Betty knew she had met Tillie’s family when she was a toddler, but only because there was photographic evidence of the gathering. Tillie was estranged from her entire family in Chicago, and they’d never reached out to Betty, something she’d pushed aside.
“Families are complicated. They shouldn’t be, don’t you think? But they are. My mother doesn’t speak to her family either.” Well, as far as Betty knew.
Abe bounced his knee like a jackhammer. “My grandparents disowned my mother. Literally wrote her out of the will and everything. My brother and I have never met them.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s horrible.” No matter Betty’s knowledge of strained families, disowning someone seemed worse than dumping them off with their well-to-do grandparents. “Why did they disown her? What did your mother do?” Surely parents had a reason for such a permanent decision and exclusion.
“She married my father,” Abe said.
Holy moly. Nannie wasn’t nuts about Tillie, but her grandmother would never disown Joe, her own son. All Betty’s grandparents ever wanted was for Tillie and Joe to give up their life on the road and live in South Haven, participate in the family business while raising their daughter. “Why didn’t they approve of your father?”
“Because he’s Jewish.”
The words rolled toward Betty with the rumble of a bowling ball. How could being Jewish be bad? Was he the wrong kind of Jew? Conservative to their Orthodox? Perhaps nonpracticing? So were many of the guests at Stern’s. But they were still Jews. “I don’t understand.”
“My mother grew up Catholic.”
Images of Christmas with Georgia’s family swirled in Betty’s head. The tree, the treif, the midnight mass, the presents, the statues, the saints, the sign of the cross.
Woozy with understanding, Betty nodded. His mother had given it all up for love.
But Judaism was based on matriarchal lineage, and the matriarch of Betty’s family wasn’t going to like this one bit. If Abe’s mother wasn’t Jewish, Abe wasn’t Jewish.
“You’re not Jewish?” Betty wanted Abe to correct her, to recite some rule or law that made him so. “Did you lie to my grandfather? He only hires Jewish boys.”
“I have a Jewish name, so people assume both my parents are Jewish. And if I hadn’t fallen for you, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d leave at the end of summer. No harm done.” Abe waved his hand as if swatting away Betty’s concerns. “Does it matter to you?”
Betty wanted to blurt out “No!” but it caught somewhere between her heart and her lips. She’d never known anyone who’d married a gentile. She didn’t know how someone Jewish even married a non-Jew. By a judge, perhaps. In secret, for sure. A few Jewish girls in her class had dated gentile boys, but even that had drawn looks and whispers, on both sides.
“No,” Betty said. “It doesn’t matter to me.” She loved him, so she would make it be true.
“It will matter to your grandparents, though. Their entire livelihood is built on Jewish families. And coeds. I’m sorry I put you in this predicament. But if I’d told your grandfather, he wouldn’t have hired me, and I wouldn’t have met you—and I’m not sorry about that.”
Betty’s anger-tinged ache dissolved.
“I’ll understand if you need to tell them. That I’m not really Jewish, I mean. I grew up going to shul and celebrating High Holidays if that helps. My mother did that for my father, not that he deserved it. It’s too bad that half is not enough for anyone.”
Betty knew there was no such thing as half-Jewish. You either were, or you weren’t.
Looking at Abe, she realized their similarities and connections transcended their blood, their ancestry. They had similar values, a shared understanding of dreams. They were more alike than anyone she’d ever known.
It would have been okay with Betty if Abe said he’d grown up with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny living in his backyard. Betty looked into Abe’s eyes and didn’t glance away.
She noticed Abe’s eyes glistening as if he was about to cry. He’d been so brave to tell her the truth. He wanted her to know everything about him.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Your father’s Jewish, right? That has to count for something.”
Abe stared at her. “My father isn’t such a great guy.”
“But he’s Jewish.” That’s what would be important to her grandparents.
“I guess that’s the bright side.”
Abe was Betty’s bright side.
They talked about Abe’s family’s five-and-dime, his sometimes-absent father, and his older brother, Aaron, who didn’t attend college and who had been drafted into the army just six weeks after marrying his childhood sweetheart.
Betty didn’t see any bright side there. She shared the story of Tillie and Joe “giving” her to Nannie, Zaide, and South Haven.
“Neither of us won the parent jackpot, I guess,” she said.
Abe wrapped her hands in his. “No one has ever understood that like you do.” It was a unique and reassuring bond. Abe gulped before kissing her. He quickly pulled back. “I love you, Betty.”
She smiled—she couldn’t help it, even though it might have been a silly smile that stretched her cheeks out to look like a squirrel’s. A blanket of calm enveloped her. It warmed her more than need be on a summer night, but she wouldn’t have changed a thing.
She kissed Abe softly on the lips. “I love you too.”
Abe continued staring into her eyes. “When I graduate in May, I’ll move to New York . . .”
Betty nodded. “You’ll design skyscrapers.”
“You’ll continue at Barnard, and when you graduate we’ll get married. You’ll work at a fancy magazine in one of those skyscrapers.”
Had Abe just proposed? Or had he promised to propose? This was everything she had wanted, everything her grandparents wanted for her. Half-Jewish would do.
“We’ll be the toast of New York!”
“We’ll vacation here in South Haven,” Betty said. “I’m sure my grandparents would like that.”
“Like an ordinary Jewish couple on summer holiday,” he said.
They laughed, and Betty knew they would never be ordinary.
She pictured herself a guest at Stern’s, a visitor like her
