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?”
My mother, I must admit, really was smarter than my father. Though she never mastered the art of cooking – my mother should have been banned from the kitchen – she spoke four languages and could quote Dostoyevsky in Russian; she was an accomplished classical pianist and had attended the University of Vienna at a time when female students were rare. My father, on the other hand, had never gone to college. Like me, he’d worked in his father’s haberdashery since he was a boy, and he was good with numbers and customers. And like me, he’d first seen his wife-to-be at the synagogue, soon after she’d arrived in Greensboro.
There, however, is where the similarity ends, because I often wondered whether my parents were happy as a couple. It would be easy to point out that times were different back then, that people married less for love than for practical reasons. And I’m not saying they weren’t right for each other in many ways. They made good partners, my parents, and I never once heard them argue. Yet I often wondered whether they were ever in love. In all the years I lived with them, I never saw them kiss, nor were they the kind of couple who felt comfortable holding hands. In the evenings, my father would do his bookkeeping at the kitchen table while my mother sat in the sitting room, a book open in her lap. Later, after my parents retired and I took over the business, I hoped they might grow closer. I thought they might travel together, taking cruises or going sightseeing, but after the first visit to Jerusalem, my father always traveled alone. They settled into separate lives, continuing to drift apart, becoming strangers again. By the time they were in their eighties, it seemed as though they’d run out of anything at all to say to each other. They could spend hours in the same room without uttering a single word. When Ruth and I visited, we tended to spend time first with one and then the other, and in the car afterward, Ruth would squeeze my hand, as if promising herself that we would never end up the same way.
Ruth was always more bothered by their relationship than either of them seemed to be. My parents seemed to have little desire to bridge the gap between them. They were comfortable in their own worlds. As they aged, while my father grew closer to his heritage, my mother developed a passion for gardening, and she spent hours pruning flowers in the backyard. My father loved to watch old westerns and the evening news, while my mother had her books. And, of course, they were always interested in the artwork Ruth and I collected, the art that eventually made us rich.
“You didn’t come back to the shop for a long time,” I said to Ruth.
Outside the car, the snow has blanketed the windshield and continues to fall. According to the Weather Channel, it should have stopped by now, but despite the wonders of modern technology and forecasting, weather predictions are still fallible. It is another reason I find the channel interesting.
“My mother bought the hat. We had no money for anything more.”
“But you thought I was handsome.”
“No. Your ears were too big. I like delicate ears.”
She’s right about my ears. My ears are big, and they stick out in the same way my father’s did, but unlike my father, I was ashamed of them. When I was young, maybe eight or nine, I took some extra cloth from the shop and cut it into a long strip, and I spent the rest of the summer sleeping with the strip wrapped around my head, hoping they would grow closer to my scalp. While my mother ignored it when she’d check on me at night, I sometimes heard my father whispering to her in an almost affronted tone. He has my ears, he’d say to her. What is so bad about my ears?