And then, one night, everything changed.
Vivie lobbied hard to stay in the city for the summer, citing Evelyn’s proximity as a reason she could be trusted, offering even to live with Evelyn and Fred （without her sister’s permission, though it would have been granted）， but to no avail. Both Miriam and Joseph stood firm; the children all came home for the summer while in college, and Vivie would be no exception.
Evelyn was at the cottage for a week, staying up late into the night talking with her sister, the topic of George dominating the conversation. Evelyn had met him twice, both times in the city. She and Fred tried to get Vivie to bring him to dinner at the house, but it never happened. Evelyn found him handsome, arrogant, and dull in his sense of self-importance. But with his inflated ego, he treated Vivie as, if not his equal, then very close to it. And Vivie, never quite as radiant in her own sphere as Evelyn, shone fiercely in his presence. Which was all that mattered to Evelyn.
She returned to New York at the end of the week, promising to come back at the end of the month when Fred would take his vacation time. Evelyn would stay another week or two when he left, soaking in as much of Hereford as she could. If she stayed mostly at the cottage, she ran almost no risk of running into Tony—not that she had anything to say to him if she did. The book with his ring had stayed in her childhood bedroom when she married, and she sometimes went weeks without thinking of him in her new life.
But when Evelyn and Fred joined the family at the cottage, they found a house in turmoil.
“No,” Miriam was saying. No one even noticed Evelyn and Fred standing in the front hall. And while Evelyn typically announced her entrance in great style with the loud flourishes reserved for royalty, the raised voices that they heard through the living room windows precluded that.
“But, Mama—”
“No. If it’s what you think, he’ll come to the house.”
Vivie stomped her foot like a child, one hand on her hip, the other gripping the yellow paper of a Western Union telegram. “He’s not like you with your old-country ways. Don’t you see how backward you’re being?”
Joseph shook his head from his armchair, a newspaper discarded next to him. “It’s not backward. It’s respect.”
“It’s respectful to ask me what I want, not you what I want.”
“We’ve never met this man. How can you expect your father to give his blessing?”
“I don’t care about a blessing! I’m going and that’s all there is to it.”
Miriam’s hands went to her hips as well. “You are not.”
Vivie turned to leave and saw her sister and brother-in-law standing in the doorway. “Evelyn,” she sighed. “You’ll talk sense into them.”
Evelyn looked at her sister’s wild eyes, then at the telegram clutched in her hand. Prying it gently from her fingers, Evelyn took the paper and read the message.
MEET ME TOMORROW. MADE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION OF MY LIFE. YOU HAVE TO COME. GEORGE.
There was as little doubt in Evelyn’s mind as in her sister’s that a proposal was imminent. And from what she had seen of George, no, he wouldn’t think he needed some immigrant’s blessing to marry the woman he had selected to be his wife.
“I’ll try,” she whispered, kissing her sister’s forehead, then went into the living room to her parents, leaving Fred, who was disinclined to enter any Bergman family spat, still holding his hat in the hall.
Vivie flew up the stairs in a fit of angry tears, and Evelyn kissed her father’s cheek, then flopped onto the sofa. “Oh, hello there,” she said, pretending to just notice her parents. “Lovely weather we’re having.”
“Stop it,” Miriam said.
“Hello to you too, Mama. Why yes, we did have a nice drive.”
“You won’t change my mind.”
Evelyn reached up and took her mother’s hand, pulling her down onto the sofa next to her. “Mama. When have I ever been able to change your mind? Papa, pssh, he’s a pushover.” Joseph harrumphed but didn’t object. “But not you.”
Miriam eyed her daughter suspiciously. “She’s not going.”
“What’s your objection? That you haven’t met him? Because I have.” Fred crept gingerly into the room and perched on the arm of the chair opposite Joseph.
“You aren’t her parents.”
“No. But New Yorkers are a different breed, Mama. This George, he . . . Well, he thinks a lot of himself. But he treats Vivie well. He makes her happy. And he’s Jewish. Vivie’s not wrong—his family has been here much longer than ours. His parents don’t even speak Yiddish. But, Mama, let her go. It’s not like she didn’t have plenty of opportunities to be alone with him all year. And he’ll come here once he’s asked her. Fred asked me first, after all.”