“What are you two fools smiling about?”
Leon turned the dial to the off position and pulled down the tartan. “You won’t believe it, Florie. Golda Meyerson is coming here, to Moscow in seven weeks.”
“The woman from Palestine?”
“She’s leading the first diplomatic legation, they’ve announced it.”
“She’s coming to speak at the Choral Synagogue,” said Seldon.
“When?”
“During the Jewish holidays.”
Florence looked at Leon quizzically.
“We’ll all go and see her!” Seldon announced with incautious triumph.
Florence stood up and went to the window. The summer daylight was dimming at last. “I don’t know. I haven’t set foot inside one of those places since I was eighteen.”
“You don’t have to go inside,” Seldon reassured her. “It’ll be outdoors, I’m certain. If Mikhoels’s funeral was any indication, there’ll be thousands.” He turned to Leon. “We’ll need to get there early.”
Florence glanced back at Leon. He looked completely on board with the plan. “What do you say, Florie?”
She heard herself give a simpering laugh. “Well, now we know how you like them, Seldon,” she said. “Built like a bulldozer with legs like tree trunks.”
Seldon did not look impressed by her snideness. “Meyerson may be no beauty, but she’s one hell of a woman.”
“That’s how they grow ’em on those kibbutzes,” Leon chimed in. “They’ve done what we couldn’t: manage to turn our Jews into regular peasants after all.”
“Go and listen to her speak; you’ll hear she’s no peasant,” objected Seldon.
Florence said, “Thousands of people—all the more reason to stay home.”
“Fine, then I’ll take Yulik,” said Leon, as if he’d expected her answer.
Florence bored her eyes into her husband. Did she really need to remind him, in front of Seldon, that the last thing they ought to be doing was showing up on the street of the central synagogue, sure to be crawling with NKVD agents? Was he so dense he couldn’t understand this? No, he understood. He didn’t care. With Seldon around he became like a boy, hungry for risk and adventure.
“If you think I’ll let you take my son into that mad crowd…”
“Our son. And he’ll be fine. He’ll sit on my shoulders like the other children. I want him to see it and remember it.”
There had been a time, she wanted to remind Leon, when he would have forbidden her to expose herself to such foolish danger, restrained her with the force of a prison warden. When had he become the one who threw caution to the wind?
Seldon, in his chair, was watching their exchange hungrily. Her face-off with Leon seemed to have kindled in their guest an amused if guilty enjoyment. No doubt he’d primed Leon for it.
“We’ll see,” she said.
—
It wasn’t long before Essie’s feelings about Florence’s slight showed themselves. At first Florence did not perceive any change. Whenever she saw Essie, her friend looked cheerful—joking and making small talk, or carelessly laughing with Yasha’s mother, Rosa. If Florence entered the conversation, Essie excused herself. In the hallway Essie acknowledged Florence’s greeting by raising her chin only slightly in a cool salute. It occurred to Florence that Essie’s new closeness with Rosa Gendler was a demonstration of her social self-reliance, her loud laughter a display for Florence. She stayed alert for a moment when she could approach Essie with a lighthearted apology, a jokingly remorseful defense of herself that would restore feelings on both sides. At last, she found Essie alone in the kitchen, trying to retrieve a hanging bag of onions from a hook inside the storm window.
“You need some help with that?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Florence slipped off her shoes, hoisted herself onto the windowsill, and untwined the snagged strings of the bag from the hook. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” Essie said quietly without much gratitude.
Florence hesitated for a moment. She had prepared a whole spiel, but now the words escaped her. “Seldon will be coming tomorrow evening,” she hinted. “Why don’t you drop in? You know, make an appearance.”
“Thank you, I have plans.”
“Oh, Essie—I’m sorry for the other time. I had a crushing headache and…”
“I appreciate the invitation, Florence, but I’d rather not.”
“Oh, come off it, you know you don’t need an ‘invitation’ to knock on our door.”
“Don’t I?”
“I feel bad. I want everyone to get along. You’d be doing me a favor.”
Essie sighed.
“What did I say?”
“I accept your apology, Florence. I just don’t want to.”
“Can you at least tell me why?”
Essie squinted out the window. “I realized you were right, is all.”
“About what?”
“Seldon. Let’s face it, he has as much interest in me as a horse does in a wheelbarrow.”
“I never said that.”
But Essie seemed not to hear this. “I was chatting about it with Rosa and it struck me smack between the eyes that I’d been wasting beans of time on a man who doesn’t care for our kind anyhow.”
“Our kind. What kind’s that?”
“Oh, you know what I’m talking about.”
“I promise I don’t.”
“You said yourself he’s an odd duck. Well, Rosa thinks so too.” Essie’s voice fell to a whisper. “He reminded me of one of those swishy fellas the Workmen’s Circle would hire to help us put on plays. In the Bronx…Oh, don’t look so startled. That’s what you were trying to tell me.”
Florence felt the glow of humiliation spreading up her neck. “I wasn’t.”
“Well, then,” Essie said, turning away again, “maybe it’s that dandy way the English have. All their men got a touch of purple on them, don’t they?”
Florence could feel the shock gathering like palsy in her face, her mouth paralyzed in its alarm. She pictured Seldon touching Leon’s wrist. She pictured the two of them in the breath-filled, warm darkness under the tartan blanket with the radio. Suddenly she had the feeling she was looking at Essie through the wrong end of a telescope, with Essie appearing remote and horribly small. “Why must you utter every stupid thing that comes into your silly head?” she sputtered. “Only children and idiots do that.”
Essie narrowed her eyes. “I’m sorry I said anything at all.” But she didn’t look very sorry.