Devotion. Michelle Herman

gone, she would have told him. That he hadn’t asked (that it seemed he would never ask) left her feeling grateful and sad at the same time. But only for the first few minutes after he had left. Then, once those few minutes passed, she would pick up the baby and resume her singing and her dancing. “We got sunlight on the sand,” she’d sing to Alexander. “We got moonlight on the sea.” She’d spin him so fast he would shriek with pleasure.

      “Ah, exactly what we are in need of right now,” Vilmos said, confusing Esther. Then she saw the waitress in her dirndl skirt and peasant blouse proffering a bottle of wine for Bartha’s inspection. “Yes, good,” Bartha said, and as the waitress poured, Vilmos announced that he wanted to make a toast. “To you, Esther my dear,” Vilmos said. “To your health and happiness and a long life that’s full of love.” Esther blushed.

      “Clara, lift your water glass, please,” he said. “Esther—you, too, lift your wine glass. Just this once it’s all right.” She picked up her glass and looked at Bartha—he was the one who had taught her that one mustn’t drink a toast to oneself—but he smiled and gave her a slight nod as he held up one finger (just this once, yes), so she brought the glass to her lips and in three long swallows she drank the contents of it.

      “Slowly, Esther, slowly,” Bartha said. But Vilmos was laughing and already reaching for the bottle to refill her glass. She waited for Bartha to tell Vilmos not to, but he didn’t.

      “And now let us drink to Alexander,” Vilmos said. “To his health and happiness and long life.”

      Esther took a single swallow this time, with one eye on Bartha, who nodded before he took his own sip of wine.

      Vilmos held his glass aloft again. “To János,” he said.

      “Who has had already a long life,” said Bartha.

      Vilmos smiled. “To his health and happiness, and to the many more years he has still to come.”

      They smiled at each other fondly. Esther took another, longer swallow of her wine.

      “Let us drink to you now, Vilmos,” Bartha said. “Esther and I both are very grateful for all you have done for us. You have been a good friend.”

      “Let us drink to friendship, then,” said Vilmos.

      Esther drank to friendship, draining her glass. She felt her eyes fill as she set down the empty glass. Again her tears surprised her. No tears for her wedding, but she was crying now over—what? Lost friendship? When she had stopped missing Leah and Kathleen even before she had left home? It had been so long since she’d felt free to talk to them that by the time she’d left she had been almost glad she wouldn’t have to see them anymore. She’d grown so used to pretending with them, to hiding the truest things about herself, behaving as if she cared about things she had no interest in, things she could not believe she had ever been interested in. By the time she left, there was no real friendship to lose. She never even thought of writing to them the way she wrote to her family. What would she say? She had never told them she was pregnant. She had never told them she and Bartha had begun a romance. How could she have told them? (Even now, after so much had happened, she couldn’t think of how to tell them that, that first essential fact.) It was not her friends these tears were for, she thought, so much as it was the idea of friends.

      It was true that Vilmos had been good to them. He had been a good friend to her and Bartha both, exactly as Bartha had said. But this was a different sort of friendship than what she thought of as friendship. In its way it took much more for granted. She never felt she had to worry about whether Vilmos would “still” like her, and she could not imagine Vilmos feeling otherwise himself—but it was not a talking friendship. And that was what she missed, really. Not friendship so much as conversation. She missed the conversations she’d had every day when she had lived at home, conversations not just with her closest friends but with the other people she had known at school, people she had never thought of then as friends but wondered about now. The girl—Alice? Alicia?—who had sat next to her in homeroom last year, whom she’d never talked to, never even saw, except for that brief period each day, when they had had hurried, intense conversations in a whisper, mainly about parents—and mainly Alicia’s (Alice’s? or was it Alison’s?), who were probably about to get divorced. The girl in her gym class junior year who always hid with her, both of them shivering in their gym bloomers, in the stairwell behind the gymnasium when the class played dodgeball—she could not remember what they’d talked about, and it astonished her now that they had talked so often, for as long as half an hour each time. Oh, and a soft-spoken, skinny, small boy named Ramon whom she’d met her first week, and his, of high school, when they’d both auditioned for the Drama Society, and who used to talk to her so seriously, if only for ten or fifteen minutes, every week before the Drama meeting started, about art and music, poetry, the theater, love and death and even heaven, which he wanted to persuade her to believe in.

      She even missed the conversations she’d had with the people in the candy store, where she helped out behind the counter most days after school and all her after-school activities, including her singing lessons and what came after that. People stopped in at the store for cigarettes or the Post or a cup of coffee and started talking about anything: their own private troubles or an idea they’d just had about something—God or baseball or politics or science—or a funny thing, or something terrible, that had happened to them (a long time ago or yesterday or a “just this minute, just before I came in here today”). And they would always say, after a while, “So what do you think? What do you make of that?”

      Until she had left home, she’d never noticed how much of her time, her life, was spent in conversation. She would never have imagined that she might look back someday and marvel over it, or think with longing (think at all!) about the people in her neighborhood who dropped in at her parents’ store each day. Certainly she’d never thought of them—the “regulars”—as friends. She had known them her whole life: she’d been working in the store in exchange for her allowance since she’d started seventh grade—and before that, all through grade school, she’d sat at the counter doing homework every afternoon, nursing an egg cream or a cherry lime rickey for hours, eavesdropping on the teenagers who gathered there and hoping one of them would speak to her. The teenagers—fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds!—she had spied on and admired so much had grown up and with hardly an exception stayed around the neighborhood (some had gotten married right away and moved into their own apartments, some had gone to Brooklyn College, and some had commuted up to Hunter or to City; two or three had left for upstate colleges and then returned once they had graduated) and then joined the ranks of “regulars,” chatting for a while with Esther after she had counted out their change. There was almost no one who came in whom Esther didn’t know, by sight if not by name, and yet if she had been asked, back then, about someone who’d come into the store, she would have said, “He’s just somebody from the neighborhood.”

      But all of those somebodies from the neighborhood, all those familiar almost-strangers, had talked to her. No one talked to her now, not that way. Not that way, and not the way the girl whose name had been something like Alice had talked to her or the way Ramon had talked to her. Who would ever talk to her that way, in any of those ways, again?

      She had not expected—had not even hoped, she told herself—that she would ever find friends like Kathleen and Leah again, that she would ever talk to anyone as she had talked to them, with them, since the second grade or even earlier. She’d known them both since the year they were born. She could not remember when they had begun to talk so earnestly and urgently to one another for hours every day. They talked on the way to school, at lunch, on the way home, and on warm nights on Kathleen’s stoop until her mother sent them home and told Kathleen to go to bed. On cold or rainy nights they took turns talking on the phone—Esther called Kathleen, Kathleen called Leah, and Leah called Esther.

      But that had changed, Esther had to remind herself, before she had left home. She still didn’t know if she had started making up excuses to avoid them out of fear she’d give away her secret if they talked, or if she had begun avoiding them because they hadn’t guessed she had a secret from them