“Rose! Are you home? I have no raisins left and I need some for my strudel. Can I borrow some raisins?” Rose stood up from her chair—the door was unlocked and Helen was entering the kitchen. When Helen saw Rose’s swollen eyes, she gasped. “What’s wrong? Oh my God, Rose, what is it? Is it the baby?” Rose shook her head no, and Helen took a deep breath. “What, then? Oh honey, what’s wrong?”
Rose wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I’m fine,” she murmured. “Here, let me find the raisins.” But Helen would not let it drop. She grabbed Rose’s hand before she could slip away.
“Is it Mort?”
“Oh Helen.” Rose hesitated. She was embarrassed to speak of it, to admit that the smallest affectionate gesture from her husband had been so surprising that it had moved her to tears.
“He … he kissed me. He held my cheek. He looked at me like he used to, the way he did when we were young.”
“Ohhh,” said Helen. “I see.” She tried to hide her surprise. “Why don’t you send the girls up to us for dinner tonight? You and Mort can have some time to yourselves.”
Rose couldn’t remember the last time she had looked forward to time alone with Mort, but now she didn’t hesitate. “All right,” she said.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon preparing for dinner. She didn’t want to send the girls upstairs empty-handed, so she decided to bake something for them to take. It was so nice to bake whenever she wanted now, without having to worry about cards and rations. As she pulled the flour canister out from behind her spice rack, it toppled over and the lid popped off. Flour poured out onto the counter and floor, leaving a cloud of snowy dust hanging in the air. Rose frowned and took out the broom.
Once the cake was in the oven, Rose tried to come up with something special to make Mort for dinner. What was his favorite dish? She honestly couldn’t think of one. Her husband never seemed to care much about food. Not like Abe, who was always asking for seconds. She envied Helen’s easy manner with Abe, how he grabbed Helen around her waist by the stove and hummed in her ear when she stirred something. No wonder Helen was such a good cook.
In the end Rose decided on a chicken dish, one she learned how to make from her mother, with dried apricots and marmalade. “A little sweet to sweeten his disposition” her mother used to say when she cooked this chicken for Rose’s father. Maybe it would work for Rose too.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she whispered to herself. Mort had been her husband for thirteen years, and she had eaten dinner with him almost every night of their marriage. Why was she so excited? She hoped the evening would go well. She hoped it would be different from the thousands of dinners that had come before it. Because if this dinner was the same, if the promise of the morning’s kiss was lost, the hope she carried would scatter and disappear, like the last puff of flour she had swept off the floor.
Chapter 8
MORT
(September 1947)
Ever since Rose told him she was expecting their fourth child, Mort had been bargaining with God. Somewhere in the dusty bottom drawer of his consciousness, he knew he had not been an attentive father or a loving husband. He knew he had failed. In the quiet of the night, with Rose sleeping beside him, he counted his sins as only a man obsessed with numbers could. He recorded each unkind remark, intentional slight and frown in imaginary columns, tallied the totals and found himself wholly in the red.
Mort’s vision of God was the punitive Old Testament righter of wrongs. He convinced himself that with good behavior (as well as good bookkeeping), he could balance his divine account statement and show a profit of virtue. A successful son to carry on his name and his business would be his reward.
So Mort took up the task at hand. He brought his daughters on walks to the candy store. He complimented his wife the way he used to when they were first dating. One morning, as Rose helped him on with his jacket, he decided to kiss her goodbye. As he turned to her, the look of utter disbelief on her face shamed him. He reached out to take her cheek in his hand. It was soft, velvety, like the outside of a peach. For a moment, he forgot about his nighttime tally and breathed in the scent of her.
As the weeks went by, Mort decided it was easier to keep track if he assigned point values to specific actions. He fell into a nightly ritual of calculating his credits and debits, the good deeds and the bad, and silently congratulated himself as his column of virtuous living out-valued the row of unkind words and selfish actions that had so recently defined him.
In his quest to boost his quota, Mort had agreed to an unprecedented outing with Abe’s family. The two families spent a lot of time together, but they rarely socialized outside their home. Mort was frustrated. Wasn’t it enough that he worked with Abe every day and spent every holiday with his family? Wasn’t it enough that he could hear Abe’s sons pounding overhead all day long? He had to go out with them on a Sunday too? But saying no for such selfish reasons would compromise his numbers so, reluctantly, he agreed.
Helen had invited them to dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan, courtesy of her older brother Sol. Sol was the proprietor of a candy stand located in the lobby of a large office building on East Thirty-eighth Street. He sold candy bars, newspapers, cigarettes and cigars. Sol also had a notary license and was happy to provide his official stamp for anyone in the building seeking his services. This tidy enterprise earned him a respectable living. But Sol made his real money as a bookie. In the morning, a customer might slip him an extra twenty-dollar bill while paying for a newspaper to place a bet on a boxing match. An afternoon chocolate bar was an excuse to pick a winner in baseball. No one questioned the monetary exchanges or the visits to Sol’s stand. Someone paying close attention might have noticed that Sol rarely had to make change for his customers. But if anyone noticed, it never came up. It was the perfect front.
Though he was older than Helen, Sol had married for the first time only a few years ago. His son, Johnny, was two, and lived on a steady diet of chocolate bars and Sugar Daddy caramel pops. Mort thought Sol should take bets on when Johnny would lose all his teeth.
To Mort’s way of thinking, Sol’s activities were clearly illegal. But Helen adored her brother and forbade anyone from talking about Sol’s side business. It was one of Sol’s customers, however, who presented the reason for their upcoming excursion.
This particular customer owned an elegant Italian restaurant near the office building and found himself in debt to Sol after getting some bad tips on a horse. Rather than shell out the cash, he invited Sol for dinner at the restaurant. Sol graciously accepted. Knowing the size of the debt, he figured he’d be eating lunch there for a month if he went alone, so he invited Helen and her boys for dinner, and told her Mort’s family should come as well.
The girls squealed when Rose told them about the invitation. Dinner at a fancy restaurant! In Manhattan!
“Can we go? Can we?” pleaded Mimi.
Eight pairs of eyes turned to Mort for approval. His initial reaction was to shake his head no. But he nodded his approval instead.
“Will we get to take the subway?” Judith asked her father, obviously excited at the prospect.
“I suppose so,” Mort said. He tried to smile. He noted, with satisfaction, that it was his third smile of the day.
“Mommy says the restaurant will be very pretty and everyone will be dressed up. I’m going to wear my best dress and my pink hair ribbon and I’m going to carry my purse!” Mimi spun around as she described the details of her outfit.
Dinah giggled and spun around as well. She approached Mort cautiously, and he patted her on the head.