Whatever language she employed, the nouns were unadorned, the syntax plain, the vocabulary undemanding: not a word that couldn’t be understood by children, though she never told the story to children, unless you counted Miriam.
He could tell the thing himself, in any of her tongues.
I was four. The Nazis had taken over. We were desperate to escape. My father went out every morning — to stand in line at one place or another, to try to pay the right person.
That morning — he took my brother with him. My brother was twelve. They went to one office and were on their way to a second. Soldiers in helmets grabbed my father. My brother saw the truck then, and the people on it, crying. The soldiers pushed my father toward the truck. “And your son, too.” One of them took my brother by the sleeve of his coat.
My father stopped then. The soldier kept yanking him. “Son?” my father said. “That kid isn’t my son. I don’t even know him.” The German still held on to my brother. My father turned away from them both and started walking again toward the truck. My brother saw one shoulder lift in a shrug. He heard his voice. “Some goy,” my father said.
So they let my brother go. He came running home, and he showed us the ripped place on his sleeve where they had held him. We managed to get out that night. We went to Holland and got on a boat for Argentina.
THE DESSERT CAME. Four different sweets: again they shared.
Lucienne said, “We will go to Santa Fe in September, for the holidays.”
Judith said, “We will go for Thanksgiving.”
“And the kids will come east for … in December,” Justin said.
The young couple spent half their vacation with one set of parents, half with the other. “More room in their place,” Miriam told Harry and Lucienne. “More food here.”
The bill came. They paid with credit cards. The nervous waiter hurried to bring their outerwear — two overcoats, and Judith’s down jacket, and Lucienne’s fur stole inherited from her mother.
“Judith,” said Lucienne. “I forgot to mention your father’s death.”
“You sent a kind note,” Judith said, in a final manner.
“My own father died when I was a little girl,” Lucienne said. “But when my mother died — I was fifty already — then I felt truly forlorn, an orphan.”
“Dad’s life satisfied him,” Judith said.
The fiddler had paused. A quiet moment. Justin leaned toward Lucienne.
“You were a little girl?” he said softly. “What did your father die of?”
The patrons were devotedly eating. A calm place. A growing intimacy.
“Where?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder, and lifted her lip, too. “Overseas,” she said. She stood up and wrapped herself in her ratty stole; and Harry had to run a little, she was so fast getting to the door.
RULES
ONE AUTUMN DONNA’S LADLE — A soup kitchen for women, operating out of the basement of the Godolphin Unitarian Church — became all at once everybody’s favorite cause. “There are fashions in charity just as in bed slippers,” sniffed Josie, who had been working as a part-time volunteer since the Ladle’s beginning, six years earlier. “Don’t count on this popularity to last, Donna.”
Donna never counted on anything to last. But she was grateful for the new help regardless. A group from a local synagogue undertook to deliver cooked delicacies. The members of Godolphin Helping Hands raked each other’s closets for clothing contributions. Maeve, a nearby Catholic women’s college, posted the Ladle’s flyer on its bulletin board. As a result, a few eager students appeared almost every day in the lower depths (Josie’s phrase) — the big basement dining room with its scabby walls, the ancient kitchen presided over by a black oven, a couple of side rooms whose high windows let in little light. Some students needed firsthand material for term papers on poverty. The others showed up out of simple good-heartedness. “Mother Theresas in designer jeans,” Josie said privately to Donna. But to the Maeve students, Josie was a model of patience, repairing the Cuisinart whenever they broke it, and demonstrating a restrained kindness toward the guests that the girls meant to emulate, really they did. They just couldn’t help overreacting to the tragic tales they heard. They were frequently in tears. Their eyes, even when red with weeping, were large and lovely.
“Those kids are prettier at that age than I ever thought of being,” Donna remarked at a staff meeting. “Is it their faith?”
Beth said, “It’s their smiles. All those buckteeth bursting out at you.” And she smiled her own small sweet crescent. “Orthodontia can be a cruel mistake.”
Pam went further. “Orthodontia is child abuse.”
Her colleagues laughed with her at this distortion. Boyish Pam, round Beth, and lanky Donna were not caseworkers, not sociologists, not child advocates — they were just the full-time staff of the Ladle and its director, three overworked young women — but they had seen children who had been abused. They had broken bread with the abusers. They had witnessed — and put a stop to — beatings by enraged mothers. “You can’t hit anybody here,” they each knew how to say in a voice both authoritative and uncensuring. A few weeks ago, Pam, turning white with fury hours after the event, reported to the others that she had interrupted Concepta peppering her grandson, a niño of eighteen months.
“Peppering him?” Donna asked. “Peppering him with what?”
“Peppering him with pepper. She had him on her lap and she was shaking the pepper jar over him as if he were a pizza. I don’t think any got into his eyes. But I wanted to strangle the bitch.” Pam bit her lip and bent her curly head.
“What happened next?” Donna mildly inquired.
“I said, ‘Please stop that, Concepta. You can’t hurt people here.’ And I sat down beside her and she handed the kid over with a giggle. ‘We were only having fun,’ she told me. I bounced him on my lap and he stopped crying and after a while I handed him back. What else could I do?”
“Not a thing,” Beth said softly, her plump little hands stirring in her lap.
“Not a damned thing,” Donna said.
Reporting incidents to the authorities was out of the question. Donna’s Ladle rarely knew the last names of its guests, or even their real first names if they chose to glide in under a nom de guerre. Their addresses, if they had any, were their own business. This peppering was thus far an isolated event. Concepta usually came in alone, drunk but not drinking. (“You can’t drink here” was another rule. Shouting and doping were also forbidden. All four rules were frequently broken.)
“Did you suggest the children’s room?” Donna asked Pam. The children’s room, opening off the dining room, contained donated toys, most broken, and puzzles and games, most missing at least one piece.