‘I want you to stop the car. I’m not going home.’

He pulled over to the road shoulder and drew to a stop. She sat looking rigidly ahead. With a nod back, she said, ‘Turn around and find another place.’ She turned quickly in the seat and looked through the rear window. ‘Go ahead, there’s no cars coming.’

‘Gertrude …’

‘I want you to turn around,’ she said, implacably watching for cars through the rear window.

‘Now just calm down a minute,’ he said with warning in his tone, and drew her shoulders around until she was facing front. But she would not relent in her demand and merely sat waiting to repeat it. ‘I’m not going through that again today,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you insulted and myself either.’

‘Turn around,’ she said.

‘They’re all restricted hotels along here. I’d forgotten about it, but the sign reminded me. It’ll be the same everywhere else around here.’

She looked at him with her eyes sizing him up. He could feel her probing him. ‘Listen,’ she said, abruptly, ‘why do you always let them make a Jew out of you?’

‘I don’t always do anything,’ he replied.

‘Why didn’t you tell him what you are? Tell him.’

‘What? What am I going to tell him? If a man takes that attitude you know you can’t tell him anything.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t tell them anything? When they pull that on me I let them know what I am. Nobody makes a Jew out of me and gets away with it.’

He started to speak and cut himself short. The garbage can …

Facing the wheel, he laid his hand on the gear shift and pressed down on the clutch pedal.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

He stopped moving. He could feel the waves of her anger. Without turning to her he said, ‘There’s a little state park down the road. We can have lunch there and sit by the river.’

‘But I don’t want to sit by the river! I want …’

His head jerked around and his words clipped out, ‘I can’t go through that again! Now stop it!’ he commanded angrily.

Rolling along the highway, they sat silent and apart. Momentarily words rose to his lips, and then slid down again. He could not bring himself to tell her what had been happening to him on the block. It would soil all their days. It would crawl in between them during the nights. He had wanted to make a new life with her and now this thing was making it bad again. Nevertheless he could tell her that much. What confused him into this silence was the way she had taken the hotel man’s side, despite her anger. To her it was simply a matter of straightening out their identities, and then they could go on and enjoy the hotel for the weekend. He did not know how to say that he could never feel at peace in that hotel any more now. He did not know how to tell her that they never ought to try to convince a hotel man or anyone else that they were Gentiles. He could not understand this feeling of his. But it would be like begging, like being admitted on trial, and if they made a gesture or said a word the air around them would grow cold, and all weekend he would have to be showing what a nice fellow he really was.