Always and Forever Read online

  On the Friday morning before the big Labor Day weekend—when Southampton became an endless party—Kathy sat on the deck with Bella at breakfast. Brenda and Gail and their husbands had just left for Bar Harbor. Alice had taken Jesse to play on the beach with a little girl who had been a classmate at his posh nursery school. Kathy enjoyed the air of serenity that enveloped Bella and herself. The quiet before the weekend explosion.

  “I’m rather glad that the girls decided to go to Bar Harbor,” Bella confessed to Kathy. “More and more they resent Phil’s success in the business. They bicker so with Julius because of that.”

  “Brenda can’t understand why Julius won’t use Eli as the company accountant,” Kathy said, faintly sympathetic.

  “Oh, Julius made that clear before they were married. He said he didn’t want Eli knowing every cent he made. But he has sent Eli important clients.” Unexpectedly she chuckled. “When Gail was first married to Milton, Julius always bought his shirts from him. Wholesale, of course. But then I insisted he go to a custom shirtmaker when he kept putting on the pounds. I gave up long ago trying to make him stop eating like a pig.”

  “Phil keeps saying he’s going to join a gym and work out regularly, but somehow I doubt it.” Phil’s favorite workout, she thought in distaste, was in the bed of some woman other than his wife.

  “I did an awful job of raising my children.” It was Bella’s frequent lament. “People are dying every day in Korea, but Gail and Brenda sulk over some imagined slight. They spend hours every day talking about lowering or raising their hemlines or whether Dior’s new Profile line is truly flattering, while that man McCarthy is ruining American lives for no reason except his paranoia.”

  “I’m thinking about going out to San Francisco while Alice is on vacation,” Kathy said. “Just for about ten days. We’ll be back in time for Jesse to start kindergarten.” She’d miss the first class of her new course at F.I.T., she realized guiltily, but she’d make it up.

  “It’ll do you good,” Bella approved. “But try to be back in time for this year’s fashion show and my Children’s Charity Dance.” Kathy served on most of Bella’s committees, which now included Manhattan charities as well as those in Greenwich, only begging off when one interfered with her classes. “You’ve become a real business asset. Even Julius admits that.”

  “Yes.” Kathy’s smile was sardonic. “Roz does manage to grab column space for Phil and me.” Which meant publicity for Julius Kohn Furs.

  “You’re a Beautiful Couple,” Bella said softly. “And you’ve got a real sense of style. The columnists like that.” She hesitated. “Are you serious about finding a job on Seventh Avenue? I mean, all the classes you’re taking—”

  “I’m very serious. In another year, when Jesse goes into the first grade, I’m going to be out there job-hunting. This is one time I’ll fight Phil.”

  “Good for you, baby.” Bella’s smile was both approving and wistful. “The time is coming when more and more women won’t let marriage stand in the way of their having careers. During World War II they went out and handled jobs men never dreamt they could handle.”

  “They saw the other side of the door, and a lot of them, like me, want to move into that outside world.”

  In the course of the weekend Kathy told Phil she’d like to fly out to visit with Marge while Alice was on vacation.

  “No problem,” he said casually. “I can play the bachelor for a couple of weeks. Call Linda at the office and have her make all your reservations. Charge everything to the company. It’ll be a business expense.”

  As on her last trip to San Francisco, Kathy had a suite reserved at the Fairmont. She went with Jesse by taxi directly to the hotel. Marge would meet them there as soon as she closed the shop.

  “Mommie, you said we could go to the zoo,” Jesse reminded while she began to unpack in the bedroom.

  “Yes, darling. But tomorrow. It’s too late now.” Too late, too, to take him up for the view from the Top of the Mark. After 5:30 P.M. no one under twenty-one was allowed because of the bar. “Why don’t you take a little nap before dinner?” she soothed. Already he was fighting yawns. “Or maybe you’d like to have your dinner now while we wait for Marge?”

  “Can I have a hamburger and fries?” he asked hopefully.

  “I’ll call room service and find out.”

  Within half an hour Jesse had consumed an elegantly served hamburger, toyed with the fries, had drunk half a glass of milk, and was changing into his pajamas. He was triumphant because his mother agreed to skipping his bath for tonight, whereas Alice would never have permitted this.

  The phone rang, piercing the comfortable quiet of the room. Kathy darted to answer.

  “I’m in the lobby,” Marge said effervescently. “Shall I come up or are you coming down?”

  “Come up,” Kathy ordered, suffused with a feeling of well-being. “I can’t wait to see you!”

  For the first ten minutes of their joyous reunion Jesse fought against sleep. Then his eyelids began to droop.

  “All right, Jesse. Bedtime.” Kathy scooped him up lovingly.

  “You won’t go away?” But already he dropped his head to her shoulder.

  “I’ll be right here,” she promised.

  With Jesse settled in bed Kathy conferred with room service about dinner for Marge and herself.

  “I talked with my neighbor, Lee Moses, and she’ll be happy to baby-sit Jesse any night you like. She’s a widow living on a pension, and she welcomes whatever baby-sitting jobs come up. She’s a darling—you’ll like her. So will Jesse.”

  Now talk focused on Marge’s new shop.

  “Of course, I’ve only been open five weeks,” Marge conceded, “but I’m so pinched for money. This elderly couple that are backing the shop—Cleo and Fred McIntosh—are always after me to cut corners. He worked hard to make his millions, I gather. He figures it won’t be right if I don’t sweat over every penny.”

  “I have a little money stashed away,” Kathy told her. “I can—”

  “No,” Marge broke in. “You hold on to that for an emergency.” Kathy knew Marge still believed that one day she’d walk out on Phil. “I’ll hang on one way or another. But I want your input on a few things. You’re my ‘board of directors.’”

  Kathy relished every moment of the evening. Being with Marge, thrashing out business problems, provided a kind of exhilaration long absent in her life. When Kathy began to yawn, Marge insisted, despite her protests, on calling it a night.

  “It may be 9:30 P.M. here, but back in New York it’s half an hour past midnight. You’re still on Eastern time.”

  “Shall I phone Mrs. Moses or will you arrange for sitting tomorrow night? And every night that I’m here!” Kathy decided impulsively. She’d spend all his waking hours with Jesse, then she’d have precious evening hours with Marge.

  “I’ll tell her. And call her Lee,” Marge ordered. “She’ll be sixty next month, but at heart she’s twenty-six. And she’ll be thrilled at all that baby-sitting loot.”

  The days—and evenings—sped past. Kathy and Marge fell into the habit of going back to the shop every night after they’d had dinner. Marge was eager for Kathy’s opinions of styles she was ordering for the fall. At the same time Kathy encouraged Marge to have some of her own designs made up.

  “You know what I think, Marge?” Kathy squinted in concentration over dinner at Jack’s on Sacramento Street. “I think you could build up something really solid by showing just casual sportswear. Why not just sweaters and slacks and shirts and shorts? The 4-S’s,” she said exuberantly. “How’s that for a name?”

  “I like it!” Marge pulled a notebook from her purse and began to experiment with lettering.

  “Keep the lettering simple,” Kathy cautioned. “Easy to read in advertising.”

  “I don’t think Cleo and Fred are going to spring for advertising,” Marge sighed. “But the more I envision what you have in mind, Kathy, the more I like it. We’re living in
an era when casual clothes—sweaters, slacks, shirts, shorts—make up the major portion of a woman’s wardrobe. Maybe not for high society,” she said good-humoredly, “but for the rest of us.”

  “You could feature your own designs, Marge. You don’t need your own factory—you can give the manufacturing out to a contractor. I can see this building up into a nationwide chain in time.” Kathy radiated enthusiasm. “It’s right for the age.”

  Reluctantly Kathy left San Francisco with Jesse on schedule. She was excited about the potential of Marge’s shop. Maybe—just maybe—she could persuade Phil to talk to his father about financing a similar shop in New York once Marge made a success of the one in San Francisco. She would manage it. Julius had a sharp eye for business. If she could prove the shop could make money, he’d be interested.

  Oh yes, she wanted to get out into the business world.

  On this December day—with Berlin still wary about a shortage of coal—David was so engrossed in his work that he was unconscious of the dank chill of the laboratory. Earlier Gretchen had brought him the sweater he kept on a hook on the door for chilly days and at her quiet insistence had pulled it on.

  Now Gretchen was bringing him a mug of coffee. He accepted it with a grateful smile.

  “You look tired,” she said. “What time did you leave here last night?”

  “It was morning. I couldn’t break off in the middle of that last experiment. Thanks for staying so late.” He’d forgotten the time until Gretchen began to yawn. When he was on to something, he was never aware of time. “You must have been here past ten,” he said.

  “It was close to midnight. I didn’t mind that. But I worry about you, the way you keep robbing yourself of sleep.”

  “I’m all right. It’s exciting when I begin to see results close at hand.” He felt guilty sometimes about the way he allowed Gretchen to put in so many extra hours on the job. Taking her out to supper now and then wasn’t enough to make up for all she gave him of her time. At intervals he forced himself to recognize that she was hoping for more than a professional relationship. Why did he hold back this way? Gretchen had so much to offer a man.

  “Tonight’s the first night of Hanukkah,” she said nostalgically. “When my family was alive, we always made a big thing of it.” He knew her mother and sister had died within two years after their release from Buchenwald. “Would you like to come up to my flat for the lighting of the first candle and for supper? Hanukkah’s supposed to be a happy occasion,” she reminded.

  David hesitated a moment. He was remembering Hanukkah of ’45, in Hamburg. For so many years it had been impossible to celebrate Hanukkah in Germany. Half of their group had been Jewish—but for all of them, Hanukkah 1945 was a major occasion because it meant the world was at peace again. Brian—who was not Jewish—had discovered a menorah beneath the rubble of what had once been a Hebrew school. Kathy bought candles, and he had whittled them down to fit into the holders, and for eight nights they lit the Hanukkah candles.

  “Thank you, Gretchen. I’d like that very much.”

  He knew when he walked into the dreary entrance to Gretchen’s building that tonight would not be like other nights with her. He had been in her apartment only twice, along with others from their research team. She had made a shabby two-room apartment seem warm and comfortable.

  He and Gretchen had much in common, he analyzed as he walked—clutching a bottle of wine—up the dark, narrow stairway: their work, their, background, their loneliness. The trip to Paris—seeing Kathy, seeing her with Jesse—had been a private torment for him. For so many years he’d lived half a life. With Gretchen perhaps he could become whole again.

  Though the night was cold, he felt a rush of warm air as Gretchen opened the door to admit him. She’d nurtured the coals in the fireplace grate into a heat-throwing redness.

  “I brought a little something to go with supper,” he said, almost shyly. “I remembered you like sherry.”

  She’d set up a table before the fireplace. He sniffed the appetizing aromas of supper cooking on the range. He could build a life with Gretchen, he told himself with a surge of hope.

  After supper—with muted music from Gretchen’s radio as a background—he took her in his arms. It seemed natural to make love to her. This was good for both of them, he thought afterward while they lay beneath a mound of blankets on her bed and she told him with ingratiating candor how she had prayed for this to happen.

  “Stay tonight,” she pleaded.

  “I couldn’t bear to leave,” he said and reached for her again, willing himself to believe this was Kathy in his arms.

  He began to spend at least two nights a week in Gretchen’s apartment. In the spring, he told himself, he’d ask her to marry him. For now it was enough they were together this way. No fancy wedding, he thought in silent amusement. Just the two of them and a handful of friends from the Institute, and the rabbi who would marry them.

  Like Uncle Julius said, a man’s wealth was his family. He was over thirty-four. What was he waiting for? He wanted a home and a family. He was so tired of coming back to an empty flat, so laden with bitter memories. With Gretchen he would share a whole new world.

  Chapter 20

  IN LATE FEBRUARY KATHY felt as though she were a schoolgirl playing hooky. Bella had gone off with Gail and Brenda for two weeks in the Caribbean. Phil was on a trip to the Midwest and West Coast stores. She could abandon the New York social circuit, the obligatory four or five nights a week of dinner at the spots beloved by the columnists, the luncheons at the Colony or the Stork at Phil’s whim or with Julius and Bella at her father-in-law’s orders, the parade of charity events that could be avoided by a wife whose husband was detained by business.

  On the first evening—Alice’s midweek day off, when she went to her sister in Levittown—Kathy told the housekeeper not to bother preparing dinner. She took Jesse off to the Times Square Automat, where he was enthralled by the procedure of dropping coins into a slot and having a door miraculously open to such Automat favorites as chicken pot pie and baked beans.

  Jesse was fascinated by the electric signs and the brilliantly lighted theater marquees. He lived in Manhattan, she thought with a rush of love, but for what he saw of the magic of the city he might still be living full-time in Greenwich. With great reluctance he allowed himself to be prodded into a taxi for the ride back up to the Fifth Avenue apartment.

  When Jesse was asleep, Kathy called her mother and arranged an impromptu dinner at the apartment the following evening. It was always so good to have them at the apartment because she knew that to her parents, she was living far beyond their fondest dreams for her.

  “If it’s too short notice, Mom, we can make it a few days later.” She didn’t mention that Phil was away on another trip—Mom knew. In the last year Phil was never home—either away on a trip or on fabricated business in town—when they came for dinner.

  “No, darling, it’s fine,” Edie said joyously. “Dad has things worked out so well with Mannie and his friend now. They come in to cover whenever Dad asks. And how’s my little darling?” she asked tenderly.

  Off the phone with her mother, Kathy called Rhoda to arrange to meet her for coffee tomorrow at Tip Toe Inn on Broadway. Now—checking her watch for the time—she phoned Marge in San Francisco to discuss her latest ideas for the shop.

  The next afternoon, at 3:30 P.M. sharp, she arrived at Tip Toe Inn. Moments later Rhoda entered the restaurant.

  “God, it’s getting cold!” Rhoda shivered good-humoredly as she slid out of her coat and settled down at the table. “And me, sworn never to wear furs.”

  “You’re looking smug today.” Was Rhoda pregnant? She and Frank were so anxious to have a baby, and each month Rhoda was disappointed. “What’s brought that glint into your eyes?” Kathy joshed.

  “Frank’s just been promoted. I am now married to an editor-in-chief!”

  “Oh, Rhoda, that’s terrific!”

  “Not much more money,” Rhoda
said with a sigh. “But Frank says he’ll have a much freer hand. He’s hoping to reshape the magazine’s image.”

  “What about his writing?” Kathy asked, serious now. She knew how important this was to Frank.

  “Oh God, he’ll still be bringing work home every night and over the weekend. But he swears that once he has everything in place, he’ll find time to write again. He’s writing the newsletter every month for our animal rights group. He’d really like to do a book on the subject. Now tell me about Jesse. Is he all excited about going into the first grade in September?”

  They talked about Jesse and then about Marge and the shop.

  “What do you hear from David?” Rhoda asked while they awaited refills of coffee.

  Kathy knew Rhoda meant: What did Bella and Julius hear?

  “We saw him in Paris in July,” Kathy reminded. “And he always sends cards at Rosh Hashanah. I don’t think Bella and Julius have heard from him since.” She was silent for a moment, her heart pounding. “He’s seeing some girl in Berlin. I suspect the next communication will be a wedding invitation.” Why couldn’t she accept that?

  “I remember the way he used to look at you in Hamburg. The rest of us were sure you two were serious.”

  “The timing was all off for us,” Kathy said slowly. No use pretending with Rhoda. “I hope he’ll be happy. There’s nobody who deserves that more than David.”

  They talked until both women recognized that their packet of free time was over. Rhoda had to run home to prepare dinner for Frank and herself. Kathy would set a festive table for her small family dinner party and—with dinner ready to be served—dismiss her housekeeper for the evening.

  By the time Kathy reached the apartment, Alice was putting out dinner for Jesse. Tonight he’d be allowed to stay up half an hour later than usual so as to visit with his grandparents and Aunt Sophie.