best schnapps, perhaps-it wasn’t the best schnapps, certainly-but it was schnapps.
Sarah drank enough to let her know she’d been drinking. She evidently drank enough to let other people know she’d been drinking, too. Isidor’s father said, “You don’t want to get too shikker, you know.”
He laughed in a peculiar, almost goatish way. To Sarah’s surprise, and to her mortification, her own father’s laugh sounded identical. Her mother, and Isidor’s, sniffed at their husbands. But then they laughed, too. Sarah stuck her nose in the air. That only made the older people laugh harder. Isidor put his arm around her, as if defending his new bride. Their parents laughed some more.
It wasn’t as if the older Goldmans and Brucks weren’t drinking with her and Isidor. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her father’s cheeks turn pink. His hard work and bad diet usually left him sallow. Pink he was, though. And the meat he cut from the rabbits made him looked remarkably content. Sarah understood that. She had trouble remembering the last time her own belly had felt so happy.
“Well…” Puffing on a pipe charged with the same kind of nasty tobacco her own father smoked, David Bruck stretched the word out. He gathered his wife and Sarah’s father and mother by eye. “What do you say we go downstairs for a while, maybe take a little walk, hey?”
“Now why would we want to do that?” Samuel Goldman said, for all the world as if he couldn’t think of any reason. Everybody except Sarah laughed again. She was sure her cheeks weren’t just pink-they had to be on fire.
All the older people left. Isidor stared as the door closed behind them. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen my mother go out after we eat without washing dishes first,” he said.
She looked at him. “Do you want to think about your mother now?” she asked. Then she blushed again. Had that really come out of her mouth? As a matter of fact, it had.
And the way Isidor looked at her left her with no doubts his mother wasn’t the first thing on his mind. She thought she would blush one more time, but the warmth spreading through her started lower down. “Come on,” Isidor said.
When they got to the doorway to his room, he picked her up and carried her over the threshold. She squeaked. He silenced that by kissing her as he put her down. Then he shut the door behind them, even though they were alone in the flat. The door had a hook and eye to keep it from being opened from the outside. Isidor fastened that, too.
He looked on what he’d done and found it good. In very short order, he and Sarah were officially man and wife. “You’re squashing me,” she said.
“Sorry.” Isidor didn’t sound sorry. He couldn’t have sounded much happier if he’d tried. Sarah was pretty happy, too-maybe not quite so happy as she’d imagined she would be on her wedding day, but her imagination hadn’t taken into account the way things were for Jews in Germany these days.
After apologizing, Isidor rolled off her. That also made her happy. He didn’t roll far. He couldn’t, not without falling off the narrow bed. They would have to get a bigger one… somewhere, somehow, sometime.
His hand roamed her. She let it happen. Pretty soon, she started enjoying it and the other things he did. Before long, they were making things official again. Sweat beaded on Sarah’s skin. She was doing a warm thing, it was a warm summer’s day, and the room was above the ovens.
After a while, she said, “Again?” in surprise.
“Again,” Isidor answered proudly.
“What if they come back?”
“What if they do? The door’s shut. They won’t come barging in. And even if they break down the door or something, you’re my wife, right? We don’t have to sneak any more.”
He sounded like a boy with a new toy. Too much like that? Sarah wasn’t sure. She liked the new toy, too. But… three times? Things wouldn’t go well if she said no on her wedding day. She turned toward him and kissed him instead. That seemed to be the right thing to do, at least for the moment. And three times it was, even if the third round wasn’t so easy as the first two had been.
If he tried for four, she was going to tell him no. Enough was enough, and she was getting sore. He didn’t. He fell asleep instead, quite suddenly and quite deeply.
Sarah was miffed-till she fell asleep herself, even though she hadn’t expected to. When she woke up, she and Isidor were entangled almost as intimately as they had been before. Noises outside the closed door said Isidor’s parents-and, she recognized a moment later, hers as well-were back.
What do I do next? she wondered. For now, nothing seemed a good answer. Her new husband-her new husband! — was still snoring. But her life had just changed forever. Much too soon, she’d find out how.
Chapter 17
Something was wrong. Peggy Druce knew that. She also knew she was afraid she knew what it was. The complicated, inside-out reasoning should have made her laugh. Instead, it left her more afraid than ever.
Most of the time, she would have taken the bull by the horns. She had a low tolerance for bull generally, as even the Nazis came to understand. Without that low tolerance, she knew she would still be stuck in Europe. But going nose to nose with somebody you couldn’t stand was one thing. Going nose to nose with the man you loved more than anyone else in the world was something else again. Boy, was it ever!
Most of the time, Herb also spoke freely, at least when he was talking with her. He might be (might be, hell! — he was) more circumspect than she was in public, but she always got to find out what was on his mind. Or she had, till she got back from England.
Of course, if this went wrong it would blow up in her face. She knew that, too. Did she ever! And what was liable to happen if it did… What was liable to happen if it did was plenty to make her keep her big trap shut for months. Not talking about something, though, could prove as toxic as talking about it obviously was. That silent poison might be slower-acting, which didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
And so, one Thursday evening after dinner and a couple of highballs, Peggy said, “Herb, I think we need to talk.”
Her husband neatly folded his copy of the Daily News (the evening paper, so he and Peggy wouldn’t have to depend on the radio or wait for tomorrow morning’s Inquirer to keep up with what was going on), stubbed out his cigarette in the pocket of a bronze ashtray shaped like a baseball glove, and said, “What’s cookin’?”
Even though Peggy was sitting down, her knees wanted to knock. All the same, she said, “I think you know. About us.”
Herb made a small production out of firing up another Pall Mall. He held out the pack to her. She got up, took one, let him light it for her, and retreated to her chair. He dragged deeply, then blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. He looked up at the smooth plaster as if watching for enemy bombers, but all there was to see was the smoke disappearing little by little.
His sigh might have come straight from Camille. “Damn,” he said without heat. “Who told you?”
“Who told me what?” Peggy echoed foolishly.
“I figured you were bound to hear sooner or later. I thought you must have already. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said ‘We need to talk’ like that.” Herb sounded resigned, and a bit mad at himself. “Or maybe you would. Who the… Who knows? But people do gossip.”
“And what do people gossip about?” Peggy chose to rephrase that: “Why would people gossip about you?” Listening to herself, she thought she sounded resigned, too. She didn’t think she sounded mad at Herb, which was good.
He sighed again, even more deeply. He knocked ash into the bronze glove and set the cigarette down. Then, staring down at the comfortably shabby Persian rug under his slippers, he said, “You know, you were away from home a lot longer than we thought you would be when you headed for Europe.”
“I sure was,” she agreed. “What about it?”
He kept looking at the rug, which wasn’t like him. “Even then, I told myself I’d tell you if you ever asked me. Dammit, I messed around with one of the girls from the typing pool for a month or so. It didn’t mean anything, and I’m sorry I did it, but it happened.”
“You’re sorry now,” Peggy said. “What about then?”
