and mine—and for the same pay.”

“You have time to call me,” she says.

“What, you think I’m lying? So, what about tonight?”

Trudy is sorry she answered his call. He is starting to get on her nerves. “I couldn’t get a baby-sitter,” Trudy lies.

“Enough with the excuses, Trudy. I think you don’t care no more.”

“Ruben, if it’s so easy to find a baby-sitter, you do it.”

“You shouldn’t have adopted Hannah.”

“Don’t say such a thing. She’s the apple of my eye.”

“And what am I? Anything to you?”

“Ruben, I care, I care. What do you want me to do?”

“Leave Barney.” My father doesn’t know why he says this. What would happen if she took him seriously? he thinks, but then he knows she won’t.

“It wouldn’t be right,” Trudy says. “He’s a very good daddy to Hannah.”

Without saying good-bye, my father sets the phone down in its cradle.

Impatient at how slowly things are moving, Ben invites his uncle and my mother to his place for dinner, which he cooks himself. My mother has been to Ben’s before, but still she can’t get over it—the black and white furniture, the bathroom painted a deep red, the mirrored ceiling of the bedroom.

“How you learn to cook so wonderful?” my mother asks. The chicken breasts are stuffed with oysters and mushrooms. The corn pudding melts in her mouth. The salad has lettuce she’s never tasted before, dark green and purple, and teeny shrimp.

“I know it isn’t kosher,” Ben says apologetically, “but being a sinner is good for the soul.” He winks at Sol.

“You think this is true?” my mother says, suddenly very serious. “How can sinning be good?”

“Oscar Wilde says you only make progress through disobedience and rebellion.” Ben rolls his eyes. “The way you’re looking at me . . . Well, suppose you were perfect, and you did everything in your life perfectly. What would you learn from it? What kind of person would you be? You’d be insufferable.”

“Insufferable?” my mother says.

Ben wonders to himself how Chenia can have a six-year-old with a vocabulary bigger than hers. “Obnoxious,” he says. “A horrible person to be around.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” my mother says. “But there are sins and sins—”

Sol exhales noisily through his nose. “Chenia, I can’t imagine you sinning. Or worrying about sins.” His smile is so peaceful, my mother thinks. There is no way he could ever understand what she’s been through.

As soon as Ben has set down parfait glasses of chocolate mousse, the phone rings. “Oh Isaac,” my mother hears Ben say. “I’ll be right over.” Ben hangs up and tells his guests he has a little emergency. “Stay where you are, the coffee is hot, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Before my mother can object, Ben is gone.

At the table Sol makes a tentative gesture of reaching for my mother’s hand. He holds it, he rubs it. “So soft,” he says before he lets go.

“Don’t stop with the massage,” my mother says.

Soon they are holding hands on the sofa. Sol removes his glasses and kisses my mother, not one of his usual quick pecks, but a long and lingering kiss. He does not open his mouth.

So sweet, my mother thinks. This man is too good for me.

After a few such kisses my mother says, “Tell me about your wife.” I imagine she wants at that moment to put a wedge between them, but the story he tells is not what she expects.

Sol tells her that his wife was in pain for years, that she went from doctor to doctor, but no one could diagnose what was wrong. “After a while she went to a spiritist, to talk to all her dead relatives, which I thought frankly was meshugge, but she said it was the only thing that helped.

“Everything she ate, she said didn’t agree with her. Every day I made concoctions for her special in the blender,” Sol says. “She got thinner and thinner. I think she was depressed, who knew why? One day she collapsed on the bathroom floor. They said it was a heart attack. She was only fifty-two.”

“You miss her a lot?” my mother asks. It’s not an innocent question. She wants to know how much room there is in his heart—not for her, but for her children—in case, just in case things should develop.

“We were married thirty years. No children,” Sol says. “You get used to a person after such a long time.”

My mother says, “The bed after my husband is gone, it feels so big.”

“For the ten years my wife was sick, we slept in separate rooms. My bed is a single bed, but now I’m used to it.”

“Oh,” my mother says. She looks at her hand, which Sol is rubbing again. “A farshlepteh krenk. Ten years is a long time for such a sickness. I wonder what it was. And you were good to help her.”

“ ‘In sickness and in health.’ I wouldn’t be honest if I said I didn’t miss getting affection. I’m alone now, but in many ways I was alone then too.”

Now my mother initiates the kiss. She opens her mouth, but Sol keeps his closed.

This time when Trudy asks my father to go with the group from Temple to Las Vegas, right away he agrees. Trudy is shocked. She expected him to say no. She expected them to have a big fight. She expected to tell my father they shouldn’t see each other for a while. Now she has a problem.

“Your boss will let you go over Christmas?” she says.

“I’ve been there long enough. I’ll take my summer vacation early.”

Trudy brings him the flyer from Temple. “Let’s stay at the better hotel,” she says. “It’s only five hundred extra.”

My father feels as if a chicken bone has caught in his throat.

“If I go, I go first class,” Trudy says. “And I want to see all the shows, no matter what they cost.”

“All right, all right,” he tells Trudy. Chenia hasn’t asked him for any money yet, he thinks, and he pays the Vogels very little from his paycheck. It was even his idea to pay rent, so he doesn’t feel so obligated. He wonders what it would be like to sleep all night with Trudy. He wonders if she snores. But the more my father considers the vacation, the more he worries. He knows if Bertha catches him, she will never take him back.

The headmaster of my school sends a letter to my parents, which my mother reads.

“Are you in trouble?” she asks me.

“No,” I say.

“Then why do they want to see me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you didn’t do something wrong?”

“Like what?” I say.

“A gezunt in dein pupik!”

“Pupik is ‘belly-button,’ ” I say.

“That’s where your head is,” my mother says. “Thanks for nothing.”

My mother shows the letter to Sol. “What is ‘social adjustment’?”

He tells her the school has concerns about the way I relate to others.

My mother laughs. She tells him about Trudy Fleisch’s kid. “ Khas vesholem, mine should be more like that one? Nit heint, nit morgen.” Not today, not tomorrow.

I imagine this is Sol’s first glimpse of my mother as rebel, one he cannot totally fathom. “They want you to call and arrange a meeting,” he says. My mother makes a sound of distress. “Would you like me to do this for you?” he offers, knowing it’s not pure altruism on his part.

My mother debates with herself for a few seconds. “I tell you, what I really want—you should come with me. You know how to talk to them with their big words.”

“I’d be honored,” Sol says.

Awkwardly my mother introduces Sol as her friend to the headmaster and to my teacher. “Friend of the family,” Sol amends.

I imagine they deliver a litany of my sins: “Devorah constantly interrupts—the other children, the teacher, even during a fire drill. If someone is reading and gets a word wrong, Devorah blurts out a correction. She acts as if she’s the teacher,” Mrs. Blendheim says. She taps a pencil on her palm.

The headmaster says, “She was remanded to my office for disrupting the class. I had her write a composition acknowledging her behavior. May I read to you what she came up with?”

“Please,” Sol says.

The headmaster reads aloud my story about a girl named Angela who promises to keep quiet but keeps breaking her promise. The first time it’s to tell a boy to look out, before he falls into a hole. The second time it’s to tell the class that the school is on fire. The third time it’s to tell the teacher that his zipper is open. After that, the teacher is so grateful, he makes it Angela’s job to tell people things whenever she wants.

My mother hoots when she hears about the zipper and again at the end, when she hears, “ ‘And Angela became the biggest buttinsky in the world.’ ”

“What you want?” my mother says to them. “You want to make her like everybody else? She could be dull like so many people”—she has to restrain herself from saying, “like you.”

Sol immediately offers apologies. “Devorah means well, but we’ll talk to her. It’s only common courtesy, not to interrupt others.” He thinks he will have to talk to Chenia too.

My mother says, “This is some special school, nu? For the talented, nu?”

“We’re also teaching these talented children to live in a civilized society.” Tapping the pencil hard on the edge of the headmaster’s desk, Mrs. Blendheim says, “At home do you allow her to do whatever she likes?”

“No,” my mother concedes, “I tell her something, she does it. She’s like a grown-up, you know? My older girl and my boy, they weren’t so good, but not so talented, either. The little one talks too much, emes. I let her, but not always.”

“Is that it?” Sol asks. “That she’s a buttinsky? She’s not hitting or biting, she’s not setting fires—”

“You have to realize,” the headmaster says, “it’s very disruptive in a classroom, especially when other children take their cues from her.”

My mother takes her cue from Sol’s chagrined expression. “Okay,” she says. “The kid, she’ll do better. But that story, it’s good, nu?”

“It shows a manipulative sensibility,” Mrs. Blendheim says.

Sol interprets.

To hold in her anger, my mother keeps her eyes on Sol’s placid face. “Maybe the little one, she’s better to start over in a different class.”

To her relief, the headmaster agrees. “We can try it—”

That afternoon my mother and Sol talk to me. They ask me why I interrupt the teacher.

“She makes mistakes,” I say.

“Like when?” my mother asks.

“When she speaks French,” I say. “She says ‘mun-SIR’ for Monsieur.”

“It’s very embarrassing for the teacher to have a little girl tell her this in front of everybody,” Sol says.

“I can’t learn her anything?” I say.

“Not in front of the whole class. And if a girl or a boy in your class makes a mistake, you have to let the teacher do her job. I suppose you learned that word buttinsky from your mother?”

“No!” I say gleefully. “That’s what Ben calls me.”

“Well, suppose I took the pencil out of your hand and finished your story myself? Would you like that, Miss Buttinsky?”

“Is your story better?” I ask.

“You’re incorrigible,” he says, “and you can go look that one up.”

Later my mother says to Sol, “So much I appreciate, your help.”

“For what? For nothing.”

“Being with me. Is so hard with the little one, doing everything by myself. My son and older daughter try to help, but you know what I mean.”

“I would like to be a father to your children. Would you like to be my wife, Chenia?”

I imagine he has caught her at a very vulnerable moment. “Yes,” she says, as surprised as he is to hear the answer.

Ben offers to help Sol pick out an engagement ring, but Sol wants my mother to pick out her own ring. They decide to do it on a Thursday afternoon when I have Science Club after school. The Monday of that week my mother begins to get cold feet. She calls her sister in Jersey.

“He’s too good for me,” she tells my Aunt Ruchel.

“Believe me, I know you, you would do him a favor to be his wife.”

“I don’t know if I love him.”

“What is love, my sister? More to the point, what good is love? Look at all the harm it does.”

“There you have something,” my mother says.

All day Tuesday, my mother chews on her situation. Can she love this man? Does it matter if she can’t? Will he know? Is it a sin to pretend? What can she do for him? Round and round the questions go, keeping her awake that night. For the first time ever, she oversleeps. On Wednesday I am late to school.

After she drops me off downtown, she thinks of a way to test herself, to see if she is good enough for Solomon Farber. She takes a taxi back to Dyckman Street and Broadway. From there she marches straight into Magic Shoes, her heart drumming, and asks for Mr. Taubman.

It isn’t excitement—a thrill at the thought of being near him. It isn’t rage. The rage she had once, it almost makes her shiver. Deigeh nisht, she tells herself. Don’t worry. It isn’t like before, in the days when she wanted to come in with a knife, to leave a scar on him bigger than the one on her daughter.

After the clerk at the register buzzes him, Harry walks out between the customers trying on shoes. As soon as he sees her he stops, then begins moving again, slowly. He has gained weight, my mother notices. His face is fuller, he has a belly that pushes out behind the vest, like a pregnant woman. He doesn’t look surprised to see her. He looks afraid.

When he’s within hearing distance, she says, “What? You think I have a gun to shoot you?”

“You make a joke, Mrs. Arnow. Let’s go outside,” he says, taking her arm.

She shrugs her arm out of his grasp. “No, I just wanted to see for myself the momzer.” Bastard. She doesn’t stay long enough to see Harry react. As soon as momzer is out of her mouth, she throws back her shoulders, turns, and strides out of the store. Outside, she hails a cab as if she’s been doing it all her life.

Riding along the Henry Hudson Parkway, my mother marvels that Harry didn’t look at all like a baizeh kheiyeh, a vicious animal. How she built him up in her mind! And he wasn’t even so handsome as she remembered. He’s just a man, she marvels. He couldn’t help himself either.

My father waits until the three men in suits leave his boss’s office. He doesn’t know who they are. He adjusts his tie and strides down to see Mr. Gershenfeld, surprised to find him at his desk with his face in his hands. Too late, he cannot retreat when Mr. Gershenfeld asks him what he wants.

“Time off over Christmas,” my father says, “instead of next summer.”

Mr. Gershenfeld strokes his beard. “That might be a good idea. That will give me time to figure things out.”

“What things?” my father asks. Maybe Gershenfeld saw the unfilled orders that have piled up on his desk.

“I wasn’t going to say anything so soon, but you’ve been a good, loyal employee.”

“You’re selling the factory?” my father guesses.

“Labor. Labor costs are killing me. We’re moving to North Carolina. If you want to keep your job, I’ll pay for the moving, and you can have a raise—only a small one, but it’s cheaper living there than here.”

“Moving,” my father repeats dully. “When?”

“We’re aiming for April. There are infinite details to be ironed out. Take your time, think about it. If you don’t want to move, I’ll give you an excellent reference.”

“Thank you,” my father mutters. He stands up, feeling dazed. Already he’s forgotten the answer to his question.

“A man of your experience, you’ll get something else,” Bertha says to my father. She sets the teacup back in the saucer. “I’ve let it get cold.”

“I don’t know. I’m no spring chicken,” he says.

“You’re thinking of moving, Ruben?”

“Away from you? Never,” my father fibs, “but Gershenfeld offered me a huge raise.”

“That reminds me, I wanted to ask you. About your wife. Your ex-wife. You said you weren’t paying alimony or child support.”

“Chenia doesn’t ask, I don’t volunteer.”

“But what are they living on? I happened to see Chenia step into a taxi last week, on Dyckman Street of all places. Last night she steps out of a car—you know, a private car service. Did she come into an inheritance?”

My father shrugs. “If someone died, I would have heard. I think her sister gives her. The husband has a good business.” My father pats his thigh. “Here, Silvey. Here, boy!” The dog jumps into my father’s lap and rolls onto its back so that my father can scratch its belly. “What kind of dog is this again?”

“Lhasa apso, it’s a kind of terrier. I think Silvey needs to go out.”

“I’d rather stay here with you,” my father says.

“Ruben—”

“All right. I’m your slave.”

My father goes to retrieve the leash, wondering why Bertha was in his neighborhood, so close to where Trudy lives, unless it was to spy on him. He consoles himself with the thought that she trusts him with Silvey. She’s as crazy about Silvey, he thinks, as Trudy is about Hannah. What is it with women? For what did God give them the equipment to love men when all they care about are children and animals?

Opening the closet door, my father sees a wad of bills on the floor. He picks it up and tries to hear if Bertha has left the sofa. All is quiet. He thumbs through the wad. All hundred dollar bills, nine of them. He thinks about slipping the wad in his sock. Too risky, he decides. Then he thinks of taking one and returning the rest.

“Ruben!” Bertha calls out. “Did you find it?”

He comes into the living room. “This is what I found.” He hands her the entire wad.

As soon as he has left with Silvey, Bertha counts the bills. When my father returns, she smothers his face with kisses. “Let’s go have a really nice dinner with the money you found,” she says. She takes a couple of bills and puts them in his pocket. My father wonders if there’ll be enough left after the dinner to buy a new pair of shoes.

From the courthouse, Ben calls my mother, all excited. “Chenia, I found the perfect place for the party. An art gallery. New Year’s Eve it won’t be open, and it’ll be a dramatic backdrop, to say the least. Isaac got it for us.”

“What art gallery? Not the Metropolitan? It’s too big. Or the Frick?”

As Ben has told Isaac, Chenia never ceases to surprise him with what she doesn’t know. “A gallery, where paintings are shown to be sold. A painting and sculpture store,” Ben says. “You must have seen them in Greenwich Village, only this one’s on Madison Avenue.”

My mother is quiet. She cannot imagine a party, least of all an engagement party, in a store.

“Well, at least see it before making up your mind. I just got a continuance on a case, so I could take the afternoon off to show you.”

My mother has never heard Ben so miffed except when he scolds me sometimes for twisting his words. At such times my mother finds it funny, a grown man arguing with a child. Sol has told her that lawyers will argue with anyone, whenever they get the chance. My mother agrees to meet Ben at his office, and together they go to the gallery.

It’s a store, like Ben said, she thinks, with a painting on an easel in the window. Inside it’s wider than she pictured, and deeper, with very high ceilings. “We’ll clear out the furniture, of course, set up the bar over there, or wherever you think . . .” Ben says, racing around. He’s trying to help my mother imagine how it would work, but it’s unnecessary. As soon as my mother sees these paintings that cover entire walls, with their crazy splotches of color, she hugs and kisses Ben with such fervor, he says, “Hey, save it for my uncle.”

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, my brother enlists in the Navy. My sister says he should wait to tell my mother, but he can’t.

“With the party is enough for a nervous breakdown,” my mother half jokes. “Now I can worry about you too. For how many years?”

“Four. I don’t go in till I graduate in June. They’ll even pay for my going to college, if I want.” My brother is practically dancing in place with his news. “Don’t worry, Ma, there’s no war on.”

“Vos vet zein, vet zein. What will be, will be.” She can see my brother is excited. She feels a little sick, but she manages to say, “You’ll leave a boy and come back a man. This could be all right, kineahora.”

“Ma, if you’d only stop already with the Evil Eye. Tonight I’ll bring Delilah by the party, but we won’t stay long, okay? We don’t have a lot of time left together.”

“As you want,” my mother says. “I know, love has to come first.”

Right away she calls Sol to tell him her son enlisted, surprised he thinks it’s a good idea. “Today a high school diploma counts for nothing. At the very least he’ll have a trade. Cars aren’t going away in our lifetime, Chenia. Personally, I think he made a wise choice.”

“I love you,” she says. “Your good heart.”

There is a strange sound on the other end of the line. A sniffle? She wonders if he’s crying. “Solly?”

“That’s the first time, Chenia. That you said it.”

“Words,” my mother says dismissively. “Vifil kost a sho?” What do they cost by the hour? “I mean it,” my mother says. “On the head of my little one.”

What a dilemma! my father thinks, about New Year’s Eve. Bertha is already making plans, but how can he get out of seeing Trudy? One thing he has going for him: he can avoid a showdown with the two of them at the Vogels’ annual party. The Vogels have gone to Florida. To escape the bookies, Vera told him.

Lately Trudy is driving him up a wall. After he got the days off for Christmas, she told him Hannah needed surgery, so she couldn’t go to Vegas. A hundred-dollar deposit he lost.

On the phone today he pleads with Trudy. “Why don’t you come over? I have this place all to myself. Don’t you miss me?”

“Of course, but with all this medical treatment for Hannah, what can I do, Ruben? Anyhow, it’s the Sabbath. We’re going to services tonight.”

My father cannot stand another moment without her. He takes the train, which he knows he shouldn’t do on Shabbes, to go to synagogue in his old neighborhood. He does it just to catch a glimpse of Trudy.

She is there with Barney and the kid. The veil over her eyes from the black hat makes her seem mysterious. Her hips look bigger with the sash on one side. My father brazenly goes up to the Fleisches, intending to sit with them during the service. Barney greets him warmly, pats his back. “How is this one?” my father says, about Hannah.

“A-one,” Barney says.

“Everything’s fine,” Trudy hastens to add.

“The surgery turned out okay?” my father asks.

“What surgery?” Barney says.

“On her eyes.”

“Where did you get that idea?” Barney turns to Trudy, who looks down.

My father says he must have heard it wrong from the Vogels. He changes the subject to New Year’s Eve and asks Barney if he’s working.

“No, we’re going to Las Vegas with the Temple,” Barney says. “From there we’ll fly to Palm Springs. Hannah’s aunt will look after her. You look so surprised.”

My father sees the rabbi emerge, but he cannot control himself. “Your wife and I were supposed to go to Vegas. Together. Ask her.” To be sure that Barney knows what his wife has been up to, my father makes an obscene, unmistakable gesture with his fingers, and stalks out of Temple.

There is nothing left for him now, my father thinks, riding the subway back downtown. He must get Bertha to marry him. Then he can lead a comfortable life, free of worries about money. With all Bertha’s meetings and committees, he’ll have his evenings to himself, to do whatever.

Though he’s not supposed to buy anything on Shabbes, my father has a sudden craving when he gets to his stop. From the little candy store down the block, he buys Good & Plenty’s. Going up in the elevator to the Vogels’ apartment, he pops the black and pink capsules in his mouth, but his mouth opens and the candies spill out on the carpet as he sinks to his knees, sobbing.

Before the elevator door opens, he pulls himself together. In the hallway two men are standing in front of the Vogels’ door. One of them says, “Arthur Vogel?”

“No, he’s moved away.”

“Sure,” the other one says sarcastically. He removes his own glasses and puts them in his breast pocket.

“I swear to the Almighty,” my father says. “I’m not Arthur Vogel. I’m Ruben, Ruben Arnow.”

My father feels a terrific blow to his lower back. After he’s down on the tile floor, the kicks and punches come, and a foot on his face, and then he blacks out.

All through the engagement party, Sol never leaves my mother’s side, except to bring her drinks and hors d’oeuvre. So different, she thinks, from the New Year’s Eve at the Vogels, when Ruben was always someplace else, flirting with the women. She recalls the horse face of Trudy and the buckteeth of the Landau woman. To push away the memories, she points to a painting on the wall. “Four thousand dollars, Ben said.”

“You want it? I buy it for you,” Sol says.

“You Sweet,” she says, very loud, because the gallery is very noisy now, crammed full with lively guests. She loves seeing the people dressed up, eating, drinking, smoking, laughing. With Sol and me in tow, she moves through the crowd, introducing us: “My intended, my little one.”

Never before have I seen her without a trace of melancholy.

“Now where are you bopping off to?” Sol says, as she rushes to the entrance. Of course we follow. My Aunt Ruchel is there and Uncle Isaac—“the other Isaac,” my mother calls him now—and my Cousin Sandy.

“Rhonda couldn’t come,” my aunt says apologetically.

“My own daughter, you think she’s here? Maybe later,” my mother says. “So where is she?”

My aunt knows my mother means Millie. “Parking the car. She brought her husband, I hope that’s kosher. Bubbeleh, let me give you a kiss.” I think she’s talking to me, but she means Sol. “We’re thrilled to have you in the family.”

“Mrs. Peisner, I appreciate it,” Sol says.

“What’s this Mrs. business? Ruchel to you.”

And then Millie and her husband come in. “So stylish!” my mother pronounces, about her print dress, the blue of a peacock, and the broad-brimmed hat. Her husband has on a dark suit that looks too big for him; later we learn it’s Uncle Isaac’s. After my mother hugs Millie, Sol shakes hands with her, and then Millie pretends to try to lift me. She moans and groans as I giggle, and just when I think she’s given up, she hoists me overhead. “Lord, is you heavy! You’s too big to be a flower girl at the wedding.”

“No!” I say. “I’m going to be a flower girl. It’s a fait accompli.” I love how they stare. I don’t tell them Ben taught me the expression.

“Mrs. Arnow, ma’am, I’d like to cook for your wedding. And I’m not gonna be charging you.”

My mother fiercely shakes her head no. “It’s a small wedding,” she says to Millie. “No bridesmaids, but you get anyhow an invitation. After all what you did for the little one—”

Seeing Sol’s puzzled expression, Uncle Isaac says, “Chenia had a bad bout of pneumonia once. Devorah came to stay with us while Chenia was in the hospital. Our two families are like one. Right, Chenia?”

When my mother kisses my Uncle Isaac on the cheek, I know she isn’t mad at him anymore. Sinners can also be good people.

No sooner does Millie set me down, a man passing by hands her an empty glass. “Dummkopf!” my mother mutters. Dumbbell. She grabs the glass from Millie. “Millie, what would you like to drink?” Sol asks. “And you, sir?” he says to Millie’s husband, as Ben and his friend Isaac join us.

Then my brother shows up with his new girlfriend. I don’t like Delilah, because she never talks to me. If I ask her a question, she’ll say, “How long did you take thinking that one up?” but she won’t answer.

Sol greets them with typical banter. “If she’s Delilah, are you Samson?”

Delilah rumples my brother’s hair. “It’s already too short, and now it’ll get mowed off in the Navy.”

“But the hair on his chest will grow,” Ben teases.

“I don’t like hairy chests,” Delilah says.

“Why not?” I ask.

“They’re ugly,” she says, looking straight at me. I think she’s trying to tell me I’m ugly too.

“We know who isn’t ugly,” my brother says, giving her waist a squeeze. My sister says Sheldon likes Delilah because she’s busty, but I think she’s being silly.

After they leave, the five-piece band shows up and plays klezmer music. People are clapping and stomping to the lively rhythm, and soon dancers holding hands form circles within circles, some moving clockwise, some counterclockwise. Then I see my mother is dancing by herself in the very center. She’s clapping her hands over her head, and I like just watching, but Sol makes me clap, too.

My mother’s arms are high in the air now, and she kicks with her left foot to the right, her right foot to the left, before she takes a couple of steps, going in her own circle. After she goes round and round, she comes to get Sol, and holds hands with him as they kick. Sol looks uncertain, but my mother has never looked more confident.

Just then, my sister arrives with Robbie, her new boyfriend. They come and stand behind me, and my sister keeps saying, “Oh my God! I don’t believe it!”

“She’s cute,” Robbie says.

“Cute?” Mimi says, incredulous. I know she feels mortified, but I don’t care. It’s the most wonderful thing, to see my mother dance.

Finally the music ends and there is wild applause and whistling. My mother applauds, too, thinking it’s for the musicians.

My sister stays long enough to sample all the food, zeroing in on the miniature quiches. After she and Robbie are gone, my mother says to her sister, “What can I do about that one? A fresser, she eats and eats.”

“Her boyfriend must like them Rubenesque,” my aunt says.

“Rubens, the artist,” Sol explains. “Even Degas’s ballerinas are a little zaftik.”

“I like the Expressionists,” my mother says, “all the skinny people, their long faces.” She glances at Sol. “And Picasso.”

Sol takes my mother’s right hand and brings it to his lips. “One more hour till the New Year,” he says.

Lying in bed that night, my mother hugs the extra pillow. She is not in a hurry to go to sleep. Dawn comes as she thinks about how she got from there to here. What was it her mother used to say? Got hit op di naronim. God watches out for fools. She thinks about the party, about Solomon Farber. Such a mekhaieh—a pleasure—to be in his presence! she tells herself. Passion, whatever it’s good for, it ain’t everything.