Rachel wasn’t listening, she was thinking about the men’s decision to stay in Laurel. She knew they didn’t hate blacks or Puerto Ricans or the Yankees from the south side of town. They didn’t like them either. They didn’t care about them. To Luria, Dworkin, Fineman, and the rest (she didn’t include Levy) they were all outsiders. To them you were a Jew from Dabrowa or you didn’t count. The Raskins didn’t count, neither did the Rosses. Allan didn’t either.

“Rachel,” Allan called her back, “you want rum cake?” She nodded, he ordered, and as soon as the waiter left Allan took a velvet ring box out of his pocket, and put it on the table in front of her. He was smiling and his eyes shone. Rachel felt faint and she put her head down to try and get some blood back into it.

“Rachel . . . hey, Rache,” he called to her over the roaring of the blood in her ears. “I just want to marry you. You know, home, kids, furniture . . .”

She opened her eyes. The ring box was still in front of her along with a large slice of rum cake. She sensed disaster and thought of Persephone opening the pomegranate. But she couldn’t stop herself and she opened the box. It was a three-­carat emerald-­cut solitaire in a fine platinum setting. It caught the light, fractured it, reflected the spectrum against the walls in the dim restaurant.

She put the ring on and stared at it fascinated. It would snag her stockings and sweaters but it was beautiful. He grabbed her hands and kissed the backs, then turned them over and kissed the palms. “When?” he asked, “when?” But she couldn’t say when.

She took the ring off before she went to bed that night. It was too big and her grandmother would have loved it. Her grandmother had been Russian and nothing was ever too much for her. Rachel remembered having breakfast with her one morning in the enormous kitchen of the old apartment on West Seventy-­second Street. Everybody else was out of the house. The old lady ate groats for breakfast with butter and she would talk about anything during the meals. Smallpox and the pogroms were two of her favorite subjects, and at breakfast she could be devastating. Rachel ate fast but not fast enough and as she cracked her boiled eggs, the bubbe opened her paper and cried “Oy . . . oy, vay iz mir. . . . Look at this.”