Rachel has been smiling throughout his technical demonstration, but now she pounces, attacking the doughnut in Aaron’s fingers with passionate appetite.
Chuckling, he tells her, “Hey, hey, leave some fingers, will you?”
She chews the doughnut with exaggerated hunger. “No, I will leave nothing. I will devour you entirely.” And she falls on his neck, devouring him next, making hungry noises. He fends off the attack in a maybe kind of embarrassed-in-public-but-still-pleasurable sort of way. “H’okay, h’okay, h’okay.” He’s laughing.
The night owl beside them lifts his eyebrows in late-night surprise. Or is it appreciation? Aaron can only speak the truth. “What can I say? She’s a tigress.” The night owl lifts his coffee cup in salute. Rachel laughs.
Outside, the snow is coming down, piling up, but she is safe inside a doughnut shop. Not huddling inside a cold cellar or walking the ice-slick streets. That is how Eema and she had lived as U-boats until the day of their arrest. But now she is warm. Warm in her wool stockings. Her wool pullover. Warm with this boy. In the doughnut shop, she holds the cheap white china mug with both hands, stealing from its heat. He, though, has set his coffee aside with quiet intention. Then planting the jeweler’s box between them, he squares his elbows on the tabletop and gazes at her in a clear, affectionately businesslike manner. “So? What do you think?” is his proposal.
She stares back at him, still gripping the china mug. “What is this?”
“What is it? What’s it look like?”
Another swift stare at the small black velveteen box.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he asks.
“You wish me to?”
The curve of his smile deepens. “Yes, I wish you to. Of course. What else?”
A swallow. Then her fingers move, opening the box with a quick movement and a soft pop of the box’s hinge. Her eyes settle on the contents, but her expression remains controlled. The pinpoint gleam of the precious stone makes her uncomfortable. She has the urge to snap the box shut and squirrel it away, as if it is a chunk of bread that she will hoard.
“So,” Aaron repeats. “Whattaya think?”
“You wish…” she begins, then stops and starts again. “You wish to marry me?” She asks this because she just wants to be sure. To be clear about the proposal being made. She fears, for an instant, that he might answer her with sarcasm or impatience. Or with the knowing irony he often adopts. But instead, his face loses all its calculation and grows soft.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I wish you to marry me, Rachel,” he assures her, his voice gentle and without hesitation. “Rachel Morgenstern, I wish you to marry me and become my wife. Will you?”
“What does your mother say?”
“My mother?”
“What does your sister say?”
“My mother says a lot of things. My sister says a lot of things, but I’m asking you to marry me, not them.”
“But how do they feel about adding a poor refugee to their family?”
“We’re Jewish. We were all refugees at some point in history. Besides, my sister’s crazy about you. She likes you more than she does me.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother? Whatever makes me happy makes her happy. This is what she says to me.”
“And I make you happy?”
“Yes,” he says. And it sounds so true that when he removes the ring from its velvet box, she permits him to slip it onto her finger, a tiny sparkle of light.
That night, they make love for the first time in his dingy downtown efficiency, with the flaking wall paint and wheezing plumbing, and she takes him inside her as if she is taking him completely. It hurts for only a moment. A curt cleaving. She is making him happy. She, Rashka Morgenstern, has the power to make him happy.
In six weeks’ time, only how many weeks after they first met—ten maybe? Something like that. They are both so primed for change, so primed to escape their oppressive lives, how long should it take? So three weeks after doughnut paradise, Rachel Morgenstern enters the Office of the City Clerk, Brooklyn Municipal Building. There, in the dingy, pillared edifice across from Borough Hall, she is married to Aaron Samuel Perlman by the power invested in a notary of the Marriage Bureau by the State of New York and Kings County. Blessed are You, Lord, our God, Master of the Universe, who creates joy and gladness, groom and bride, mirth, song, delight, and rejoicing, love and harmony, and peace and companionship. B’aruch ata Adonai, m’sameiach chatan im hakalah.
Aymen.
For their first year, they live on East Tenth Street. A one-bedroom on the top floor of a sandstone apartment block across from Tompkins Square Park. Rachel likes to walk through the park sometimes in the afternoon or sit and smoke on a bench where the old men read their newspapers in Yiddish, though Aaron forbids her to enter the park after dusk. Too dangerous for a woman alone, he insists. The reason? Hopheads. Hopheads, dope peddlers, and beatniks, a ghastly array of interlopers in her husband’s mind. The neighborhood was going to hell, he complains, and they should find a place uptown. Somewhere on the Upper West Side maybe. But really Rachel doesn’t mind the peeling paint, the unswept gutters and dilapidated streets. Even in the face of Aaron’s hopheads, dope peddlers, and beatniks, who are waiting to plunder any woman who steps too close, she feels free there.
She strolls down to the coffee shops, to Washington Square. She can go sit in the park or eat a pierogi at the Ukrainian luncheonette on Ninth Street. Reconnoitering the Book Row on Fourth Avenue, she finds she has a taste for mystery novels. Whodunits, especially Nancy Drew. She sits in the Reggio all afternoon reading The Ghost of Blackwood Hall or The Clue of the Velvet Mask. The Upper West Side may have Murray’s Sturgeon Shop to recommend it, but really, who wants to live in the Eighties as a slave to the Seventh Avenue Local?
Then certain phone calls are made.
When Aaron’s cousin Ezra mentions that a one-bedroom is opening up in the building where he rents with his wife and brood just above the fur district? Well. Wheels are set in motion. Ezra’s mother calls Aaron’s mother, and anyway, the rest is history. The Perlmans move into a new home in a five-story walk-up, not in the Upper East Side but on West 22nd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Chelsea. A prewar red brick with black-iron fire-escape scaffolding bolted to the facade. Aaron refers to it as a shitty little one-bedroom while talking to Ezra, because he certainly doesn’t want his cousin to get a big head about it, but honestly it’s not so shitty at all.
Rachel finds it rather roomy. Inside there is the salon, or should she say the living room? There is a sofa flanked by matching lamp tables, but not matching lamps. Then comes a galley kitchen with a linoleum floor and a narrow apartment stove from Welbilt, the bedroom with a double bed and foam mattress, the bath with a claw-foot enameled tub and a showerhead. A hall tree by the front door, opposite a closet. A few other sticks of furniture here and there, and that’s it. Basic digs. Not a luxury penthouse maybe, but not a dump either.