Love Saves the Day

“Do we have any pictures?” Mr. Mandelbaum’s voice was always powerful. Sometimes Laura could hear him from the hallway in front of her own apartment, all the way downstairs. But even Honey opened her eyes wider at how loud his voice sounded now. “Ida, bring out the photo albums.”

Mrs. Mandelbaum had gone to the linen closet in the front hall, pulling out several thick albums. She’d spread them out on the linoleum kitchen table, and Mr. Mandelbaum came in to join them. Laura marveled at the tiny hats and long beads women had worn back then as Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum told stories about this relative and that friend. Finally, Honey had crept from Laura’s lap onto the table and sat smack in the middle of an open photo album, rubbing her head against Mr. Mandelbaum’s cheek and swishing her tail across Laura’s hand. “Honey, in her infinite wisdom, is here to remind us that all good things must come to an end,” Mr. Mandelbaum declared. Then Mrs. Mandelbaum had put the albums back in the linen closet and begun preparations for a strudel with Laura’s help (“A girl is never too young to learn how to cook,” she always said), and Mr. Mandelbaum returned to the living room where he continued to listen to Count Basie until dinner was ready.

Later, after they’d eaten, Laura would fall asleep in the bed that had once belonged to their son, Honey clasped in her arms and purring contentedly. It was from Honey that Laura had learned the trick of sleepily half closing her eyes in a series of slow blinks in order to make a cat fall asleep. At some point Sarah would close the record store and come to carry her downstairs to her own bed, although Laura would be too deeply asleep to remember this part. She’d always slept well with Honey snoring softly beside her.

If she squinted now, sitting on the couch with Prudence, she could almost imagine that it was Honey sleeping next to her once again. The two of them looked somewhat alike, both slim brown tabbies (although Prudence seemed to be getting plumper lately—or was Laura imagining things?) with black tiger stripes. Prudence even had a hint of the same tiny black patch on the white fur of her lower jaw that Mrs. Mandelbaum had referred to as “Honey’s beauty mark.”

Of course, Prudence and Honey were very different creatures. Honey hadn’t been nearly as comical as Prudence, with her funny little airs of self-importance and the peremptory way she was apt to demand food (a thing Honey had never done). And Prudence was far more aloof than Honey had ever been, Honey who was so gentle and who had turned huge, green, adoring eyes upon you the second you reached down to stroke her head. Sweet as a piece of honey cake, Mr. Mandelbaum had always said. Laura remembered now, with a sudden shock at having ever forgotten, that Mr. Mandelbaum had also sung the “Daisy Bell” song to Honey—except, of course, he’d sung, Ho-ney, Ho-ney, give me your answer do …

Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum and everything else she’d loved had been lost to exactly the same inexorable forces Josh was now trying to combat. Mr. Mandelbaum himself had talked about friends forced from their tenements in the West Sixties back in 1959, when the buildings were leveled to clear space for Lincoln Center. It was the inevitable life cycle of a large city. A few tenderhearted people would wring their hands and write piteous op-ed pieces for the local newspapers, and some poor sap would be trotted out before the cameras to share his tale of woe for the evening news. But in the end, the buildings came down, the rents went up, and sooner or later everybody forgot. Cities had no memories. Only people did, and even people would forget eventually.

And this was the thing, of all possible things, that Josh had chosen to fixate on. This was where Josh was putting all his time and energy instead of focusing on what he should have been focused on—himself and Laura and the future the two of them would have together. Laura wanted her life to move in one direction: forward. And here Josh was, dragging her back into the past.

All of it had become so jumbled in her mind that by the time she’d knocked on Perry’s office door that morning, she wasn’t sure if she was there for Josh, on a pretext to talk to Perry at length about something, or to assuage her own conscience when it came to the dim view she’d taken of Josh’s efforts. Probably, she told herself, it was some combination of both.

From her customary seat across from Perry’s desk, Laura could see the framed photograph of Perry with his wife and two daughters taken at the older one’s Bat Mitzvah two years earlier. Laura had attended alone and been seated with the handful of other people Perry had invited from the firm. She had been the only third-year associate. Next year, she would attend the younger girl’s Bat Mitzvah with Josh. If I’m invited …