“Long enough, Rachel. Even the Talmud says it’s been long enough . . .”

He stood up again and crossed the room, keeping his back to her.

“I’m lonely, Rachel. I work hard and come home to this mess every night too tired to clean or to even call someone to clean. I don’t like it. I love you, but I want a wife; if it can’t be you, then at least tell me and I’ll . . .”

“Marry Barbara Michaels?”

He turned around. “Maybe,” he said very seriously. “Maybe I will.” She ran across the room to him, so scared she could barely breathe. She led him back to the bed, kissed him, did everything to him; but she didn’t feel anything except fear. Even so, she couldn’t say she’d marry him on May fifth or June first or any particular day. After they were finished, he fell asleep, and she got out of the messy bed, got dressed, and went downstairs through the abandoned-­looking foyer and out into the empty road.

The snow stopped, the wind died, and snow covered the houses and hedges. Branches creaked, then stopped, and in the sharp cold air she thought she heard music coming from a block or so down toward town. Her boots squeaked in the snow and she stopped walking to listen again. It was like the music her father used to play when her mother was out playing bridge, Eastern music with a sighing kind of rhythm that she remembered from weddings and bar mitzvahs. It didn’t belong with snow and fake gaslight streetlamps or the ersatz New England architecture. It sounded like it came from the little shul and she walked toward it.

The first floor of the shul was dark, and the path up through the hedges was forbidding, but the music was coming from there, and Rachel saw a bar of light on the snow from the basement window.

She’d gone to service here once; she’d sat behind the drape that separated the men from the women; and in the middle of the service, as Reuben Alldmann had lifted the Torah from the ark to carry it around the shul, she had an attack of claustrophobia so intense it turned to asthma. She gasped for air she couldn’t get and, clutching Golda, she’d staggered out onto the porch into the open air where she could breathe again. She hadn’t been back since. Now she went up the spooky path to the light, squatted down in front of the basement window, and looked in.