Brooklyn

1953

THE FIRST THING one noticed about Sarah Adler was the pair of big tortoiseshell glasses on her narrow face. Charlie had also noticed, when she leaned forward, the little Jewish star pendant on a necklace that rested between the tops of her breasts. But now as he looked into those glasses, he saw that her eyes were not only intense, but a magical brown and flecked with wondrous lights.

Sarah Adler was twenty-four. And right now, as those brown eyes stared at Charlie Master across the table in the elegant St. Regis, she was wondering: How old is he? Fifty maybe? Twice her age, anyway. But he looked in pretty good shape.

And you had to admit, older men were much more interesting.

The St. Regis, on Fifth at Fifty-fifth, was not just a hotel. It was a palace. He’d taken her for a drink, first to the paneled bar, where Maxfield Parrish’s huge, luminous mural, Old King Cole, gave a rich glow to the whole room. She’d liked that. And then they had gone into the pillared dining room. Mr. Charles Master certainly knew how to treat a girl. And he talked well, too.

It was only three weeks since she’d taken the job at the gallery, even if it did pay peanuts. So when Mr. Master had walked in this morning with his incredible collection of photographs, and the gallery owner had told her to take care of it, she couldn’t believe her luck. And now they were sitting in the St. Regis, and she was enjoying one of the most interesting conversations she’d ever had in her life.

This man seemed to know everybody. He’d been friends with Eugene O’Neill and all the theater crowd back in the twenties, and he’d written plays himself. He’d heard the jazz greats in Harlem before they were famous, remembered Charlie Chaplin when he was still performing onstage. And now he’d just told her something even more amazing.

“You know Ernest Hemingway?” She worshipped Hemingway. “Where did you meet him? In Paris?”

“In Spain.”

“You mean you were in the Spanish Civil War?”

Sarah had only been seven years old when the Spanish Civil War began, but she had learned about it at school—and at home. At the Adler house in Brooklyn, the discussions had been endless. Of course, none of them supported the side that finally won. General Franco the fascist, with his authoritarian Catholics and monarchists, was everything the Adler family hated. “He’s no better than Hitler,” her father used to say. As for her mother, Esther Adler, who came from a family of liberals and trade unionists, she was ready to join the International Brigade and go to fight herself! Everyone was for the left.

Except for Uncle Herman. Her father’s brother was a thickset man who used to pride himself on his knowledge of European affairs. And whatever the subject, he always knew best. “Listen,” he’d declare, “Franco is an old-fashioned authoritarian. He’s a son of a bitch, okay? But he’s not a Nazi.”

Then her mother would berate him.

“And those Catholic monarchists of his? You know what the Spanish Inquisition did to the Jews?”

And soon there would be a furious argument.

“You think the people fighting Franco are American liberals, like you? Let me tell you, Esther, half these people are Trotskyists and anarchists. Okay? They want to turn the place into Stalin’s Russia. You really think that’s a good idea? No!” Uncle Herman would suddenly shout when his brother tried to interrupt him. “I want to know if she really thinks that’s such a great idea.”

“Your uncle just likes to argue,” her mother would tell Sarah, afterward. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

But when he was alone with Sarah, Uncle Herman would give her candy and tell her stories in the gentlest voice, so she knew he was good and kind. It was just that he liked to argue.

Sadly, those were the only memories Sarah had of her Uncle Herman. The Spanish Civil War was still in progress when he’d gone away to Europe—though not to fight in Spain. Maybe his fate would have been different if he had gone there.

For Uncle Herman had never returned. It was a subject her father couldn’t bear to speak about. So the family never mentioned the poor man now.

“I was a journalist,” said Charlie. “For the Hearst newspapers. I drank with Hemingway a few times, that’s all.”

Sarah laughed out loud.

“You’re mocking me,” he said.

“No. I’m impressed. What was Hemingway like?”

“Good company. I liked him better than Dos Passos or George Orwell.”

“Dos Passos? Orwell? Oh my God, that must have been amazing.”

“True. But civil wars are ugly. Bloody.”

“Hemingway was wounded.”

“So was I, actually.”

“Really? How?”

“There was a man down, quite near where I was reporting. You could hear him screaming. They had a stretcher, but only one bearer.” He shrugged. “I helped out. Took some shrapnel on the way back.” He grinned. “There’s a piece still in my leg, which speaks to me sometimes.”

“You have a scar?”

“Of course.”

“But you saved a man.”

“He didn’t make it.”

Charlie Master had a mustache. It was flecked with gray. She couldn’t decide if it reminded her more of Hemingway or Tennessee Williams. It looked good, anyway. He’d mentioned he had a son. Did he have a wife?

“So what did you do in the Second War?” she asked. “Did you fight in Europe?”

“Newport.”

“Newport, Rhode Island?”

“Has one of the finest deep-water harbors in the country. The British used it during the War of Independence. There was a lot of activity there, especially in ’43 and ’44. Coastal defenses, naval schools, you name it. I was in the Coast Guard.” He smiled. “A return to childhood for me, really. We used to have a cottage there.”

“Like, one of those palaces, you mean?”

“No, but it was pretty spacious. After my father lost all his money in the crash, the Newport and city houses were both sold. My parents had to move to an apartment on Park Avenue.”

She’d already figured that Charlie Master was some kind of blue blood. He had that soft way of speaking. But to move to Park Avenue because you were poor? This was another world.

“You really knew hardship in the Depression,” she laughed, then regretted her sarcasm.

He gave her a wry look.

“It sounds kind of foolish, doesn’t it? But believe me,” he continued more seriously, “at the start of the Depression, it was only a step from considerable wealth to total poverty. There were lines around the block for every job. Wall Street brokers, I mean people you knew, were selling apples on the street. I remember walking with my father once, and he looked at one of those fellows, and he said, ‘A couple of percentage points, Charlie, and that would have been me.’”

“You believe that?”

“Oh, absolutely. When my father’s brokerage failed, we could have been bankrupt, completely finished. Did you ever see Central Park during the early years of the Depression? People put up shacks there, little shanty towns, because they had nowhere to live. One day, my father found one of his friends there. He brought him home, and he lived with us for months. I remember him sleeping on a couch. So, we were lucky but, believe me, we knew it.” He nodded thoughtfully. “What about your family? How did you get by?”

“My crazy family? In my father’s family, one of the children always got an education. So that was my father. He became a dentist. Even in the Depression, people needed to get their teeth fixed. We got by.”

“That was good.”

“Not so good. My father didn’t want to be a dentist. He wanted to be a concert pianist. He still keeps a piano in his waiting room, and he practices while he’s waiting for his patients.”

“Is he a fine pianist?”

“Yes. But he’s a terrible dentist—my mother would never let him fix our teeth.”

Sarah didn’t really want to talk about her family, though. She wanted to hear more about his life. So they talked about the thirties for some time. It was just so interesting. And she found she could make him laugh.

Finally, she had to go back to the gallery. Their next meeting was arranged for the following month, so she supposed she wouldn’t see him until then. But just as they were parting, he remarked: “There’s a new show at the Betty Parsons Gallery next week. Do you go to openings?”

“Yes,” she said, taken by surprise.

“Oh, well, maybe I’ll see you there.”

“Could be.”

I’ll be there, all right, she thought. Though she still hadn’t found out if he was married. But then, there were things he didn’t know about her, either.

On Saturday, Charlie took the ferry to Staten Island. It was a fine October day, so he quite enjoyed the ride. He took it every other weekend, usually, to collect little Gorham.

It hadn’t been his idea to give his son the name. Julie had wanted him named after her grandfather, and his own mother had approved. “I think it’s nice to carry the name of an ancestor who signed the Constitution,” she had declared. Old money, and all that.

Julie was old money. And she had some money, too. She was blonde and blue-eyed and bland, and her family were Social Register, like the Masters. Mrs. Astor’s famous Four Hundred might be a thing of the past, but the registers, those broader guides to the good old families of America, were very much around. Indeed, it was perfectly possible, Charlie supposed, to lead a fulfilling social life without stirring outside their pages. His mother had been delighted when, at the end of the war, he’d married Julie.

And not too pleased last year, when they’d divorced.

He’d supposed it was his fault. Julie had grown tired of his ever-shifting employment. Not that he didn’t earn any money. In the thirties, though money had been tight, he’d always got by with a variety of freelance activities. And even during the Depression you could make money in the entertainment industry. He’d collaborated on plays and movies; by the time he married, he’d even had a small share of a Broadway musical. And after Julie bought the apartment, he’d always been able to pay the maintenance and that sort of thing. When their son was born, he’d hoped it would draw them closer.

Little Gorham. Most of the people one knew had nicknames. If you were John, you became Jack. Henry was Harry, Augustus was Gus, Howard was Howie, Winthrop was Win, Prescott was Pres. That’s what people called you, people you knew, that is. But young Gorham, for some reason, had just stayed Gorham.

Then Julie had told him she wanted a divorce so she could marry a doctor, from Staten Island, for God’s sake. Not that he had anything against Staten Island. The island borough of Richmond, as it officially was, had not been connected to any other borough by a bridge yet, so it still retained the rural, almost eighteenth-century character that Manhattan Island had entirely lost. The views across the water were pleasant, but it was inconvenient to go all the way out there to collect his son for the weekend.

Julie and Gorham were waiting for him at the terminal. Julie was wearing a new coat and a small felt hat. She looked good. He hadn’t fought any of her demands for money when they divorced. It wasn’t worth the hassle. She’d sold the apartment and, as the doctor she married had a handsome house already, she had plenty to spend on herself.

On the way back, he put his arm around his son and pointed things out to him. Gorham was five. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed like both of his parents. Children resemble various relatives at different ages, but for the moment at least, Gorham looked like his father. Charlie knew his son needed him, and he did his best for the boy.

“Are we going to a show tonight?” Gorham asked.

“Yes. We’re going to South Pacific.”

“We are? Really?”

“I promised.”

A huge smile appeared on the little boy’s face. “South Pacific,” he murmured.

He was awfully young for it, but for some reason he’d set his heart on seeing the show, so what could you do? Some years back, when Charlie had first heard that James Michener’s book was being adapted into a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, he had wondered how it would work. Well, half a dozen smash hit songs and nearly two thousand performances later, he had his answer. Even now, he’d had to pay double price to a scalper for the seats he wanted tonight. He hoped after all this effort that the little boy would enjoy it.

While his son contemplated the treat ahead, Charlie’s mind wandered back to the meeting he’d had with the girl.

The photography collection was important to him. He’d been very fond of Edmund Keller. During the Depression Keller had not only been a good friend, but he’d even got him some lecturing assignments at Columbia that had provided some extra income. It had come as a hell of a shock when Keller told him a couple of years ago that he had cancer.

“Charlie, I want you to be the guardian of my father’s photographs. There’s no one in the family who’d know how to deal with this. If you make any money out of it, then you should take a fee and pass on the rest to my estate. Would you do that for me?”

The collection was magnificent. A small apartment in a building up on Riverside Drive, near Columbia, served as an office and storage space, and Charlie often liked to work up there. He’d made an approach to the gallery a little while ago, and the owner had come to see the collection and agreed on a show. Charlie would arrange the publicity.

He’d been decidedly frustrated when the owner had suddenly handed over all the arrangements to some girl who’d only just started there. Reluctantly, he’d given her the portfolio he’d brought with him, and let her take a look at it.

But instead of looking through it and making the usual polite noises, the girl had gone through the photographs, staring so intently through her glasses at each one that, for a few minutes, he wondered if she’d forgotten him.

“These ones,” she pulled out half a dozen of the later photographs, “these could be early Stieglitz.”

She was right. New York’s legendary photographer and art entrepreneur had produced some beautiful work, around the turn of the century, after his return to New York from Germany, that was close to Theodore Keller’s. “Did they meet?” she asked.

“Yes. Several times. I have Keller’s diaries.”

“We should mention that.” She pulled out an earlier shot, of men walking up the railroad beside the Hudson River. “Great choice,” she said. “Amazing composition.”

They started to talk about Keller’s technique. They kept talking. After an hour he’d said, “I have to be in Midtown after this. Shall we go to the St. Regis?”

He wondered if she’d turn up at the opening of the show at the Betty Parsons next week.

At the Manhattan ferry terminal, he found a taxi. Soon they were going up the East River Drive, and crossing to First Avenue. As they passed Forty-second Street, he pointed out the big new United Nations building on the right, overlooking the water. He liked its clean, modern lines. Gorham stared at it, but it was impossible to know what the boy was thinking.

“The River House is just up from here,” Charlie remarked. “Your grandmother has a lot of friends in that building.” Maybe the grandest apartment building in the city. But of course, little Gorham had no idea what that meant.

Charlie had always supposed that his son would live in the same world. Assumed it really. Until Julie went off to Staten Island. Could you breathe the spirit of the great, daring city out on Staten Island? Maybe. It was one of the Five Boroughs, after all. But would his son really understand? Would he know which were the best buildings on the Upper East Side? Would he know all the restaurants and clubs? And the intimate sights and smells of Greenwich Village, the grainy texture of Soho? Moments like this made Charlie realize how much he loved Manhattan. And it gave him a terrible pain, and sense of loss, to think that he might not be able to share the city with his son.

They turned left on Forty-seventh Street. As they crossed Lexington, Charlie pointed south. “Grand Central Station’s just down there,” he said. Gorham was silent. They reached Park Avenue and turned north. “When I was a boy,” said Charlie, “there were railway yards here. Park Avenue wasn’t so nice then. But the railway lines are all under the ground now, and Park Avenue looks pretty neat, don’t you think?”

“Yes, Dad,” said the little boy.

There was something else, he realized, that he wanted to convey to the boy. Something deep and important. Beyond the magnificent houses and apartments, the teeming life of the streets, the newspapers, theaters, galleries—the huge business of the place. What he needed Gorham to understand—what his son was heir to—the thing that really mattered—was the New Yorkers’ indomitable spirit.

Even the Depression hadn’t really brought the city down. Three giants had saved it. FDR, the president of course—and the good old Dutch name of Roosevelt was as New York as could be. It took the guts and daring of a New Yorker, Charlie reckoned, to push the New Deal through. Second, from the early thirties, right through to ’45, New York’s tiny, feisty Mayor La Guardia—a Republican technically, but a New Dealer all the way—had run the most honest administration the city had ever seen, and championed the poor through all those painful years. Third, and no less dramatic in his own way, that brutal giant Robert Moses.

No one had ever seen public works on the scale Commissioner Moses undertook. Those massive bridges—the Triborough, from Long Island to Manhattan; the beautiful Whitestone, from Long Island to the Bronx. A slew of public parks. Above all, the huge roadways that swept the ever-growing traffic round New York’s boroughs. With these titanic projects, Moses had brought countless millions of federal dollars into the city, employing thousands.

Some people said there was a cruelty about Moses and his methods. They said his big Long Island expressways avoided the great estates of the rich, but devastated the homes of the poor; that he only cared about the flow of motor cars, and ignored public transport. They even said the new highways created barriers, physically separating black neighborhoods from the public parks.

Charlie wasn’t sure. New York’s public transport was pretty good, he reckoned, and in this new age of the motor car, the city would have come to a standstill without the new roads. The criticism about the parks and the black neighborhoods might be true, but the layout of the roads was magnificent. When he drove up the West Side’s Henry Hudson Parkway, which swept one gloriously along the great river all the way past the George Washington Bridge, Charlie could forgive Moses almost anything.

The question was, he thought, as they pulled up at his mother’s building on Park, how was he going to explain all that to his son?

The white-gloved doorman took them to the elevator, and Rose was waiting for them at her apartment door. She might be over eighty, but she could have passed for sixty-five. She welcomed them warmly and they all went into the living room.

It was a nice apartment. According to the way they counted these things in the city, it had six rooms. Living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a maid’s room off the kitchen. The three bathrooms weren’t counted. Respectable enough for a widowed lady, but not quite what a family like his should have. Charlie would have preferred an eight—that gave you another bedroom or library and a second maid’s room. The rooms got bigger too, with an eight. When they’d been married, Charlie and Julie had had an eight, though not on Park.

Of course, if he’d gone into Wall Street, if he’d made money like some of his friends, Charlie might have got one of the big apartments on Park or Fifth by now. Ten rooms, fifteen. They were huge, really like mansions, with four or five maids’ rooms for your staff.

Charlie had an apartment on Seventy-eighth and Third these days. Not far away from his mother. Seventy-eighth was a good street, and the apartments had big living rooms like artists’ studios, so it was quite interesting for a single man. It didn’t have a doorman, though. One really should have a doorman.

Rose was good with children. She showed little Gorham photographs of his grandfather and great-grandfather. The boy liked that. There were pictures of the Newport house as well. Things to remind the little fellow where he really belonged.

At noon, they went out and took a taxi across to the Plaza Hotel. In the Palm Court, they were ushered to a table. He could see that Gorham was impressed with the Palm Court.

“Sometimes I walk over to the Carlyle,” said Rose. “But I like coming here. It’s nice being near the park.”

She picked at a salad while her grandson, having dutifully eaten a fishcake, tucked into a chocolate eclair. They talked about the school he’d started at.

“When you’re older,” Rose said, “you’ll go to Groton.”

Julie hadn’t given any trouble about that. They’d all agreed. To be precise, Charlie recalled, his mother and his ex-wife had agreed. He just had to pay the bills. He’d have liked Gorham to go to one of the day schools in the city, but you couldn’t do that easily from Staten Island, and having the boy live with him, or his grandmother, assuming she was alive by then, seemed a bit difficult.

“Did you go to Groton, Dad?” the little boy asked.

“No,” said Rose, “but he probably should have.”

It was a fine place of course. The Massachusetts boarding school was closely modeled on Cheltenham College in England, and its Latin motto said it all: “Serve God and Rule” Charlie translated it. Muscular Christianity. Episcopal, of course. Good, sound education, nothing too intellectual. Plenty of sport. Cold showers. Like the rulers of Britain’s empire, the owners of America’s great fortunes mustn’t get soft.

“He’ll meet the right sort of people there,” Charlie said cheerfully. Roosevelt, Auchincloss, Morgan, Whitney, du Pont, Adams, Harriman, Grew … People with names like that went to Groton.

“Wasn’t there somebody called Peabody there?” asked Gorham.

“Yes, Gorham.” Charlie smiled. “He founded it. He was headmaster there for fifty years. Well done.”

“It’s not Peabody, dear,” said Rose. “It’s pronounced Pee-bdy.”

“Oh, Mother,” said Charlie with a shrug. “At his age …”

“Pee-bdy,” said his mother firmly.

It amused Charlie how old money in America had somewhat adopted the English custom of leaving verbal traps for the socially unwary. Old money pronounced certain names in ways that discreetly separated them from the rest. There were other words, too. The modern custom of referring to a man’s casual evening dress as a “tuxedo,” or even worse a “tux,” was definitely considered vulgar. Middle-class America said “tuxedo.” Old money said “dinner jacket.”

“Mind you,” said his mother quietly, “I hear Groton let in a black boy.”

“They did,” said Charlie. “A couple of years ago. Good thing.”

“Oh well,” his mother murmured, “at least it wasn’t a Jew.”

Charlie shook his head. There were times when you just had to ignore his mother.

When they came out afterward, Gorham saw one of the pretty little horse-drawn hansom cabs standing by the corner, and asked if they could go for a ride. Charlie glanced at his mother, who nodded.

“Why not?” said Charlie.

It was a pleasant ride. First, they went down Fifth Avenue. His mother was her usual self. As they passed Bergdorf’s elegant department store, she explained to Gorham: “That used to be the Vanderbilt mansion.” A couple of minutes later, as they approached the High Gothic front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she said sadly: “This used to be all private houses. Now it’s just churches and stores.”

Yet in fact, Charlie realized, they were actually coming to the true, spiritual center of Midtown. And it wasn’t the cathedral, important though that was. No, Manhattan’s spiritual center lay opposite the cathedral, right across the street.

How well he remembered those long years, all through the thirties and beyond, when one looked across Manhattan to see the huge tower of the Empire State Building, the great symbol, dominating the sky. But the symbol of what? Failure. Eighty-eight floors of offices—which couldn’t be let. People did rent them eventually, but right through the Depression years, it was known as the Empty State Building. And you’d have thought others would hesitate to build more office blocks at such a time.

But not if you knew New York, or the Rockefeller family.

Just before the crash of ’29, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had leased twenty-two acres on the west side of Fifth Avenue to build a complex of art deco office buildings and an opera house. After the crash, the opera house had to be abandoned. But that didn’t stop Rockefeller executing the rest of the project. Single-handed, the richest family in the world developed not one but fourteen office towers, with roof gardens and a central plaza, creating the most elegant street space in the city. Its delightful central court doubled as an open restaurant in summer and small ice rink in winter. Toward the end of a decade of building, some of the construction workers, one December, decided to put a Christmas tree in the plaza.

Rockefeller Center was a triumph. It was big, it was elegant, it was rich. It was created by New Yorkers who refused to take no for an answer. Even the Depression couldn’t keep them down. That was it, Charlie thought. That was the point of New York. Immigrants came here penniless, but they made it all the same. God knows, the first Astor had come with almost nothing. It was the tradition, going right back to those hard, salty East Coast sea captains and settlers from whom he and his son descended. Rockefeller was a titan, like Pierpont Morgan, or President Roosevelt—princes of the world, and with the New York spirit, every one.

“That’s Rockefeller Center,” he said to his son. “They kept on building it right through the Depression because Rockefeller had money and guts. Isn’t it fine?”

“Yes,” said Gorham.

“A New Yorker can never be beat, Gorham, because he gets right back up again. Remember that.”

“Okay, Dad,” said the little boy.

The cab took them round, up Sixth and back through Central Park. It was really very pleasant. But as they came back to where they’d started, Charlie couldn’t help reflecting upon one, inescapable truth. They’d just taken a horse-drawn hansom, like tourists. Tonight he’d take Gorham to a show, somewhat like a tourist. And tomorrow he’d have to take him back to Staten Island.

And then his son spoke.

“Dad.”

“Yes, Gorham.”

“When I grow up, I’m going to live here.”

“Well, I hope you will.”

The little boy frowned, and looked up at his father solemnly, as if he had not quite been understood.

“No, Dad,” he said quietly, “it’s what I’m going to do.”

Charlie arrived at the gallery quite early, but Sarah Adler was already there.

The Betty Parsons Gallery was on Fifty-fifth Street. It had only opened in 1946, but it was already famous. Partly, no doubt, it was Betty’s character. Born into old money, she’d followed the prescribed path, married young and respectably. But then she’d rebelled. She’d gone to Paris, and set up house with another woman. In the thirties she’d lived in Hollywood, and been a friend of Greta Garbo. Finally, an artist herself, she’d set up her gallery in New York.

And in the 1950s, if you were interested in modern art, New York was the place to be.

There had been American schools of art before: the Hudson River School in the nineteenth century, with its magnificent landscapes of the Hudson Valley, Niagara and the West; the American Impressionists, who’d often gathered in France, around Monet’s place in Giverny, before returning home. But good though they were, you couldn’t say they’d invented any new kind of painting. And indeed, the huge movements of modern abstract art, from cubism onward, had all been European.

Until now. Suddenly, a crowd of artists with huge, bold abstract work, unlike anything seen before, had burst upon the New York scene. Jackson Pollock, Hedda Sterne, Barnett Newman, Motherwell, de Kooning, Rothko—“the Irascibles,” people often called them. The name of their school: Abstract Expressionism.

Modern America had an art that was all its own. And at the center of it all was a small, indefatigable lady, born into the world of New York private schools, and summers in Newport, but who preferred the company of the most daring artists of her time: Betty Parsons. And her gallery, of course.

It was a group show. Motherwell was there, and Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock too. Charlie brought Sarah over to meet Pollock. Then he and Sarah looked at the work.

The show was magnificent. One Pollock they particularly liked—a dense riot of browns, whites and grays. “It looks like he rode around the canvas on a bicycle,” Sarah whispered.

“Perhaps he did,” said Charlie, with a grin. Yet it seemed to him that, as usual, in that apparently random, swirling mass of abstract color, you could find subliminal repetitions and complex rhythms, which gave the work amazing power. “Some people think he’s a fraud,” he said, “but I think he’s a genius.”

There was a fine Motherwell, one of his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, with great black glyphs and vertical bars on a white canvas. “It feels as if it’s resonating,” Sarah said. “Like an oriental mantra. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes,” said Charlie, “it does.” It was funny, he thought, it hardly mattered whether someone was older than you or half your age, when there was a real meeting of minds. He smiled to himself. Money and power were supposed to be the biggest aphrodisiacs, but shared imagination was just as strong, it seemed to him, and lasted longer.

They both saw people they knew, and drifted apart to talk to them. He said a few words to Betty Parsons.

He liked Betty. When he looked down at her neat New England face, with its small square jaw and broad brow, and brave spirit, he almost wanted to kiss her—though she probably wouldn’t have welcomed that.

An hour had passed when, glancing across the room, he saw that Sarah was deep in conversation with some young people of her own age, and with an inward sigh, he decided he’d better slip away. He went over though, to say good-bye to her first.

“You’re going home?” She looked disappointed.

“Unless you’d like to eat? But you should stay with your friends.”

“I’d like to eat,” she said. “Are you ready?”

They decided on Sardi’s. It was still early, long before the after-theater crowd would fill the place. They didn’t even have to wait for a table. Charlie always liked the theatrical decor of the place, with its cartoons of actors all round the walls. Out-of-town people might go to Sardi’s because it was so famous, but it was still a lot of fun.

They ordered steaks and red wine, and soon needed a second bottle. They didn’t talk about the show. Charlie told her about his outing with his son, and then they discussed the city in the thirties. He told her his feeling about Rockefeller and Roosevelt, and the ancestral New York spirit.

“But don’t forget Mayor La Guardia,” she reminded him. “He saved New York too.”

“That is absolutely true.” Charlie grinned. “Thank God for the Italians.”

“La Guardia wasn’t Italian.”

“I’m sorry—since when?”

“His father was Italian, but his mother was Jewish. That makes him Jewish. Ask my family.”

“Okay. How do they feel about Robert Moses? Both his parents are Jewish.”

“We hate him.”

“He’s done a lot for the city.”

“That’s true. But my Aunt Ruth lives in the Bronx, and he’s just destroyed the value of her property.” The great Cross Bronx Expressway that Moses was carving across that borough was the most difficult project the masterbuilder had ever undertaken. A lot of people were being displaced, seeing their property values go down, and they didn’t like it. “She says she hopes he breaks his neck.” She grinned. “My family’s close. We support her. Moses will eventually be destroyed.”

“You have a big family?”

“A sister, two brothers. My mother’s family all moved out of New York. Aunt Ruth is my father’s sister.” She paused. “My father had a brother, Herman, who used to live in New York. But he went to Europe before the war and then …” She hesitated.

“He didn’t come back?”

“We don’t talk about him.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, then changed the subject.

“So, your son lives on Staten Island. Does he have a mother?”

“Yes. My ex-wife.”

“Oh. I guess it’s not my business.”

“That’s okay. She and I get along.” He smiled. “You know, when the gallery said you were going to organize Keller’s show, I wasn’t too certain about it.”

“What changed your mind?”

“What you said about Keller’s work and Stieglitz. Of course,” he added, “I still have to discover if you’re competent.”

“I am. And I’m a big fan of Alfred Stieglitz, by the way. Not just his own photography, but all the other shows he arranged. Did you know he organized one of the first exhibitions of Ansel Adams in New York?”

The show of Adams’s astounding photographs of the huge American landscape had been the highlight of Charlie’s year, back in ‘36, shortly before he went to the Spanish Civil War.

“I was there,” he said.

“I also admire his personal life. A man whom Georgia O’Keeffe marries must be pretty special.”

In Charlie’s view, the affair and marriage of the photographer and the great painter had been one of the most significant partnerships in the twentieth-century art world, though it had been quite stormy.

“He wasn’t faithful,” he said.

“He was Stieglitz.” She shrugged. “You’ve got to hand it to him, though. He was nearly fifty-five when he started living with O’Keeffe. And he was sixty-four when he took up with that other girl.”

“Dorothy Norman. I knew her, actually.”

“And she was only twenty-two.”

“Hell of an age difference.”

She looked at him. “You’re only as old as you feel.”

On Friday afternoon, Sarah Adler took the subway to Brooklyn. She had a new book to read. The Bridges at Toko-Ri was a short, fast-paced novel by James Michener about the recent Korean War. She hardly noticed the stations go by until she got to Flatbush.

Sarah loved Brooklyn. If you came from Brooklyn, you belonged there always. Partly, perhaps, it was the basic geography of the place. Ninety square miles of territory, two hundred miles of waterfront—no wonder the Dutch had liked it. There was something about the light in Brooklyn, it was so clear. The English might have come and called it Kings County. Huge bridges might link it to Manhattan—in addition to the Brooklyn Bridge, there were the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges now—along with the subway. Seventy years of growth might have covered much of its quiet, rural space with housing—though huge parks and leafy streets remained. Yet on a quiet weekend morning, walking along a street of brownstone houses with their Dutch stoops, you could still almost think, in that limpid Brooklyn light, that you were in a painting by Vermeer.

It was still light as she made her way from the station. The whole of Flatbush was so full of childhood landmarks, from the modest pleasures of the soda fountain where you had egg creams, the kosher delicatessen and the restaurant on Pitkin Avenue where you went for a treat, to Ebbets Field itself, that cramped but sacred holy ground where the Brooklyn Dodgers played. She went by the candy store where all the children used to hang out, then entered the street where they used to play stoop ball.

The Adlers lived in a brownstone. When Sarah was very young, her father had rented his surgery under the stoop. Wanting to secure good tenants during the Depression, the landlord had soon offered her parents the two floors above, with three months rent-free. It was an excellent accommodation and they’d lived there ever since.

When she arrived, her mother met her at the door.

“Michael’s ready, and your father and Nathan will be down in a moment. Rachel was coming tomorrow, but she says they all have colds.”

Sarah wasn’t too dismayed about her sister. Rachel was two years older. She’d married at eighteen and couldn’t understand why Sarah hadn’t wanted to do the same. Sarah went to kiss her brother Michael. He was eighteen now, and getting to be rather handsome. Then she went up and knocked at Nathan’s door. His room was just the same as ever, the walls covered with photographs of baseball heroes and Dodgers’ pennants. Nathan was fourteen and a good student, who studied hard at yeshiva. But the Dodgers were still the biggest thing in his life. “I’m ready, I’m ready,” he cried. He hated people coming into his room. Then she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder.

Dr. Daniel Adler was short and round. His head was nearly bald on top, and he wore a small, dark mustache. If he regretted that he was a dentist and not a concert pianist, his comfort lay in his family and his religion. He loved them both—indeed, for him, they were one and the same. Sarah was always grateful for that. It was why on Friday afternoons, whenever she conveniently could, she came home to Flatbush for Shabbat.

They gathered in the living room. The two candles were ready. While the family stood quietly, Sarah’s mother lit them, and then, with her hands covering her eyes, she recited the blessing.

“Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam …”

It was the duty of the mother to perform this mitzvah. Only then, to complete the mitzvah, did she uncover her eyes and look at the light.

Sarah appreciated the ritual, the whole idea of Shabbat: God’s gift of a day of rest to His chosen people. The family gathering at sundown, the sense of intimate joy—she might not be a very religious person herself, but she loved coming home for it.

After the lighting of the candles, they walked in the dusk to the synagogue.

Sarah liked her family’s religion. People who didn’t understand these things sometimes imagined that the nearly million Jews in Brooklyn all worshipped the same way. Nothing could be further from the case, of course. Over in the Brownsville area, which was overwhelmingly Jewish, and where the streets were pretty rough, people were mostly secular. Plenty of Jews there never went to services at all. In Borough Park, there were a lot of Zionists. Williamsburg was very Orthodox, and in the last few years a number of Hasidim from Hungary had arrived there, and in Crown Heights. With their old-fashioned dress and their rigorous adherence to Jewish laws, the Hasidim really lived in a world apart.

Coming mostly from Germany and Eastern Europe, the Jews of Brooklyn had been Ashkenazim at the start. But in the twenties, a large group of Syrian Jews had moved into Bensonhurst. That Sephardic community was completely unlike the others.

As for Flatbush, it varied. There were Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews all living on the same street. A few of the Hungarian Hasidim had come into the area too. Everybody seemed to get along, though, so long as you supported the Dodgers.

The Adlers were Conservative. “To be Orthodox is good, if that’s what you want,” her father would say to his family. “But for me, it’s too much. Yeshiva is good, but so is other education. So, I am Conservative, but not Orthodox.”

A few doors down the street was a family who went to a Reform temple. Daniel Adler fixed their teeth, and Sarah had played with their children as a little girl. But even then, she understood there was a difference. “The Reform Jews go too far the other way,” her father had explained. “They say the Torah is not divine, and they question everything. They call this being enlightened and liberal. But if you keep going down that road, then one day you have nothing left.”

Most of Sarah’s friends in the city were Liberal, or secular. They were her company during the week. Then she’d come home for the weekend. So far, she liked living in two worlds.

After the brief Friday service, they all walked back. At home, they gathered round the table, her parents blessed their children, her father recited kiddush over the wine, the prayer was recited over the two loaves of challah, and then they started their meal.

All through her childhood, Sarah had known what food she would eat. Friday was chicken. Wednesday lamb chops. That was the meat. Tuesdays meant fish, and Thursdays egg salad and potato latkes. Only Monday was unpredictable.

The rest of Shabbat passed quietly. The Saturday-morning service was always long, from nine to twelve. She used to find it burdensome, but strangely she didn’t any more. Then the pleasant, leisurely family lunch. After that, her father read to them for a while, then went to take a nap, while she and Michael played checkers. Sarah and her brother always enjoyed each other’s company. Michael was musical, and on Sunday afternoon, he and his father were going to a concert at the Brooklyn Museum. There was no television allowed until the end of Shabbat, but on Saturday evening, her father asked her if she’d like to listen to a record he’d just acquired. It was an RCA recording of Bernstein conducting his own First Symphony. So she sat on the sofa beside him, and watched affectionately as her father’s round face relaxed into an expression of perfect happiness. They turned in early after that. It had been a perfect day.

On Sunday morning, however, when Sarah came into the kitchen, things weren’t so good. Her mother was alone, making French toast. Downstairs, she could hear the sound of her father practicing on the piano, but when she started to go down to say good morning to him, her mother called her back.

“Your father had a bad night.” She shook her head. “He was thinking about your Uncle Herman.”

Sarah sighed. In the year before the Second World War began, Uncle Herman had been based in London. But he spoke French well, and he’d been spending time in France, where he had a small exporting business.

If they didn’t hear from Uncle Herman for a year, they weren’t surprised. “He never writes letters. He just shows up,” her father used to complain. But late in 1939 they did get a letter. It came from London, and said he would be going to France. That had worried her father. “I don’t know how you get in there,” he’d said, “or how you get out.” Months had passed. No further word had come. They hoped he was in London. When the Blitz came, her father said: “Maybe I should hope he’s in France.”

The silence continued.

It was more than four years before they finally learned the truth. It was the only time Sarah had seen her father truly outraged, and inconsolable. It was the first time, also, that she had understood the power of grief. And seeing her father’s suffering, young though she was, she had wanted so much to protect him.

Then the Adlers did what a Jewish family does when it loses a loved one: they sat shiva.

It is a kindly custom. For seven days, unless one observes a less strict practice, family and friends come to the house bringing food and comfort. After saying the traditional Hebrew words of condolence as they enter, the visitors talk softly to the bereaved, who sit on low boxes or stools.

Sarah’s mother had covered every mirror in the house with cloth. The children all wore a black ribbon, pinned on their front, but their father ripped his shirt and sat in a corner. Many friends came by; everyone understood Daniel Adler’s grief and sought to console him. Sarah never forgot it.

“The days we sat shiva for your Uncle Herman were the worst in my life,” her mother said. “Worse even than the day I got fired.”

The day her mother got fired had always been part of family lore. It had been long before Sarah was born, before her mother married. She’d gone to work in Midtown, and got a job as a secretary in a bank. Her father had warned her not to do it, but something had prompted her to prove him wrong. With the reddish hair she had then and her blue eyes, people didn’t usually think she was Jewish. “And my name’s Susan Miller,” she said. “It was Millstein, once,” her father said. He could also have added that Miller was the third most common Jewish name in America.

But the bank had employed her without awkward questions, and for six months she’d worked there and been quite happy. True, it had meant that she didn’t observe Shabbat, but her family weren’t religious, so they didn’t mind too much.

It was a chance remark that had let her down. One Friday, she was talking to another girl who she was quite friendly with. They were talking about one of the tellers, a bad-tempered fellow who had been complaining about her friend. “Don’t mind him,” she’d told the girl, “he’s always kvetching about something.” She’d said the Yiddish word quite without thinking, hardly even realized she’d said it, though she did notice the girl looking at her oddly.

“And do you know, I can’t prove it, but I believe that girl followed me home to Brooklyn. Because the next Monday morning, I saw her talking to the manager, and at noon that day he fired me. For being Jewish.”

The incident had changed her mother’s life. “After that,” she’d declare, “I said to myself, enough of the goyim. And I went back to my religion.” A year later, she’d married Daniel Adler.

These memories were soon interrupted, however, by Michael and Nathan arriving for their breakfast. Sarah helped her mother dish up, while her father continued his piano playing downstairs.

After her brothers went out, Sarah and her mother tidied up the kitchen for a while.

“So,” her mother said, when they had put everything away, “you’re still happy in the apartment you have?”

Her mother had not been too pleased about her move to the city, but the apartment had been a stroke of luck. The brother of one of her father’s patients owned the apartment in Greenwich Village. He was going to California for a year or two, he wasn’t sure for how long. On condition that she would vacate at once if he needed it back, he’d been glad to rent it for a very modest amount to a family his brother assured him he could trust. So Sarah had a nice little one-bedroom place where she could live, even on the tiny salary the gallery paid her.

“It’s fine,” she said, “and I love my job.”

“Will you be coming home next weekend?”

“I think so. Why?”

“You remember I told you about Adele Cohen’s grandson. The boy who went to Harvard? The one that’s a doctor now?”

“The one who went to Philadelphia?”

“Yes, but he has a position in New York now. He’s just moving there. And he’s coming out to see his grandmother next weekend. I believe he’s very nice.”

“You’ve never met him.”

“If he’s Adele’s grandson, I’m sure he’s very nice.”

“How old is he?”

“Adele says he’ll be thirty next year. And he’s very interested in art. He bought a painting.”

“You know this?”

“Adele told me. She thinks he’s bought several.”

“What sort of paintings?”

“How should I know? They’re paintings.”

“We should marry.”

“You could meet him.”

“Does he have money?”

“He’s a doctor.” Her mother paused as if to indicate that this should be enough. “When his father married Adele’s daughter, he was an accountant. But he didn’t like accounting, so he set up a business selling heaters for houses. He sells air conditioning too. All over New Jersey. Adele says he’s done very well.”

So, Adele’s grandson had money. Sarah smiled. She could imagine her mother and Adele arranging all this. And why should she complain? Perhaps he would be perfect.

“I’ll meet him,” she promised.

As she returned from Brooklyn late that afternoon, however, it was not the doctor who occupied her thoughts in the subway. It was Charlie Master.

She’d flirted with him at Sardi’s, of course. She’d gently challenged him about his age. And he’d been interested, she was sure of it. But he’d been cautious, too, and she thought she knew the reason.

He wasn’t going to do anything that, if it went wrong, might jeopardize the exhibition of Theodore Keller’s photographs. He really cared about the work, and she respected that. So, half of him was attracted to her, and the other half wanted to keep the relationship professional. That challenge made the business of seducing him all the more interesting.

Sarah Adler liked her work. She loved her family. She respected her religion. But now and then, she also liked to break the rules.

Sarah Adler was not a virgin. Her parents did not need to know this.

Charlie Master was an interesting older man, and she was curious to know more about him. She wanted to learn what he knew. And, of course, he wasn’t Jewish.

So he was forbidden.

It was certainly something to think about.

The next day, she began to prepare a potential layout of the Keller show. As she thought about the balance and flow, it seemed to her that it could be improved if they had more examples of certain periods of Keller’s work. She made a note of these, and she also did a rough of the catalogue. Charlie Master was going to provide the text, but she outlined half a dozen points that she thought should be included.

The gallery had a good mailing list, but it occurred to her that if they had a list of collectors and institutions who’d acquired Stieglitz or Ansel Adams, then that would be useful. She made a note of this as well, asking if Charlie had any suggestions for how she could get this information. Then, having shown all the material to the gallery owner, she sent it to Charlie.

Whether I seduce you or not, Mr. Master, she thought, this is going to be one hell of an exhibition. Then she waited.

He did not fall in love with her at once. Ten days after he got the material, they met up at the little office near Columbia and spent a couple of hours going through the collection. Together they selected five more photographs for inclusion, and decided to leave out one of the previous selection.

She was wonderfully efficient. But she was also humble. He liked that.

“This is the first show I’ve organized for the gallery,” she told him, “and I have so much to learn. I’m really afraid of making mistakes.”

“You’re doing fine,” he assured her.

The following week they met at the gallery, and using a detailed diagram, she showed him how the show was going to look.

“We won’t be certain until we start to hang the work,” he said, “but so far I think it’s looking good. Very good.” When she was out of earshot, he complimented the owner. “She seems to have a real talent,” he said.

“She was here until ten the other night, going over mailing lists,” the owner told him. “You have to respect that.”

A few days later, Charlie asked her to lunch, to meet a collector he knew. The collector was impressed.

“She seems very good,” he remarked afterward. “And behind those glasses …” He grinned. “I see burning fires.”

“You think so?” said Charlie.

“You haven’t tried?”

“Hmm,” said Charlie, “not yet.”

Perhaps, he supposed, he could be her mentor.

When it happened, it was by chance. He was walking back from a meeting one evening and realized he was close to the gallery. On impulse, seeing the lights on, he looked in. Sarah was there alone. She looked pleased when she saw him.

“I was about to close up.”

“I just happened to be passing. Thought I’d look at the space again.”

“Go right ahead.”

There were two rooms. He went into the second one, and stood there, looking around the walls.

“You want more light?” she called.

“No. Thanks. I’ll be getting home now. What are you doing this evening?”

“Actually, I have a friend who’s in a little theater group. They’re putting something on this evening—I don’t even know what it is—but I promised I’d go.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Maybe. Want to come?”

He paused, hesitant. “It’s been a while since I went to a theater group.” He smiled. “Why not?”

The theater was in the West Village. To be precise, it was a basement in a brownstone. There were two or three young people on the sidewalk. One of them had a mug of coffee. The door of the basement, however, was closed. There was a piece of paper pinned on it which said: “No performance tonight.”

“Great,” said Sarah.

“Maybe they didn’t have an audience,” said Charlie.

“That doesn’t stop them,” said the man with the mug of coffee. “Julian was sick.”

“What about Mark?” said Sarah.

“He had a quarrel with Helga.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” said the man, helpfully.

“I’m so sorry,” said Sarah to Charlie. “I shouldn’t have suggested it.”

“The situation is familiar to me,” said Charlie easily. “Shall we get something to eat?”

They walked through the Village, looking at cafés and restaurants. They found a small Italian trattoria, ordered Chianti and bowls of pasta. Charlie grinned.

“I feel as if I were in my twenties again.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” she said.

While they ate, they talked about music. He told her where the best places were to hear jazz in the city. She told him about her luck in getting the apartment in the Village. After the pasta they had a crème caramel dessert.

“Do you ever walk about in the Village?” she asked, when they were done.

“Yes. Why?”

“I feel like walking.”

“All right.”

The little streets were quite busy; the restaurants weren’t short of custom. Charlie wasn’t sure where the evening was going, or where he wanted it to go. He felt a little awkward. They passed a little place where the tables were set for playing chess. Several men were sitting there, looking very solemn. The waiters brought them drinks from time to time.

“Want a game of chess?” Sarah asked.

“Okay. Sure, why not?” They sat down, and each ordered a small cognac. They played quietly for half an hour, then Charlie looked at her suspiciously. “Are you letting me win?”

“No.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Yes.”

“Trust me.”

“Hmm. Checkmate.”

“There.” She laughed. “I never saw it coming.”

When they left, they went up the street. At the corner, there was a candy store still open. Telling him to wait, Sarah went inside, and emerged with two little bags of fudge. She gave him one. “A present for you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Do you want coffee? My apartment’s just around the corner, on Jane Street.”

He hesitated a moment.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“Coffee sounds good,” said Charlie.

All through that midwinter and early spring they would meet, two or three times a week usually, sometimes spending the night at his apartment uptown, sometimes at hers in the Village. In part, for both of them, it was an adventure. Charlie knew she was hungry to possess the knowledge and experience he had to offer. And for his part, he enjoyed sharing the things he loved with such an intelligent mind, and watching her grow and develop. But that was only the half of it.

By January, her slim, pale body had become an obsession with him. Often in the afternoons, while Sarah was busy at the gallery, he’d sit in the little office near Columbia, or in his apartment, and dream away an hour at a time thinking about her. Standing beside him, she only had to move her body sinuously close to his, and he would be overcome with a desire to possess her.

Each time, before their lovemaking, she would slip off the little pendant that she wore around her neck, and for him this little gesture, which she did quite unself-consciously, became a moment of excitement and great tenderness. In their lovemaking, she could drive him wild with passion. But she was more than a young mistress; there was something else that he could not describe exactly, something ancient, something belonging to the East, he supposed. He’d discovered that first night that her narrow breasts were larger, fuller than he’d expected. When they made love, and when she lay beside him afterward, it seemed to him that Sarah was not just a girl, however interesting, but a timeless woman, full of richness and mystery.

He spent so much time thinking about her that sometimes he cursed himself for not having enough to do.

Every other weekend, he would see little Gorham as usual. He almost wanted to introduce the boy to her. But even if he just said she was a friend, Julie would soon get to hear of it, and guess the truth, and then there would have to be explanations, and trouble. Besides, on these occasions, Sarah was always home with her family.

That was a small difficulty. He’d have liked to spend all his free weekends with her, but usually she insisted that she had to see her family.

“They’d get very suspicious if I missed too many weekends,” she told him with a laugh.

Some weekends she could get away, though. Late in January, he took her skiing in Vermont. She fell down quite a few times, with good humor, looked at her bruises ruefully, and agreed she’d give it another try, but maybe not for a while. Then, in February, he treated her to a weekend at a country hotel in Connecticut.

It was a cold Friday afternoon when they drove out of New York. The roads were clear, though there was still snow on the banks beside them. Charlie owned a 1950 De Soto Custom Sportsman of which he was very proud.

He’d booked the room in advance, in a charming place he knew, only an hour’s drive out of town. In the name of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Master. Hotels didn’t usually inquire too closely, so long as you signed in that way. It was dusk when they arrived. They had a couple of suitcases which he carried himself to the door of the white clapboard house. There was a log fire in the lobby, and while the manager greeted Charlie and led him to the little counter to sign in, Sarah went over to it. After a moment or two she took off her coat and sat on the low ottoman in front of the cheerful blaze. She was wearing a white shirt and a cardigan. Charlie glanced over toward her and smiled; the fire was already giving her face a charming glow. Just then, an ember fell out of the fire. She reached forward for the tongs, in order to replace it, and as she did so the little Jewish star on its chain swung out from her neck, catching the firelight. Having put the glowing ember back on the fire, she got up and came toward the desk.

The manager of the place had just been starting to tell him about the room when Charlie noticed him look sharply across at Sarah as she leaned down by the fire. Now, as she came over, the man was staring at her neck.

“Nice fire,” she remarked.

“Excuse me,” said the manager, and went into the little office behind the desk. A minute or so passed before he came back.

“I am so sorry, sir,” he said to Charlie, “but there seems to be a problem with the booking. When you came in, I mistook you for another guest. We don’t seem to have a reservation for Master at all.”

“But I telephoned. The reservation was definitely made.”

“I cannot tell you how it happened, sir, and I do apologize. But I’m afraid we’re entirely full. I just went to make sure. All our weekend guests are already here.”

“There must be a room.”

“No, sir. There’s absolutely nothing. I don’t know what to say.”

“But I’ve just driven out from the city.”

“Yes, sir. There’s another hotel a couple of miles away I could direct you to. They may have space.”

“Damn the other hotel. I booked here. I demand my room.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Charlie.” It was Sarah, at his side. “Come over by the fire, Charlie,” she said softly. “I want to tell you something.” With an irritated shrug, Charlie did as she asked.

“What is it?” he said.

“Charlie, I don’t want to stay here. I’ll explain in the car.” Charlie started to protest, but she put her hand on his arm. “Please, Charlie.”

Thoroughly angry, and mystified, Charlie took the bags and went out to the car with her. When they were sitting inside, she turned to him.

“It’s me, Charlie. He didn’t have a room when he saw me.”

“You mean he saw you didn’t have a wedding ring? I hardly think—”

“No, Charlie. It was my pendant he saw.”

“Your pendant?”

“The Star of David. He realized I’m Jewish.”

“That’s absurd.”

“They don’t have Jewish people in this hotel, Charlie. This is Connecticut—how many miles are we from Darien?”

It was said that a Jewish person couldn’t even buy a house in nearby Darien. Charlie didn’t know if it was true; more likely just an ugly rumor. And anyway, the horrors of the thirties and the war had changed all that sort of thing. People weren’t anti-Semitic now. You couldn’t be.

“I don’t believe it.”

“If you go out with me, Charlie, you have to accept these things are going to happen. You think a Jew can get into most country clubs? My mother was fired by a bank for being Jewish. Are you telling me that people you know, like your own family, don’t make anti-Semitic remarks?”

Charlie thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. Maybe sometimes. But it’s just a sort of Episcopal, old-money thing. People like my mother look down on anyone who isn’t one of them. Jewish, Irish, Italian, you know. It’s ridiculous, but they don’t really mean anything by it. I mean, they’d never—”

“You’re right, Charlie. I’m sorry. So how does it feel, being thrown out of a hotel?”

“I’m going to make him give us that room.”

“Just take me back, Charlie. It was very nice of you to bring me out here, but can we eat in the city, please?”

And as the weeks went by Charlie realized that she was right. Of course, being involved with the theater and the arts, he’d always had plenty of Jewish friends. He had friends of all sorts, for that matter. When he was with them, they might refer to their Jewishness sometimes, or tease him a little for being an Episcopalian blue blood. But these things never came up very much. And when he was with his own crowd, people he’d known at school, that sort of thing, there might be things said about all kinds of races that you wouldn’t say in other company. Harmless prejudices, little jokes. They hardly seemed to matter when it was someone else you were talking about. But now he began to observe with different eyes.

He’d often told Sarah about his family. Just small stories about their life in the old days, and how his mother remained, in most of her attitudes, a splendid relic of those times.

“I’d love you to meet her,” he once said.

“That might not be such a good idea,” Sarah had remarked.

He’d continued to think about it, however, and one afternoon in early March, when they’d been visiting a gallery on Fifty-seventh, he suddenly said to her, “Let’s go up Park and see my mother.”

“I don’t know, Charlie,” Sarah said. “How are you going to explain me?”

“That’s easy. You’re the person who’s organizing the Theodore Keller show. I told you, our family were his first patrons.”

“I suppose so,” she responded, doubtfully.

But in fact, the visit went very well. His mother seemed delighted to see them. She told Sarah how she’d given the big party for the publication of Edmund Keller’s book, back in the old days. And she promised to bring people to the gallery opening.

“I want you to give me at least thirty invitations I can send out, my dear. I’ll write a letter, and telephone. I know a lot of people who I’m sure would buy.”

“That would be wonderful, Mrs. Master,” Sarah said.

They were leaving the building when the tiny incident happened. George the doorman had hailed a taxi. Charlie disliked the usual business of people sliding across the seat, so he’d walked round the taxi while George on the sidewalk held the door open for Sarah. And just as Sarah got into the taxi, he saw the doorman staring down at her head with a look of disgust.

“Is there a problem, George?” he said sharply.

“No, Mr. Master.”

“I hope not,” said Charlie, threateningly. He’d be inheriting that apartment one day, so George had better watch out. He got in beside Sarah, frowning.

“So,” she remarked as they started down Park, “what was that about?”

“Nothing.”

“He looked at me like that when I arrived, too. But you didn’t notice.”

“I’ll have him fired.”

Sarah stared out of the window for a moment, then changed the subject. “Your mother’s great,” she said. “She could be really helpful with those invitations, you know.”

It was a week later when he was having dinner at his mother’s that she brought up the subject of Sarah.

“Your girlfriend seems nice.”

“What do you mean?”

“The girl you brought round.”

“Sarah Adler. She’s doing a good job with the show, I think.”

“I’m sure she is, dear; she seems very competent. She’s also your mistress.” Rose looked him in the eye. “I can tell, you know.”

“Oh.”

“She’s very young. Can you manage?”

“Yes.”

“That’s nice. Is it difficult, her being Jewish?”

“Should it be?”

“Don’t be silly, dear. This isn’t exactly a Jewish building, you know.”

“The damn doorman was impertinent.”

“What do you expect? It’s never arisen, as far as I know, but I don’t imagine the co-op board would let a Jew buy into the building.”

It was one of the features of apartment life in the city that Charlie had always found amusing. Most of the apartment buildings on Park were cooperatives now. His mother no longer rented the apartment, but was a shareholder of the building. And the shareholders elected a board which had the right to vet anyone trying to buy in. So if you wanted to sell your apartment to someone whom the other people in the building thought undesirable, the board could refuse to let you complete the sale. They might give reasons. They might not. But the unspoken rules were generally understood.

“It’s absurd,” he said. “We’re in the 1950s, for God’s sake.”

“There are plenty of buildings that do. On the West Side, anyway.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re not planning to marry her, are you?”

“No.” He was quite taken aback by the idea.

“They’d take you out of the Social Register, you know.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, I believe they would. They don’t mind people being poor,” said Rose, “but they care about who you marry.”

“Damn the register.”

“Anyway,” she said, matter-of-factly, “you really can’t afford another family, can you?”

Another effect of the relationship was Charlie’s realization that he didn’t actually know much about Judaism. He had Jewish friends; he might go to a wedding or a funeral. The Jewish wedding service, apart from the chuppah and the breaking of the glass, didn’t seem so different from a Christian wedding, as far as Charlie could see. The familiar Christian blessings were clearly taken straight from the Hebrew tradition.

But beyond that he knew very little. Sometimes he’d ask Sarah about her family life, and about Jewish customs. He became quite curious.

It was late in March when Sarah suddenly asked him:

“Do you want to come to a Passover Seder?”

“A Seder? Where?”

“In Brooklyn. With my family.”

“You mean, meet your parents?” He was well aware that Sarah’s parents had no idea of their relationship. Apart from anything, she had explained, they still imagined, or at least hoped, she was a virgin. The thought of meeting them intrigued Charlie, but also made him nervous. “You really think that’s a good idea?” he said.

“They’d be so honored. Remember, they’ve heard of you as the owner of the Keller collection. My first really important client. They know you’re a big deal to me.”

When the day arrived, Charlie drove over the Williamsburg Bridge, and down through Brooklyn. He didn’t know the borough that well. There were the huge acres of docks all along the waterfront, the endless collections of small factories, warehouses and plants that still made it one of the major places of production in the nation. You knew that, of course, but you didn’t really get to see it in Charlie’s world. He had a friend, a professor, who lived in a large and handsome brownstone on the Heights near Prospect Park; he’d been there a few times. It reminded him of the spacious houses on the West Side, and walking in the huge spaces of Prospect Park itself was delightful. A few miles further east, he knew, was Brownsville. He’d heard there were a lot of Jews there, but the thing he really knew was that it was a dangerous slum area where the gangland killing agency of Murder Inc. had been born. From Prospect Park, however, Flatbush Avenue ran south, so he supposed Flatbush itself might be quite a decent sort of place.

Needless to say, Sarah had made him a perfect map and directions, so he found her parents’ house with no difficulty. She met him at the door, and brought him in.

They were all there. Her parents, her brothers, her sister Rachel and her family. Even her Aunt Ruth from the Bronx, who hated Robert Moses, had come. He felt a little out of place as the only Gentile in the house, but the Adler family didn’t seem to mind at all. As Sarah had told him, he was the honored guest. “We shall explain the Seder to you as we go,” her sister Rachel assured him. The idea seemed to please the whole family.

Dr. Adler turned out to be everything Charlie expected. As the father of the family, this was a very important day for him, and his face was beaming with pleasure. It only took Charlie a few moments to engage him in conversation about the composers he most liked to play, and the pianists Charlie had seen at Carnegie Hall.

The family also wanted to hear about the exhibition of Theodore Keller’s photographs which Sarah was working so hard at. So he told them about his family’s relationship with the Kellers down the generations, and how close a friend he’d been to Edmund Keller, and how honored he’d felt when Edmund had laid this duty upon him.

“For me,” he explained, “looking after and showing the collection is an obligation to the Keller family. But it’s more than that. I have a duty of respect toward the work itself.” He turned to Dr. Adler. “Imagine how you’d feel if the family of a composer you admired gave you all his papers, and you found dozens of compositions, even whole symphonies, that had never been played or published.”

This was greeted with much respect.

“That’s a big obligation,” said Dr. Adler.

“Well,” said Charlie, seeing his chance, “I am just so grateful to your daughter for doing such a wonderful job at the gallery. This is very important to me.”

Dr. Adler beamed. The whole family looked delighted. If they were being friendly and welcoming before, there was a new warmth in their manner toward him now.

Only one false note interposed itself. Charlie was talking to Rachel when he overheard it. Sarah was speaking to her mother, a few feet away.

“So,” he heard Mrs. Adler say, “you still didn’t tell me. When are you seeing Adele’s grandson again?”

“I don’t know. Soon, I expect.”

“Adele says he took you out to dinner in the city.”

“Is nothing private?”

“She says he likes you very much.”

“She knows this?”

“Yes, he told her so. He’s a very good doctor.”

“I believe it.”

“Well, I won’t interfere.”

“That’s good to know.”

Charlie had been listening so carefully that he almost lost the thread of the conversation he was having with Rachel about her children. What doctor? When did Sarah have dinner with him?

Then it was time to begin. The table was laid magnificently. Every bit of silverware had been polished until it gleamed. As the meal took its slow, ceremonial course, Rachel or her mother would explain what was happening, with one of Sarah’s brothers occasionally chiming in.

“The mitzvah of Passover is to teach the next generation about our bondage and deliverance out of Egypt,” Rachel told him. “So, the ceremony is in two parts. The first is to remind us of our slavery in Egypt; the second is to remember our freedom.”

“And that’s the matzo, the unleavened bread,” said Charlie, looking at a plate at one end of the table.

“Right. Three matzos. Also, on the Seder plate, we have bitter herbs, to remind us of the bitterness of slavery. And charoset—that’s like a paste—for the mortar the Jewish slaves used when we built the storehouses of Egypt; for a vegetable, we have parsley. This we shall dip in salt water, to remind us of our tears. Also, as symbols, we have roasted egg, and roasted lamb-shank bone. During the meal we shall also drink four cups of wine—grape juice for the little ones—to remind us of the four promises God made to us.”

Dr. Adler commenced the Seder with a blessing, which was followed by the washing of hands. The vegetable was dipped in salt water, the middle matzo broken in two, and then the telling of the first Passover began.

As the evening slowly progressed, Charlie watched with admiration. He’d never realized how beautiful it was. When the invitation to the Seder was recited, not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, it struck him with great force that, of course, these were exactly the proceedings that Jesus must have followed at the Last Supper. And as he considered the crisp New England Episcopalians he knew so well, he wondered how many of them truly understood the rich Middle Eastern texture to which their own religion belonged.

Then came the time for the youngest of Rachel’s children to ask the Four Questions, beginning with: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

How moving it was. Charlie thought of Thanksgiving, the most rooted family celebration in the American tradition, and the joyful sharing of food. Thanksgiving was real. It was important, and it was already over three centuries old. Christmas, of course, was an ancient festival. But modern Christmas celebrations, the dinner and the Christmas tree, and even Santa Claus—the things which made Christmas for everyone now—these customs weren’t nearly as old as Thanksgiving, if the truth were told. Yet here in Jewish households was a tradition going back not for centuries, but millennia.

And all the time, the children were being instructed. The Telling of the Passover, the Four Questions, the meaning of the Seder—the children had to participate actively in these. At some length, Dr. Adler spoke to them about the significance of the affliction and the delivery out of Egypt, and they enumerated the Ten Plagues. Then came the second cup of wine, another hand-washing, and blessings before the meal.

As the ritual of the Seder went on through the evening, Charlie was not only moved but impressed. Dr. Adler’s face, so warm and fatherly, might have been that of any man sharing a meal with his grandchildren. Yet under it all was a passion, an intensity that Charlie could only admire. These people had respect: for tradition, for education, for the things of the spirit.

Were such things to be found among the Gentiles? Certainly, in the families of professors, schoolteachers and the clergy, but not with this intensity. Sarah’s family belonged to a community which was conscious of roots going back three thousand years and believing, at least, that they had received the divine fire from the hand of God Himself.

Late that night, as he left to drive back to Manhattan, he parted from Sarah and her family, moved with a new respect and admiration.

Of course, he asked Sarah about the doctor pretty soon.

“Adele Cohen’s grandson? He’s a very nice person, just not my type. But I let my family think I might be interested. It keeps them happy.” She gave him an amused look. “I suppose I’d have to marry him if he was my type. He’s everything a nice Jewish girl could want.”

Charlie wasn’t sure what he thought about that. Thinking about it afterward, and feeling a pang of jealousy, he told himself not to be foolish. At some point, this girl would have to settle down with a proper young man of her own kind. But not yet. Not for a long time yet. Until then, he wanted her, very much, for his own.

The aftermath of the Seder had some other consequences as well. He began to ask Sarah questions. Some were quite simple. “Why do you say synagogue, but most Jews I know say temple?”

“It pretty much depends what kind of Jew you are,” she explained. “The real Temple, the Temple in Jerusalem, was destroyed nearly two thousand years ago. Orthodox and Conservative Jews believe that one day it will be rebuilt. This will be the Third Temple. But the Reform movement says that we should not be waiting for the Temple to be rebuilt, and so they call their synagogues temples. So there are all kinds of names for synagogues in the diaspora. Orthodox Jews often call it ‘shut,’ which is a Yiddish word. My family usually says synagogue. The Reform Jews usually say temple.”

Other questions were more searching. What did Sarah feel about her duties as a Jew? How did she want to live? Did she truly believe in God? He discovered that she was surprisingly torn.

“God? Who can know about God, Charlie? No one can be sure. As for the rest, I break a lot of rules. Look what I’m doing with you.” She shrugged. “I suppose the truth is, I’m secular during the week, and I go home to my tradition at the weekend. I have no idea how that’s going to work out in the long run.”

Once, she found him reading a book about Judaism.

“You’re going to know more than I do,” she laughed.

But it wasn’t only Judaism that Charlie had become curious about. The encounter with her family had made him think about all the other communities he’d taken for granted in the big city. The Irish, the Italians, the people coming in from other places. What did he really know about his neighbors? Next to nothing, if the truth were told.

The exhibition opened in April. It was a big success. Rose Master surpassed herself. Collectors, people on museum boards, people from the social worlds, she had managed to bring them all. The catalogue and the little historical notes that Sarah had put together were perfect. Charlie had brought journalists and literary people; the gallery had done the rest.

Before he died, Theodore Keller had produced thousands of signed prints, and even during the evening, a large quantity were sold. Not only that, a publisher approached Charlie to suggest they do a book on his work.

There were several Kellers there, the descendants of Theodore and his sister Gretchen. Sarah’s family had come, modestly staying in the background, but clearly proud of her success. Charlie had a moment of panic when he realized that several of his friends knew about his affair with her, but a quick word with a couple of them ensured that no one said anything about the relationship to her family.

And Charlie made a charming speech about both Theodore and Edmund Keller, and graciously thanked the gallery and Sarah in particular for the show which, he assured them, was everything that the artist himself could have wished.

Often at the end of an opening, the gallery would take the artist and a few friends out to supper. Obviously that wouldn’t be the case here, but Charlie had wondered what he should do. The gallery owner and Sarah and her family were going out together, and he would have liked to join them. But his mother was tired, and after all she’d done, he felt he ought to take her home.

But as he said goodnight to Sarah and her family, he felt so proud of her, and yet, at the same time, so protective; and he experienced a sudden sense of desolation at being parted from her.

If only they could be together openly, he thought. But as what?

One aspect of their relationship that amused Charlie was watching Sarah in his apartment. Since his divorce, he had reverted to his former bachelor ways. He wasn’t untidy—indeed, his white-walled apartment was simply and precisely arranged. “It’s almost like an art gallery,” she’d remarked, the first time she saw it. But it was spartan. There was hardly any food in the kitchen, because he usually ate out. She bought him pots and pans and implements which he didn’t suppose he’d ever use, and new white towels for his bathroom. She did it cleverly, however, and never in a way that was intrusive. And she seemed so pleased with the results, and so relaxed when she was there, that Charlie reckoned their tastes were very compatible. It hadn’t occurred to him before that he might have difficulty living with a woman who wanted to change his household or started putting up floral curtains when he wanted plain venetian blinds, but he realized now that he really didn’t want to go back to the conventional domesticity in which he’d lived when he was married to Julie.

“It’s funny, but I don’t seem to mind having you in the apartment,” he once remarked.

“Well, thank you for the big compliment,” she laughed.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

The only time he ever experienced a flash of irritation, and a moment of fear, it was over almost at once. He had come into his bedroom early one evening and found her going through his drawers.

“Are you looking for something?” he asked in a sharp voice.

She turned. “Caught in the act,” she said with a sheepish smile. “I need to see your ties.”

In Charlie’s experience, women never managed to give him ties he liked, and he was wondering whether to discourage her from attempting such an impossible task, when she frowned, and pulled something out from the back of the drawer.

“What’s this?” she asked.

It had been a while since he’d looked at the wampum belt. He took it from her and gazed at it thoughtfully.

“Any guesses?”

“It looks Indian.”

“It is.” He ran his fingers over the tiny decorated beadwork, which was rough to the touch. “It’s wampum,” he explained. “You see all these tiny white beads? They’re seashells. The dark beads make a pattern, as you see, and that’s actually a kind of writing. This wampum belt probably has a message.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It’s been in the family for a long time. Maybe hundreds of years. I don’t know how we first got it, but it’s supposed to be lucky. Like a charm.”

“Has it ever brought you any luck?”

“My father was wearing it the day he lost all his money—after the crash. He told me he had it on when he decided to jump off the GWB. But then he didn’t jump, or I guess we wouldn’t still have the belt. So that was lucky, you could say.”

“May I look at it?”

He handed it back to her. She took it over to the small table by the window and studied it. As she was doing so, Charlie thought about the belt and the process of making it. How long had it taken? Was it a labor of love, or perhaps just a tedious duty? He liked to think the former, but there was no way of knowing.

“Whatever it means, this is an amazing abstract design,” Sarah suddenly said. “Very simple, but strong.”

“You like it?”

“I love it. That’s a wonderful thing to have in the family.”

“I suppose it is.”

“It’s a work of art,” she said.

Ten days later, she had given him a tie. Needless to say, her choice was perfect—a rough silk with a dark red background and a faint paisley pattern. Discreet but elegant.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“It’s more than all right,” he said.

“You’ll wear it?”

“Absolutely.”

She smiled with pleasure. “I have something else for you,” she said.

“Another present?”

“Just something I saw. But I can take it back if you don’t like it.”

She handed him a rectangular package wrapped in plain paper. It looked like a book, but felt too light. He opened it carefully. Then stared, amazed.

It was a drawing by Robert Motherwell.

“I thought it might go over there,” she said, and pointed to a space on the living-room wall. “If you like it, that is,” she added.

“Like it?” He was still staring at the drawing, almost unable to speak. It was a simple abstract, black on white, which reminded him of a piece of Chinese calligraphy. And so beautiful.

“Don’t move,” she said, and taking the drawing from him, she went over to the place on the wall she had indicated, and held the drawing up there. “What do you think?”

It was more than perfect. It transformed the entire room.

“You’re a genius,” he said.

“Really?”

She looked so pleased.

What had it cost her? He didn’t like to think. No doubt Betty Parsons would have given her terms, let her buy it over time. But Sarah, on her modest salary, would probably be paying for this drawing for months if not years.

And she was prepared to do this for him? He was both astonished and moved.

For days after that, he wondered what he could possibly give her in return. What would be appropriate? It had to be something that would give her pleasure. But more than that. An expensive coat or a piece of jewelry, something she couldn’t normally afford, might give her pleasure, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to find a present that showed he had gone to particular trouble. Something of significance. Something of emotional value. He racked his brains for what it could be.

And then, at last, the idea came to him.

It was a Sunday, on a clear, crisp day, just before noon, when he arrived at her apartment. She’d been out to see her parents in Brooklyn, but come back that morning to spend the day with him. He took the present carefully out of the taxi. It was awkward to carry, and he had to proceed slowly up the stairs to her door.

Inside, he laid his parcel down on the floor of her living room.

“For you,” he said with a smile. “From me.”

“Whatever can this be?” The package was certainly strange, about four inches wide and six feet long. It took her a minute or two to get the wrapping off.

“It’s a little awkward,” he said. But she was managing fine.

“Oh, Charlie.” She was staring open-mouthed. “You can’t give me this.”

“I can.”

“But this is an heirloom, Charlie. You have to give this to Gorham, for your children’s children. It belongs in your family.”

“He isn’t expecting it. He doesn’t even know about it. I think you’d appreciate it more than anyone I know. The framers did a good job, don’t you think?”

They certainly had. The wampum belt had been laid flat and mounted on a long, thin, cloth-covered board with simple lip mounts, so that it could be easily removed. The board slid into a long white box with a glass front, and this display case could then be hung or fixed to a wall for display.

“Nice piece of abstract art,” Charlie said with a grin. “I can’t believe you’re giving me this, Charlie,” she said. “Are you really sure?”

“I thought about it a lot, Sarah. I know you’re the right person to have it.”

“I’m touched, Charlie,” she said. “I’m really touched.”

“In that case,” he said happily, “I guess it was a good present.”

It was from that weekend that he began to wonder if they could be man and wife.

He thought about it every day. Of course, you couldn’t deny the difficulties—there were plenty of those. But then again, what were they, if you really came to think about it?

He was older, yes. But not so old as all that. He knew of other couples where a man had married a much younger woman, and they seemed to get along. He made her pretty happy, he was certain of that.

What would they do about religion? he wondered. Her family would have wanted Sarah to marry the Jewish doctor no doubt. On the other hand, when all was said and done, marrying him would be quite a step up in the world for her. He wondered what sort of wedding ceremony they’d have. The simple Episcopalian ceremony was so close to the Jewish service anyway.

And when they were married, she’d be under his protection. If his mother’s doorman dared even blink at his wife, he could say good-bye to his job. His friends would all welcome her—and if they didn’t, then they weren’t his friends. Were the old-money crowd so wonderful anyway? Did he really have that much in common with them? What if he just went his own way completely? He’d known other people, old-money people like his own family, who’d married appropriately the first time, been unhappy, married completely inappropriately the second time round, and been happy for the rest of their lives.

There was the question of finances to be considered. Being young, Sarah would probably want a child or two. Could he afford a new household, private schools and all that? If he really put his mind to it, Charlie reckoned he could make a hell of a lot more money than he did now. Being married to Sarah would inspire him. The Keller show had been so successful, and the book contract might bring in quite a bit of money. He’d be passing some of that on to the remaining Kellers, of course—that went without saying—but he wasn’t actually obliged to give them any particular percentage. It had been left to his discretion, and God knows he’d done all the work. There was a bit of cash coming right there.

And besides, if he was really going to step out of the club, so to speak, then maybe he’d go even further. Little Gorham was going to be all right, with the private education he was providing, and his mother’s money. Sarah’s expectations for her children would be quite different. What if they moved out to some place like Greenwich, where the town had schools that were just as good as the private schools? You could do that. As he thought about all this, Charlie felt as if his life was flooded with a bright new light. He felt a sense of freedom.

In short, he was a middle-aged man in love with a younger woman.

The day was pleasantly warm. It was May, almost June. They had just been to look at a collection of prints in the New York Public Library, and they had come out onto its broad steps.

“There’s a bit of a family tradition associated with this place,” Charlie said to Sarah.

“There is?”

“Dates back to the time when it used to be a reservoir. It’s where my great-grandfather proposed to my great-grandmother. In the street somewhere, I suppose, though that would be a bit dangerous nowadays.”

“Lethal. Were they happy?”

“Yes. It was a very successful marriage, as far as I know.”

“That’s nice.”

Suddenly Charlie went down on one knee.

“Sarah, will you marry me?”

She laughed. “I get it. That must have been very romantic.”

But Charlie didn’t get up.

“Sarah Adler, will you marry me?”

A couple of people were coming up the steps. They looked at Charlie curiously. Then they started to whisper to each other.

“Are you serious, Charlie?”

“Never more so in my life. I love you, Sarah. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“Charlie, I didn’t imagine …” She paused. “Can I think about this a little while?”

“Whatever time you need.”

“Charlie, I really … You caught me by surprise. I’m so flattered. Are you sure about this?” She smiled. “I think you’d better get up now, you’re collecting a crowd.” It was true. There were half a dozen people watching them now, some of them laughing. As he got up, she kissed him. “I’m really going to have to think about this.”

Rose Master was most surprised, two days later, when George the doorman called up to inform her, in a voice that suggested he was keeping the visitor outside on the sidewalk, that there was a person called Miss Adler who desired to see her.

“Send her up,” said Rose. She met Sarah at the door herself, and once they were in the living room, she was even more surprised when Sarah asked her if she might speak to her in confidence. “Of course you may,” she said guardedly, “if that is what you wish.”

“Has Charlie spoken to you about me?” the girl said.

“No.” He hadn’t.

“He wants to marry me.”

“Oh. I see.”

“So I came to ask what you think about it.”

“You came to ask me?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

Rose stared at her. Then she nodded thoughtfully. “Well, dear, that’s very nice of you.” She paused. “You’re very clever.” She was sitting in an upright chair; Sarah was on the sofa. She glanced toward the window where the early-evening light from Park Avenue was casting a gentle glow.

“I’m sure you want me to be truthful.”

“Please.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea, though I can quite understand his being in love with you.”

“A Jewish girl with glasses?”

“Oh yes. You’re intelligent and attractive—I dare say he should have married someone like you in the first place. Of course, I’d have been horrified.” She shrugged. “Well, you said you wanted me to be truthful.”

“I do.”

“I just think it’s too late now. Do you like him?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking really hard. I love him.”

“Lucky Charlie. What do you like about him?”

“A lot of things. I think he’s the most interesting man I’ve ever met.”

“That’s only because he’s older, dear. Older men seem interesting, because they know things. But they may not be so interesting really.”

“Don’t you think he’s interesting? You’re his mother.”

Rose sighed. “I love my son, my dear, and I want the best for him. But I’m too old to hide from reality. Do you know the trouble with Charlie? He’s intelligent, he may even have talent, but he’s old money. Not that he has any, you understand. But he belongs to it. That’s my fault, I’m afraid.” She sighed again. “I mean, it always seemed so important.”

“It isn’t important now?”

“I’m getting old. It’s strange how your view of life changes when you get older. Things …” she made a gesture with her hands, “fall away.”

“I never met old money before Charlie, Mrs. Master. I love Charlie’s manners, and he’s so charming.”

“He is charming. He always was. But let me tell you the trouble with people like us, my dear. We have no ambition.” She paused. “Well, sometimes people of our class have ambition. Look at the two Roosevelts. Two presidents from one family—very different branches of the family, of course, but still …” She stared out of the window again. “Charlie’s not like that. He knows all kinds of things, he’s interesting to talk to, he’s thoughtful, he’s very kind to me—but he’s never done anything. And even with you beside him, dear, I’m afraid he never will. It isn’t in his nature.”

“You think it takes pushy Jewish people to get things done?”

“I don’t know about Jewish. But pushy? Definitely.” She looked at Sarah seriously. “If my son marries you, dear, I don’t know how he’ll be able to afford another family. But even if he finds the money, he will still be old a long time before you are. And as time passes, I’m afraid you will become impatient with him. You deserve something better. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I wasn’t expecting to hear you talk like this.”

“Then you wouldn’t have learned anything, would you?”

“No,” said Sarah, “I guess not.”

On Friday Sarah went home as usual. It was good to be back with her family, and to hear about the daily lives of her brothers. The Shabbat meal passed quietly. During the morning service, she listened to the rabbi and tried not to think about anything else. In the afternoon, though, her brother Michael won three games of checkers against her so easily that he couldn’t believe it. After that, she sat quietly with her thoughts.

What did she feel about Charlie? She really hadn’t expected him to propose to her like that. She hadn’t been prepared at all. Did she love him?

She realized one thing. Whenever he wasn’t there, she missed him. If she saw a picture she liked, or heard a piece of music, or even a joke, she wanted to share it with him. The other day an objectionable client had come into the gallery, and she automatically found herself thinking: I wish Charlie were here, he would hate this man so much.

She liked to dress him the way she thought he ought to look. She’d bought him a blue scarf that he looked very nice in. But he had this terrible old hat, and he absolutely refused to stop wearing it. She didn’t really mind—it just became a challenge to figure out how long it would take to get him to give it up. In fact, she liked the challenge. If he’d given it up without a fight, she’d have been disappointed.

So how would she feel if Charlie were her husband? Pretty good, actually. As for having a little boy that was like Charlie, or a little girl he could dote on—why, that seemed the most wonderful thing in the world.

But what about religion? Would the Master family insist that she or the children be Christians? That she couldn’t agree to. However, Charlie hadn’t raised the question, so he couldn’t care about it that much, she supposed. She’d expected that old Mrs. Master would be the one really to object, but unless Rose was bluffing, Sarah’s Jewishness no longer bothered her that much. If Christians used the term, Sarah thought, the Episcopalian Masters appeared to be secular rather than observant.

As for herself, though she loved her tradition, Sarah reckoned that she could probably live in Manhattan without too much difficulty as a secular Jew, and even bring her children up that way—so long as they could experience their heritage whenever they visited her parents. If Charlie would make that compromise, then she could cope. She knew it could be done. She had friends in the city with mixed marriages who seemed to be happy enough.

But that still left the big problem. Her parents. Her father especially. Everyone knew the views of Daniel Adler.

Might it help that her father liked Charlie? “I was worried about you going into the city,” he had told her. “But the gallery is serious, this I can see. And your client Mr. Master—that is a distinguished man, a fine man.” There was no question, her father had liked Charlie a lot. Perhaps that would count for something.

Besides, she could remind her father, his grandchildren would still be Jewish. They’d have a Jewish mother. Maybe Daniel Adler could reconcile himself to having secular grandchildren, so long as they came to Seder at his house where he could educate them. “After all,” she could hear herself telling him, “this way, they still have the choice as they grow older. There’s nothing to stop a child of mine becoming a rabbi even, if he wants to.”

These were the hopes, the calculations, the little scenarios Sarah invented for herself as she sat in her home and thought about the man she loved.

Maybe it could all work out. She didn’t know. Perhaps by the end of the weekend, she’d have a clearer picture. For the time being, she decided it would be better not to speak to anybody about it.

She was caught completely off guard, therefore, when her mother suddenly turned to her in the kitchen that evening before they went to bed, and said: “I hear this man, Mr. Master, is falling in love with you.”

Fortunately, Sarah was so taken by surprise that she just stared at her.

“What do you mean?” she managed to say.

“Ach,” Esther Adler threw up her hands, “you know nothing.”

“Who would think such a thing? And why?”

“Your sister. She told me two days ago. She noticed it when he was here. She was talking to him when I asked you about Adele Cohen’s grandson, and he overheard. He was listening so hard, Rachel said, that he didn’t even answer her questions.”

“And this means he’s in love with me?”

“Why not?”

“You want everyone to be in love with me, Mother. Besides, he’s not Jewish.”

“I said he was in love with you, not that he could marry you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means be careful.”

“I will be careful, Mother. Is this all?”

“If you need to talk to me, Sarah, you can talk to me. Just don’t talk to your father. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand. Can I go to bed now?”

Her mother shrugged. “You can always talk to me.”

Let’s hope so, thought Sarah. For the moment, though, she was glad to escape upstairs.

Sunday morning was peaceful. Sarah and her mother made French toast for the boys. Her father went downstairs to practice the piano. After a few scales, he began to play Chopin. He was playing well.

How happy she felt—how glad that she had a home like this. Charlie would be happy in this setting, she thought. He’d be quite content to read the Sunday paper while her father played the piano below. For him, with his views and his intellect, this wouldn’t be such a terrible transition.

Should she speak to her mother about it, after all? Should she tell her the truth after breakfast, when they were alone? She wasn’t sure.

The boys were still eating when they heard a ring at the doorbell. Her mother was at the stove, and there was no chance of the boys stirring from their food, so she went to answer it. For a foolish moment, and though she knew very well he was in the city with his son, she hoped it might be Charlie.

She opened the door.

There were two people standing on the top step. The woman was fair, in her fifties, a complete stranger. The man was burly, wearing a black coat and a homburg hat. She stared at them.

“I’m sorry it’s so early,” said the woman. She looked awkward. Her accent was British.

“Well,” said the man, “aren’t you going to ask your Uncle Herman in?”

They were standing in the kitchen. Downstairs, her father was still playing the piano, oblivious to their presence.

“I told you he plays well,” Uncle Herman said to his wife.

“You shouldn’t have come,” said Sarah’s mother. “You should have written. You should have telephoned, at least.”

“I did say to him …” said Uncle Herman’s wife, but nobody paid attention to her.

“And be told to stay away?” said Uncle Herman. “So I’m here.” He looked at Michael. “You I remember.” He looked at Nathan. “You I don’t know. I’m your Uncle Herman.”

Esther Adler glanced at Herman’s wife, then addressed her brother-in-law.

“I don’t want to say what happened.”

“She knows,” he boomed. “She knows.” He turned to his wife. “I told you. They sat shiva for me when I married you, because you’re not Jewish. I’m dead to them. You understand? They treated me like a dead person. They called all their friends to come and mourn for me, and they never spoke of me again. This is what we do, in families like ours. We’re very particular.”

“I never heard of such a thing before,” his wife said to them apologetically. “I didn’t know.”

“You don’t have to worry,” said Uncle Herman. “It’s only me that’s dead. Not you.”

“You have to go, Herman,” said Mrs. Adler. “I’ll tell him you came. Maybe he’ll see you. I don’t know.”

“This is stupid,” said Uncle Herman.

Sarah said nothing. She slipped from the room.

Her father did not even hear her come into the waiting room where he was playing, but when he saw her, he smiled. His face seemed so contented, and as she looked at him, she felt such love. She stood beside him.

“Father,” she said gently, “something’s happened. I have to tell you something.”

He paused in his playing.

“What is it, Sarah?”

“You have to be prepared for a shock.”

He stopped and half turned. His face looked anxious.

“It’s all right. Nobody’s hurt. Nobody’s sick.” She took a deep breath. “Uncle Herman is here. With his wife.” She paused. “The wife is quite nice. Uncle Herman doesn’t listen to her.” She smiled. “He’s just like I remember him. But Mother’s sending them away. Is that what you want?”

For a long moment, her father said nothing.

“Herman is here?”

“Yes. He just showed up. On the doorstep.”

“With this woman he married? He comes without warning, and he brings this woman to my house?”

“He wants to see you. I think he wants to be reconciled. Maybe he’ll apologize.” She hesitated. “It has been a long time,” she added gently.

“A long time. I commit an offense. I wait a few years. Does this make the offense go away? Does this make it right?”

“No, Father. But maybe if you talk to him …”

Her father was leaning forward now, staring down at the piano’s ivory keys. He shook his head. Then he rocked his body back and forth.

“I cannot see him,” he said softly.

“Maybe if—”

“You don’t understand. I cannot see him. I cannot bear …”

And suddenly Sarah understood. Her father wasn’t angry, he was in terrible pain.

“This is how it begins,” he said. “Always it is the same. In Germany, the Jews thought they were Germans, and they intermarried. But then, even if you had a Jewish grandmother or great-grandmother … they killed you. You think the Jews will be accepted? It is an illusion.”

“That was Hitler—”

“And before that it was the Poles, it was the Russians, it was the Spanish Inquisition … Many countries have accepted the Jews, Sarah, and always they have turned against them in the end. The Jews will only survive if they are strong. This is the lesson of history.” He looked up at her. “We were commanded to keep our faith, Sarah. So let me tell you: every time a Jew marries out, we are weakened. Marry out, and in two, three generations, your family will not be Jewish. Maybe they will be safe, maybe not. But in the end, either way, all that we have will be lost.”

“You feel this?”

“I know this.” He shook his head. “I sat shiva for my brother. He is dead to me. Go up and tell him so.”

Sarah hesitated, then turned toward the stairs. But before she got to see Uncle Herman, his voice came booming down from above.

“Daniel, I’m here. You won’t speak to your brother?”

Sarah glanced at her father. He was still staring down at the keyboard. Uncle Herman’s voice came again.

“Time has passed, Daniel.” There was a pause. “I won’t come here again.” Another pause, then, in a voice of fury, “If that’s what you want, it’s finished.”

A moment later, the front door slammed. Then there was silence.

Sarah sat on the stairs. She didn’t want to intrude upon her father, but she didn’t want to leave him. She waited a little while. Then she saw his shoulders were moving and, although there was no sound, she realized he was weeping.

She couldn’t help herself, she had to go to him. She came back down the stairs, and stood by the piano, and put her arms around him and held him.

“You think I don’t love my brother?” he managed to say, after a little while.

“I know you love your brother.”

He nodded slowly. “I love my brother. What should I do? What can I do?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

He half turned his face to look at her. The tears were streaming down his cheeks to his mustache.

“Promise me, Sarah, promise me you will never do such a thing as Herman has done.”

“You want me to promise?”

“I could not bear it.”

She paused, but only for a moment. “I promise.”

Perhaps it was for the best.