“The day my life changed forever,” I say. “The day I first saw you.”
For a moment, Ruth says nothing. She knows I mean it, but unlike me, she has a hard time saying such things. She loved me with a passion, but I felt it in her expressions, in her touch, in the tender brush of her lips. And, when I needed it most, she loved me with the written word as well.
“It was February sixth, 1939,” I say. “You were shopping downtown with your mother, Elisabeth, when the two of you came into the shop. Your mother wanted to buy a hat for your father.”
She leans back in the seat, her eyes still on me. “You came out of the back room,” she says. “And a moment later, your mother followed you.”
Yes, I suddenly recall, my mother did follow. Ruth has always had an extraordinary memory.
Like my mother’s family, Ruth’s family was from Vienna, but they’d immigrated to North Carolina only two months earlier. They’d fled Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria, when Hitler and the Nazis absorbed Austria into the Reich. Ruth’s father, Jakob Pfeffer, a professor of art history, knew what the rise of Hitler meant for the Jews, and he sold everything they owned to come up with the necessary bribes to secure his family’s freedom. After crossing the border into Switzerland, they traveled to London and then on to New York, before finally reaching Greensboro. One of Jakob’s uncles manufactured furniture a few blocks from my father’s shop, and for months Ruth and her family lived in two cramped rooms above the plant floor. Later, I would learn that the endless fumes from the lacquer made Ruth so sick at night, she could barely sleep.
“We came to the store because we knew your mother spoke German. We had been told that she could help us.” She shakes her head. “We were so homesick, so hungry to meet someone from home.”
I nod. At least I think I do. “My mother explained everything after you left. She had to. I couldn’t understand a word that any of you were saying.”
“You should have learned German from your mother.”
“What did it matter? Before you’d even left the store, I knew that we would one day be married. We had all the time in the world to talk.”
“You always say this, but it is not true. You barely looked at me.”
“I couldn’t. You were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. It was like trying to stare into the sun.”
“Ach, Quatsch…,” she snorts. “I was not beautiful. I was a child. I was only sixteen.”
“And I had just turned nineteen. And I ended up being right.”
She sighs. “Yes,” she says, “you were right.”
I’d seen Ruth and her parents before, of course. They attended our synagogue and sat near the front, foreigners in a strange land. My mother had pointed them out to me after services, eyeing them discreetly as they hurried home.
I always loved our Saturday morning walks home from the synagogue, when I had my mother all to myself. Our conversation drifted easily from one subject to the next, and I reveled in her undivided attention. I could tell her about any problems I was having or ask any question that crossed my mind, even those that my father would have found pointless. While my father offered advice, my mother offered comfort and love. My father never joined us; he preferred to open the shop early on Saturdays, hoping for weekend business. My mother understood. By then, even I knew that it was a struggle to keep the shop open at all. The Depression hit Greensboro hard, as it did everywhere, and the shop sometimes went days without a single customer. Many people were unemployed, and even more were hungry. People stood in lines for soup or bread. Many of the local banks had failed, taking people’s savings with them. My father was the type to set money aside in good times, but by 1939 times were difficult even for him.
My mother had always worked with my father, though seldom out front with the customers. Back then, men – and our clientele was almost exclusively men – expected another man to help them, in both the selection and the fitting of suits. My mother, however, kept the storeroom door propped open, which allowed her a perfect view of the customer. My mother, I must say, was a genius at her craft. My father would tug and pull and mark the fabric in the appropriate places, but my mother in a single glance would know immediately whether or not to adjust the marks my father had made. In her mind’s eye, she could see the customer in the completed suit, knowing the exact line of every crease and seam. My father understood this – it was the reason he positioned the mirror where she could see it. Though some men might have felt threatened, it made my father proud. One of my father’s Rules for Life was to marry a woman who was smarter than you. “I did this,” he would say to me, “and you should do it, too. I say, why do all the thinking?”