I told Ruth this story shortly after we were married and she laughed. Since then, she would sometimes tease me about my ears like she is doing now, but in all our years together, she never once teased me in a way that felt mean.
“I thought you liked my ears. You told me that whenever you kissed them.”
“I liked your face. You had a kind face. Your ears just happened to come with it. I did not want to hurt your feelings.”
“A kind face?”
“Yes. There was a softness in your eyes, like you saw only the good in people. I noticed it even though you barely looked at me.”
“I was trying to work up the courage to ask if I could walk you home.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. Though her image is blurred, her voice is youthful, the sixteen-year-old I’d met so long ago. “I saw you many times at the synagogue after that, and you never once asked me. I even waited for you sometimes, but you went past me without a word.”
“You didn’t speak English.”
“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.”