The next one was a good-looking man who was in dental school. He took me to a beautiful white-tablecloth restaurant, but by the time I’d finished my lamb chop, I knew I was there only as a favor to one of Levine’s business friends.
At least the dentist was honest. He said he needed a wife with connections. “I know that sounds bad, but it’s the only way I’ll be able to set myself up in practice. And it’s not like money would be the only condition.”
I said, “I guess you’d also want two arms and two legs.” For spite I ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu, the one with the cherries that they light on fire. You know the saying about how revenge tastes better cold? Well, it tastes just as good warm.
Betty was ready with a nice quiet bookkeeper, but I said I didn’t want to meet any more frogs. “So what are you going to do?” she said. “Sit around the house and listen to Mameh call you an old maid and say ‘I told you so,’ and that you’re ‘too smart for your own good’?” Betty kept hocking me about going out again until I said, “Would you leave me alone if I go back to night school?”
She said that would be okay but that she wasn’t going to stop nagging me until I signed up and started class. It was annoying how she treated me like I was one of her children and not a grown woman. But it was a good thing, too.
I thought he was sweet and that I was sweet on him.
I ran into Ernie Goldman on the trolley but I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t introduced himself. He looked ten years older than the last time I’d seen him, which was only a few years earlier in the Shakespeare class. He was so pale and skinny, I thought he’d been sick, but then I saw the cane, which meant he’d probably been overseas in the war.
I asked what he was doing and he said he was working in his father’s scrap metal business. When I told him I was on my way to a class at Simmons, he said, “I figured you for a college girl. You always asked the best questions.”
When I said that was one of the nicest compliments I ever ha
d, all the lines around his mouth relaxed and his whole face rearranged itself into a smile that reached up into his eyes. When a shy person smiles, it’s like the sun coming out.
We got to my stop and said goodbye and honestly I didn’t give him a second thought. But the next morning, there was a bouquet of roses on my desk. The note said May I take you to dinner on Saturday? Ernie Goldman.
Five minutes later, the phone rang and Betty said, “Herman says you got roses from Ernie Goldman? Who is he? Do I know him?”
He asked me to pick the restaurant. Betty said the Marliave was nice but when we got there, I was mortified; the dining room was lit with candles and all the tables were full of couples holding hands and whispering. There was even a violin player walking around playing schmaltzy music. I was afraid Ernie would think I was being pushy, but he didn’t seem to take it that way. He held out my chair and said he liked how quiet the place was.
I knew Ernie was shy, so I’d thought up some questions to get him talking, but he managed to turn them all around and I wound up doing most of the talking while he leaned forward and watched my face as if he was afraid of missing something. It was very flattering, and when I got him to smile I felt like I’d won the lottery. By the end of the evening, I thought he was sweet and that I was sweet on him.
We saw each other once a week after that, and when he found out that I usually went to Saturday Club, he asked if I would prefer we go out on Sundays instead. He was thoughtful that way, nothing like the blowhards I’d been fixed up with, and the complete opposite of you-know-who.
Ernie was formal, even a little stiff, but I didn’t hold it against him. I was pretty sure it had something to do with his being wounded, but when I asked where he’d been in the war he shook his head. “The doctors said I should put it all behind me.” I didn’t ask again.
When I think back, I get mad at what they did to those poor men. Ernie must have had PTSD—they called it shell shock—and the doctors told him to keep it all bottled up inside. They didn’t know any better, but it was like treating syphilis with candy bars.
A few weeks after we started going out, I finally got up the nerve to get my hair cut. The barber said I was lucky; my hair was so thick and wavy, it looked like I’d had it marcelled. Of course, what I wanted was straight hair with big spit curls on each side, but that would have taken a pound of pomade. No girl is ever happy with her own hair, is she?
But I did look good, if I say so myself. On the way home, a stranger actually stopped me on the street and asked if I was single.
When Ernie didn’t notice my haircut at all, I was hurt. Betty just shrugged and told me not to worry about it. “Typical man.”
But I was starting to wonder about Ernie. It’s not like I wanted him to make a pass at me, but after three months he hadn’t even kissed me on the cheek. Once when we were at the movies and he had his hand on the armrest, I put my hand on top of his. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t take it, either, and I felt like an idiot.
And then there was the day at the art museum. I’d gotten two postcards in one day from Filomena, so I told Ernie I’d rather go look at the paintings than go to a matinee. He said okay, like he did to everything I suggested, but when we got off the trolley I saw he was limping more than usual. I asked if he wanted to sit down and rest and he snapped, and I mean like one of those turtles that bite. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
I pointed out some of the paintings Filomena had shown me but Ernie didn’t seem interested in anything, so after a little while I said we should leave.
We were on our way out when he stopped and stared at a big painting of a young man floating in the sea. Right next to him was a huge shark with its mouth wide open, like he was getting ready to bite the man’s head off. Some men in a boat were trying to rescue him but it looked like they were too late. His skin was gray and his eyes were glassy. It was gruesome.
One look was enough for me but Ernie couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“It’s from a true story,” he said. “Do you see the blood in the water, there? Do you see that his foot is missing?”
“What an awful way to die,” I said.
“But he didn’t die.” Ernie limped across the gallery to a bench facing the painting and I sat down with him. He was still staring at the painting. “This was the first place my nurse took me when I got out of the wheelchair. She said if Watson could be the mayor of London without a foot, there was no reason I couldn’t get myself up and out of the house.”
“And you did,” I said.
Ernie put elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands and sat like that for a long time. He didn’t answer me when I said we should go, and eventually one of the guards came over to see if something was wrong. Ernie didn’t say another word all day.