Homesick

said.

Vera was hurt. “Why? Why can’t you?”

“It’s much too expensive a present. Especially for a working girl to give.”

“Nowhere near as expensive as a window,” she said pointing to the sheet of plywood now nailed into the window-frame. “And I can’t help feeling responsible.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. In any case, insurance pays for the window.”

“I want you to have it,” Vera said. “To show my appreciation for your kindness.”

“No, I couldn’t,” he said, picking up the book and holding it out to her. “You know you can’t afford it. Return it and get your money back.”

Vera refused to touch the book. Like a stubborn child she actually hid her hands behind her back and violently shook her head no when Stanley leaned across the counter and tried to prevail upon her to take it back. “Don’t be foolish! Take it!”

“I won’t. If you don’t want it – why, throw it in the garbage.”

He only relented when he realized she was becoming angry with him.

“Well, all right,” he said at last, reluctantly. “Thank you.” But couldn’t stop himself adding, “You shouldn’t have.”

In the course of the next couple of weeks Vera wondered if Stanley wasn’t right – she shouldn’t have. After all, the gift certainly hadn’t encouraged boldness on his part; he gave no indication that he was summoning up the courage to ask her out. It was true that he didn’t have her address, or her telephone number, but every day a little after noon Vera walked past his store on her way to work. He might have just once come out and spoken to her instead of waving to her from behind his new window like a coward.

The whole futile performance made Vera furious, livid. Maybe she ought to have taken back the Montaigne and shown him. But then, what would have been the point? Pride would never have allowed her to return it to the bookstore where she had been treated rudely and snubbed. Of course, she reminded herself, if she had taken the book she wouldn’t have had to go out and find her own second-hand copy of Montaigne, a book she assiduously read each morning in the hope that it would provide some clue to understanding Stanley Miller.

If there was a clue, she hadn’t discovered it. Montaigne was mostly common sense and Stanley Miller mostly wasn’t. Because if he had an ounce of common sense he would have recognized long ago what a good thing was sidling up to his door and purring to be let in.

It never occurred to Vera that Stanley Miller might think himself too old for her, far too ancient for such a young girl. Or that he was concerned that he was a Jew and she was a Gentile. Vera never gave a second thought to Stanley’s being a Jew. In church and Sunday School Jews had been spoken of frequently and approvingly, in fact the Bible was nothing but one long story about Jews. Outside of church, when they were discussed at all, the picture was slightly different. Jews, apparently, were smarter than ordinary folk and many were prone to sharp business practices. “To jew someone” was a commonly used expression in Connaught, like “drunk as an Indian” or “don’t get your Irish up,” but the use was more habit than conscious, directed malice. Since she had no objections to intelligence, rather admired and hankered after it, in fact, and since neither Stanley Miller nor his business looked prosperous enough to sustain a plausible charge of sharp practice, she wasn’t going to be scared off by an old characterization. Besides, the war had proved what sort of people had a prejudice against Jews, pigs like Adolf Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering. Vera believed you could judge someone by his enemies as much as his friends.

Only after they were married had Vera learned that her blindness to Stanley’s Jewishness had left him confused. Did she or didn’t she know? Was it possible that she hadn’t picked up on his allusions to Torah, his Yiddish proverbs? In the months following the wedding, they had laughed together about how he had done everything short of pinning the yellow Star of David on his lapel and gone around proclaiming himself one of the Chosen People. Yet not a word, not a hint that she grasped what he was. Could she be really that much in the dark? Who could tell with these small-town shiksas, these country pumpkins, what they did and didn’t catch? As he had been careful to explain later to Vera, all his life he had been a socialist, a passionate believer in the undifferentiated brotherhood of man. He had lived for the day when words like Gentile and Jew would lose their meaning in the word Man. As far as he was concerned, the word Jew only mattered when it mattered to someone else. After their first meeting, he asked himself, Was that the case with Vera Monkman? Without knowing the answer he was already half in love. Why else did he position himself in the window every noon when she passed on her way to work, if it wasn’t to see and be seen, to wave and be waved to? Why else did he disregard the well-meaning advice an uncle had given him when he was fourteen and beginning to show interest in girls? “Don’t have anything to do with shiksas,” he had been warned. “Your first fight – she’ll call you a dirty Jew.”

One shiksa, however, hadn’t been prepared to throw in the towel on the fight just yet. If Montaigne wasn’t the way to a man’s heart perhaps music was. Vera hadn’t forgotten the classical records that had provided background music to their conversation the night they had passed talking in his apartment. It was only natural then that a poster on a notice board outside an Anglican church she passed one day should stop her dead in her tracks with its announcement of a recital of organ music. Before either pride or circumspection could make themselves felt, Vera had purchased two tickets in the church office. Offering one of these to Stanley she told a lie which involved a girlfriend unexpectedly called away by an illness in the family. Immediately Vera had thought of Stanley. Would he like her friend’s ticket?

It seemed he would. Better still, he also wanted Vera’s address so that he could come by and collect her for the concert in a taxi. It was beginning to feel like a proper, an official date.

In the few remaining days before the concert, she succeeded in working herself into a regular frenzy worrying about all the ways she might make a fool out of herself on this most special of occasions. What if Stanley wanted to discuss the pieces played? What in the world did she know about classical music? To be absolutely honest, nothing. Furthermore, she had to admit that the prospect of an hour and a half of continuous organ music left her feeling downright dismal. For Vera, organ music was Patricia Mackinnon, the organist at St. Andrew’s United Church in Connaught, weaving back and forth on her bench and pumping pedals so desperately she left the impression that she was engaged in some hell-bent-for-leather bicycle race rather than aiming to drive a few mournful notes out of the pipes. Cripes, organ music. What she wouldn’t do to please a man.

There was also the question of a hat to fret over. Vera knew that in Roman Catholic churches women were expected to cover their heads. But what about an Anglican church like the one she was going to? Where did they stand on such an issue? Vera had never set foot in an Anglican church and had no idea whether or not hat-wearing was a requirement or not. And if it was, did the rule apply just to religious services or everything else that took place under its roof, recitals included? God, the humiliation if she got turned away from the door because she didn’t have a hat. Which she didn’t, had never owned such an article, making it necessary to borrow a hat from Amelia, one of the weird Wilkinson sisters.

Add to all of this, she was, as usual, broke. No money for a new dress and barely enough to provide refreshments to properly entertain a guest. She blew all her ready cash on a bottle of gin, a bottle of rye, a couple of cans of smoked oysters, a jar of cocktail onions, some stuffed olives, and fancy crackers. All this on the off- chance that Stanley could be prevailed upon to drop by after the recital for a drink and a snack.

The big night, a Friday, Vera played sick, phoning in the excuse that she was laid low by the flu. Mr. Buckle was beside himself when he received the sad news. Friday was one of the busiest evenings of the week and one of the rowdiest. How was he going to cope without her? Couldn’t she manage to come in, surely she wasn’t as ill as all that, was she? Vera asked him how he would like it if she brought up all over a customer? That pulled the wheels off his little red wagon.

However, none of her planning and careful preparations had anticipated what she opened her door to that night. That was Stanley, looking nothing like his normal self. It was the way he was dressed, or costumed, or whatever might be the proper word for it. Stanley resembled a Rumanian aristocrat or something along that line – Ronald Coleman stepped out of the movie The Prisoner of Zenda. His hat alone would have been enough to suggest that – a Homburg, Vera thought was the name for it – a smoke-grey Homburg. And more. A topcoat with a velvet collar, a tightly fitted wasp waist and flaring skirts which fell to his ankles, the sort of skirts Russian cavalry officers in historical movies spread over the rumps of their horses when they were mounted. Standing erect and tall in her doorway he looked every inch a foreign visitor holding his face clenched and composed against the strangeness of the world he was on the brink of entering. While his odd appearance surprised and dismayed her just a little, she was careful to cloak her feelings in bustle and talk as she gathered up her purse and