Devotion. Michelle Herman

smile. She hated it when he complained, or made a joke, about the baby’s nighttime habit of waking and crying for her at two-hour intervals, not falling back to sleep until she’d held him, nursed him, rocked him, sung to him, and then walked him around and around the dark room, sometimes for as long as half an hour. This did not seem so terrible to her. That Alexander needed her attention (her attention; Bartha’s would not do) so much that this need could awaken him from a sound sleep was rather thrilling to her. She had hinted at this once to Bartha—had mentioned, with a laugh, as if this time she were the one making jokes about it, that she did not find interrupted sleep so great a price to pay for being loved—but she saw from the look he gave her then that this was not a sentiment that he approved of. After that, she felt she had no choice but to feign sympathy with him when he complained about the way the baby slept (or didn’t sleep), and she pretended now, smiling and nodding. But when she saw that he had begun to stand up, that he was about to put the baby in his carriage after all, she stopped smiling her false smile and said, sharply, “Please, hold him. For five minutes, hold him. Then I’ll take him back.”

      “Esther, you cannot eat while holding him,” he said.

      She thought of telling him, “And why not? I’ve done it before, and will again.” But did she want to argue with Bartha? She considered this. They had never argued. She could not imagine what an argument between them would be like.

      Carefully, she said, “When the food comes, I promise you, I’ll put him down.”

      “Fine,” he said. “Good.” And that was that, the end of it. Still, watching him resettle himself with the baby, she could feel her anger prickling at her as if it were something caught under her skin. You are being foolish, she told herself. Foolish and unreasonable. Why angry? Nothing had changed—everything was just the same as always.

      So it was, she thought. Exactly.

      Everything was just the same. She felt as if she had been tricked.

      She watched Bartha as he began once again to read his menu. He held Alexander securely, with both hands, but Esther could see that he had already ceased to be aware of anything except the list of choices that lay on the table. What if she were to snatch the menu away? But this was just the sort of childish thought she most despised herself for having. Somehow, even if she could prevent herself from doing childish things, she could not keep herself from thinking of them. It was as if there were a part of her that was determined to show her (and him? How lucky it was that he couldn’t read her mind!) how much of a child she was, still. (But she wasn’t, she told herself. How could she be, now?)

      “Esther, have you come to a decision?”

      She blinked at him. “A decision?”

      He inclined his head. The waitress, in her costume—multicolored flowers stenciled on her tall white hat and on the square of apron over her short, stiff black skirt—stood beside the table.

      “Oh—no.” Esther felt herself blush. “No, I’m sorry.” She glanced at the menu, but there were too many choices. She couldn’t think of any reason to name one of them. “Maybe you could…” she began, but as she spoke, she looked up at him, saw the start of a frown—no, no, this wouldn’t do—and she began again, taking a different tack. “Everything looks good. How can I decide?” She paused. “No, I can’t. Please, won’t you choose for me?”

      He smiled. “Of course. I will order for us both then.”

      She paid no attention to what he chose for her. She set her menu down on the tiled tabletop (the tiles were flowered too, and she wondered if the hats and aprons had been made to order so they’d match the tables, or vice versa; or if everything had been planned from the restaurant’s inception) and while he ordered she reflected on how fussy he was, how strict, really, about the reason she deferred to him. She knew that if she let him take charge when she wasn’t interested in taking charge herself, because the issue at hand bored her or did not seem worth the trouble to her, he would be displeased. But it never failed to delight him when she asked him to take over because she knew he knew better. The distinction, she thought, was almost too subtle (she did not have to come out and say that he would make a wiser choice than she would—indeed, she had learned that it was better to imply this than to say it), so that it was easy for her to forget how much it mattered to him and make a mistake, as she nearly had just now. And yet it had mattered to him from the start. He had taken pains to tell her, early on, that he didn’t want to make decisions for her, to treat her “like a father treats a child.”

      “That’s all right,” she had assured him. “I don’t want you to. But there’s no chance that I’ll confuse you with my father. He assumes he knows best always, about everything.”

      “Yes, precisely,” Bartha had said. “I shall not—we shall not—make such an assumption.”

      But it didn’t seem to her so terrible if sometimes he did, especially once they’d left Brooklyn and come here and she had no one but him to depend on. And he did know better about most things. “He’s read everything and he’s been everywhere,” she had told her two closest friends after she had met him for the first time. She’d called Kathleen and Leah one after another, right after her first lesson with him. Just as she had called them after every lesson after that—until she had to stop calling, stop telling them anything.

      She had talked about him far too much at first, so that when she had to stop, afraid she would reveal her secret if she spoke of him at all, she was afraid her friends would notice something. It still seemed strange to her that they had not: she had believed that they knew her so well they’d see the change in her without her telling them—and it had confused her when it was clear that they saw nothing, for she had been unable to decide if she were disappointed or relieved.

      In the beginning she had talked endlessly about him, about how brilliant he was, how interesting. “Interesting?” Kathleen had said doubtfully. “He’s, like, as old as my grandfather”—though he probably wasn’t, or not quite, and even if he were, the comparison was nonsensical. Kathleen’s grandfather lived with Kathleen and her parents and told them stories no one was interested in, the same stories again and again, and when he wasn’t telling stories to Kathleen’s family or friends, he was with a bunch of other old men playing pinochle and sitting in the sun on folding chairs, complaining to each other about “the government.”

      Kathleen and Leah listened politely when Esther told them how many different foreign languages Bartha could speak, or talked about how elegant his manners were, or mentioned famous people he had met—and then they changed the subject without asking any questions, as if gossip about kids in school or the cute new math teacher, or comparing their complaints about their parents, or deciding what to do on Saturday night (the same boring things: a movie at the Oceana, bowling, listening to records at Leah’s) were at least as worthy—more worthy—of their serious attention than “this old guy who gives Esther singing lessons” (which was what Kathleen had said when someone at school, overhearing Esther talking as they stood outside the building waiting for the bell to ring one morning, asked who she’d been talking about).

      Esther told them how kind Bartha was, how he fed the stray dogs and the alley cats and even the pigeons in the courtyard of his building—and how gently he spoke to them; she told them how honored she felt by the way he talked to her—as if she were his equal, she said, when she obviously wasn’t (“Grandfathers always want to talk, though,” Kathleen said. “I don’t see what’s so honoring about it”). They claimed to be baffled by how impressed she was by him. It didn’t seem to mean anything to them when she told them that Bartha had had the most extraordinary life of anyone she’d ever known or even read or heard about—and when once, long ago, she told them that she’d “fallen absolutely and completely madly in love” with him, even though they didn’t take it literally (well, she hadn’t meant it literally—not then, not yet), they begged her not to say that. “Not even as a joke,” Kathleen said. “It’s just much too creepy.” And Leah, with a theatrical shudder, said, “He’s so old, Esther, it’s too weird and awful when you think