Well Behaved Wives(3)

Creatures of habit, Shirley and Leon would be deep in their after-dinner crossword puzzles. No one was eavesdropping.

Big breath. “How could you tell your mother it was okay for me to attend etiquette lessons? You know I have to study,” Ruth whispered. It was their first moment alone since that morning, when Asher had kissed her goodbye in the attic.

“I said if you wanted to,” Asher said, crossing his arms, his casual tone belied by downcast eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell her to ask me? She thought I was looking for your permission.”

Asher laughed. “Ruth! You have never asked for permission for anything.” He sandwiched one of her hands in his. “Nor should you, but—”

“But what?” Ruth pulled away.

“If it’s important to my mother, maybe you should go. The bar exam isn’t till when? February? You have five months.”

“Are you kidding me? You know I have to work twice as hard to have half the opportunities of male lawyers. I can’t lose my edge. I talked to some friends at Columbia, and they said prepare to spend forty hours a week for ten weeks. I don’t have forty hours in a week. The holidays are coming.” She tried not to hyperventilate. “And you promised me a honeymoon in the Poconos when I pass the bar.”

Asher nodded.

“I’m not asking for too much. You know getting along with my mother would be good for us both.”

Ruth’s stomach clenched as she felt her dinner coming back up. She’d understood this in theory, but she hadn’t realized getting in good with Shirley would take up so much of her time.

Why couldn’t Shirley have asked Ruth if she wanted to go instead of using Asher as ammunition? That would have made it more palatable. She had assumed that Ruth would be seeking Asher’s approval for everything—the quilt on their bed, Ruth’s choice of dungarees for gardening, one extra cup of sugar in the lemonade. Any decision made on Ruth’s own had been met by Shirley with “What would Asher think?”

Still, she tried to see the best in Shirley’s old-fashioned nature. Ruth had been taught by her father to respect her elders.

“The fact is, it’s not about you so much as about how she looks,” Asher said. He had a way of helping Ruth see things simply, clearly.

Eloping had etched a chink in Shirley’s maternal armor—she thought her son wouldn’t have eloped if she were a better mother. Maybe that’s why she had mentioned etiquette lessons at the beauty parlor. In front of witnesses. For public compliance, which equaled respect. Respect that had been stripped from the Appelbaums when they were excluded from the wedding. She heard it in Shirley’s snide remarks, saw it in the disapproving pursed lips of Shirley’s friends.

Ruth would have planned a traditional wedding if she’d known eloping would upend her in-laws’ lives. It couldn’t have been worse than what likely awaited her with etiquette lessons.

When she was growing up, Ruth had known girls who’d gone to charm school who emerged spouting rules, sticking their noses in the air. She didn’t know what they had learned, just that she didn’t want any part of it. Her father had never forced her. He had always afforded her the luxury of choice. Piano lessons or flute lessons (neither), roller skates or bicycle (both), charm school or chess (no contest).

Now Ruth was twenty-three, no longer a child, no longer in her father’s home. Her choices were her own but affected Asher as well.

That didn’t mean Ruth had to forget what she wanted. She wouldn’t. The Asher she met and fell in love with in college drank Rheingold with his ZBT brothers and had a wry sense of humor but had always treated her with courtesy. He’d never told her what to do.

“I’ll go,” Ruth said, staring at the paper in her lap, fighting the tug of war.

“Good.” Asher nodded once, less in agreement than in confirmation.

Ruth looked up. She detected a hint of smugness, which set her nerves on edge. “Excuse me?”

Asher shook his head as if released from a trance. “I meant thank you.”

“That’s what I thought you said.” Ruth bent over and gathered a few fallen leaves from the ground. Maybe Asher was the one in need of etiquette lessons. She’d pay good money to see him in white gloves or drinking tea with his pinky raised.

Over the next few days, fall blew right into Philadelphia on a cool September breeze. Knitted sweaters, potted mums, sunset-colored leaves, and bushels of apples appeared throughout the neighborhood. All Ruth’s favorites. She even liked hayrides. Hayride. She had only ever been on one. The Upper West Side, at least her part of it, below Eightieth, was more concrete than country—a place where buses far outnumbered hay-filled flatbeds.

Ruth stood on the portico of Lillian Diamond’s Wynnefield Avenue mansion flanked by marble columns and stone lions, in front of a white double door trimmed in gold.

She shivered with the chill of a new season . . . and unrelenting doubt.

Fall had marked beginnings in Ruth’s life again and again and again. Not only did the Jewish New Year occur in the fall—when she and her family and friends would be written in the Book of Life, God willing—but it had been the start of the school year for most of Ruth’s life. She loved school, unlike most of the girls she knew; she loved learning for its own sake, not as a way to bide her time until a boy or a husband took precedence.