Love Saves the Day

Laura remembered a little joke of her mother’s, something like, You’re not paranoid if they really are all against you. Laura didn’t want to be paranoid, but she couldn’t help noticing that where she’d typically racked up anywhere from 200 to 240 billable hours a month, in the past two months she’d barely broken 160. While technically this wouldn’t affect her salary, her bonuses this year would undoubtedly be smaller than in previous years—and bonuses accounted for nearly half of what she earned.

It wasn’t that Laura had slacked off or was unwilling to take on the work. Work wasn’t being sent her way. It could be that there wasn’t as much work to go around as there had been in flusher times. She suspected that some of the other associates might be “hoarding” work, although it was nothing she could set out to discover and prove without making herself appear even more paranoid than she already felt. Maybe Perry wasn’t looking out for her the way he used to. Maybe Perry was somebody else’s rabbi these days, although she couldn’t be so far out of the loop as to be unaware of something like that, if it had truly occurred.

Unless, she would think grimly, she was.

Laura had fallen into the habit of staying up late thinking about these things, telling Josh she was staying up to go over work papers the way she always had, but actually turning everything over in her mind. Frequently she found herself encouraging Prudence to join her for company, placing a morsel of tuna or cheese, or some other much-loved treat, on the couch until Prudence was lured into settling down next to her. Once the cat had fallen asleep, Laura would gently comb the tips of her fingernails through the fur of Prudence’s back, which was what had first suggested the cat brush she’d spontaneously stopped for on the way home from work today. Only a few months ago (had it really only been a few months?), Sarah must have stroked Prudence in much the same way Laura did now. Laura would look at her long fingers—fingers that, under different circumstances, might have moved with ease across a turntable or a musical instrument or a typewriter—and think, I have my mother’s hands.

As a child, on hot July days like this one, with school out and her mother busy at the store, Laura had spent a great deal of time in one of the ladder-backed chairs in the Mandelbaums’ kitchen with Honey in her lap. Mrs. Mandelbaum would chop a frozen banana into a bowl, sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar over it, then mix it with sour cream taken from what she insisted on calling, to Laura’s amusement, “the icebox.” Honey would lick the sugared cream from Laura’s fingers with her raspy tongue while Mrs. Mandelbaum prepared dinner and Mr. Mandelbaum rested in his overstuffed living room chair only a few feet away, listening to the big-band albums that Sarah scavenged from her store to bring back for him.

Once, listening to an album by the Count Basie Orchestra, Mr. Mandelbaum had closed his eyes and said, “Ah, this takes me back.” Calling into the kitchen, “Ida, do you remember this one?”

“Of course I do,” Mrs. Mandelbaum had answered. She thwacked a chicken breast cleanly in half with a cleaver. “Norm Zuckerman and I danced to this at the Roseland Ballroom in 1937.”

Mr. Mandelbaum grumbled something under his breath that sounded like Norm Zuckerman followed by a bad word in Yiddish. But Mrs. Mandelbaum had been unperturbed, her deft hands massaging spices into the chicken as she smiled and told Laura, “Mister Bigshot in there might not have thought much of me at first, but plenty of boys had eyes for me in those days. Believe you me.”

“No wonder,” Mr. Mandelbaum snorted. “You had the shortest skirts and longest legs on the whole Lower East Side.”

“Stop it, Max! You’re filling her head with nonsense.” Mrs. Mandelbaum slid the chicken into the oven and ran her hands under the faucet. “I’ll put the leftovers in the icebox and bring them up later when your mother comes home,” she told Laura. “Nothing beats cold chicken at the end of a hot day.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Don’t listen to what he says. My mother used to measure my skirts with a ruler before I went out. If they were shorter than two inches below my knee, I had to go back upstairs and change.”

“Ah, but those were some knees.” Mr. Mandelbaum smiled from his chair. “They still are, you know. Nobody has knees like my wife’s.” Mrs. Mandelbaum had pretended not to hear him, but a pleasant blush spread across her wrinkled cheeks.

Laura, rubbing her knuckles gently behind Honey’s ear, had considered this, unable to imagine what it would be like to have such a strict mother. Sarah had never been especially prone to discipline, had never once raised her hand to Laura or enforced punishments of any kind. “Do you have any pictures of what your dresses looked like back then?”