Part Six

Before I discover the necklace, I am certain that after my mother marries Solomon Farber, nothing interesting happens in her life. They are close companions, devoted to each other and to the symphony and ballet. “Oy, the passion in that Lenny Bernstein,” my mother is fond of saying. Sol silently admires Margot Fonteyn, so strong yet feminine. My mother and Sol go for long walks in the city, and they travel, but only short distances—to the Poconos and the Adirondacks. When Sol proposes we go to Europe, my mother develops nightmares, because she is afraid of airplanes, especially over water. She becomes a sort of expert on plane crashes. “Nineteen fiftyfive, I remember it,” she might say in the middle of a conversation. “The plane went down, two planes that year, in the west United States.”

In her nightmares, planes crash and people die, but not my mother—she becomes the rescuer. In one, she tries to pull a man into a rowboat; in another, she tries to catch a baby that falls through the air. In both she fails.

Sol gives up the wish to travel abroad and accompanies my mother to art galleries. She accompanies him to baseball games. They dine with Ben, they dine with friends, they look forward to all the occasions of family: the birthdays, graduations, weddings, brises, bar and bas mitzvahs, the seders, and even Thanksgiving.

My sister, tending toward plump, fights constantly with my mother over her diet. “These portions are huge enough for a horse,” she complains one night. When Sol intervenes, my sister screams at him for taking his wife’s side. For the first time ever, my mother slaps her.

At first I treat Sol as an extension of my mother. I ask him questions that dictionaries can’t answer. I ask if he and Mama are more-than-friends, and when he says yes, I ask how can that be true, if they’re not going to have babies. I love making him stutter. I ask how an atlas can be flat and also round, and after he painstakingly explains, I ask how they can both be accurate. Exasperated, he says, “The world is full of mysteries.” This, I like to hear. I like the answers that are like puzzles.

Mostly, Sol’s answers are so tedious that, halfway through, I regret asking the question. Sometimes I can tell he answers just to be polite. I know he’d rather be reading The Wall Street Journal while he sits quietly next to my mother, no matter what she’s doing—ironing or sewing or polishing the silver they acquired as wedding gifts. “Sol would sit next to her if she was doing number two,” my sister says.

On our outing to the Dyckman House, where a Dutch family lived once upon a time on their big farm, Sol has to remark on every tile and spoon. I get so bored I walk on ahead or linger behind, and then they get mad at me. Wherever I used to go with my mother alone, Sol now comes along. Under my breath, I mutter, nuchshlepper. Hanger-on. But not so my mother can hear me.

Even to grocery shop she waits till Sol gets home, no matter how irregular his hours. Sometimes he leaves his office early. Orders pile up for Japanese figurines and brass incense pots, ceramic salt and pepper shakers, elephants and palm trees—what my mother calls tsatskehs, meaning “things you have only to dust, what we don’t need.” The importing business is so good that Sol hires additional helpers. He tells my mother, “Frankly, one I hired so I’ll have more time to spend with you.”

He spends time with my mother at the A&P, where it takes forever to fill the basket. They have long discussions over which kind of cookie is best, and what brand. I ask if I can wait for them outside, but they always say no. I bring comic books to the store to read. I know Sol doesn’t like comic books.

Sol comes with us even when we shop for clothes. I refuse to model for him, but my mother does. When we go to the beauty parlor, Sol shleps us back and forth. There I can’t talk to my mother either, because she sits under a hair dryer and thumbs House Beautiful.

As separate as my mother’s life has been from my father’s, with Sol it’s close to the point of what my sister says is suffocation.

“Is Mama really suffocating?” I ask.

“Mama has no room to breathe. Don’t worry, not literally.”

“Literally?”

“It’s just an expression,” my sister says.

I don’t see my mother suffocating. If anything, she seems to breathe easier. She is très calme, I write in my diary. She no longer uses her sharp tongue, which I miss. Sol is now the comedian of the family, but there’s no bite in his humor. When we move to a spacious apartment on West End Avenue, I think my mother lets go the last of her eccentricities: her fear of the Evil Eye.

Downtown, my mother and Sol become even more inseparable. My sister is able to make jokes about Mama and Her Shadow: “Her Shadow says it’s time for dinner.” “Her Shadow went down to the mailbox by himself.” I feel my mother becoming a shadow as well, and the two of them slipping away from me.

After Sol becomes our stepfather, my father continues to telephone us on Sundays. He asks how my brother is doing in the Navy. He asks my sister how she’s doing in school. He asks me if I still love my papa.

“Yes, Papa,” I say, because that’s the right answer.

“Better than your stepfather?”

“Yes, Papa,” I say, but I don’t really understand the question. I can’t admit this vague longing I have for him, for his gruff presence, for the strength of his hairy arms around me. Is this what my father means by love?

With the help of my teacher, Miss Spinelli, I write a play that my fifth-grade class performs. Afterwards Sol hands me a bouquet of pink and purple flowers, but he doesn’t say a single word, good or bad, about what he saw.

“What did you think, Mama?” I ask my mother.

“Nu, I should be surprised you do this?”

I’m struck by the notion that while they’re standing right there, they seem to be behind soundproof glass.

Her arm through Sol’s, my mother says Sol made reservations at a fancy restaurant.

“He knows you like fancy restaurants, Mama.”

“Me? He did it for you.”

“I want to eat at the Chinks on Dyckman. A combination plate, with pork fried rice.” I know Sol won’t allow us to eat pork.

My mother bops me in the head. “Es brent mir ahfen harts.” I have a heartburn.

“You’re getting under her skin,” Sol says. “Is it necessary? You’re such an intelligent girl. Hours and hours your mother and I have spent discussing you. Yes, you. We don’t know how to handle you.”

“I don’t want to be handled, thank you.”

My mother shoves my shoulder. “You’re right, but you should say it different.”

Outside the Belevair School, I press my face into the flowers and inhale.

“You could thank him for the beautiful bouquet,” my mother says.

“That’s the conditional tense,” I say to Sol, “when she means the imperative. Thank you. I never got flowers of my own before.”

“Never had,” he corrects. He seems eager to get us on our way, but I linger, relishing the attention of my classmates and their families. My friend Dina comes up to us with her parents.

“You’re the writer I’ve heard so much about,” Dina’s mother says to me. “What a scream—that line Miss Hearts says about love! Remind me.”

I recite, “ ‘Love is like bonbons. You can’t tell if the center’s going to be hard or gooey.’ Then Mr. Flowers says, ‘Or nuts— the kind you can break your teeth on.’ ” Sol’s brow dimples. “It’s a metaphor,” I tell him, using a word I’ve fallen in love with.

“A joke, no?” my mother says.

“Yes, but it’s also serious,” I say.

“This could be,” my mother says. Elegant in a black dress and fox stole, she’s staring at my classmate’s father.

“Delicious!” he says, looking directly at my mother. His mustache reminds me of Papa.

Nightly, I cover pages of my diary with just the word Papa, but it doesn’t fill the emptiness. I make a conscious decision to wean myself from my mother and Sol. I no longer seek their attention. I don’t ask them questions. Mostly I go limp and do whatever they want. I keep my thoughts to myself. It’s easier than feeling excluded.

Before I graduate from Belevair, I am no longer an extrovert. I sit quietly in my classes. I don’t volunteer answers. I get stomachaches when teachers call on me. I communicate mostly with my diary. In my diary I begin to imagine my mother’s past.

I begin with the memories I have of things I can’t explain. The Cloisters. Peter the Wolf. The red valentine’s box that holds my mother’s sewing needles and assorted buttons. The time I spent in New Jersey. I make up explanations, but the mystery remains.

My vague longings to be close to my father dissipate when I realize the separation is permanent. He is moving to North Carolina. I learn this from my mother who learns it from Vera Vogel who tells it all to Sol: “Ruben decided he should move since Bertha Landau broke it off with him.” My mother quotes Vera: “ ‘News travels fast. You wouldn’t believe what he pulled at Temple. Little does he realize, Bertha’s old schoolmate, she’s sitting right behind them. It’s fate.’ ”

“Consorting with a married woman,” Sol says. “What could the man be thinking?”

He glances at me as if maybe he’s said too much, but I can tell he doesn’t really care. I’ve become for him just part of the mismatched furniture my mother shlepped from the old apartment.

“What is this, consorting?” my mother says.

Sol no longer stops to explain to my mother every little thing. He continues his thought. “In Temple, yet. Has he no sense of right and wrong?”

I see my mother looking out the window, far into the distance, between the Hudson River and the moon above.

I imagine my mother is seized with a sudden loneliness.

To fill her husband in on the finster yor has been her secret wish, but now she knows it cannot go. To tell him, the earth would open up between them. And for what? For the first time in her life, the ground under her feet feels solid. Sol, solid, she thinks. Such a perfect name! Yet something in her longs for danger, for the pull and tumble of the Atlantic Ocean, for a glimpse of a green fedora.

woman?” I ask my sister. “The dictionary says it "Why is it bad for Papa to consort with a married means ‘associate with.’ ”

My sister informs me that consort means “to have an affair with.”

“How do you know,” I ask, “if it isn’t in the dictionary?”

“Don’t be silly. You learn words from hearing people use them.”

“Ben says the whole English language is in the dictionary.”

“Not curse words,” she says.

“Consort is a curse word?”

“I guess you can call it that,” my sister says.

She doesn’t know how her offhand answer troubles me. I cannot believe my father would put his penis in Trudy Fleisch’s vagina—in anyone’s vagina, actually. I am even glad he is moving away.

The next time my mother mentions my father and Trudy, I tell her, “It’s gossip, why do you want to believe it?”

“When you grow up—” she starts. I open a book and place it over my face.

My mother brings up my father a lot now, usually when she talks to Sol. Usually she is making comparisons. “The way you help with the dishes,” she says to Sol, “Ruben would never.”

She speculates about my father, how he’s doing in the heat of North Carolina. “You think he likes his job?” she asks Sol.

“Why not?” Sol answers.

“The factory, it can get so hot. You think it’s air-conditioned?”

“I doubt it.”

“What’s it like, this place, North Carolina? I know, you told me, it’s hot, but what else?”

“It’s very green. Rural. Mostly farms. The cities are small. People live in houses. They eat trayf. Bacon grease with everything.”

“Oy,” my mother says. Once I hear her use the word umgliklekn, which I know means “unhappy.”

At age ten I start seventh grade at Finestar Academy for Girls. Sol talks my mother into sending me there because “the school has backbone.” I don’t mind, because I find it easy and can use my time for other things. I correspond with a boy in France, only he’s a figment of my imagination. Mon cher ami. Finally, when I get tired of answering myself, I turn my attention to writing a play for Valentine’s Day, because the ones in the book are so dumb. In my play, Cupid is not very good with the bow and arrow, and makes a lot of mistakes.

I read everything I can about love, my sister’s grown-up books, such as Giant by Edna Ferber and Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, which is old but very good. I read parts of it over and over, and cry. In Sol’s locked bookcase I see a book called Sexual Behavior in the Human Female by Alfred Kinsey. I use a bobby pin to open the lock, a trick I learned from my brother. It’s the most amazing book. I ask my sister what extramarital means. Soon my sister is also reading the book. So far, it doesn’t mention love, but I think love has to do with it, anyhow.

From North Carolina, my father sends my sister and me presents at Hanukkah but forgets our birthdays. Once, he comes to New York for the week of Rosh Hashanah, and invites us to eat with him in a delicatessen downtown. “There’s no deli where I am. I could go crazy for corned beef on rye,” he tells me on the phone, “meshugge for kosher dill.” My father, to my recollection, has never before spoken Yiddish. Though I feel anxious, I’m curious to see him again.

My sister, who is student-teaching art, simply refuses to go. “I just look at food and I gain weight. Besides, what do I owe him?”

Sol and my mother insist that my sister accompany me. “Whatever you think, he’s your papa,” my mother says.

“Two or three days a year,” my sister says. “That’s worth honoring?”

“From where you get such a smart mouth?” my mother answers. “For many years he supported you, he supported all of us. You think it’s easy to work in a hot factory?” Unaccountably she begins to weep.

Shocked, my sister says she’ll go, after all.

“Don’t do me any favors,” my mother says.

My father is not alone at the Formica table in the deli. Beside him is a woman in her late forties, with creased, bronzed skin and a smile that rivals Miss America’s. At first I think my father has just told her a joke, but it turns out she’s smiling at us, my sister and me, as we walk across the creaky wooden floor. She doesn’t let go of the smile until after the introductions.

“Goldie is opening a Hadassah chapter in North Carolina. The first one in our city. There aren’t so many Jews as here,” my father explains.

My sister is on her best behavior. “That’s very nice, Mrs. Chaffee,” she says, and reaches for the bowl of pickles in front of us.

“Please, call me Goldie. So you’re familiar with what Hadassah does?”

“Not really,” my sister says.

Goldie leaves her tongue sandwich untouched as she tells us about Mitzvah Day projects and teaching the Midrash. “Our Temple has a tikkun olam project.” I guess we look blank. The wrinkles in her tanned brow deepen.

I can’t stand it. I have to ask her to explain tikkun olam. She looks reprovingly at my father, who scrapes the last of the coleslaw from the pleated paper cup. “Repair of the world. To further Jewish identity, moral integrity, and social action,” she says.

I have no idea what she means but it sounds interesting.

“You weren’t bas mitzvahed?” Goldie says to my sister. Wrinkles fan out at the outer corner of her eyes as she smiles at me. “For you there’s still time.”

“Sol would like that,” I say. My sister kicks me under the table.

While my father is in the men’s room, Goldie tells us she has a grown-up son in college in Florida. “My husband passed, may he rest in peace, after a car accident.”

“I’m sorry,” my sister says politely. “Where did you and Dad meet?”

“I’m the bookkeeper at the factory. At first I wouldn’t have a thing to do with him outside work”—she looks to one side, remembering—“I went to our boss, Mr. Gershenfeld. So everything would be on the up and up. And here we are.”

“Where?” I say.

“I’ll let your father tell you.” But after he comes back, she keeps on talking.

Later, when we critique Goldie, my sister says, “Did Papa get two words in edgewise?”

“Did he even try?” I say.

“Should we tell Mama?” she asks. “Will she be jealous?”

“We’ll tell her about Goldie’s wrinkles and all the Jewish stuff.”

“ ‘Moral integrity,’ ” my sister sneers. “I think Papa puts up with that horseshit because she’s so much younger than he is. Leopards don’t change their spots.”

I have at least a dozen questions to ask as we stand on a street corner, under a lamppost, but I choose the most important. “Why did Mama cry when you said you weren’t coming tonight?”

“Menopause,” my sister says.

“That was before, when she met Sol. She was always fanning herself.”

“Oh, right,” my sister says. “I hope she’s not going crazy again.”

“What do you mean?” In the pit of my stomach I feel queasy, but not from the pastrami.

“You know,” she says, “from that time.”

“What time? Tell me!” I say.

“When she went crazy.”

Now I think I’m losing my own mind. “When did she go crazy?”

“Maybe you don’t remember it. You were three or four. She went crazy, and they put her in a mental institution. That’s why you went to Aunt Ruchel’s.”

“You’re nuts! Mama had pneumonia then. Uncle Isaac said so, at the engagement party. I’ll never forget it.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I’ll ask Aunt Ruchel,” I say.

“Go ahead,” she says. “But it’s true.”

Aunt Ruchel says it’s all a misunderstanding. “Your mother, she was worn out.” The way she says it, I start studying my mother now for signs of insanity: how she looks, how she sounds, how she acts. Everything is normal, disgustingly so. She is as placid as Sol, and at least as boring.

For a memento, I make a list of my mother’s former eccentricities: how she would talk to herself in Yiddish; how she would lose her temper in public places; how she was so afraid of the Evil Eye, she would throw salt over her shoulder, or spit, or stink up the house and our clothes with garlic.

I wonder now if she was crazy then and why I miss her the way she used to be.

“You!” my mother says to me.

“What? I picked up my room already.”

“I want to ask you something,” she says. There is danger in her voice, but what could it have to do with?

“What, Mama?”

“Asia, where is this?”

“It’s a continent on the other side of the world.”

“What’s this, continent? Like going to the bathroom?”

“I think that’s incontinent. A continent is a land mass, there are seven in the whole world.” I start to recite them, but she cuts me off.

“Show me,” she says.

In Sol’s den, I show her on the globe where we are and where Asia is.

“Where’s New Jersey?” she asks. There is a new smile on her face, a wistful one. “I didn’t have schools like you. And you, you don’t know enough to appreciate. So, Asia, it’s far, nu?”

“Why do you care where Asia is?”

“Solly’s going. On business. He wants me to go, but the airplane, it takes all day and night. Crazy I’m not. You’re smiling.”

“No, Mama, you’re not crazy.”

The week before Sol’s trip, my brother comes home for a weekend and right away notices my mother’s long face. “You look like you’re sitting shiva, Ma. Who died?”

“Such things you don’t joke about, hear?” she says. “I’m worried about Solly’s plane. My nightmares, the planes they fall from the sky. Or boom! one goes into the other. Now Solly wants to fly to Asia. A whole day he has to be in the sky, coming and going. We should both live through it, alevai.”

“A thousand planes take off and land every day,” my brother tells her. “Not just in airports. From our ship—they take off and land on the deck. They don’t crash. It’s very rare.”

“It’s the very rare I worry for, not the safe ones,” my mother says.

No longer gangly, my brother has filled out just enough to make his leanness attractive. With his cap angled on his head, he looks like Frank Sinatra. He wants to talk about places he’s been—Burma, Malaysia, Singapore—but Sol asks if he’s learning a lot about auto-mechanics.

“I’m teaching them,” my brother says. “About trucks.”

“How can this be, you’re not on a boat?” my mother says.

“Yes, Ma. We’re military transport. We gotta transport everything—weapons, trucks, tanks.”

“Fixing trucks—this makes a good living?”

“I don’t know, Ma, but I like the Navy. Don’t be surprised if I re-up.”

“Reenlists,” Sol explains.

“We may be going to Germany next month, it’s just a rumor. Because of the Russians,” my brother says, then remembers that Russia was where she was born.

Sol pretends to spit. “You couldn’t get me there—”

Even my mother stares at this burst of passion.

“It’s not as if I have a choice,” my brother says.

“Please, I don’t want to hear such words in connection with Germany,” Sol says. “You’ll excuse me.” After he leaves the room, my mother tells us he lost all the relatives on his father’s side in the concentration camps.

“You go by boat all the way there?” she asks Sheldon. “I feel better.”

“Remember the Titanic? C’mon, Ma, I’m just clowning around. We have plenty of life rafts, God forbid anything.” He puts his arms around her. “Flying is no big deal, Ma. I flew up from Virginia. And tomorrow I’ll fly back.”

“Ver volt dos geglaibt!” my mother says. Who would have believed it!

I imagine the very first meeting happens right after Sol leaves.

My mother is in a state approaching hysteria because Sol is in the sky, someplace over the water. All night she was awake, with the radio on. If the plane crashes, she figures she’ll hear it on the news. After I leave for school, she has her coffee and a toasted English, and calculates that Sol still isn’t on the ground yet in Asia. The hardest part, she thinks.

She puts on a new dress to make herself feel better, and medium heels so she can walk. Too restless to go to a museum, she goes to Broadway and heads south, without a destination in mind. She strokes the fox collar of her jacket, another gift of Sol’s, just because he felt like, she recalls telling her sister.

On 72nd Street she sees a new store has come in, Magic Shoes. She stares hard—like a yekl, a greenhorn, taking in the sights. Still staring, she continues up the street, distracted finally by a plane passing overhead.

My mother looks up, and in the moment she is contemplating how it can possibly stay up there, her right shoulder collides with the right shoulder of a man not much taller than herself. Her heel catches on a crack in the sidewalk, and she goes stumbling forward, but the man grabs her from behind. She looks up, expecting the plane to fall out of the sky.

With his arms still on her forearms, the man glances up too. “Pardon me!” he says, and drops his arms. His glance follows hers to the pavement.

“Oy, my shoe, it broke,” my mother says.

The man quickly stoops to pick up her heel. “There’s a shoemaker around the corner, I’m sure he can fix it.”

She meets the man’s eyes, the color of caramel. She can’t put into words how they make her feel.

While the shoemaker reattaches her heel to the shoe, my mother and the man sit in adjoining booths, a wooden partition between. She thinks it’s strange for him to wait with her. The shop is very dark, his face in shadow when he introduces himself as Zeke Bialowski—Polish, he says. Already she forgets his last name. She doesn’t tell him her name.

“I’m a salesman. Jewelry,” he says, hoisting the black case off the seat to show her. “You live around here?”

“More uptown,” she says. “You must be busy. You don’t have to stay.”

“I feel responsible. If you have lunch with me, I’ll make it up to you.”

I imagine that when she says okay, all she is thinking is that he’ll keep her mind off Solly.

The steak house looks to my mother like a bar, the kind she went to with Harry. She wonders why he’s come to mind now after such a long absence. Then she recalls the new store on 72nd. Magic Shoes.

“My husband, he’s on an airplane to Asia. Right now,” she says to Mr. Bialowski.

“And why aren’t you with him?”

She shrugs, not wanting to tell him of her fears.

“You don’t like flying?” he guesses. “I don’t blame you. Remember when the two planes collided right over the skies here?” He shudders. “I wouldn’t fly, except for my job. We’re based in Frisco, but the business is here, Mrs. uh—”

“Mrs. Farber.”

“Mrs. Farber, may I recommend the lobster?”

“Ah, you’re not Jewish?” she says.

“Roman Catholic, but I’ve lapsed some.” He laughs. “Too many sins to confess, so I go to the goditorium only once a year.” My mother’s expression is quizzical. “Goditorium— what I call church,” he explains.

What a character! my mother thinks. “You’re a big sinner?” she prods.

“Very big. Not murder, almost everything else. I like lying. It’s creative. I cheat on my wife every chance I get.”

“You’re joking, Mister, no?”

He takes the matchbook out of the ashtray, moves his fist in a little arc, opens his hand. The matchbook is gone. “Now you see it . . . What about you, Mrs. Farber? Are you a sinner?”

She shakes her head no. Not anymore, she thinks.

“You’re one of those faithful wives, cooking, cleaning, waiting for the old man to come home?”

“You make this sound terrible.”

“Like death warmed over.”

“What this means?”

“Barely alive. You don’t feel like you’re in a domestic prison?”

“Prison? I thanks God for what I have. My Solly, he’s an angel.”

“I hope not,” Mr. Bialowski says. “Let’s hope the plane landed safely.”

A few hours later, when my mother is home again, Sol calls from Hong Kong. “What a long flight! Turbulent. We bounced around so much, the passengers applauded when we landed. Everything okay by you?”

She tells him how she bumped into a man and broke her heel.

“Here it’s a shopper’s paradise. You could buy all the shoes you want. They supply all the chains in New York now, like Magic Shoes—”

“Solly,” my mother interrupts. She tells him she had lunch with this strange man. In her nervousness, she goes on and on.

“Don’t faint when you see the telephone bill,” Sol says gently.

“Solly, I love you,” she says.

“That’s good, because the trip may take a little longer. I may have to fly to the Philippines.”

“Oh no, please—”

“Chenia, there’s no danger. Repeat after me: There’s no danger.”

Dully, she repeats the words. But in her mind, she sees the blood-red sign on a white background: MAGIC SHOES.

Right away the phone rings again, and my mother picks it up.

“Mrs. Farber? It’s Zeke Bialowski.” When she doesn’t respond, he says, “The man you had lunch with today?”

“Yes, yes, but how did you find me?”

“I’m a genius. I used the phone book. I’ll tell you why I’m calling. I just happen to have an extra ticket to Fiddler on the Roof.”

“What’s on the roof?”

“It’s a Broadway play. Fiddler on the Roof. I’m sure you’ll like it. It sounds like I’m flirting with you, but all I want is your company. Is that a sin?”

“I’m too old to flirt with,” my mother says, “so long as you understand.”

“To be honest, it’s not my first choice, but I accept your frankness. You’ll see the play with me? Eight o’clock. That gives you plenty of time.”

My mother knows Sol wouldn’t like her to go. At the same time, she knows if she explains it right, it won’t cause any trouble. By Sol, she can do no wrong. “Mister, if I can pay for my own ticket, I go with you.”

“I got the tickets from a distributor. They didn’t cost me a dime.”

“You’re lying, no?”

My mother puts on a wine velvet dress that Sol picked out. And the pearls he gave her for her birthday—necklace and earrings. She likes how she looks but suddenly recalls her sister saying once, “Pearls are unlucky.”

“Shlimazldik? How can that be? All the famous actresses, the rich people, they wear the pearls,” she told my Aunt Ruchel.

“What do we know about their lives? Myself, I wouldn’t take a chance.”

My mother sifts through her jewelry box. Nothing else goes so well. She considers changing the dress but now time is running out.

“Where are you going, Mama?” my sister asks. “Your lipstick’s too red.”

“Oy vey.” She swipes a tissue across her lips, and in a minute my sister is back with one of her dozens of lipsticks. Using her pinkie, my mother smears the purplish-red color on her small, heart-shaped mouth.

“It’s perfect,” I say. “You look very nice. Where are you going?”

“To fiddle on the roof.”

“Pretty funny, Mama. Sol’s gone one day and you’re getting your sense of humor back.”

Walking into the crowded lobby with Mr. Bialowski, my mother starts at a familiar silhouette, but it disappears inside the theater.

“What is it? Your husband?”

“Somebody I thought I knew. Maybe not.”

Past the ticket takers, my mother is on high alert, and then she sees him. Harry is by the drinking fountain, beside a tall woman, her pale blond hair in thick swirls piled on her head. An interesting face. My mother’s stomach churns. She can see why Harry would prefer the woman to her.

My mother’s smile is feeble. “Where do we sit?”

After the usher seats them on a side aisle, my mother takes off her glasses.

“You’re farsighted?” Mr. Bialowski says.

“My eyes, they need a rest.”

I imagine in that moment my mother struggles between shame and longing. Why this has to happen now? she wonders. I had a feeling something, she thinks, about Sol’s being gone.

Mr. Bialowski pokes the program at her. “Zero Mostel. They say he’s terrific.”

Reluctantly, she puts her glasses back on. She glances up as Harry and the woman go past them down the aisle. Harry glances back. “Chenia!” he blurts out.

My mother numbs herself as she introduces Mr. Bialowski to Harry, but not by name. “My second husband. The first one—” She sighs but doesn’t finish.

Sympathetically, the woman crinkles her eyes. Forty-nine, maybe fifty, my mother guesses. Her neck has rocks of turquoise all around, each a different size. Her wedding band is plain.

Slowly my mother’s gaze lifts to Harry’s face as he says, “I’d like you to meet my wife, Claudia. You’re a fan of musical theater?”

“After the program I tell you,” my mother says. “The little one, she writes the plays now. Sol and I saw one—” She stops, realizing her mistake, but Harry doesn’t seem to notice.

The lights flicker and Claudia tugs on his arm. “We better go, darling.”

“A pleasure to see you again, Chenia,” Harry says.

The theater lights dim, and my mother sits in a darkness of her own. Darling. The word slices through her belly. Darling. And this grobyan beside her, he sits through the introductions! It’s all she can do not to run from the theater. To run under a truck.

In the spotlight, the conductor turns to face the audience.

Let him think what he wants, my mother tells herself. All that consoles her is that Harry believes she is with her husband. He should know she didn’t die of love after all.

She joins the clapping, but before the orchestra sinks below the stage, my mother realizes she is not the only one who lied. She would bet anything that the tall woman is not Harry’s wife.

At first my mother has to struggle to keep her thoughts away from Harry, but soon she’s caught up by the music, the dancing, the costumes, the wonderful acting. Like a fever, they make her run hot and cold. The melodies lift her heart and break her heart.

In the lobby during intermission, she glances around but does not see Harry. Darling. She lets the word prick her again and again. She cannot figure why Harry would bother to talk to her. Was it to show off the woman? To make her feel small, less than nothing?

“So far so good?” Mr. Bialowski asks.

“It’s very nice, this show,” my mother says, playing down her feelings.

“Nice? It’s terrific! Even at scalper prices, it’s good.”

“What’s this, scalper prices?”

“Don’t worry your pretty head,” he says. “So who was the fellow? An old boyfriend?”

“I know him from the shoe store.”

“He called you Chenia. That’s your name?” After she nods he says, “My customers, they’re Mr. and Mrs. No first-name basis, that’s low class.”

“I know him eleven years now,” she says sharply.

He elbows her. “I wasn’t born yesterday. There was electricity between the two of you. Am I right?”

“Excuse me, what are you saying?”

“Don’t get your dander up!”

She laughs, a strained laugh. “He’s a shoe salesman, that’s all. You have a good imagination.”

Can that be true? she muses. Since the little one wasn’t born yet, is eleven years, she tells herself. Everything, her whole life, is like yesterday.

I imagine that as my mother leaves the theater she is exhilarated, yet full of yearning. Sunrise, sunset. Sweet and bitter. This is life, she tells herself—to see Fiddling on the Roof, and then to see Harry.

In the crush of people outside, she catches sight of Harry trying but failing to hail a cab. He returns to the sidewalk, where the woman waits.

Then, who knows how it happens, my mother is face-to-face with him, and he asks her, “What did you say your last name is now?”

She hesitates, wishing she could remember the long Polish name. “Farber,” she says.

“You’re still in Inwood?” Harry asks.

“Downtown,” she says.

“Around here?”

“Not so far downtown.”

“Mrs. Zeke Farber,” Harry says, “very good.”

“It’s Sol,” Mr. Bialowski says. “Zeke’s my nickname.”

“Sol Farber,” Harry says. “I’ll change our records—in the store.” His voice is business-like.

My mother clutches Zeke’s arm, feeling her knees wobble.

Minutes later, as Harry and the woman get into a taxi, Zeke says, “Shoe store, my ass.”

“Mister, whatever your plan is, this is no way to talk to me. I think you are a devil, to tell him my name. Thank you for everything, but I go home now.”

“Here, take my card,” Zeke says. “I’m at the Roosevelt Hotel. At your service, anytime.”

I imagine that she looks into his caramel eyes and knows now the feeling she couldn’t say before. Sticky. I imagine that Zeke regards her confused, fearful expression, and finds her even more desirable.

In the cab, my mother wonders if she has a hole in the head. What is she thinking, that Harry will call her up and it will be as before? Even if she could love this man again, she thinks, she can never stop hating him.

The morning after she sees the play, she doesn’t want to get out of bed. The covers are pulled over her head when I come into her room. “Are you all right, Mama? You’re usually dressed by now.”

“A headache!” she barks. “Leave me.”

The next thing she knows, she is woken out of a sound sleep by the telephone. Her heart pounds. She knows it’s about Solly, something terrible, but when she picks up the receiver and says, “Hello?” a familiar voice says, “Chenia?”

My mother puts the phone down and falls back on the pillow. “Gottenyu!” she says aloud.

As the phone rings again, she remembers a saying her mother made: Me ken nit iberloifen di levoneh. You can’t outrun the moon. Wearily, she picks up the receiver.

“Give me a minute,” Harry says, “and then you can hang up. All right?” When my mother doesn’t answer, he begins talking. “For years I’ve looked for you. I wanted to apologize. Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Did you hear me? I called every Arnow in Manhattan, in the Bronx, in all the boroughs. I even tried Fair Lawn, where I thought you said your sister lives, but I couldn’t find you. Are you there?”

“I’m here.” My mother thinks, I’m not breathing, but I’m here.

“I wanted to apologize. I know it was wrong what I did.”

“What?” my mother says.

“To see you, you know, when I was in no position—” There is a pause, and then Harry says, “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“If you hurt me?”

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

My mother’s face crumples, but she will not let Harry hear her cry.

“Chenia?”

“I’m here.”

“I didn’t realize what I was getting into. You were some kind of lovely vision, there on the Boardwalk, dazzling my eyes like the sun at noon.”

My mother squeezes the phone cord so hard, her nails dig into her palm.

“Chenia, don’t say no right away. I’d like to see you. I have something for you, something I have to give you.”

“A frosk in pisk,” my mother jokes. A slap in the face, but she doesn’t translate. “What?”

“I’d rather not tell you on the phone. Meet me tonight? Wherever you want.”

At the bottom of the ocean, my mother thinks, but doesn’t say. She is in such a tangle now, she has to see him, to get it all straight. “Where is best?” she asks.

During the week Sol is gone, my mother becomes moody, impatient, sharper-tongued—the mother I actually prefer. She yells at my sister, “For what you leave crumbs on the table overnight? Better the roaches can eat?”

“We don’t have roaches here,” my sister reminds her.

“So long as we’re careful with the crumbs, pisk.” Loud-mouth.

My mother also becomes dreamy. She puts records on the phonograph, she stirs her coffee and stares into the distance.

One night she comes home and hums to herself. When I step out of the shadow, she’s shocked to see me.

“What put you in such a good mood?” I say, which is what Sol would say.

“A movie. I forget the name.”

“I didn’t know you were going to a movie. I would’ve gone with you.”

“At the last minute I make up my mind.”

In the bathroom she’s still humming, and now I have to know what movie she saw. I look through the newspaper. I wait a long time till she comes out of the bathroom. “Which theater?” I ask.

“Loew’s. What do you want to know so much?”

I read her the name of the movies they’re showing.

“That could be it,” she says.

“It’s two westerns. They put you in such a good mood?”

She shrugs. “I liked it, so sue me.”

Other nights, when we ask where she’s been, she has ready answers: She says she was shopping, she was walking around, one night she was with Ben. My sister and I know she is lying, but not why.

They meet in front of the Coliseum at 59th Street. He is waiting for her by a frankfurter cart. “Thank you for doing this,” he says right away. “The restaurant I have in mind is five blocks from here. We can walk or take a cab.”

“A taxi I would like,” my mother says, because she is testing him. And anyway, she has worn high heels, not so good for walking.

Settled in the cab, Harry says, “You look wonderful. Very chic.”

“My husband, he has good taste,” my mother says, about the tweed suit.

“Your earrings, they gleam like real pearls.”

“Of course they’re real,” my mother says. “From Solly.” Quickly she says, “He likes Zeke. I call him Solly.” She thinks she prefers Harry to be thinner.

There is a heavy silence until Harry says, “You’ll appreciate this place we’re going to. Lots of ambiance—atmosphere,” he says.

“Here is, too,” my mother says, making a joke.

The light is soft inside the restaurant. On each table is a white candle, its flames dancing yellow and blue. In the corner, a man in a tuxedo plays the violin, a romantic melody. My mother is beginning to think that Harry really is sorry for the trouble he made.

She studies the tiny tufts of hair on his fingers as they hold the wine menu. Once upon a time she could faint, thinking of his hands on her, but now—nothing. Harry orders and then the Cabernet arrives.

Lifting his glass, Harry toasts, “To precious memories, Chenia.”

“Oif mist iz geroten korn,” she toasts back. It means “Corn can grow on manure,” but she doesn’t translate. She is curious what he wants to give her, but she only asks about his mother.

“She succumbed to a stroke a couple of years ago. Mercifully.”

“I’m sorry. My mother, oleho hasholem, she passed away soon after we come to this country. My father, olov hasholem, he passed away before the little one was born. The little one, she’s not so little. Such a mouth on her!”

“That’s normal,” Harry says, “to rebel against the parents.”

“Solly’s an angel,” my mother says. She looks hard into Harry’s dark eyes as if to say, Don’t think I’m lying, Mister.

“Even so, it’s an upheaval, living with a stepfather.”

“This could be,” my mother says.

“I’ll bet she’s a good kid. She just needs your approval.”

“You think so?” my mother says hopefully.

“She was such an amazing child. A prodigy.”

“Now you couldn’t know her from a nishtikeit. A nobody. And by her, what isn’t a joke?”

“Your husband, he has a sense of humor?”

My mother can’t help it. She bursts out with, “This Zeke, this grobyan, he’s not my husband.”

“I knew that.”

“You knew?”

“He’s not your type. Where did you meet him?”

My mother tells him the story, about her shoe, about Solly flying.

“I understand,” Harry says. “The woman I was with—”

“Not your wife,” my mother says.

Harry smiles. “We’re a pair, you and I. No, she’s not my wife. My wife divorced me after she found out about you.”

My mother is dying to ask, but the waiter sets down their plates, then the busboy brings water.

Finally Harry speaks. “The bill for Bickford’s, for the damages, they sent it to Mr. and Mrs. Taubman. My wife opens it. She contacts Bickford’s, gets the police report—” He shakes his head, as if he’s sorry for himself.

My mother tries not to care, one way or the other.

“We had it out then,” Harry continues. “She forgave me, until she found the umbrella. The one you gave me. Do you remember?”

My mother shrugs, but she recalls perfectly.

“How’s your veal cutlet?” Harry asks. “This sausage is hot. Mmm.”

“To have an appetite at this time—” my mother says. She takes a small bite. “A little spicy but is okay, this. So go on, please.”

“Remember the girl in the front of the store? We’d have coffee, get things off our chest—about my wife, about her boyfriend. One day—I think that was right after you came in the last time, like gunning for bear—Sylvia walks into Nasch’s. Jilly and I, we’re in back, laughing over something. Harmless, but that was the coup de grace—the final blow. She flew to Vegas and divorced me. But first, she made a lot of trouble for me in the store. I lost my job.”

Harry stares intently into my mother’s eyes. “After that I began to think about things, the cost of taking risks—”

“A person that understands his own foolishness isn’t so foolish,” my mother says, translating from an old proverb. “But what I want to know—”

“What?”

“Why you didn’t tell me you were married.”

Harry looks sheepish. “I thought you knew.”

“Meh ken brechen,” my mother says. “You can vomit from this.”

“I was afraid you’d have nothing more to do with me.”

“So you lied?”

Harry gives a half-shrug. “Let’s say I tried to shade the truth.”

My mother stares. “Ich vil nit kein gedempts. I can’t translate exact but like this: I could do without the sauce.”

“Like I said, Chenia, you were such a vision.”

My mother wants to hear more, but Harry seems to be done. “So, you’re sorry,” she says dryly. “This is good to know.”

The violinist is at their table now and asks what they would like to hear. Harry says, “ ‘Dark Eyes,’ ” but my mother says, “No, not that one. Fiddle on the Roof something. You know this?”

The violinist plays a medley of tunes from the show.

“Oy, so beautiful!” my mother says. Music, dancing, art— she knows now why they exist: to make up for the troubles people have with love.

Harry smiles indulgently. “Your taste—it’s very eclectic. A little of this, a little of that.”

Whoosh, the time goes by like nothing, she thinks, when the check arrives. Harry takes something out of his pocket. Money, my mother thinks, but he says, “Open your hand.”

Holding the necklace by the chain, he lowers the heart into her palm. “I had the chain fixed.” When my mother looks vague, he adds, “You tore it off your neck and hurled it at me, in Bickford’s.”

My mother stares at the heart. Coeur, she recalls. She remembers my asking why there was a hole in the middle.

“Real gold,” Harry says.

My mother nods. To her it’s like a riddle: how something can be both real and false. This Harry, he’s like a stranger. Looking at him across the table, she cannot imagine why she would ever kill herself over him. She drops the necklace in her purse. “Now where are you working?”

“I’m between jobs. I was an expediter for a shipping company, routing packages, tracing them when they got lost . . . Then my son, he got into a car accident, no insurance. The bills wiped out my savings. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was the victim of the Evil Eye.”

“Kineahora!” my mother says automatically, but she has a fleeting thought: That curse she put on him—it took. I take it back, she says to herself. Zolst nit visn fun azelkhe tsores. May you not know of such troubles.

“A penny for your thoughts, Chenia.”

“You have no job and you invite me to dinner?”

“I was afraid to let more years go by. Your name might change again.”

My mother takes some bills out of her wallet. “Is enough?”

“Plenty,” Harry says, and lays them on top of the check.

Out on the sidewalk, before he puts her in a taxi, Harry says, “I’d love to see the necklace on you. May I fasten it for you?”

My mother takes it from her purse and hands it over. After he secures the lock, he kisses her on the nape of the neck and squeezes her shoulders.

Electricity runs right through her, quick and sharp. Besides the physical shock, she is jolted by the thought that as a woman, she is not dead, after all.

“Been a pleasure,” Harry says. “Thank you for accepting my apology.”

“Excuse me,” my mother says. “I listened, but who says I accept?”

In the taxi, my mother takes off the necklace and contemplates it. She cannot bring it home, even if she wanted to keep it. Where Ruben never noticed a thing, she thinks, Solly is the opposite. She rolls down the window, turns her back to it, and flings the necklace over her shoulder, into the Henry Hudson Parkway.

As she expects, Harry calls her in the morning. “Chenia!” he says. “I just wanted to see how you are.”

She wishes she hadn’t told him that Solly is in Asia. “Excuse me, I have company here.”

“I’ll call you later,” he says and hangs up the phone before she can say, “Don’t bother yourself.”

My mother dresses and puts on her walking shoes because she doesn’t want to be home when Harry calls again. In a coffee shop on Broadway, she orders a cup of coffee and cheese Danish at the counter. It’s very interesting to see who comes in, where they sit, what they order. She sips another cup of coffee, and before she knows it, two hours have gone by. To her surprise, she finds she doesn’t mind in the slightest being alone.

She continues walking down Broadway to Columbus Circle, but then she follows Central Park to Fifth Avenue and turns right, toward the stores. Soon her bladder is so full it feels as if it’s bursting. Where can she go? she wonders. She stops a woman in the street to ask.

“A hotel’s your best bet. Go over to Madison.” The woman points.

On Madison, my mother sees it, the Roosevelt Hotel. She thinks if she laughs, she’ll pish right there in the street. She hurries inside and finds the powder room in the lower lobby. On her way out she quickly scans the upper lobby, relieved not to see Zeke. It would be just her luck, she thinks. He would never believe she came there just to pish.

In Saks, my mother buys two new ties for Solly, so smart she wants to buy an armful, but it would make him suspicious. At the jewelry counter, she discovers a necklace like the one Harry gave her, but it’s not real gold. Soon she’s browsing in fine jewelry. “How much?” she asks the saleslady about a cameo brooch. “The old things I like better,” she confides.

In spite of her resolve, my mother spends another evening with Zeke.

During the day she walks around town, the way she did when she was waiting for me in school. All she wants is not to be home when Harry calls. But whenever the phone rings, it’s Zeke Bialowski. Better to lie to Solly about Zeke than to sin with Harry, she thinks.

“If you’re game, we can have dinner and shoot some pool,” Zeke says.

My mother takes it as a figure of speech, but after Sunday dinner they go to a pool hall, where Zeke shows her how to hold the cue stick, how to use the chalk. My mother, who has never studied math, is able to figure out the angles. She gets a kick out of seeing Zeke’s astonishment as the billiard balls plop into the pockets. It pleases her even more when he gets irritable and says, “Beginner’s luck.”

At the end of the evening they sit in the corner while he drinks one glass of beer after another from the pitcher he ordered. She only sips from the first glass. This is what pish must taste like, she thinks.

“Tomorrow it’s my last night here, then back to Frisco and the grind. How about you meet me at the Roosevelt Hotel at seven?”

“No funny business,” my mother says, “I told you.”

Zeke keeps my mother waiting in the hotel lobby for twenty minutes, but when he appears, he has a rectangular yellow box with him, chocolates from Schrafft’s. He apologizes for being late. “I was on the phone, long distance.” He expects her to ask, but she doesn’t.

They dine in a fish place with an Irish name written in white on the green canvas awning. Zeke has two bottles of beer with his fried smelts and goes twice to the men’s room. Hours go by before he insists on her having a slice of chocolate layer cake. Although it’s too late to be having dessert, my mother thinks, she enjoys every bite.

Then, seemingly from nowhere, a deck of cards appears in his hand. “Now you see it . . .” The deck disappears.

My mother laughs.

“Now you see it . . .” He fans the deck over the table. At first the pictures seem to be abstract. My mother squints. “Put your glasses on!” Zeke instructs, which she does.

My mother is flabbergasted. On the first card a naked man is lying on a bed. Hanging over him are breasts as big as cow udders.

“Gevalt!” my mother says, and shoves away the deck.

Zeke sweeps up the cards, and again they disappear, only to reappear, this time as a perfectly ordinary deck.

My mother feels as if she’s going to jump out of her skin. As if Zeke has read her mind, he snaps his fingers. Suddenly there is a card, mid-air, with a woman in a black bra and garter belt, her mouth over a man’s penis. Is she going to swallow it like a sword? My mother cannot believe her eyes. She turns to Zeke. He’s shuffling the deck now, as if it’s nothing special. That people do this, my mother thinks. She can’t get over it.

Afterwards as they walk up the street, he talks a little loud. Later she doesn’t remember a thing he said.

On 57th Street they walk crosstown, and then, past Fifth Avenue, my mother sees the horse-drawn cabs lined up by the park.

The next thing she knows, the driver, who’s wearing a top hat and a fancy gray coat with a flared bottom, helps her up into the cab. There’s a smell of leather and something else she can’t identify. She finds it thrilling when the horse begins to trot down the big street along Central Park, cars on either side of them. She thinks of a time when she was a little girl in the old country. Where were they going in the carriage, all dressed up? And then she recalls the funeral of her sister. Oleho hasholem. May she rest in peace.

Soon the carriage turns into the park, where only an occasional lamppost lights the darkness.

Zeke is quiet for once. My mother can hear the clopCLOP of the horse and some kind of humming from the trees. At first it’s pleasant, and then she gets anxious. “It’s dangerous in the park, no?”

“If you was on foot, I would say, ‘Run for your life.’ Who’s gonna contend with a horse?”

Now my mother feels foolish.

Zeke slides closer, the moment she’s been dreading from their first night out. She jumps when he puts his arm around her. She wants to push it away, but she’s afraid of making him angry. He squeezes her shoulder, once, twice. She sits very still, frozen with expecting the worst. The clopCLOP of the horse is like a drumbeat now, hypnotic.

Then she gets the strength, who knows from where, to shrug off his hand. “Mister,” she says sharply, “if you touch me again, I’ll scream bloody murder.”

“Relax, will you!” As if nothing at all has happened, he says, “To beat the morning rush I have to get up with the birds. It’s one thing for birds to fly—”

My mother stares straight ahead into the darkness, hardly daring to breathe until she sees the street lights again. As soon as the driver has helped her down, she hails a cab beside them. The box of Schrafft’s she’s left behind.

Two more days, she says to herself, and Solly will be back.

At home, she takes off her clothes, puts her suit in a pile to take to the cleaners. Everything else goes in the hamper. She fills the bath, extra hot, and runs the soap all over herself.

My mother knows it’s crazy but she wishes she could tell Solly about the deck of cards. She can imagine his disgust. She, too, is disgusted, but with herself, more than with Zeke. Anyway, by now she’s decided she can’t tell Sol anything at all.

She recalls the pictures on the cards and feels astonished at her reaction. A lebedike velt—lively things are happening—in her own love pocket. She never knew such a thing was possible, to get that kind of feeling from pictures! She doesn’t want to, but then she does. She reaches down to touch her knepl, and keeps touching, until what she calls the miracle happens.

And then I am knocking on the door. “Mama, there’s someone on the phone for you.”

“Who?”

“A man, I didn’t ask. He said he’s going to wait.”

“Ai yi yi,” my mother says. “What now?”

"Where’ve you been, Chenia? I’ve called day and night.” “Is it your business?” my mother says on the phone to Harry.

“No, but I felt very bad after I saw you. Here I was, trying to apologize, and you paid for the dinner. I’m in such financial straits now. I have debts. Serious debts. They’ve repossessed my car—took it back—because I couldn’t make the payments.”

“That so?” Her fingers twirl the sash on her quilted satin robe.

“Anyway, I want to get things square between us, to clean the slate—”

“What, you think my life is some chalkboard you wipe and make all clean?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Harry says.

“Excuse me, but what you said.”

“Chenia, I kept that necklace all those years, hoping to see you again—” He talks and talks. Soon my mother doesn’t even hear the words, just the sound of his voice, which is deep and rich, like an announcer on the radio.

“—let’s go tomorrow, to the Cloisters. For old times’ sake.”

All she has to do is say no. Then she thinks, Maybe if she sees him again, she could better understand the whole thing. Anyway, she won’t go with him anywhere else, and what bad could happen in the Cloisters? It’s been so long since she’s seen it. Sol doesn’t care for it. “Too Christian,” he said when she asked why.

“Okay,” my mother says to Harry, “what time I meet you?”

My mother takes the bus up, a long ride she’s always enjoyed till now, when it feels endless. They meet at the subway entrance on Fort Washington Avenue and walk together into the park. Harry looks good in a turtleneck sweater under his tweed jacket. Like a professor, my mother thinks.

Though it’s a beautiful fall afternoon, there aren’t so many people around. Then she sees the sign on the front door of the Cloisters: CLOSED.

“You!” she rails at Harry. “You get me here for nothing? You do this on purpose—” She balls her hand into a fist and is about to strike his chest, but she notices how he looks almost sick, like a dog someone kicked. She drops her hand. “I’m sorry, I lose my temper,” she says.

“I’m not sorry,” Harry says. “I was beginning to think you’d been lobotomized.”

She loves how he explains this new word to her.

“When I saw you at Fiddler, you looked like the serene Madonna herself, but the fire is still in you, Chenia. Ah, cha-Chenia,” he croons.

After she leans back against the sign, his arms encircle her, and he presses his mouth to hers.

Her lips feel as if they’re melting, but Harry pulls himself away. “Now I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. I couldn’t help it,” he says, then he’s kissing her again, their tongues circling. When they come up for air, they walk to the bench where she used to sit with me.

The view is different now, with new buildings below, maybe a housing project. She stares till she gets her fill, and when she glances back to the low stone wall, she’s startled that the stroller isn’t there. Then she notices Harry patiently waiting.

He holds her head between his hands and kisses her some more. It’s as if they were back on the Boardwalk, how it was in the beginning, with the sun in her eyes. “I want you, Chenia,” Harry says in her ear. He tugs her hand and leads her into a thicket nearby. They sink down on the brown grass.

“For this I will go to hell,” my mother tells him. “Whatever bad happens to me now, I deserve it. So long as it’s not my children, kholilleh.”

“Foolish Chenia, nothing will happen.”

“Hob rakhmones,” my mother says. Have mercy.

The pleasure is like before, although her feeling for him is different. This, too, is new, to enjoy making love with someone you’re not sure you like. To tremble and pant with a man not your husband, and feel no guilt—she cannot understand this, or herself.

Afterwards, holding hands, they sit on the bench again and talk, almost like old times. Harry tells her so much about himself as a boy in Rumania, how his family expected him to be a doctor. “My mother, God bless her, had this dream that I would cure people from terrible diseases.”

“From love,” my mother says, but he doesn’t smile.

Hours go by, and then they walk around the bluff. The gray water is pink along the Jersey shore. The sun is blood red. They stand quietly and watch the wafer drop into the mouth of the Palisades. My mother feels as if she’s in a trance. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s happy, so happy she wouldn’t mind to die right this minute.

At the entrance to the elevator that leads to the subway, Harry says, “Chenia, I hate to ask. You’ve no idea how much I hate this, but I’m in a bind.”

“What?”

“Could you—would it be possible if—if you could lend me some money?”

“How much?” She thinks she has maybe thirty dollars in her bag.

“Two thousand.”

“What?”

“Even a thousand.”

“What do you take me for?” She answers her own question. Yekl. Greenhorn. No matter that she wears nice clothes and lives in a swanky building. Yekl. The word should be carved into her chest. She laughs. “That’s what you wanted from me? Money?” Her laughing gets louder and alternates with crying. She tries to stop but she can’t. “Such a joke . . .” she says.

“You’re getting hysterical,” Harry tells her, thankful that no one else is around.

She keeps laughing and crying. From a distance she hears a sound like hiccoughing, but she is powerless to stop. Even when he slaps her, she doesn’t stop. He slaps her harder. He shakes her, until she comes to.

She feels exhausted, and frightened. A krenk, she thinks, about how she acted. A sickness. Over Harry’s shoulder is a shtik of moon in the darkening sky, the tiniest piece. A cold light, Solly said once. She blows her nose and moves toward the subway entrance.

“It’s not what you think—” he says.

“Don’t come with me, Mister,” she warns.

As she descends the stone steps, she thinks, Yeder barg-aroif hot zein barg-arop. Each way up the mountain has its way down.

Pressing the button to summon the elevator, she knows something seems different. Is it the doors? They were dark, but now they’re shiny, like aluminum. The elevator arrives, the doors open. No one is inside. It’s self-service now. The operator is gone.

On her ride down to the subway, my mother regrets she can’t say hello and good-bye to that nice Negro man. It would be good to do that, she thinks, before she throws herself in front of a train.

For that night, my sister has made reservations for us—my mother, me, and her—in a Viennese restaurant on 72nd Street. It’s the last night before Sol is due back, the last chance, Mimi thinks, for us to have Mama all to ourselves. The reservations are for seven o’clock, which my mother knows, but at seven, she is not home.

Mimi calls the restaurant to change the time.

“Make it eight-thirty,” I say, and she does.

While we wait, Mimi plays the piano, a spinet that Sol bought for himself after my mother begged him: “Do yourself a little something.” Mimi never plays when Sol is there because he likes only classical. Tonight Mimi plays, pop tunes, show tunes. She doesn’t sing on key, but she sings along anyhow. Over and over, I hear, “ ‘Can’t help, loving dat man of mine . . .’ ” An hour goes by, then another.

Sol calls us from Idlewild when he lands. “I’ll be home in two hours,” he tells my mother. “I can’t wait.”

An hour later, my mother is already in the lobby. She paces the marble floor as she debates with herself: to tell, not to tell, what to tell. She doesn’t know why she is still alive.

The train was coming when she got to the platform. She started running toward the edge, ready to jump. Only at the last second did she think: I should kill myself for a vantz? For a louse, a bedbug?

When Sol’s taxi pulls up now, she runs into the street and trembles as the door opens. She is sure Solly will take one look and know everything. But he only looks glad to see her. His eyes shine as he presents a bouquet of tiny pink roses. “Pupiks,” she blurts out. Belly buttons. “You adorable—”

He reaches into the backseat to get his bags. “Oh, I forgot,” he says, as he slams the taxi door shut with his backside. “Go into my breast pocket.”

My mother takes out a tapestried box. “I have a present for you, too. Upstairs. Not such a beautiful box as this.”

“It’s from Hong Kong,” Sol says. “Open it.”

Hugging the flowers by their stems under her arm, she manages to open the lid. Inside the box, on a bed of red silk, is a chain with a golden heart, completely solid.