Miriam watched from the front stoop as the Corvette pulled away. Albert turned and waved as he taxied the vehicle down the street. Ruthie didn't look back, sitting stiffly next to him with her hands in her lap. Miriam waved back at her son-in-law as the car disappeared. She stared after them for a minute, thinking about the young Gentile.
Breakfast would have been very awkward if it hadn't been for Albert. Ruthie had been very quietly, not willing to talk, and there was something wrong with Isaac. Therefore it had been up to Miriam and Albert to keep the conversation afloat, and he had risen to the task admirably. He had started by marveling over the food, both quality and quantity. Then he had ferreted around for stories about Ruthie as a little girl and talked animatedly about his students at the base. After the food was cleared away he had declined coffee with Isaac and insisted on helping the women with the dishes. While they had worked he had regaled them with stories about his adventures as a summer stock player in high school. He had been astounded and delighted to learn that Ruthie had had a lead in her high school's production of The H.M.S. Pinafore, even going so far as to try to coax her to sing a few bars for him. She had resisted almost waspishly.
Now they were on their way back to Lakehurst. Miriam turned and went back into the house, wondering what had happened last night. Strange noises had shattered the silence of the night, and Isaac had gone, against her better judgment, to check on the young couple. When he had finally come back he had said nothing except that they had not been making love, but he had lain awake next to her for a very long time.
Miriam liked this newest son-in-law much more than she did any of the other three. The whole family needed Albert. In many ways he was filling the empty place that Aaron had left in all of their lives. He had the same carefree manner, the same fierce, energetic hold on life. The way he always greeted Miriam with a quick filial kiss melted her heart: before Ruthie's wedding day she had not been kissed by a young man since Aaron had gone away. He filled needs in other hearts, too. Naomi and Dina missed the little brother who used to tease them, Rachel secretly pined for her big brother's affectionate flattery, and Albert could and did proffer both. The children who were old enough to remember their blood uncle felt his absence at family gatherings. It had been Aaron who would run around the yard, directing games and telling stories. Now, the little ones had Albert to organize rounds of baseball and referee tag, and his stories were even better than Aaron's had been, because they were true… or at least, mostly true, she suspected he exaggerated sometimes.
If Albert could be all of these things, Miriam could not help hoping, maybe he could fill some of the emptiness that Aaron's exile had left in Isaac's heart. Isaac had never been one to make friends easily: he had connected with his father-in-law at last, but had had no other close friends, until Ruthie and Aaron had started to grow up. Ruthie was like her father, quiet and thoughtful, loving in silence but enormously. Aaron was as different from the pair of them as it was possible to be. He was witty, extroverted, eternally optimistic. The only trait he shared with them was a fanatic anti-war activism, a fervent belief in the necessity for nonviolent resolution of conflict that his country had forced him to put to the test. When the draft card had come, two days after his eighteenth birthday, Aaron had wasted no time in formulating his escape plan. All the money he had saved for college was withdrawn from the bank, he had packed a single suitcase, and bought a ticket to Montreal. On the morning he had left, only Miriam had been aware of her husband's pain. As proud as he was of the boy for refusing to go, the separation was as excruciating as a death—worse, because with it came the agony of betrayal of the dream of peace and freedom that had brought him to the United States in the first place.
So she had hoped that Albert might take some of that pain away, the way he had unwittingly eased the grief of the others. The trouble was, of course, that Albert couldn't seem to get past the façade of grim silence that Isaac exuded. She had been trying almost since the wedding to get her son-in-law to talk to her husband. Over and over again they exchanged the bare pleasantries and although Isaac maintained that he didn't dislike the young captain he didn't seem to like him much, either.
This morning when she had realized that Albert had caught her hint and was going to talk to Isaac Miriam had been overjoyed. They had seemed to be trading comments about nothing in particular, and then Isaac had fixed Albert with the piercing look that always gave the recipient the feeling that he could see straight into the darkest recesses of their soul—the look that made it impossible for anyone to lie to him. Albert had shuddered, then tried to excuse himself, but Isaac had grabbed his shoulder, holding him back. Then something the younger man had said had bit back at Isaac, filling his eyes with sorrow. By the time the Gentile had reached the house he had been smiling again, but Miriam knew that the gulf between the two men was widening instead of narrowing.
With the company gone, she could at least confront her husband, provided she could find him. He wasn't in the sitting room, the kitchen, the den, or the empty bedroom that still waited for a boy who would probably never come home. She called his name up the stairs and out the back door. Finally, running out of places to look, she descended to the rumpus room.
He was sitting on the floor behind the sofa-bed, where the wall was lined with shelves full of magazines. In high school Ruthie had thought she wanted to be a journalist, and she had kept up subscriptions to Life, Time, and National Geographic right through university. Never one to abet disorder, she had filed each issue meticulously, one cardboard sleeve per year, but she had shown no desire to take them with her when she moved on to her own life in Jersey City. So they had remained where she left them, largely untouched until today.
Now two boxes from each set had been pulled down, their contents fanned out on the floor. Isaac held one copy of Time in his hands, open to a page that he was staring down at, a haunted look in his eyes.
It was that expression that made Miriam hang back. It was easy for Isaac to lose himself in the past, and it was a blow to his dignity if he was forced back to the present too quickly.
"Isaac?" she said. "I wanted to talk about Albert."
Isaac looked up at her and sighed. "Why?" he said.
"He's Ruthie's husband, and I think we should talk about him," Miriam replied, taking it slowly because his expression wasn't changing.
"Better if he had been Dina's husband," Isaac said.
"Dina's only two years older than Ruth," Miriam reasoned. "And I know Albert is a little old for her, but he's young at heart." She smiled as she thought of the Naval captain dramatically and convincingly letting nine-year-old Reuben strike him out.
"No," Isaac murmured. "No. Miriam, you remember when Ruthie first brought him to the house? I told you I had seen him before. Michael said the same thing at the wedding. And your father agreed that he looks familiar."
Miriam nodded. "The last moon mission. He was the flight commander."
Isaac shook his head. "What do I care about that? One spaceman is much like another to me. I saw him somewhere else. Look, Miriam."
He held out the magazine. Miriam looked at the cover. May, 1973. On the front cover were two men, painfully thin but fiercely proud, wearing dirty pink-and-white striped pajama shirts. The caption across their shoulders read: America's Silent Heroes: The Men of Hanoi.
"Inside," Isaac said.
Miriam turned to the page her husband had been looking at. Gruesome photographs stared back at her amid the columns of text: three gaunt men in smocks clustered around a hospital bed holding a fourth, smiling despite the stump where his left arm should have been; a pair of bearded, filthy men staring at the camera over the rims of mugs emblazoned with U.S. Navy decals; a man swimming in a too-large uniform, his arms around a woman and a little boy, tears of joy streaming down his cheeks. The last picture drew her eyes away from the others.
There was only one man in this one, naked except for a pair of tattered, filthy shorts that might once have been part of a uniform—or perhaps not. He was emaciated to the last degree, his thighs less in circumference than his knees, every rib standing out and casting its own distinct shadow—not all of them straight. His right collarbone seemed jointed, rising in the middle as it did at a sharp angle, so that one shoulder was higher than the other. His bare chest was covered in dark, barely-healed wounds and brilliant red scars. His hair was long, matted curls falling past his shoulders. One eye was gloriously black, swollen almost shut. Most horrifying of all were the shackles, enormous, heavy irons at his wrists and ankles linking each limb to its mate by a short chain. Despite the grainy quality of the black-and-white photograph it was obvious that the tissue where the manacles had rubbed was worn away to a bloody pulp. It was doubtful that even the man's mother would have recognized him, were it not for the enormous, rakish grin on the hollow-cheeked face.
Miriam's eyes flew to the caption, expecting to see a familiar name to confirm the horror and pity wrenching her stomach. Instead she read: Stripped even of his dog tags, this pilot greets his rescuers with enthusiasm. "War?" he told reporters later. "There was no war in there, just you and the VC. It was personal."
Miriam's eyes flickered back to the captive's face, trying not to see the resemblance. It was Ruthie's husband, or else his living doppelganger. She looked at her husband, who was putting away the other magazines with care.
"Isaac," she whispered.
"Just like her mother," Isaac said simply.
"How did you find out? Did he tell you?"
"Did I tell your father?" he asked. "No, last night I saw a scar, here—" He touched the back of his neck. "—where an iron collar had been left on too long, biting the flesh."
Miriam was silent. Isaac bore such a mark. The Germans had chained them together in a long line, marching them for days through a winter-wasted forest.
"I saw it," he said; "and I remembered the face. It is a very good photograph. No wonder they used it even if he did not let them use his name."
"Has he told Ruthie?" Miriam asked, closing the magazine so that she didn't have to stare at that ghastly picture.
Isaac shook his head. "That I do not know. How could I ask her? If he has not told her, she should not hear it from me."
"If she doesn't know she can't help him," Miriam reasoned. "And Ruthie would never guess."
"He has to tell her, not me and not you," Isaac said. "For him, not for her, he needs to be the one who tells her. Perhaps she knows already."
"I hope so," Miriam murmured.
Isaac got to his feet and took the magazine from her. "I am going to the funeral parlor," he said. "I need to polish the caskets for the new week."
Miriam nodded, watching him walk away, still holding the periodical. She didn't have the heart to remind him that he had polished the caskets on Friday afternoon.