He liked her to dress in black. Black was what she was wearing when he proposed to her and it suited her best and went best with the jewelry he bought her. He was always ready to buy Sophie another good black dress. A good black dress was for a lifetime. What Sophie always dreamed of having was a white nightgown, long and soft of the finest cotton or flannel. But Ezra couldn’t understand why she wanted it. She looked better naked. Sometimes he asked her to come to bed in the fur coat. A nightgown? That was a luxury.
Not everything Sophie kept accumulating followed her in boxes and by freight in crates and trunks; that was difficult and expensive and complicated. Besides, if they were going south, they wouldn’t need all their coats and woolens, although they might need them the year after or at some future time, for they never knew where they would proceed to next. Similarly she would store outgrown children’s clothes which could be useful for the next child. Of course most of the things she collected from different places on the way she could not take with her but stored, depending on where they happened to be, with friends and relatives who were settled. Everything had to be kept for the time when she would be settled and have a great big house with many wings and floors, a cellar for storage, an attic to keep all the pets she had promised the children. In her mind it was all together, she was always in an imagined house, leaving for a trip and choosing one or two things to take with her. But perhaps all she really wanted was that imaginary house and she would always go on traveling and collecting things and living everywhere. In the meantime she managed quite well storing a box here and a suitcase there, with friends or relatives who were settled. Then, if she stayed in the same place for more than a year, even though nothing was ever definite, she could ask for certain things she wanted to be sent. She always wished she could have known and packed in view of future circumstances.
It was a weakness, she knew, to accumulate and to keep and to remember where she had left things. Things got lost, but that was part of traveling. Not only individual objects, but packages, a whole suitcase, mysteriously lost. She did her best to take care of things, and if they got lost despite her efforts she was cheerfully resigned to it, unlike Ezra who recalled the lost object over and over again. Whether it was something precious to him or simply something he needed that moment, each time a new loss was discovered, he would mournfully enumerate every single item that had gone astray since the day they embarked together. This Sophie did not do. Or she kept it to herself. There was the moment the loss was discovered, the anguish felt. Once is enough was Sophie’s stand. Lost objects wanted to be mourned. Ah yes, you could never grieve enough for those earrings bought in some back street of Genoa. But it was against Sophie’s principles to suffer the loss of anything more than once. How could Ezra take the side of things? Not that Sophie was absolutely sure. In fact she was haunted by those lost things in spite of her principles and it didn’t help to say: Good riddance, I wouldn’t be seen dead in those earrings today! They sent their ghostly eidolon: on the dresser of some hotel room. It was in the nature of things to do this, Sophie concluded, and in her nature as a woman of principles to resist. If that thing still haunts me, Sophie considered, it must be because I did not suffer its loss as truly, profoundly, as I should. But in that case there is nothing to be done. I have missed my moment; or the thing has missed its moment; that is why it keeps coming back. As for the loss of anything that caused her true anguish, that loss she carried in her very marrow, compacted with it. If at any time she had wanted to know the total of what had been lost, all she needed to do was state the last thing lost and Ezra would begin reckoning, today this, yesterday that, all the way back. But Sophie wasn’t interested. Keeping count was men’s business. That’s what her father did and both her grandfathers.
Yes she loved traveling. It’s the only way to live, Sophie always said, the only way to live in time: fly right with it. Sophie got nervous when they settled too long in one place.
Sophie made every effort to avoid arguments, but it didn’t always work because Ezra was not content with simply worrying and complaining: he wanted an argument. Furthermore, Sophie had some grievances of her own which she could not always contain in silence. So they quarreled.
Ezra always won. Whatever the issue and regardless who started it, Ezra always managed to make her come out in the wrong. Sophie didn’t understand how he did it. It must have been his special talent. And in the end he always said she was the most wonderful woman in the world.
Ezra began with a very small point. So small that Sophie didn’t realize at all that he was starting a quarrel. A little thing that can be settled in a minute, she thought; or a little thing there’s nothing to be done about that can be dismissed in a minute. Then as Ezra went on developing
