Glenna, to her credit, addressed her answers to both my parents. Mom, however, wasn’t talking. She could have mentioned that after high school she had worked for Dr. Himmelmann, a psychiatrist who had trained with Freud. Being a secretary must have seemed inconsequential to her compared to Glenna’s schooling, and perhaps it was, but Glenna was becoming uneasy with my mother’s silence, her answers getting shorter and faster. The waiter brought pints of milk and a jar of Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup for dessert, and as my father mixed himself an egg cream, I rerouted the talk by saying, “Ma, what’s happening with you and the Russians at Temple Hillel?”

Glenna relaxed, and my mother spoke primarily to her. “I’m helping eleven new immigrant women get acquainted with New York City. Yesterday, we were in Korvettes when Olga Urofsky, who, I’m telling you, must have had the greasiest hennaed hair in the whole Soviet Union, inspects a dress and says to me, ‘We have like this in Odessa.’ All of the women agreed with her, and they must have nicked a patriotic nerve, because I got so … so indignant, and I took them to Saks, where I almost pushed Olga into a rack of Puccis and said, ‘Mrs. Urofsky, do they have like this in Odessa?’”

“Right on, Mrs. Meyers,” Glenna said, smiling. I was smiling, too.

My father lit a Lucky Strike and said, “Renée, you’re a regular propagandist. You did good. You turned Russians into JAPs.”

My mother didn’t react, and I felt like slapping my father across his face. He started glancing around again and finally saw what he’d been looking for—the hostess, an older woman with a black turban and dress, and spooky eyes that made her seem better suited for reading palms than directing traffic in a restaurant. She had been at the door when Glenna and I arrived, but off in the kitchen when my folks came in.

The hostess walked toward us, beaming. My mother stared at my father. It was an intimate stare, and seeing it embarrassed me. Glenna also saw it, and she concentrated on mixing an egg cream. With a heavy European accent, the hostess said, “Alexander, this is you, yes?”

My father dragged on his cigarette and stood, giving her a fast hug. “Tamara, how are you? You remember Renée?”

The hostess shut off her beam. “You married her, yes?”

“Yes,” my mother said.

My father introduced Glenna and me to the hostess. She was the proprietress of Zalman’s. The restaurant, she said, had been owned by her uncle, who, like her, had never married. It had closed after his death, and she had, as of late, reopened it.

“Food’s terrific,” Dad said.

Tamara replied with a racy, theatrical laugh, saying, “It’s terrific, yes. What did you expect?” Then she rested her hand on my father’s shoulder and reminisced about a 1939 trip they had made to Washington, DC. I remembered my mother telling me about it when I was a teenager. My father, along with his Zionist pals, had gone to protest FDR’s refusal to grant entry visas to Jewish refugees from Hitler. Tamara was in that group, and my mother had characterized her as a Romanian hussy inclined to quote Theodor Herzl while rubbing my father’s leg. Now, listening to Dad and Tamara nostalgically rehash the past—not bringing up that my father was arrested for coldcocking a Nazi supporter and that my mother, his steady girl, had to wire him his bail—I decided that Dad had been screwing Tamara in 1939, and Mom knew it.