Ruth saw. Afterward, Ruth complained. Ruth walked.
In a week Sam and Sally strolled streets together to look in windows, and one Sunday they went to a movie called Gentlemen’s Agreement. The story had a New York City journalist, Phillip Green, becoming Phillip Greenburg so he could understand anti-Semitism. Sam and Sally talked a lot afterward about the masquerade. She could never do it, fake who she was on whatever side, while he kept saying you do what you must for a cause.
And, of course, he thought about, but didn’t tell her about, the fake MP in the woods south of Bastogne sitting proudly on a fallen tree, chin up, spine straight, lips moving in praise to the God or führer he loved, so that her newest suitor, Sammy Rabinowitz, could aim a muzzle at his chest and blow out the young German’s heart.
Sam was off-duty, out of police uniform, and at another favorite place for breakfast, tearing into a bagel loaded with cream cheese and sliced salmon and onions, two kinds of pickles on the side. He picked up a newspaper from the seat of the chair opposite and was reading it when Izzy and Mike Kelley walked in. Sam rarely saw anyone from the old days. Now he’d seen Iz twice in two weeks.
Sally had told Sam her brother didn’t really like it that she was dating him. “Izzy can be funny about things,” she said. Iz thought Sam had it too easy. Easy—Sam’s father dead early, Sam out busting his hump for jobs to help out his mother, once in a smelly butcher shop.
Mike headed over to his table. He still sported a crew cut, his red scrub looking good atop a body that had gained the right weight. His pants bore a sharp crease, as always, and his shirt, you could go blind from the white. “They let you off the beat?” he asked. “Don’t they know you’ll just go stir up trouble?” Not too funny, but Mike always tried.
“They let a horse out of its stall sometimes,” Sam said. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” Mike said he was selling furs out of his uncle’s shop in Stuyvesant.
Izzy, he could be Sad Sack from the comics, slouchy as he was. He gazed at the banner on the newspaper that Sam still held in his left hand and said, “Don’t tell me you read that piece of toilet paper.”
Sam shrugged and didn’t explain.
Izzy’s face pinched. He said to Mike, “Let’s order. We have things to do.”
They got their orders bagged. On the way out, Izzy gave Sam a look that should have bothered Sam, but the effort would take more energy than what his caffeine boost had yet imparted. Good old Mike: at least he mouthed a “sorry.”
Sam folded the newspaper and laid it on top of the next table, masthead boldly showing. It was his first look at the The Daily Worker, the rag that had disrupted more than one family and set of friends.
The next time Sam went out with Sally, she told him how crabby her brother was after seeing Sam in the deli. “It was that newspaper you were reading,” she said.
“He thinks I’m not serious about you, is all. I’ll go have a talk with him. When’s he home?” Her brother still lived with their mother, although they’d moved downstairs to the first floor. The next day on his lunch break, Sam rang the two-chime bell.
When Izzy opened, he paused and then said, “Get your filthy Commie feet out of here.” He leaned left, and Sam could see a yellow something move between the door hinges. The door opened wider so Izzy could show him he was gripping his old stickball bat.
“She’s safe with me, Izzy.”
“You like your stinkin’ knees? You like walking around in your cop suit? Tell you what. Keep walking. The direction you came from.”
Sam left, but for Izzy’s mother’s sake. She was sitting on the green couch by the front window, holding back the lace curtain. Sally told him their mother’s doctors said she’d had a nervous breakdown. The father lived a separate life two apartments over. Mrs. Jacobs’s gray hair hung in strings past the collar line. Her mouth was the shape of a staple.
Six months later, Sam got a transfer to the Ninth Precinct. He’d still be pressing the bricks for a while, but in a larger area. If things worked out, he was told, he might get to work investigations, with a small pay pop. He let that desire be known from the start, but he knew it could be a year before it happened.