Always and Forever (9 page)

B
Y THE TIME THE
cab approached Thirteenth Avenue, night had settled over Brooklyn. Kathy gazed avidly out the window, absorbing familiar sights, impatient now to see her parents and Aunt Sophie. Her heart pounded as she tried to frame the words to tell them about Phil.

She glanced at her watch. Mom and Dad would both be in the store. First, Dad would go upstairs to have dinner, then Mom would go up and eat with Aunt Sophie. The only time they all sat down to dinner together was on a holiday.

The driver slowed up, searching for numbers.

“It’s two doors past the fish store,” she told him, excitement surging in her. “Right here!”

While the cabdriver brought her two valises from the trunk, she saw her mother hurrying from inside the store. Dad was making a soda for a customer.

“Kathy! Oh, baby, it’s wonderful to see you!” Her mother reached eagerly to embrace her. “We had no idea you were arriving today.”

“We had only forty-eight hours’ notice. With the mails the way they are, I knew we’d get home before a letter.” Clinging to her mother, Kathy saw her father hurry from behind the counter and across the sidewalk. “Daddy—” She opened her arms to him. “Every day on the ship seemed to drag forever.”

“I’ll take your luggage upstairs. Edie, watch the store.” His eyes bright with love, he reached for the two valises.

“How’s Aunt Sophie?” Kathy asked as they walked up the stairs to the flat.

“You know Aunt Sophie.” He chuckled affectionately. “She’s full of dire predictions about the Russians now that the war is over. And every day she cut out items in the newspapers about how terrible things were in Europe. She was afraid you were going hungry.”

“Adam?” The door to their apartment opened and Sophie gazed out inquiringly. “Kathy! You’re home!” she shrieked in delight.
“Bubbeleh!
You didn’t give me any warning.” She clutched at Kathy and rocked her. “Why didn’t you let us know? I would have made brisket for dinner. You always love my brisket.”

“Aunt Sophie, whatever you make is terrific!” She reveled in the presence of family.

“I’ll go down and send your mother up,” her father told her. “Later we’ll talk.”

Not until her father closed the store for the night and the four of them were gathered around the table over a freshly baked coffee cake and tea did Kathy begin to talk about Phil.

“Kohn?” Her aunt gazed earnestly at her. “From Germany?” She paused. “From Berlin?”

“No, Aunt Sophie, his family is from Russia. They’ve been here for three generations, I think. Phil came to Hamburg to do a photo layout for a magazine. You know, shots of the concentration camps and the survivors.” Kathy saw the swift exchange of a pleased glance between her parents.

“He’s Jewish?” Aunt Sophie asked, although she’d already made that clear.

“Yes, Aunt Sophie.”

“Kathy, are you serious about him?” Her mother was trying hard to appear casual. Kathy intercepted a furtive glance at her ring finger.

“Very serious.” Kathy sensed her father was having difficulty accepting this. To Dad she was still his “little girl.”

“So fast?” her father said warily.

“I’ve known Phil almost four months, Dad. And over in Germany,” she managed a humorous smile, “that’s like a year.”

“What does he do for a living?” Sophie was ever practical.

“Well, he’s just out of the army,” Kathy explained. “But I know his father wants him to come into the family business.” Not that Phil was ready to do that. She wasn’t sure what he meant to do, she suddenly realized. He’d said the magazine job was just something he did “for a fast buck.”

“What’s the family business?” her father asked.

“Wholesale and retail furs.” She paused, knowing they would be impressed. “Phil’s father is Julius Kohn, the furrier.”

“A wealthy family—” Edie Ross broke the sudden silence. Her expression was respectful.

“So when do we meet this young man?”

Her father cleared his throat self-consciously. “You’ll bring him home for some Friday night dinner,” he decided before Kathy could reply. “I’ll have Mannie come in and cover the store for me.” Mannie was a retired garment worker who took over running the store on rare occasions: a funeral or the wedding of a child of close friends or a son’s bar mitzvah.

“Next Friday,” Kathy said with a brilliant smile. Her gaze moving from one to the other. “We want to have a very short engagement.”

“Kathy, you want to marry him?” Edie Ross was ecstatic. “If you picked him, my darling, we’ll love him, too.”

“So how long have we got before we have to plan a wedding?” Sophie asked, her eyes bright with sentimental tears. “You don’t arrange a wedding without a lot of plans.”

“We’ll talk about it when Phil comes over for dinner.”

“I can’t believe it!” Adam Ross shook his head. “She goes away my little girl, and she comes home a few weeks later and she’s ready to get married.”

“A few months later, Dad,” Kathy corrected tenderly.

“Adam, bring out the bottle of schnapps,” Sophie ordered.

Bella Kohn stared in disbelief at her son, a forkful of porterhouse suspended in midair.

“You want to marry some girl you met in Hamburg?” Her voice was shrill.

“She’s from New York,” Phil said. “She was working with that group David was with. She just graduated from Barnard last June.”

“She comes from Brooklyn, Bella.” Phil knew his father was in a needling mood. His mother was born and raised in Bensonhurst, though she preferred to forget that now. “Her father runs a candy store on Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park.”

“What difference does that make?” Phil demanded. Christ, couldn’t they ever sit down to a meal without needling each other? “I’m marrying Kathy, not her family.”

“And how do you plan on supporting a wife?” his mother asked, grim but polite now.

“I’ll get a job. We both will. I thought you’d be thrilled that I’m getting married,” Phil reproached. “You keep telling me I ought to settle down.”

“Bring her out to the house for dinner,” Bella ordered. “Later we’ll meet the family.”

“What do you know, Bella? This wedding’s not on me.” Julius grinned. “The father of the bride foots the bills.”

On Friday evening Phil arrived for dinner: Sophie had been cooking for two days. Her mother had taken time off from the store to buy a new dress at Klein’s.
“I saw the same thing in Saks for three times the price.”
Her father wore his good suit. The table was festively laid; Friday candles were still burning when they sat down.

They liked Phil, Kathy told herself in relief. He was going all out to charm them. They hung on his every word about what he’d seen in Germany.

“Kathy, did you ever get to Berlin?” Sophie asked as she brought in an oven-hot coffee cake. “Did you have a cup of tea or coffee in a café on the Kurfürstendamm?”

“Yes!” Kathy’s face lighted in tender recall. “I made a day trip to Berlin.” She saw Phil lift an eyebrow in surprise. She hadn’t mentioned the trip to Berlin—that was before he arrived in Hamburg. “We had tea at an indoor café on the Kurfürstendamm.” All at once she visualized herself and David in that café, herself and David at the pawnshop where he discovered what he called “the secret pin.” Was he all right? He was always so vulnerable. “Berlin was very different from Hamburg. A lot of destruction,” she conceded, “but people there seemed in better spirits. More able to go on with their lives.”

Now both she and Phil were plied with questions about both Hamburg and Berlin. Everything was going well, she told herself. Let it go as well tomorrow night, when Phil took her to meet his parents in Greenwich. Because Phil knew her parents were up before 6
A.M.
to open the store, he said good night at an early hour.

“I’ll walk with you to the car,” Kathy told him. He’d borrowed his mother’s white Cadillac convertible for the drive down from Greenwich and out to Brooklyn.

“You wouldn’t consider driving into the city with me?” he whispered. “I’d send you back home in a taxi.”

“Not a chance,” she flipped. “You’re going to wait for me now.”

“The chauffeur will pick you up tomorrow at five,” he said after he’d kissed her goodnight in the dark shadows of the car and reluctantly released her. “Watch for a maroon Cadillac limo.”

“Around here I can’t miss it,” she laughed, hiding her disappointment that Phil was sending a chauffeur for her instead of coming himself. It was a long drive both ways, she reproached herself. When the family had a chauffeur, why should Phil have to make that long trip? The rich knew how to live.

They wouldn’t live in Greenwich, would they? Phil had kept his little apartment on West End while he was in Germany. It would be big enough for the two of them, she surmised. So many things Phil and she must talk about!

When she walked into the living room again, she discovered the others had gone out to the kitchen. The kitchen was where they held serious discussions. The voices were low, sounding almost somber. Had she been wrong?
Didn’t they like Phil?

Her mother looked up with a smile when she came into the kitchen.

“We were talking about the wedding,” she told Kathy. “We’ve managed to put aside a little money. But I don’t know what Phil’s parents expect in the way of a wedding.” Her voice was troubled. “We can’t afford a fancy wedding at the Plaza or the Hampshire House.”

“Mom, we’d both hate a splashy wedding,” Kathy insisted. “Phil said his sisters’ weddings were like royal affairs. He wouldn’t want to go through something like that.” They were anxious about not being able to spend a fortune on a wedding, she thought tenderly. “Just family and a handful of friends,” she emphasized. Marge for her maid of honor, Rhoda as bridesmaid.

“You set a date,” her mother said. “I’ll start calling the caterers. But you’ll wear a white gown and veil,” Edie Ross insisted. “I’ve always dreamt of the day I’d see you walking down the aisle in a bridal gown.”

She had been awed when the chauffeur turned into the parklike grounds of the Kohn house, a modern Tudor-style gray cut-stone residence with gabled roof set far back on five acres. Phil had come out immediately to welcome her. His mother was not yet downstairs. He and his father showed her through the lower floor.

There was a two-story beamed entrance hall with fireplace, a gallery at the upper level, a huge living room and formal dining room—both darkly beamed and paneled—a library, a smaller family dining room, a spacious breakfast room, powder room, and a complete kitchen wing. On the second floor, Julius told her, there was a two-bedroom master suite plus five additional bedrooms, all with their own tinted tile bathrooms. The servants’ quarters were on the third floor.

The furniture was baroque, richly carved, upholstered in elegant damasks and velvets, its scale appropriate to the dimensions of the rooms. But to live here, Kathy thought, would be like living in a minor museum.

Kathy sat beside Phil on a gray velvet sofa in the Kohns’ almost oppressively ornate Louis Quatorze living room and listened with a show of polite interest while Phil’s father talked about the founding of the Kohn fortune. Obviously bored, Bella Kohn flipped through a copy of
Town & Country.
Kathy was grateful that Phil’s two sisters and their husbands had been unable to come to dinner on such short notice. It was enough to have to deal with his parents.

In the course of a tour she’d been startled to see a collection of family photographs that included David as a teenager. She could not imagine David living comfortably in such surroundings. For a poignant moment she remembered that day in Berlin when she had stood beside David while he gazed agonizedly at a sheared-off house and pointed out what had once been his mother’s music room. How could he bear living in Berlin again?

“I know you both want a May wedding”—Bella’s voice brought Kathy back into the conversation—“but you must realize there’s so much to be done. I’m afraid your mother will have a dreadful time locating an available room on such short notice.”

“You’ll need a large place,” Julius said expansively. “Our guest list will be about two hundred.”

“We’re planning a very small wedding.” Kathy tensed, anticipating a battle. “Just immediate family and a handful of friends.”

“Out of the question.” Julius waved a hand in rejection. “My two daughters were both married at—”

“Dad, Kathy and I don’t want that,” Phil said, reaching for Kathy’s hand. “It’s a bore.”

“Phil, we have obligations.” His father bristled. “It’s expected that you’ll have a large wedding.”

“It’s a financial impossibility for my parents.” Let there be no pretense, Kathy told herself defiantly. “And even if it were not,” she continued, polite but firm, “Phil and I prefer just family and a few friends.”

Kathy saw the swift exchange between Julius and Bella Kohn. Phil’s mother was not above offering to pay. His father balked. Thank God for that. She couldn’t have allowed Phil’s parents to pay for their wedding. Mom and Dad would have been humiliated.

“Only our immediate family will attend.” Julius made no attempt to hide his anger, but Kathy sensed a reluctant respect on the part of his wife. Kathy realized she’d made an enemy of Phil’s father. He wasn’t accustomed to being crossed. What an awful beginning for her marriage, she thought in dismay. But she wasn’t marrying Phil’s parents, she reminded herself defensively. Phil understood. “My wife and myself, our two daughters and their husbands.” Julius made it seem an unpleasant obligation. “There will, under the circumstances, be no announcement in the newspapers.” Did he consider that a punishment, Kathy mocked in silence. So his publicist wouldn’t get the item into the
Times.

“Where do you plan on living after you’re married?” Bella gazed from Kathy to Phil.

“At my place on West End,” Phil said after a moment. “For now.”

Kathy remembered that Julius Kohn had given a home in Greenwich to each of his daughters upon their marriage. Had Phil been expecting the same? She wouldn’t want to live out here. She’d feel herself in exile. And given the chance, she suspected, Phil’s father would try to rule their lives.

Three days after she had met Phil’s parents, he presented her with a minuscule diamond engagement ring.