Devotion. Michelle Herman

a fluorescent light that buzzed and flickered, about the importance of choosing the right college and then asked a few irrelevant, obviously memorized questions, the answers to which the counselor did not even bother to pretend to listen to before she wished Esther luck with her applications and called for the next senior waiting on the bench in the hallway, who shrugged and rolled her eyes at Esther as she passed.

      How foolish she had felt for being disappointed, for having hoped for anything resembling guidance.

      The restaurant Vilmos chose, the Bohemian Café, was a favorite of Vilmos and Bartha’s. The four of them settled themselves into a booth there, and Esther readjusted the baby (still sleeping, miraculously, although now in her arms), laying him across her lap, her left hand tucked beneath his head, her right hand on his chest so that she could feel the lift and fall.

      Vilmos accepted a menu from a waitress in a Czech costume even as he smacked one hand on the table. “Wine!” he said. “I believe wine is called for on such a day. Shall we all have some?”

      “Wine?” Clara said. “At this hour?”

      A menu was set before Esther but she did not pick it up. She watched Vilmos, who smiled a little, nodding, then answered his own question, “Yes, I believe we will have some wine.”

      Ever since she’d met them, Esther had been waiting for Vilmos to get angry with Clara. He never even seemed to be annoyed. Esther couldn’t understand it, and she watched him carefully now as he turned to Bartha: “And some dumplings, too? For everyone? Because they’re homemade here, you know, and they’re not bad. You’ve tried them, János, have you not?”

      “Of course,” said Bartha. “And you’re right, they’re not bad. But the noodles also are homemade, and they are better than the dumplings.”

      “Esther?” Vilmos said. “Do you also prefer the noodles?”

      Esther nodded. It made no difference to her. She liked going to restaurants, but not for the food. She liked the eventfulness of a trip to a restaurant. She liked being served; she liked being asked what she wanted. It was still a novelty to her. Her father did not believe in restaurants. “A waste of good money,” he had always said. “I do not understand how such places stay in business.”

      But mostly, going to a restaurant was interesting now because it was the only place she did go, the only place Bartha ever took her. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

      “Yes,” Vilmos murmured, thinking aloud, “it’s true that the noodles might be even better….”

      Esther tried not to smile. She could not imagine thinking about such a thing long enough to make a choice about it, to have an opinion about it. She wondered if Vilmos meant what he said—if he’d really just rethought the dumplings. Vilmos loved Bartha as much as she did. Certainly he cared as much as she did about pleasing him, or at any rate not displeasing him.

      Clara cleared her throat. She often did, before she spoke—it was her version of a drumroll, to introduce whatever new disagreeable thing she meant to say. “No noodles for me,” she said, “and no dumplings either. It’s too early in the day for something so heavy. I’ll just have a little soup.”

      “And a glass of wine?” Vilmos said. “You’ll have wine with us, to celebrate?”

      “No,” Clara said. “No wine. If I drink, I’ll fall right to sleep.”

      “Not even a single glass, or half of a glass, to make a toast?”

      There was not a hint of irritation in his voice. Esther wondered how he managed it. She could not have done it, could not have remained amiable day after day, year after year, to Clara—who responded to her husband now with a look so empty of expression that if Esther hadn’t already been used to it she would have been alarmed.

      She had no doubt that Clara hated her (though Vilmos swore she didn’t, swore she “only disapproved” of her—“and even that, believe me,” he insisted, “just a little bit. She’ll get over it in time, I promise you. You only must have patience”).

      “No wine,” Clara said again. “I’ll have a glass of water.”

      “Soup and a glass of water,” Vilmos said. He said it thoughtfully, as if he were memorizing a difficult line of poetry. “All right, then.” He picked up his menu. “For the rest of us, however…let’s see.…”

      Esther could not begin to guess what had made him want to marry Clara. She wasn’t pretty and she had no sense of humor, she wasn’t talented or clever—she wasn’t even interesting, the way some plain but smart girls were at school (though Clara was smart enough, Esther supposed; still, she was not quick-witted, which was the attractive part of smartness). She was always angry or dissatisfied—always. Esther could not recall a time when she had heard Clara say something kind, or when she had seemed happy—and at twenty-nine she was already every bit as harshly finished-looking as the stout, tired, middle-aged Midwestern women Esther saw each week at Hinky Dinky pushing cartfuls of canned vegetables and cellophane-wrapped meat.

      “János, you must choose the wine,” Vilmos said, without taking his eyes off his menu. “Unless of course you would prefer some beer. They have Czech beer, you know, in this place.”

      “I prefer wine, always,” Bartha said. He didn’t look up from his menu either. This was how he and Vilmos always behaved in restaurants. It mystified Esther, their fascination with these lists of things to eat and drink. They would argue tirelessly about the merits and demerits of a given restaurant, a dish, a method of food preparation. “If Esther also will have wine, let’s have a bottle.”

      “Good. Will you have wine then, Esther?”

      She looked from one to the other. Neither of them had looked at her. Each was studying his menu as if he would be tested on its contents later.

      “Esther? Will you drink wine?” Bartha said.

      She knew she should say, Yes, I’ll have wine, or else, No, I don’t think so, thank you. No—she knew that what she should say—what Bartha wanted her to say—was yes, she’d have some wine, of course I will. But really she could have wine or not have wine, it made no difference to her. And Bartha must know that it made no difference to her—noodles or dumplings, wine or no wine. He must know that she only pretended, for his sake.

      A moment passed before he looked up, eyebrows raised—puzzled, not impatient. He wasn’t accustomed to having to wait for her to answer him. Whenever he asked her a question, she was grateful, for it wasn’t so often that he asked her anything, and no matter what it was—how serious or trivial, or even if she knew it was only rhetorical—she’d reply immediately, sometimes without pausing to think about what she was saying.

      But she was thinking now. What she was thinking (she told herself this, told it to herself as if she were telling someone else a story) was that she was angry. This had only just occurred to her, as she considered him while he considered her—his head cocked, his eyebrows raised (as if she were a menu, she thought; as if he were contemplating and discarding possibilities). His eyebrows, like his hair, were perfectly, brilliantly white, and so unruly that he looked, always, as if a ferocious wind had just blown by him.

      They looked at each other steadily. He—her husband, Esther thought—was still waiting for an answer. She knew she was being stubborn, knew it wasn’t reasonable to refuse to answer. But she found—and this was a surprise—that her stubbornness pleased her.

      “Take the baby from me, will you? My arms are getting tired.”

      This was true enough—her arms were tired—as she had been holding Alexander since they’d left the office of the absurd little Mr. One Penny. But she expected Bartha to point out that she could not blame him for this, that he had tried to convince her to put the baby in his carriage when they were led to their booth here, that he’d objected in the first place when she’d scooped the sleeping baby up after the ceremony and left him—her husband—to push the