There were no serious regrets, then, no punishing second thoughts about having accepted Stanley’s proposal, but the marriage nevertheless came with certain drawbacks, none of which could be directly blamed on Stanley, but still, by marrying him she had also married into his family, and every time she was thrown together with that half-cocked trio of misfits, she wondered how Stanley had managed to survive his boyhood without becoming as crazy as they were. His mother first of all, the still energetic Fanny Ferguson, in her mid- to late sixties by then, who stood no taller than five-two or five-two-and-a-half, a white-haired sourpuss of scowling mien and fidgety watchfulness, muttering to herself as she sat alone on the couch at family gatherings, alone because no one dared go near her, especially her five grandchildren, ages six to eleven, who seemed positively scared to death of her, for Fanny thought nothing of whacking them on the head whenever they stepped out of line (if infractions such as laughing, shrieking, jumping up and down, bumping into furniture, and burping loudly could be considered out of line), and when she couldn’t get close enough to deliver a whack, she would yell at them in a voice loud enough to rattle the lampshades. The first time Rose met her, Fanny pinched her cheek (hard enough for it to hurt) and declared her to be a fine-looking girl. Then she proceeded to ignore her for the rest of the visit, as she had continued to do throughout every visit since then, with no more interaction between them than the blank formalities of saying hello and good-bye, but because Fanny demonstrated the same indifference toward her two other daughters-in-law, Millie and Joan, Rose didn’t take it personally. Fanny cared only about her sons, the sons who supported her and dutifully showed up at her house every Friday night for dinner, but the women her sons had married were no more than shadows to her, and most of the time she had trouble remembering their names. None of this particularly bothered Rose, whose dealings with Fanny were sparse and irregular, but Stanley’s brothers were a different story, since they worked for him and he saw them every day, and once she had absorbed the stunning fact that they were two of the most beautiful men she had ever seen, male gods who resembled Errol Flynn (Lew) and Cary Grant (Arnold), she began to develop an intense dislike for both of them. They were shallow and dishonest, she felt, the older Lew not unintelligent but crippled by his penchant for gambling on football and baseball games and the younger Arnold all but semi-moronic, a glassy-eyed letch who drank too much and never passed up an opportunity to touch her arms and shoulders, to squeeze her arms and shoulders, who called her Doll and Babe and Beautiful and filled her with an ever-deepening revulsion. She hated it that Stanley had given them jobs at the store, and she hated how they made fun of him behind his back and sometimes even to his face, the good Stanley, who was a hundred times the man they were, and yet Stanley pretended not to notice, he put up with their meanness and laziness and mockery without a word of protest, showing such forbearance that Rose wondered if she hadn’t inadvertently married a saint, one of those rare souls who never thought ill of anyone, and then again, she reasoned, perhaps he was no more than a pushover, someone who had never learned how to stand up for himself and fight. With little or no help from his brothers, he had built 3 Brothers Home World into a profitable concern, a large, fluorescent-lit emporium of armchairs and radios, of dining tables and iceboxes, of bedroom suites and Waring blenders, a high-volume, mid-quality operation that served a clientele with mid-level and low incomes, a wondrous, twentieth-century agora in its way, but after several visits in the weeks following the honeymoon, Rose had stopped going to the store — not just because she was working again, but because she felt uneasy there, unhappy, entirely out of place among Stanley’s brothers.
Still, her disappointment in the family was softened somewhat by the brothers’ wives and children, the Fergusons who were not really Fergusons, the ones who had not lived through the calamities that had befallen Ike and Fanny and their offspring, and Rose quickly found herself with two new friends in Millie and Joan. Both women were years older than she was (thirty-four and thirty-two), but they welcomed her into the tribe as an equal member, according her full status on the day of her wedding, which meant, among other things, that she had been given the right to be let in on all sister-in-law secrets. Rose was particularly impressed by the fast-talking, chain-smoking Millie, a woman so slender that she seemed to have wires under her skin rather than bones, a smart and opinionated person who understood what kind of man she had married in Lew, but no matter how loyal she remained to her scheming, profligate husband, that didn’t prevent her from issuing a steady flow of ironic cracks about him, such clever, acerbic asides that Rose sometimes had to leave the room for fear of laughing too hard. Next to Millie, Joan was something of a simpleton, but so warm-hearted and generous that it still hadn’t occurred to her that she was married to a dunce, and yet, what a good mother she was, Rose felt, so tender and patient and caring, whereas Millie’s sharp tongue often led her into tangles with her kids, who were less well behaved than Joan’s. Millie’s two were eleven-year-old Andrew and nine-year-old Alice, Joan’s three were ten-year-old Jack, eight-year-old Francie, and six-year-old Ruth. They all appealed to Rose in their different ways, except for Andrew perhaps, who seemed to have a rough and belligerent side to him, which led to frequent scoldings from Millie for punching his little sister, but the one Rose liked best was Francie, unmistakably it was Francie, she simply couldn’t help herself, the child was so beautiful, so exceptionally alive, and when they met it was as if they fell in love with each other at first sight, with the tall, auburn-haired Francie rushing into Rose’s arms and saying, Aunt Rose, my new Aunt Rose, you’re so pretty, so pretty, so very pretty, and now we get to be friends forever. So it began, and so it continued afterward, each one enthralled with the other, and there were few things better in this world, Rose felt, than to have Francie crawl into her lap when they were all sitting around the table and start talking to her about school, or the last book she had read, or the friend who had said something nasty to her, or the dress her mother was going to buy for her birthday. The little girl would relax into the cushioning softness of Rose’s body, and as she talked Rose would stroke her head or her cheek or her back, and before long Rose would feel she was floating, that the two of them had left the room and the house and the street and were floating through the sky together. Yes, those family gatherings could be gruesome affairs, but there were compensations as well, unexpected little miracles that occurred at the unlikeliest moments, for the gods were irrational, Rose decided, and they bestowed their gifts on us when and where they would.
Rose wanted to be a mother, to give birth to a child, to be carrying a child, to have a second heart beating inside her. Nothing counted as much as that, not even her work with Schneiderman, not even the long-range and as yet ill-defined plan of one day striking out on her own as a photographer, of opening a studio with her name on the sign above the front door. Those ambitions meant nothing when she compared them to the simple desire to bring a new person into the world, her own son or daughter, her own baby, and to be a mother to that person for the rest of her life. Stanley did his part, making love to her without protection and impregnating her three times in the first eighteen months of their marriage, but three times Rose miscarried, three times in her third month of pregnancy, and when they celebrated their second wedding anniversary in April 1946, they were still childless.