She had been worried about whether the children would accept her. Because she was Jewish in a school that was almost exclusively Christian, because she was from Vienna and had a German accent, she wasn’t sure whether they would regard her as alien. She had never said this directly to me, but I knew it for certain one day in December, when I found her sobbing in the kitchen at the end of the day. Her eyes were swollen and raw, frightening me. I imagined that something terrible had happened to her parents or perhaps that she’d been in an accident of some sort. Then I noticed that the table was littered with an assortment of homemade items. She explained that her students – each and every one – had brought her gifts in celebration of Hanukkah. She would never be sure how it had come about; she hadn’t told them about the holiday, nor was it clear that any of the students understood the meaning of the celebration. Later, she would tell me that she heard one of the students explaining to another that “Hanukkah is the way Jews celebrate the birth of Jesus,” but the truth was less important than the meaning of what the children had done for her. Most of the gifts were simple – painted rocks, handmade cards, a bracelet made of seashells – but in every gift there was love, and it was in that moment, I later came to believe, that Ruth finally accepted Greensboro, North Carolina, as her home.
Despite Ruth’s workload, we were slowly able to furnish our home. We spent many weekends during that first year shopping for antiques. In the same way she had an eye for art, she had a gift for selecting the kind of furniture that would make our home not only uniquely beautiful, but welcoming.
The following summer, we would begin renovations. The house needed a new roof, and the kitchen and bathrooms, though functional, were not to Ruth’s liking. The floors needed to be sanded, and many windows had to be replaced. We had decided when purchasing the house to wait until the following summer to begin the repairs, when Ruth would have time to supervise the workers.
I was relieved that she was willing to assume this responsibility. My mother and father had cut back further on the time they spent at work, but the shop had only grown busier in the year that Ruth had begun teaching. As my father had done during the war, I again took over the lease on the space next to ours. I expanded the store and hired three additional employees. Even then, I struggled to keep up. Like Ruth, I often worked late into the evenings.
The renovations on the house took longer, and cost more, than expected, and it went without saying that it was far more inconvenient than either of us imagined the process might be. It was the end of July 1947 before the final worker carried his toolbox to the truck, but the changes – some subtle, others dramatic – made the house finally seem really ours, and I have lived there for over sixty-five years now. Unlike me, the house is still holding up reasonably well. Water flows smoothly through the pipes, the cabinets swing open with ease, and the floors are as flat as a billiard table, whereas I can no longer move from room to room without the use of my walker. If I have one complaint, it’s that the house seems drafty, but then I’ve been cold for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel warm. To me, the house is still filled with love, and at this point in my life, I could ask for nothing more.
“It is filled, all right,” Ruth snorts. “The house, I mean.”
I detect a note of disapproval in her tone and glance at her. “I like it the way it is.”
“It is dangerous.”
“It’s not dangerous.”
“No? What if there is a fire? How would you get out?”
“If there was a fire, I’d have trouble getting out even if the house stood empty.”
“You are making excuses.”
“I’m old. I might be senile.”
“You are not senile. You are stubborn.”
“I like to remember. There’s a difference.”
“This is not good for you. The memories sometimes make you sad.”
“Maybe,” I say, looking directly at her. “But memories are all that I have left.”
Ruth is right about the memories, of course. But she is also right about the house. It’s filled, not with junk, but with the artwork we collected. For years, we kept the paintings in climate-controlled storage units that I rented by the month. Ruth preferred it that way – she always worried about fires – but after she died, I hired two workers to bring everything back home. Now, every wall is a kaleidoscope of paintings, and paintings fill four of the five bedrooms. Neither the sitting room nor the dining room has been usable for years, because paintings are stacked in every spare inch. While hundreds of pieces were framed, most of them were not. Instead, those are separated by acid-free paper and stored in a number of flat oak boxes labeled by the year that I had them built by a carpenter here in town. I’ll admit that there’s a cluttered extravagance to the house that some might find claustrophobic – the journalist who came to the house wandered from room to room with her mouth agape – but my home is clean. The cleaning service sends a woman to my house twice a week to keep the rooms I still use spotless, and though few, if any, of these women over the years spoke English, I know that Ruth would have been pleased I hired them. Ruth always hated dust or mess of any sort.