She made herself nod. She made herself hold her face straight while she did it. Beside her, Isidor nodded, too. He even smiled a little. That was more than she had in her.
She waited for the man in the armband to congratulate them. She should have known better. He seemed surprised to discover the half-dozen Jews were still standing there in front of him. With a brusque, impatient nod, he said, “That is all. You may go.” It wasn’t quite Now drop dead, but it might as well have been.
They left in a hurry, before the fellow changed his mind. Isidor pulled something out of his pocket-a thin gold band. He put it on the index finger of her right hand, the place where Jewish women traditionally wore wedding rings. She took it off and put it on the fourth finger of her left hand. Both her mother and Isidor’s kept their rings there, too. They wanted to fit in with the German majority. That wasn’t so easy when you wore a yellow star that screamed Jew! at the world.
“I love you,” Isidor said.
“I love you.” Sarah wondered if she really did. This wasn’t a fairy tale where you got married and lived happily ever after. But it was a world where you had to grab whatever happiness you could. If you didn’t, you knew you’d never see it again. She added, “Let’s go home.”
From now on, home would be the flat over the Brucks’ bakery. Her folks had made the mistake of asking for permission to put that door through between her room and Saul’s abandoned one. New construction? For Jews? Impossible! The arrangement wouldn’t be ideal, but nothing in Munster was ideal for Jews.
There should have been a reception, with music and dancing. There should have been more food than a regiment could eat, and more liquor than a division could drink. There should have been all kinds of things. There was… a loaf of bread from the bakery, and a couple of stewed rabbits Samuel Goldman had unofficially and expensively obtained from one of the other men in his labor gang. The way things had gone for Jews in Germany the past couple of years, that would do for a feast.
And there was schnapps. Somehow there was always schnapps, no matter how bad things got. It wasn’t the best schnapps, perhaps-it wasn’t the best schnapps, certainly-but it was schnapps.
Sarah drank enough to let her know she’d been drinking. She evidently drank enough to let other people know she’d been drinking, too. Isidor’s father said, “You don’t want to get too shikker, you know.”
He laughed in a peculiar, almost goatish way. To Sarah’s surprise, and to her mortification, her own father’s laugh sounded identical. Her mother, and Isidor’s, sniffed at their husbands. But then they laughed, too. Sarah stuck her nose in the air. That only made the older people laugh harder. Isidor put his arm around her, as if defending his new bride. Their parents laughed some more.
It wasn’t as if the older Goldmans and Brucks weren’t drinking with her and Isidor. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her father’s cheeks turn pink. His hard work and bad diet usually left him sallow. Pink he was, though. And the meat he cut from the rabbits made him looked remarkably content. Sarah understood that. She had trouble remembering the last time her own belly had felt so happy.
“Well…” Puffing on a pipe charged with the same kind of nasty tobacco her own father smoked, David Bruck stretched the word out. He gathered his wife and Sarah’s father and mother by eye. “What do you say we go downstairs for a while, maybe take a little walk, hey?”
“Now why would we want to do that?” Samuel Goldman said, for all the world as if he couldn’t think of any reason. Everybody except Sarah laughed again. She was sure her cheeks weren’t just pink-they had to be on fire.
All the older people left. Isidor stared as the door closed behind them. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen my mother go out after we eat without washing dishes first,” he said.
She looked at him. “Do you want to think about your mother now?” she asked. Then she blushed again. Had that really come out of her mouth? As a matter of fact, it had.
And the way Isidor looked at her left her with no doubts his mother wasn’t the first thing on his mind. She thought she would blush one more time, but the warmth spreading through her started lower down. “Come on,” Isidor said.
When they got to the doorway to his room, he picked her up and carried her over the threshold. She squeaked. He silenced that by kissing her as he put her down. Then he shut the door behind them, even though they were alone in the flat. The door had a hook and eye to keep it from being opened from the outside. Isidor fastened that, too.
He looked on what he’d done and found it good. In very short order, he and Sarah were officially man and wife. “You’re squashing me,” she said.
“Sorry.” Isidor didn’t sound sorry. He couldn’t have sounded much happier if he’d tried. Sarah was pretty happy, too-maybe not quite so happy as she’d imagined she would be on her wedding day, but her imagination hadn’t taken into account the way things were for Jews in Germany these days.
After apologizing, Isidor rolled off her. That also made her happy. He didn’t roll far. He couldn’t, not without falling off the narrow bed. They would have to get a bigger one… somewhere, somehow, sometime.
His hand roamed her. She let it happen. Pretty soon, she started enjoying it and the other things he did. Before long, they were making things official again. Sweat beaded on Sarah’s skin. She was doing a warm thing, it was a warm summer’s day, and the room was above the ovens.
After a while, she said, “Again?” in surprise.
“Again,” Isidor answered proudly.
“What if they come back?”
“What if they do? The door’s shut. They won’t come barging in. And even if they break down the door or something, you’re my wife, right? We don’t have to sneak any more.”
He sounded like a boy with a new toy. Too much like that? Sarah wasn’t sure. She liked the new toy, too. But… three times? Things wouldn’t go well if she said no on her wedding day. She turned toward him and kissed him instead. That seemed to be the right thing to do, at least for the moment. And three times it was, even if the third round wasn’t so easy as the first two had been.
If he tried for four, she was going to tell him no. Enough was enough, and she was getting sore. He didn’t. He fell asleep instead, quite suddenly and quite deeply.
Sarah was miffed-till she fell asleep herself, even though she hadn’t expected to. When she woke up, she and Isidor were entangled almost as intimately as they had been before. Noises outside the closed door said Isidor’s parents-and, she recognized a moment later, hers as well-were back.
What do I do next? she wondered. For now, nothing seemed a good answer. Her new husband-her new husband! — was still snoring. But her life had just changed forever. Much too soon, she’d find out how.
Chapter 17
Something was wrong. Peggy Druce knew that. She also knew she was afraid she knew what it was. The complicated, inside-out reasoning should have made her laugh. Instead, it left her more afraid than ever.
Most of the time, she would have taken the bull by the horns. She had a low tolerance for bull generally, as even the Nazis came to understand. Without that low tolerance, she knew she would still be stuck in Europe. But going nose to nose with somebody you couldn’t stand was one thing. Going nose to nose with the man you loved more than anyone else in the world was something else again. Boy, was it ever!
Most of the time, Herb also spoke freely, at least when he was talking with her. He might be (might be, hell! — he was) more circumspect than she was in public, but she always got to find out what was on his mind. Or she had, till she got back from England.
Of course, if this went wrong it would blow up in her face. She knew that, too. Did she ever! And what was liable to happen if it did… What was liable to happen if it did was plenty to make her keep her big trap shut for months. Not talking about something, though, could prove as toxic as talking about it obviously was. That silent poison might be slower-acting, which didn’t mean it wasn’t there.