“Ira.”
I hear it first in my dream, slurry and unformed, an underwater sound. It takes a moment before I realize someone is saying my name. But that is not possible.
“You must wake up, Ira.”
My eyes flutter open. In the seat beside me, I see Ruth, my wife.
“I’m awake,” I say, my head still against the steering wheel. Without my glasses, which were lost in the crash, her image lacks definition, like a ghost.
“You drove off the highway.”
I blink. “A maniac forced me off the road. I hit a patch of ice. Without my catlike reflexes, it would have been worse.”
“You drove off the road because you are blind as a bat and too old to be driving. How many times have I told you that you are a menace behind the wheel?”
“You’ve never said that to me.”
“I should have. You didn’t even notice the curve.” She pauses. “You are bleeding.”
Lifting my head, I wipe my forehead with my good hand and it comes back red. There is blood on the steering wheel and the dash, smears of red everywhere. I wonder how much blood I’ve lost. “I know.”
“Your arm is broken. And your collarbone, too. And there is something wrong with your shoulder.”
“I know,” I say again. As I blink, Ruth fades in and out.
“You need to get to the hospital.”
“No argument there,” I say.
“I am worried about you.”
I breathe in and out before I respond. Long breaths. “I’m worried about me, too,” I finally say.
My wife, Ruth, is not really in the car. I realize this. She died nine years ago, the day I felt my life come to a full stop. I had called to her from the living room, and when she didn’t answer, I rose from my chair. I could move without a walker back then, though it was still slow going, and after reaching the bedroom, I saw her on the floor, near the bed, lying on her right side. I called for an ambulance and knelt beside her. I rolled her onto her back and felt her neck, detecting nothing at all. I put my mouth to hers, breathing in and out, the way I had seen on television. Her chest went up and down and I breathed until the world went black at the edges, but there was no response. I kissed her lips and her cheeks, and I held her close against me until the ambulance arrived. Ruth, my wife of more than fifty-five years, had died, and in the blink of an eye, all that I’d loved was gone as well.
“Why are you here?” I ask her.
“What kind of question is that? I am here because of you.”
Of course. “How long was I asleep?”
“I do not know,” she answers. “It is dark, though. I think you are cold.”
“I’m always cold.”
“Not like this.”
“No,” I agree, “not like this.”
“Why were you driving on this road? Where were you going?”
I think about trying to move, but the memory of the lightning bolt stops me. “You know.”
“Yes,” she says. “You were driving to Black Mountain. Where we spent our honeymoon.”
“I wanted to go one last time. It’s our anniversary tomorrow.”
She takes a moment to respond. “I think you are going soft in your head. We were married in August, not February.”
“Not that anniversary,” I say. I don’t tell her that according to the doctor, I will not last until August. “Our other anniversary,” I say instead.
“What are you talking about? There is no other anniversary. There is only one.”
“The day my life changed forever,” I say. “The day I first saw you.”
For a moment, Ruth says nothing. She knows I mean it, but unlike me, she has a hard time saying such things. She loved me with a passion, but I felt it in her expressions, in her touch, in the tender brush of her lips. And, when I needed it most, she loved me with the written word as well.
“It was February sixth, 1939,” I say. “You were shopping downtown with your mother, Elisabeth, when the two of you came into the shop. Your mother wanted to buy a hat for your father.”
She leans back in the seat, her eyes still on me. “You came out of the back room,” she says. “And a moment later, your mother followed you.”
Yes, I suddenly recall, my mother did follow. Ruth has always had an extraordinary memory.
Like my mother’s family, Ruth’s family was from Vienna, but they’d immigrated to North Carolina only two months earlier. They’d fled Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria, when Hitler and the Nazis absorbed Austria into the Reich. Ruth’s father, Jakob Pfeffer, a professor of art history, knew what the rise of Hitler meant for the Jews, and he sold everything they owned to come up with the necessary bribes to secure his family’s freedom. After crossing the border into Switzerland, they traveled to London and then on to New York, before finally reaching Greensboro. One of Jakob’s uncles manufactured furniture a few blocks from my father’s shop, and for months Ruth and her family lived in two cramped rooms above the plant floor. Later, I would learn that the endless fumes from the lacquer made Ruth so sick at night, she could barely sleep.
“We came to the store because we knew your mother spoke German. We had been told that she could help us.” She shakes her head. “We were so homesick, so hungry to meet someone from home.”
I nod. At least I think I do. “My mother explained everything after you left. She had to. I couldn’t understand a word that any of you were saying.”
“You should have learned German from your mother.”
“What did it matter? Before you’d even left the store, I knew that we would one day be married. We had all the time in the world to talk.”
“You always say this, but it is not true. You barely looked at me.”
“I couldn’t. You were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. It was like trying to stare into the sun.”
“Ach, Quatsch…,” she snorts. “I was not beautiful. I was a child. I was only sixteen.”
“And I had just turned nineteen. And I ended up being right.”
She sighs. “Yes,” she says, “you were right.”
I’d seen Ruth and her parents before, of course. They attended our synagogue and sat near the front, foreigners in a strange land. My mother had pointed them out to me after services, eyeing them discreetly as they hurried home.
I always loved our Saturday morning walks home from the synagogue, when I had my mother all to myself. Our conversation drifted easily from one subject to the next, and I reveled in her undivided attention. I could tell her about any problems I was having or ask any question that crossed my mind, even those that my father would have found pointless. While my father offered advice, my mother offered comfort and love. My father never joined us; he preferred to open the shop early on Saturdays, hoping for weekend business. My mother understood. By then, even I knew that it was a struggle to keep the shop open at all. The Depression hit Greensboro hard, as it did everywhere, and the shop sometimes went days without a single customer. Many people were unemployed, and even more were hungry. People stood in lines for soup or bread. Many of the local banks had failed, taking people’s savings with them. My father was the type to set money aside in good times, but by 1939 times were difficult even for him.
My mother had always worked with my father, though seldom out front with the customers. Back then, men – and our clientele was almost exclusively men – expected another man to help them, in both the selection and the fitting of suits. My mother, however, kept the storeroom door propped open, which allowed her a perfect view of the customer. My mother, I must say, was a genius at her craft. My father would tug and pull and mark the fabric in the appropriate places, but my mother in a single glance would know immediately whether or not to adjust the marks my father had made. In her mind’s eye, she could see the customer in the completed suit, knowing the exact line of every crease and seam. My father understood this – it was the reason he positioned the mirror where she could see it. Though some men might have felt threatened, it made my father proud. One of my father’s Rules for Life was to marry a woman who was smarter than you. “I did this,” he would say to me, “and you should do it, too. I say, why do all the thinking?”
My mother, I must admit, really was smarter than my father. Though she never mastered the art of cooking – my mother should have been banned from the kitchen – she spoke four languages and could quote Dostoyevsky in Russian; she was an accomplished classical pianist and had attended the University of Vienna at a time when female students were rare. My father, on the other hand, had never gone to college. Like me, he’d worked in his father’s haberdashery since he was a boy, and he was good with numbers and customers. And like me, he’d first seen his wife-to-be at the synagogue, soon after she’d arrived in Greensboro.
There, however, is where the similarity ends, because I often wondered whether my parents were happy as a couple. It would be easy to point out that times were different back then, that people married less for love than for practical reasons. And I’m not saying they weren’t right for each other in many ways. They made good partners, my parents, and I never once heard them argue. Yet I often wondered whether they were ever in love. In all the years I lived with them, I never saw them kiss, nor were they the kind of couple who felt comfortable holding hands. In the evenings, my father would do his bookkeeping at the kitchen table while my mother sat in the sitting room, a book open in her lap. Later, after my parents retired and I took over the business, I hoped they might grow closer. I thought they might travel together, taking cruises or going sightseeing, but after the first visit to Jerusalem, my father always traveled alone. They settled into separate lives, continuing to drift apart, becoming strangers again. By the time they were in their eighties, it seemed as though they’d run out of anything at all to say to each other. They could spend hours in the same room without uttering a single word. When Ruth and I visited, we tended to spend time first with one and then the other, and in the car afterward, Ruth would squeeze my hand, as if promising herself that we would never end up the same way.
Ruth was always more bothered by their relationship than either of them seemed to be. My parents seemed to have little desire to bridge the gap between them. They were comfortable in their own worlds. As they aged, while my father grew closer to his heritage, my mother developed a passion for gardening, and she spent hours pruning flowers in the backyard. My father loved to watch old westerns and the evening news, while my mother had her books. And, of course, they were always interested in the artwork Ruth and I collected, the art that eventually made us rich.
“You didn’t come back to the shop for a long time,” I said to Ruth.
Outside the car, the snow has blanketed the windshield and continues to fall. According to the Weather Channel, it should have stopped by now, but despite the wonders of modern technology and forecasting, weather predictions are still fallible. It is another reason I find the channel interesting.
“My mother bought the hat. We had no money for anything more.”
“But you thought I was handsome.”
“No. Your ears were too big. I like delicate ears.”
She’s right about my ears. My ears are big, and they stick out in the same way my father’s did, but unlike my father, I was ashamed of them. When I was young, maybe eight or nine, I took some extra cloth from the shop and cut it into a long strip, and I spent the rest of the summer sleeping with the strip wrapped around my head, hoping they would grow closer to my scalp. While my mother ignored it when she’d check on me at night, I sometimes heard my father whispering to her in an almost affronted tone. He has my ears, he’d say to her. What is so bad about my ears?
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.”