Right away Sonya got her hair cut. The actress Mary Martin was playing a navy nurse in a Broadway show. Mary Martin’s hair was clipped close to the scalp, like a boy’s. All over Manhattan women were trying that coiffure, most of them just once — even the prettiest face looked plain without surrounding fluff. But the cropped style suited Sonya’s long head and steady eyes. “You’re always beautiful to me,” Roland said when she came nervously home from the beauty shop. The effect of his declaration was stronger because of the flatness of its tone. “I’ll love you until the day I die,” he added, again without emotion; and she knew that to be true, too. Let the day be slow in coming, she thought, again smelling the carbolic of the hospital.
Roland’s skin was still pasty but he was less often short of breath — a new medicine was helping. The Joint kept asking him to make speeches; well, of course, who knew more about the plight of European Jews during the previous two decades; who could judge better the situation of those who were left on the continent; who could better suppose the future? He came home from speech giving with his shirt moist. Thank God the apartment building had an elevator.
The apartment’s permanent tenant was a woman, they thought — they judged partly from the four-poster’s silk spread, creamy yellow. Eggnog? There was a crumpled, lace-trimmed handkerchief in the back of one of the dresser drawers; it smelled of perfume. The tenant read German; German books were everywhere. “She is German,” concluded Sonya.
“Or Austrian or Swiss,” Roland said. “Or Lithuanian.”
“She’s no Litvak,” Sonya insisted, helplessly remembering Baltic Persons shivering in Gruenwasser’s under-heated barracks. “She’s an aristocrat.”
“There are Lithuanian aristocrats,” began the reasonable man, but Sonya was already enumerating the signs of hoch culture: millefleur paperweights, framed eighteenth-century drawings, volumes of Rilke and Novalis, a shelf of novels in French. And the family photographs on the desk: a bespectacled father, a fine-featured mother — how would she fare with a Mary Martin chop? — five blond daughters in the loose children’s dresses of the twenties. The photographs seemed unposed — perhaps a favorite uncle had taken them, Roland suggested. The girls, very young, played in a garden; mountains rose in the distance. Slightly older, they occupied a living room — three lolled on a couch, another sat at a piano, the littlest looked out the window. At the foot of a gangplank the entire family stood close together, as if bundled. They were all in coats except for the father, who carried his over his arm. Mama wore an asymmetrical hat. The girls — teenagers now — wore cloches.
“They got out in time,” Roland said.
“They’re not Jewish. Intellectuals, though, liberals …”
“National Socialism had no use for them. Which one is our landlady, do you think?”
Sonya peered at the faces, alike but different — one wore glasses, one had very full lips … Roland coughed, touched his chest. “The curly one,” Sonya decided.
And so, the identity of their more-or-less landlady more-or-less established, they turned to other things. Roland’s job at the Joint kept him busy, and Sonya was playing hausfrau and taking long walks. She got to know the butcher, the grocer, the fishmonger. She was a steady customer at the hardware shop and the lending library and the dry cleaning establishment. She patronized a coffee shop on Fourth Avenue, and established an ersatz friendship with its proprietress. Through the Joint she and Roland met apprehensive immigrants and were kind to them. And Sonya made two real friends: women who’d known one of her cousins — a jewelry designer on the East Side, a social worker on the West. Sometimes, on weekends, Sonya and Roland went to the movies with these women and their husbands, or out to a restaurant. “Normal life,” she exulted. She thought of Ida, the camp secretary, maybe safe in Israel née Palestine, maybe killed by mortar fire.
There was an armoire in the room they called the study. Sonya had stored her few summer dresses in the right side of it, and Roland’s one summer suit. He had a winter suit, too. Insufficient; the Joint asked him to provide himself with a tuxedo at its expense. He was more and more in demand as a speaker, requested now by organizations of wealthy philanthropists, not just Zionists and socialists. Roland reluctantly bought a tuxedo at Macy’s, and Macy’s altered it to fit. It was delivered on a Saturday.
“I’ll hide it in that armoire,” he said. “And I’ll hope that I don’t ever have to pull it out, that those fellows find somebody else to harangue them. Just thinking of their dinners I get heartburn,” and he groaned in his easy chair.
“Don’t get up, I’ll put it away,” Sonya said quickly.
She opened the left door of the armoire; and held the tuxedo high, like a lamp. It was shrouded in the new element plastic. She attempted to hang it and encountered resistance. Something was already hanging there. She opened the right door and thrust the tuxedo among the summer clothes. Then she took down the something.
It was a long black narrow coat of soft wool. It was double-breasted: buttons on its right side, buttonholes on its left, and so — she had to look down at her own striped cotton blouse to be sure — it was a coat designed for a man. It had a shawl collar of fur — brown fur, mink probably. Her friend the jewelry designer had a mink jacket, its glossy hairs similar to this. There was a producer who lived on West End Avenue; Sonya had seen him in his famous mink greatcoat.
She peeked into the living room. Roland was dozing now, the newspaper in disarray across his lap. She took the coat from the wooden hanger and, carrying it across her two extended arms, brought it into the bedroom.
There she put it on. The stripes of her blouse peeped between the crescents of fur like some other species. This coat needed a brandy-colored silk scarf costing perhaps one month of Roland’s salary, perhaps two. A bit of black would suffice. She reached into her middle drawer, pulled out a black slip, draped it within the collar. There.
Women’s slacks were just catching on. They were not generally for street wear, unless the streets were in the Village. Sonya had adopted them enthusiastically. They suited her long stride. She could buy men’s pants off the rack. She was wearing black trousers today, and oxfords.
A pier glass stood between the two bedroom windows. She walked slowly toward it.
What a distinguished gentleman. How well the white-haired head sat above the fur collar. The owner of this coat must be a slender fellow — the garment barely skimmed Sonya’s thin frame. A man like this had had the cash to get out of Vienna, then get out of Paris, then get to New York — not like the little shoemaker Yenkel and his numerous children, not like chess-playing Claud, smoking and coughing on his lower bunk …
She took off the coat and brought it into the living room. Roland was awake. She showed him the garment like a saleslady, displaying the fine workmanship of the buttoned right cuff. The other cuff, she discovered, had lost its button.
“Very nice, but no use in California,” Roland said. “So she left it in New York.”
“He.”
“He, I suppose. We might have figured. A woman irons.” There’d been no ironing board when they arrived; they’d had to buy one. “A woman would have chosen different draperies — a softer color. Yes: this is a man’s apartment.”
“There’s no spice rack above the stove,” Sonya said. Roland gave her a thoughtful look. She turned from him and laid the coat at an angle on the Biedermeier sofa, its shoulders against the strict back, its skirts spread on the seat.