She found the solution in work, in trying to establish a place for herself by earning her own money, and once she turned fourteen and was old enough to apply for working papers, she found her first job, which quickly led to a series of other jobs, and by the time she was sixteen she was fully employed by day and going to high school at night. Let Mildred withdraw into the cloister of her book-lined brain, let her float off to college and read every book written in the past two thousand years, but what Rose wanted, and what Rose belonged to, was the real world, the rush and clamor of the New York streets, the sense of standing up for herself and making her own way. Like the plucky, quick-thinking heroines in the films she saw two and three times a week, the endless brigade of studio pictures starring Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell, Rosalind Russell, and Jean Arthur, she took on the role of young, determined career girl and embraced it as if she were living in a film of her own, The Rose Adler Story, that long, infinitely complex movie that was still in its first reel but promised great things in the years to come.
When she met Stanley in October 1943, she had been employed for the past two years by a portrait photographer named Emanuel Schneiderman, whose studio was located on West Twenty-seventh Street near Sixth Avenue. Rose had started out as a receptionist-secretary-bookkeeper, but when Schneiderman’s photographic assistant joined the army in June 1942, Rose replaced him. Old Schneiderman was in his mid-sixties by then, a German-Jewish immigrant who had come to New York with his wife and two sons after World War I, a moody man given to fits of crankiness and bluntly insulting language, but over time he had conceived a grudging fondness for the beautiful Rose, and because he was aware of how attentively she had been observing him at work since her first days at the studio, he decided to take her on as an apprentice-assistant and teach her what he knew about cameras, lighting, and developing film — the entire art and craft of his business. For Rose, who until then had never quite known where she was headed, who had worked at various office jobs for the wages she earned but little else, that is, without any hope of inner satisfaction, it felt as if she had suddenly chanced upon a calling — not just another job, but a new way of being in the world: looking into the faces of others, every day more faces, every morning and afternoon different faces, each face different from all the other faces, and it wasn’t long before Rose understood that she loved this work of looking at others and that she would never, could never, grow tired of it.
Stanley was now working in collaboration with his brothers, both of whom had also been exempted from military service (flat feet and poor eyesight), and after several reinventions and expansions, the small radio-repair shop started in 1932 had grown into a sizable furniture-appliance store on Springfield Avenue that featured all the lures and gimmicks of contemporary American retaiclass="underline" long-term installment plans, buy-two-get-one-free offers, semi-annual blowout sales, a newlywed consultation service, and Flag Day specials. Arnold had been the first to come in with him, the blundering, not-too-bright middle brother who had lost several jobs in sales and was having a rough go of it trying to support his wife, Joan, and their three kids, and a couple of years after that Lew joined the fold, not because he had any interest in furniture or appliances but because Stanley had just paid off his gambling debts for the second time in five years and had forced him to join the business as a show of good faith and contrition, with the understanding that any reluctance on Lew’s part would entail never receiving another penny from him for the rest of his life. Thus was born the enterprise known as 3 Brothers Home World, which was essentially under the direction of one brother, Stanley, the youngest and most ambitious of Fanny’s sons, who, from some perverse but unassailable conviction that family loyalty trumped all other human attributes, had willingly taken on the burden of carrying his two failed siblings, who expressed their gratitude to him by repeatedly showing up late for work, filching tens and twenties from the cash register whenever their pockets were empty, and, in the warm months, taking off to play golf after lunch. If Stanley was upset by their actions, he never complained, for the laws of the universe prohibited complaining about one’s brothers, and even if Home World’s profits were somewhat lower than they would have been without the expense of Lew and Arnold’s salaries, the business was well in the black, and once the war ended in another year or two, the picture would be even brighter, for television would be coming in then, and the brothers would be the first boys on the block to sell them. No, Stanley wasn’t a rich man yet, but for some time now his income had been growing steadily, and when he met Rose on that October night in 1943, he was certain the best days were still to come.
Unlike Stanley, Rose had already been burned by the fires of a passionate love. If not for the war, which had taken that love from her, the two of them never would have met, for she would already have been married to someone else long before that night in October, but the young man she had been engaged to, David Raskin, the Brooklyn-born future doctor who had entered her life when she was seventeen, had been killed in a freak explosion during a basic training exercise at Fort Benning in Georgia. The news had come in August 1942, and for many months after that Rose had been in mourning, by turns numb and resentful, hollowed out, hopeless, half-mad with sorrow, cursing the war as she shrieked into her pillow at night, unable to come to terms with the fact that David would never touch her again. The only thing that kept her going during those months was her work with Schneiderman, which brought some solace, some pleasure, some reason for getting out of bed in the morning, but she had no appetite for socializing anymore and no interest in meeting other men, reducing her life to a bare routine of job, home, and trips to the movies with her friend Nancy Fein. Bit by bit, however, especially in the past two or three months, Rose had gradually begun to resemble herself again, rediscovering that food had a taste when you put it in your mouth, for example, and that when rain fell on the city it didn’t fall only on her, that every man, woman, and child had to jump across the same puddles she did. No, she would never recover from David’s death, he would always be the secret ghost who walked beside her as she stumbled into the future, but twenty-one was too young to turn your back on the world, and unless she made an effort to reenter that world, she knew she would crumple up and die.
It was Nancy Fein who set up the blind date for her with Stanley, caustic, wise-cracking Nancy of the big teeth and skinny arms, who had been Rose’s best friend since their childhood days together in Crown Heights. Nancy had met Stanley at a weekend dance in the Catskills, one of those crowded bashes at Brown’s Hotel for the unattached-but-actively-seeking young Jews from the city, the kosher meat market, as Nancy put it, and while Nancy herself was not actively seeking (she was engaged to a soldier stationed in the Pacific who at last word was still among the living), she had gone along with a friend for the fun of it and had wound up dancing a couple of times with a guy from Newark named Stanley. He wanted to see her again, Nancy said, but after she told him she had already promised her virginity to someone else, he smiled, made a neat little comic bow, and was about to walk away when she started telling him about her friend Rose, Rose Adler, the prettiest girl this side of the Danube River and the nicest person this side of anywhere. Such were Nancy’s genuine feelings about Rose, and when Stanley understood that she meant what she was saying, he let her know he would like to meet this friend of hers. Nancy apologized to Rose for having brought up her name, but Rose merely shrugged, knowing that Nancy had meant no harm, and then she asked: Well, what is he like? In Nancy’s words, Stanley Ferguson was about six feet tall, good-looking, a bit old, almost thirty being old to her twenty-one-year-old eyes, in business for himself and apparently doing well, charming, polite, and a very good dancer. Once Rose had absorbed this information, she paused for a few moments, pondering whether she was up to the challenge of a blind date, and then, in the middle of these reflections, it suddenly occurred to her that David had been dead for more than a year. Like it or not, the moment had come to test the waters again. She looked at Nancy and said: I suppose I should see this Stanley Ferguson, don’t you think?