“I’ll go,” Ruth said, staring at the paper in her lap, fighting the tug of war.
“Good.” Asher nodded once, less in agreement than in confirmation.
Ruth looked up. She detected a hint of smugness, which set her nerves on edge. “Excuse me?”
Asher shook his head as if released from a trance. “I meant thank you.”
“That’s what I thought you said.” Ruth bent over and gathered a few fallen leaves from the ground. Maybe Asher was the one in need of etiquette lessons. She’d pay good money to see him in white gloves or drinking tea with his pinky raised.
Over the next few days, fall blew right into Philadelphia on a cool September breeze. Knitted sweaters, potted mums, sunset-colored leaves, and bushels of apples appeared throughout the neighborhood. All Ruth’s favorites. She even liked hayrides. Hayride. She had only ever been on one. The Upper West Side, at least her part of it, below Eightieth, was more concrete than country—a place where buses far outnumbered hay-filled flatbeds.
Ruth stood on the portico of Lillian Diamond’s Wynnefield Avenue mansion flanked by marble columns and stone lions, in front of a white double door trimmed in gold.
She shivered with the chill of a new season . . . and unrelenting doubt.
Fall had marked beginnings in Ruth’s life again and again and again. Not only did the Jewish New Year occur in the fall—when she and her family and friends would be written in the Book of Life, God willing—but it had been the start of the school year for most of Ruth’s life. She loved school, unlike most of the girls she knew; she loved learning for its own sake, not as a way to bide her time until a boy or a husband took precedence.
It made sense then that an opportunity to learn new things and to make new friends would begin in the fall. There! She had talked herself into it.
Ruth stared at her maroon leather loafers and imagined sparkly red pumps on her feet instead, even though they weren’t her style. She’d do anything if, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she could click her heels three times and go home. That’s where she had fit in simply because she was little Ruthie Cohen. It didn’t matter that she had been a lot smart and a little tomboy.
Ruth had always been an instigator—in a good way. She’d started the first Jewish Girl Scout troop in her neighborhood. When their rabbi had said that it was improper—and worse, unnecessary—for girls to be scholars, she and her father started an admittedly somewhat secretive Torah study group. He taught Ruth and two of her high school classmates to be scholars.
Her father had promised her dying mother that Ruth would have the same opportunities as her brothers. He had ensured that. And Ruth’s backbone, it seemed, was hereditary from her father. Ruth led a faction of female history majors at Barnard into the meetings of the History Society at Columbia College, which admitted only boys. They petitioned the administrations of both colleges until they’d been permitted, not to join, but to at least participate.
Now as Mrs. Asher Appelbaum she wanted in as well—this time to Wynnefield’s inner sanctum. She didn’t know yet what that looked like or precisely how to navigate it, but she was smart, a polymath. She could learn.
Confidence tucked into her pocketbook, Ruth looked west, up Wynnefield Avenue. She looked east. She checked behind her. No one strolling up the street or the path. Then she closed her eyes, rocked to the balls of her feet, and tapped her heels together.
One.
Two.
Three.
For a few seconds she allowed herself—maybe forced herself—to believe in an unknown excitement beyond the big, fancy door. To trust the same kind of nervous, uncertain flutter that had drawn Asher to her and permeated their courtship, allowing—no, insisting—that they fall in love and eventually elope. Away from their studies, the couple were prone to impulses opposing their thoughtful, structured daily lives. Their whole relationship had been one of adventures—like last-minute weekends to the Hudson Valley without a map, or trying new food in Chinatown. Ruth was no stranger to life’s curveballs. She could do this.
Someone ascended the steps behind her. Ruth opened her eyes.
“I don’t mean to interrupt your, um, thoughts—but you gonna ring the bell?” The raspy voice was marked by a Philadelphia accent. Ruth was still growing accustomed to the sounds and the lingo.
Water. Wooder.
Stoop. Step.
Sub. Hoagie.
She turned. A woman had joined her on the porch. Steadying the maroon pocketbook that dangled near her elbow, Ruth held out her hand. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Ruth Appelbaum. Are you here for the housewife etiquette lessons?”
“Sure am. Reenie—Irene Pincus. Nice to meet you, Ruthie.”
“Just Ruth.” Only her brothers called her Ruthie.
“Well, nice to meet you, just Ruth.”
Irene’s bold-orange lips spread into a wide and genuine smile showcasing straight, large teeth. She didn’t have the look Ruth associated with Wynnefield wives, and Ruth liked that about her immediately.
Her mother-in-law’s friends, and the neighbors she’d met, were reserved, proper, and subtle with their cosmetics. The lime-green shadow painted across Irene’s eyelids drooped and folded at the outer corners and collected in faint crow’s-feet, which didn’t comply with Ruth’s housewife notion and reminded her of a crayon. An exaggerated flip at the ends of Irene’s red hair hit the shoulders of her bright-green dress, but the look was more brash than refined and had more individuality than Ruth thought was tolerated. Ruth was more “like a blank slate for makeup and fashion,” Shirley had said. “That’s a compliment. So many options.”
She was quickly becoming fluent in her mother-in-law’s language.
Shirley had said the class would be like a small, private finishing school—but how could Ruth finish something she hadn’t even started?
“You’ll feel better about the lessons once you get used to the idea,” Shirley had promised.
Ruth was still waiting.
If her confidence had been Shirley’s main concern, why then hadn’t her mother-in-law imposed more of her Wynnefield values and suggested Ruth wear something fancier than a plain navy skirt and blouse to the first class? Or hinted that lipstick would be a better choice than Ruth’s usual dab of Vaseline? Ruth may have scoffed at—or ignored—the tips, but they would have demonstrated Shirley’s support. Her love.
“Let’s go in. We won’t learn anything standing out here.” Irene patted Ruth’s shoulder like an old friend would, allowing her hand to linger.
Ready or not, Ruth rang the doorbell.
Chapter 2
LILLIAN
When the doorbell chimed its four notes, Lillian checked her watch.
“Excuse me, ladies.” She headed to the front door, with a smile and a slight gesture urging Sunny, her housekeeper, back to the kitchen.
“I’ll get it,” Lillian said.
It was her job to set these young housewives at ease, to teach them what was expected. Lillian taught by example. That’s why she’d chosen her burgundy lightweight worsted wool suit with covered buttons, straight from the pages of the August ’62 issue of Vogue. Perfect for an early fall day, according to the magazine. Lillian took their word for it. She’d accessorized it with a matching scarf and short strand of pearls—showing the girls how to behave, how to dress.