“Wait till you see it,” said Stella. “He got it at a place on Main Street.”
“You fret yourself and fret yourself.” Joe savored a kholleh cube while comforting his wife. “It’s nothing with nothing. “He’s a pious Jew. Perhaps he was afraid you’d try to dissuade him—”
“But why did he mumble about his grandchildren?”
“Who knows? Go. I’m not stopping you from going. Go in good health. And I wager he won’t tell you. He’ll give you some other excuse. Faults he has in plenty, but an observant Jew he is. He wouldn’t let his own son, Saul, jilt Ida, to whom he had pledged marriage. Why? Because she was an orphan. And Saul had to be led fainting to the canopy. That’s how Ben Zion is. Hear me out. If you want to know what my complaint is, it’s not his love of fresh bulkies and fresh egg biscuits. At age fifty — you hear, Ira? — when he came to America, what man in his fifties can’t work? Hired work didn’t suit him. Commerce and trade he couldn’t pursue — how? Without a word of English? His brother Nathan was a diamond dealer. That would have suited Ben Zion. But dealing in diamonds you don’t learn so easily, and Nathan, brother or not, wasn’t willing to teach him—”
“Especially to sell diamonds with little black spots in them to all your relatives,” Hannah remarked, and for Ira’s benefit, “To all Uncle Nathan’s relatives, he sold a diamond with a little, a black spot.”
“Shah! He’s dead. Wild prattler,” Mamie reprimanded. “You know, Uncle Nathan threw himself from the window. He had a cancer.”
“I know. Mom told me.” Ira’s gaze furtively followed Stella as she left the kitchen again.
“It’s a great scandal.” Mamie lowered her voice. “Zaida was never told.”
“So if he leans on all his sons for support,” Hannah observed tartly, “how can he be such an ehrlikher yeet, when all his sons work on Shabbes? Doesn’t that sin fall on him too?”
“And he knows it,” Stella called from the hall on the way to the front room.
“America is America,” Joe yawned, a cruet between thumb and forefinger. “Everything is a little treife. What? I don’t take a coffee with milk at night when I’m in the cafeteria? And the cup — it’s not washed by the dishwasher with everything else milkhdik, fleishik? A piece of steak, like Max, I don’t eat. But a piece of fish, yes. Piety is stretched here. It’s not Europe, and that’s how it is.”
“And with Zaida, what you do, you do. What I do, I do,” said Mamie.
“And women count for nothing,” Hannah added. “It’s no use talking. That’s how he was brought up. You told me yourself a hundred times,” she said to her mother with asperity: “A girl is only good to get married.”
“She’s a thorn,” Mamie smiled.
“I’ll save you a trip,” said Joe. “Saturday night I go to work, I’ll ask Morris: Why? What happened? Morris will tell me sooner than your father will tell you.”
“No. I want to see him,” Mamie insisted.
“You know what?” Stella’s voice preceded her from the front room. She was holding a textbook. “He knows we’re not going to get married the way he wants us to get married. Kosher it should be. With a shotkhin and pictures. So he doesn’t want to stand in the way.”
“Go, you’re foolish,” said Mamie.
“All right, so I’m foolish.” Stella held up her book: Pitman Method Shorthand. “So why do you take a whole towel along when we go to somebody’s wedding, and they say, ‘The same should happen to you next year’? Why?” She addressed Ira. “You know I’m sixteen, and I’m supposed to be a kolleh moit already, a bride.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Mama is afraid I’m not pure enough for Zaida. He found out maybe some boy was escorting me, and he touched my breast by accident on purpose.”
“That’s enough,” said Mamie. “May it be no worse.”
“How did you first find out where he went, if nobody was home?” Ira asked.
“I found out,” Stella answered.
“You did?”
“Morris talked to me over the phone. I was the only one home afterward.”
“Oh.” Ira searched her face. She betrayed nothing: blank. He was stewing over nothing. But then again, she was expert at exhibiting only vacuities. Fortunate too, or he would have been compromised more than once. Still, that last Talmudic comment of Zaida’s to his grandson: “By this act.” He watched her leave for the front room. Hell, bored to death over nothing. He stood up.
“Ira, are you leaving so soon?” Joe asked.
“Soon? It’s almost ten o’clock.”
“He’s got such big things on his mind. You don’t know him, Papa. He’s always in a hurry.”
And then turning to Ira, she said, “Girl, when it comes to talk, you’re a regular geyser.”
“You’re a geyser. I’m a girl.”
“O-o-y! Good night.”
“You didn’t see yet the bargain I made with the radio store for my old one,” Joe said, intercepting Ira’s retreat. “A piece of furniture you’ll never see,” said Joe.
“Well, I’ll take a quick look.”
“When you look once, you’ll look longer.” Joe led the way to the front room. “Na. You ever saw such piece of furniture?” And a piece of furniture it certainly was, a softly crooning cabinet, massive in size, maple in veneer.
“Hey, that’s the biggest I’ve seen yet,” Ira commended.
“Look yet how they painted it,” Joe extolled. “He said they got special Chinamen who were the only ones could do it. Look on how that goes, both whole sides. One sticking out the tongue to the other. No? Dus heist kunst.”
“Art. I should say,” Ira agreed.
“They’re genuine.”
“Not even Zaida could complain,” Stella remarked from the other side of the table.
“What d’ye mean?”
“Does it remind you of any animal or anything?”
“Oh, graven images. Oh, no. What dragons! It’s real lacquer.”
“I told you,” Joe said, gratified. “Turn it up a little. You’ll hear.” Joe matched act with word. “Stay a minute.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ira stood rapt in admiration. “What a radio!” With an opportunity like that, he simply had to wait — transfixed with awe — at least another minute. Joe returned to the kitchen.
Ira stepped swiftly to Stella’s side, bent over, whispered: “Did Zaida — I mean, did he tell Morris anything about us? Did Morris say anything?”
“Us?” Her smooth face, her shallow blue eyes opened in surprise. “Us, what?” She shook her blond head vigorously — for her.
“Oh. Okay.” Disgruntled with himself at final confirmation of the groundlessness of his fears, he was on the point of leaving — then remembered to salvage a little anticipation: “Listen, stay home after they leave Sunday. You hear me?”
“I wanted to ask you something, Ira,” she whispered. “Not now. Sunday.”
He hesitated. “What? Fast.”
“Ira, is it all right if I didn’t get my period for four days?”
He had expected the opposite: that she was having her period; he had prepared an answer. Speechless, his lips and scowl formed the question: “What?”
“Is it all right?” Her features were childishly suppliant, lips slackly open in plea.
“No.” Her very entreaty sent a surge of savagery through him. “It’s not. What the hell’s the matter with you? Four days?”
Sound of conversation in the kitchen had subsided. She nodded.
“You’re sure?” he whispered into her ear.