The Longest Ride(8)

“By then, I had begun to understand some of the language, and I could talk a little. If you had asked, I would have said, ‘Okay, Ira. I will walk with you.’”



She says these last words with an accent. Viennese German, soft and musical. Lilting. In later years her accent faded, but it never quite disappeared.



“Your parents wouldn’t have allowed it.”



“My mother would have. She liked you. Your mother told her that you would own the business one day.”



“I knew it! I always suspected you married me for my money.”



“What money? You had no money. If I wanted to marry a rich man, I would have married David Epstein. His father owned the textile mill and they lived in a mansion.”



This, too, was one of the running jokes in our marriage. While my mother had been speaking the truth, even she knew it was not the sort of business that would make anyone wealthy. It started, and remained, a small business until the day I finally sold the shop and retired.



“I remember seeing the two of you at the soda parlor across the street. David met you there almost every day during the summer.”



“I liked chocolate sodas. I had never had them before.”



“I was jealous.”



“You were right to be,” she says. “He was rich and handsome and his ears were perfect.”



I smile, wishing I could see her better. But the darkness makes that impossible. “For a while I thought the two of you were going to get married.”



“He asked me more than once, and I would tell him that I was too young, that he would have to wait until after I finished college. But I was lying to him. The truth was that I already had my eye on you. That is why I always insisted on going to the soda parlor near your father’s shop.”



I knew this, of course. But I like hearing her say it.



“I would stand by the window and watch you as you sat with him.”



“I saw you sometimes.” She smiles. “I even waved once, and still, you never asked to walk with me.”



“David was my friend.”



This is true, and it remained true for most of our lives. We were social with both David and his wife, Rachel, and Ruth tutored one of their children.



“It had nothing to do with friendship. You were afraid of me. You have always been shy.”



“You must be mistaking me for someone else. I was debonair, a ladies’ man, a young Frank Sinatra. I sometimes had to hide from the many women who were chasing me.”



“You stared at your feet when you walked and turned red when I waved. And then, in August, you moved away. To attend university.”



I went to school at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I didn’t return home until December. I saw Ruth twice at the synagogue that month, both times from a distance, before I went back to school. In May, I came home for the summer to work at the shop, and by then World War II was raging in Europe. Hitler had conquered Poland and Norway, vanquished Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and was making mincemeat of the French. In every newspaper, in every conversation, the talk was only of war. No one knew whether America would enter the conflict, and the mood was grim. Weeks later, the French would be out of the war for good.



“You were still seeing David when I returned.”



“But I had also become friends with your mother in the year you were gone. While my father was working, my mother and I would go to the shop. We would speak of Vienna and our old lives. My mother and I were homesick, of course, but I was angry, too. I did not like North Carolina. I did not like this country. I felt that I did not belong here. Despite the war, part of me wanted to go home. I wanted to help my family. We were very worried for them.”



I see her turn toward the window, and in the silence, I know that Ruth is thinking about her grandparents, her aunts and uncles, her cousins. On the night before Ruth and her parents left for Switzerland, dozens of her extended family members had gathered for a farewell dinner. There were anxious good-byes and promises to stay in touch, and although some were excited for them, nearly everyone thought Ruth’s father was not only overreacting, but foolish to have given up everything for an uncertain future. However, a few of them had slipped Ruth’s father some gold coins, and in the six weeks it took to journey to North Carolina, it was those coins that provided shelter and kept food in their stomachs. Aside from Ruth and her parents, her entire family had stayed in Vienna. By the summer of 1940, they were wearing the Star of David on their arms and largely prohibited from working. By then, it was too late for them to escape.