“You wish…” she begins, then stops and starts again. “You wish to
“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
“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
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.
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
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?