One might say the same of Harry. His preferred haberdashery was the army/navy surplus store downtown. Lucienne, however, was genuinely Parisian (she had spent the first four years of her life there, never mind that the city was occupied, never mind that she was hardly ever taken out of the apartment) and she had a French-woman’s flair for color and line. As a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires, as a young working woman in 1950s Boston, she had been known for dressing well on very little money, and she and her brother had managed to support their widowed mother, too. But Lucienne was well over sixty now, and perhaps this turquoise dress she’d bought for a friend’s grandson’s bar mitzvah was too bright for the present company. Perhaps it was also too tight for what Lucienne called her few extra pounds and what Harry called her blessed corpulence. He was a fatty himself.
In the da Costas’ disciplined presence Harry was always a little embarrassed about their appetites, his and Lucienne’s. Certainly they had nothing else to be ashamed of: not a thing! They were well educated, as high school teachers had had to be in their day (she’d taught French, he chemistry). Lucienne spoke three languages, four if you counted Yiddish. Harry conversed only in Brooklyn English, but he understood Lucienne in all of her tongues. They subscribed to the New Yorker and Science and American Heritage.
These da Costas, though — they were very tall, they were very thin. Judith, with her pewter hair and dark clothing, could have passed for a British governess. Justin was equally daunting: a high brow and a lean nose and thin lips always forming meaningful expressions. But there were moments when Justin glanced at Judith while speaking, and a spasm of anxiety crossed his face, entangling itself with the meaningful expressions. Then Justin and Harry briefly became allies: two younger brothers who’d been caught smoking. One morning at breakfast Harry had described this occasional feeling of kinship to his wife. Lucienne looked at him for a while, then got up and went around the table and kissed him.
PAPRIKA BREADSTICKS! The waiter’s young hand shook as he lowered the basket. Judith took none; Justin took one but didn’t bite; Lucienne took one and began to munch; Harry took one and then parked another behind his ear.
“Ha,” Judith said, mirthlessly.
“Ha-ha,” Justin said.
Lucienne looked at Harry, and sighed, and smiled — her wide motherly smile, reminding him of the purpose of this annual evening out. He removed the breadstick, brushing possible crumbs from his shoulder. “What do you hear from our kids?” he said to Justin.
“Our kids love it out there in Santa Fe. I don’t share their taste for the high and dry,” Justin said with an elegant shrug.
“You’re a Yankee from way back,” Harry said.
The da Costas, as Harry well knew, were an old Portuguese-Dutch family who had begun assimilating the minute they arrived in the New World — in 1800, something like that — and had intermarried whenever an Episcopalian would have them. Fifty years ago Justin had studied medicine for the purpose of learning psychiatry. His practice still flourished. He saw patients in a free-standing office, previously a stable, behind their home, previously a farmhouse, the whole compound fifteen miles north of Boston. Judith had designed all the conversions. The windows of Justin’s consulting room faced a soothing stand of birches.
The Savitskys had visited the da Costas once, three years ago, the night before Miriam Savitsky’s wedding to Jotham da Costa. At that party they discovered that there were backyards in Greater Boston through which rabbits ran, into which deer tripped; that people in the mental-health professions did not drink hard liquor (Justin managed to unearth a bottle of Scotch from a recess under the sink); and that the severe Judith was the daughter of a New Jersey pharmacist. The pharmacist was there on the lawn, in a deck chair: aged and garrulous. Harry and his new son-in-law’s grandfather talked for a while about synthetic serotonin. The old man had died three months ago, in January.
COCKTAILS! The Hussar did provide Scotch, perhaps knowing no better. The fiddler’s repertoire descended into folk — some Russian melodies. Harry guessed that Lucienne knew their Yiddish lyrics. The da Costas ignored the tunes. They were devotees of early music. To give them their due — and Harry always tried to give them their due — they perhaps did not intend to convey the impression that dining out once a year with the Savitskys was bearable, but only marginally. Have pity, he told himself. Their cosseted coexistence with gentle wildlife must make them uncomfortable with extremes of color, noise, and opinions. And for their underweight Jotham, who still suffered from acne at the age of thirty-seven, they’d probably wanted somebody other than a wide-hipped, dense-haired lawyer with a loud laugh.
“The kids’ apartment out there … it’s adorable,” Lucienne said.
“With all that clutter, how can anybody tell?” Harry said.
“Mostly Jotham’s paints and canvases, that clutter,” Justin bravely admitted.
“Miriam drops her briefcase in one room, her pocketbook in another, throws her keys on the toilet tank,” Lucienne said. “I raised her wrong,” she continued, in mock repentance.
“They like their jobs. They both seem happy,” Judith said, turning her large khaki eyes to Harry — a softened gaze. Justin said, “They do,” and Lucienne said, “Do,” and for a moment, the maître d’ if he was looking, the fiddler if he was looking, anybody idly looking, might have taken them for two couples happy with their connection by marriage. Sometimes what looked so became so. If Jotham was a bit high-strung for the Savitskys, if Miriam was too argumentative for the da Costas, well, you couldn’t have everything. Could you?
“Many people have nothing,” Harry said aloud, startling Judith, alerting Justin’s practiced empathy—“Yes?” the doctor encouraged — and not at all troubling Lucienne, who was on her fifth breadstick.
THE APPETIZERS CAME — four different dishes full of things that could kill you. Each person tasted everything, the Savitskys eager, the da Costas restrained. They talked about the Red Sox, at least the Savitskys did. The team had begun the season well, and would break their hearts as always, wait and see. The da Costas murmured something.
The main course arrived, and a bottle of wine. Judith poured: everyone got half a glass. They talked about the gubernatorial race. The da Costas were staunch Democrats, though it sometimes pained them. “No one cares enough about the environment,” Judith said. Harry nodded — he didn’t care about the environment at all.
The fiddler fiddled. They talked about Stalin — there was a new biography. None of them had read it, and so conversation rested easily on the villainy they already knew.
Harry finished the rest of the wine.
They talked about movies that both couples had seen, though of course not together.
There were some silences.
LUCIENNE WOULD TELL the story tonight, Harry thought.
She would tell the story soon. The da Costas had never heard it. She had been waiting, as she always did, for the quiet moment, the calm place, the inviting question, and the turning point in a growing intimacy.
Harry had heard the story scores of times. He had heard it in Yiddish and in French and occasionally in Spanish. Mostly, though, she told it in her lightly accented English.
He had heard the story in many places. In the sanctuary of the synagogue her voice fluted from the bimah. She was sitting on a Survivor Panel that time. She wasn’t technically a survivor, had never set foot in a camp, but still. He’d heard it in living rooms, on narrow backyard decks, in porches attached to beachfront bungalows, in restaurants like the Hussar. Once — the only instance, to his knowledge, she’d awarded the story to a stranger — he’d heard it in the compartment of an Irish train; their companion was a priest, who listened with deep attention. Once she’d told it at the movies. They and another couple had arrived early by mistake and had to occupy half an hour while trivia questions lingered on the screen. That night she had narrated from his left, leaning toward their friends — a pair of lesbian teachers — on his right. While she spoke she stared at them with the usual intensity. Harry, kept in place by his wife aslant his lap, stared at her: her pretty profile, her apricot hair, the flesh lapping from her chin.