Always and Forever

by Cynthia Freeman

  “Only our immediate family will attend.” Julius made no attempt to hide his anger, but Kathy sensed a reluctant respect on the part of his wife. Kathy realized she’d made an enemy of Phil’s father. He wasn’t accustomed to being crossed. What an awful beginning for her marriage, she thought in dismay. But she wasn’t marrying Phil’s parents, she reminded herself defensively. Phil understood. “My wife and myself, our two daughters and their husbands.” Julius made it seem an unpleasant obligation. “There will, under the circumstances, be no announcement in the newspapers.” Did he consider that a punishment, Kathy mocked in silence. So his publicist wouldn’t get the item into the Times.

  “Where do you plan on living after you’re married?” Bella gazed from Kathy to Phil.

  “At my place on West End,” Phil said after a moment. “For now.”

  Kathy remembered that Julius Kohn had given a home in Greenwich to each of his daughters upon their marriage. Had Phil been expecting the same? She wouldn’t want to live out here. She’d feel herself in exile. And given the chance, she suspected, Phil’s father would try to rule their lives.

  Three days after she had met Phil’s parents, he presented her with a minuscule diamond engagement ring.

  “The old man says it isn’t legal without the ring,” he told her with a teasing grin. “So he sprang for this. It’ll do for now.” He was amused by the modesty of the engagement ring. “I’ll buy you a real one later.”

  “Phil, it’s beautiful,” she insisted. “And it fits perfectly.”

  “Your mother sneaked out your high school class ring. I told her to keep her mouth shut until I had it cut down to size.”

  “She didn’t say a word,” Kathy said softly.

  Despite Phil’s objections and that of her parents, Kathy decided to look for a job immediately. She had abandoned all thoughts of a master’s in social work. She was disturbed by Phil’s lack of concern about their future income. He had no intention of going into his father’s business. He talked grandly about finding a part in a Broadway play. He sat around some Times Square drugstore, she gathered, and read a newspaper called Show Business. And he “made rounds.”

  When she tried to pin him down even about the rent of his apartment, he brushed this aside. “Sweetie, it’s a steal. “From her mother and Aunt Sophie she had learned the need to budget. Now Phil was complaining about the difficulty in buying a car. They weren’t coming off the assembly line fast enough to satisfy prospective buyers. Could they afford a car?

  As an English major she tried for a job in publishing. The first job offered her was at a record company. She accepted it, with the stipulation she could take off two weeks in May for her wedding and honeymoon. Marge was working on Seventh Avenue as a cutting assistant. She declared she finally knew what she wanted to do with her life. “I want to be part of the fashion world, Kathy—forget the master’s in social work.” Rhoda was working as a receptionist in a law office. In September she would begin to teach at an expensive private school.

  Kathy tried not to be caught up in the details of the wedding. Her mother and Aunt Sophie argued with the caterers about what was to be served as the main course, about the wedding cake. They worked out the small guest list, insisted on a room that was big enough but not too big. They talked to the rabbi and the florist and the woman who would play the organ at the chapel.

  On a bright Sunday morning Kathy went with Marge and Rhoda to the bridal shops on the Lower East Side. The three girls were shocked at the inflationary prices even down here. But they quickly found a bridal gown that elicited squeals of approval not only from Marge and Rhoda and the saleswoman but other shoppers. Before they headed to Ratner’s for a celebratory lunch, they shopped for dresses for Marge and Rhoda as well.

  “I’d better not eat too much at Ratner’s,” Rhoda sighed, “or I’ll never get into that dress, but, oh, those blintzes—and the onion rolls!”

  In a grandiose gesture, Julius Kohn told Phil that he would pay for the honeymoon—ten days at The Cloister in Sea Island, Georgia. He made the announcement at a family dinner at the Greenwich house, where Kathy met his younger daughter Brenda and her accountant husband Eli and his older daughter Gail and her shirt manufacturer husband Milton.

  “That’s where the Thomas Deweys went after he lost the election in ’44,” Brenda said with a hint of envy. Kathy recalled that Phil said Greenwich was a Republican stronghold. He said they’d even voted against Roosevelt two to one. “Eli and I had five days in Palm Beach.”

  “You were married a week after Pearl Harbor. Eli had to report to his reserve unit,” her father reminded her.

  Eli had spent the war years working for Naval Intelligence on lower Broad Street, Phil had told Kathy with the contempt of men who had seen active service. Milton had worked for his father’s shirt manufacturing firm, thanks to his 4-F status. Their wives, like Bella Kohn, had put in the requisite hours as Red Cross volunteers.

  Kathy went through her wedding day in a euphoric haze. She ignored the coolness of her father-in-law, reveled in her parents’ happiness, tossed the bridal bouquet to Aunt Sophie. Late in the afternoon she and Phil left for the airport for their flight south. She was Mrs. Phillip Kohn, Kathy thought joyously. Life was wonderful.

  Kathy adored the quiet beauty of Sea Island, warmed by the Gulf Stream but with cool off-shore breezes to assure comfort. She admired the tall palm trees, the live oaks and pines. She enjoyed the quiet elegance of The Cloister, the exquisite beauty of the beach. The little girl who’d helped out on Saturdays behind the counter at her father’s candy store had come a long way.

  In Phil’s arms she could forget his father’s hostility, the hint of arrogance she felt in his mother and sisters. She was obsessed by her husband, she thought in glorious abandon. She posed radiantly with Phil for the traditional honeymoon photograph, to be added to the albums on display in an alcove off the hotel lobby.

  But back in New York, in what she called “the real world,” Kathy worried about their future. When she tried to discuss their financial situation, Phil brushed away her questions.

  “Kathy, don’t be a worrier,” he scolded. “I saved most of my money from that magazine assignment. By the time it’s gone I’ll have a part in a play.” But be never told her how much money they had from the Hamburg assignment.

  Phil’s father might be rich, but they were not. They had to live within their means. She was a Depression child—she could remember her parents’ fears about tomorrow. Of her own volition she assumed the responsibility of paying for their daily expenses. Phil paid the rent, utilities, and the car loan. She would have liked to redecorate the apartment but was wary of such an outlay of cash. They could live for now with the hand-me-down furnishings plucked from the attic of the Greenwich house when Phil moved into his Manhattan apartment.

  One night a week they drove to Borough Park for dinner with her family. The evening was always a warm, joyous occasion. At intervals Phil announced they were driving up to Greenwich for dinner. He was quick to say how much he hated Manhattan in the summer—the stretches of steamy heat meagerly relieved by electric fans. He was annoyed, too, that he had not been able to find a job in summer stock.

  “But it’s just as well,” he bounced back, “because I’ll be here in town when they start casting for fall productions.”

  In July Phil’s mother and two sisters took up residence in their summer house in Maine. His father and two brothers-in-law flew up for weekends, then went up for two weeks in early August when Julius Kohn Furs—except for the Madison Avenue retail store—closed for vacation.

  “We’ll drive up to Greenwich for the weekend,” Phil decided on a sultry August night when they deserted the apartment for a bench on Riverside Drive. “We’ll have the whole house to ourselves.” For a moment his face tightened. “I don’t know why the hell we haven’t been invited up to the Maine house for a couple of weeks.”

  “I couldn’t go, Phil. I took off two weeks in May.” His family was
punishing Phil for marrying her, she reasoned. They held it against her that she wasn’t from an affluent family, that her father wasn’t rich and successful. A disconcerting fear took root in her. Was Phil beginning to regret having married her?

  Chapter 7

  KATHY WAS INCREASINGLY INVOLVED in her job with the record company, which produced records for young children. Her boss was delighted when she took some of the public relations work upon herself, and arranged for promotion gimmicks that worked out well. When actors were being hired to appear on their latest releases, she contrived for Phil to audition for a small part.

  The evening after his audition, Kathy rushed home jubilantly with the news that he had been hired.

  “It’s crap,” he told her. “A shitty five lines on a kids’ record.”

  “Phil, it’s a job,” she said earnestly. “It means you’re a professional.”

  “Don’t tell the family,” he ordered her. “They’d never stop kidding me, and no pun intended.”

  “You said you were going to start taking classes this fall.” She was concerned by his restlessness, his anger that he was making no headway. With her he was restless and angry, she pinpointed. When they met with his “round-making” friends once or twice a week for a cheap Chinese or Italian dinner, he radiated optimism. There was always some producer, he intimated, becoming interested in his potential. “You said the others all take classes,” Kathy pursued.

  “For Chrissake, Kathy, stop nagging me!” he flared. “You work for a children’s record company, so now you’re an authority about acting!”

  They went to Greenwich for Thanksgiving dinner, though Kathy would have preferred going to her parents’ home. Phil’s father called and told them—he didn’t ask—that they were expected for the holiday dinner. It would be the first time since the wedding that Kathy and Phil would be seeing Brenda and Gail and their husbands.

  Kathy was disappointed that Phil’s four nieces didn’t come to dinner. All under five, they were relegated to the care of nursemaids. She had brought along a batch of records for the little girls and had to settle for giving them to their mothers.

  “So when are you going to stop playing games and come into the business?” Julius demanded of Phil as a maid brought in the traditional pumpkin pie, and Kathy thought involuntarily of last Thanksgiving in Hamburg.

  How different that Thanksgiving had been from this one, in the ostentatiously formal dining room with a crystal chandelier hovering over the table like an oversized diamond on an overdressed matron. At Thanksgiving dinner in Hamburg she’d felt part of a family. Here she was an outsider—accepted but hardly welcome.

  “Dad, I’m not the furrier type,” Phil drawled and grinned. “I don’t have the girth for it.”

  “That’ll come,” his mother said drily. “Along with a regular salary.” Kathy knew her mother-in-law frowned on Phil’s unemployment at a time when jobs were so available. Nor was Bella Kohn comfortable in the knowledge that Phil was out of work while his wife held down a job.

  “I had a letter from David,” Julius said, and Kathy turned to him with a glow of pleasure. At intervals she thought about David, wondered how he was faring. “He wrote to give us his address in Berlin, but after that we heard nothing until now. He’s all steamed up over some research project in Berlin.”

  “That’s David.” Phil smiled indulgently. “The perennial do-gooder.”

  “David felt he could be useful to the Jewish survivors in Berlin. And he was hoping to pursue his father’s research on nutrition,” Kathy told them. “He said that before World War II the Germans were convinced they’d lost World War I because their soldiers were not properly nourished. He was hoping that his father’s research had been saved by the government.”

  “David should worry about the nutrition of the Germans?” Bella asked scornfully. “When his family died in the camps?”

  “I suspect he’s thinking in terms of world nutrition,” Kathy said. All at once Hamburg seemed so close. Yet David still seemed far away.

  “I sent him an invitation to the wedding, of course,” Bella said, “but we knew he couldn’t make the trip.”

  Kathy felt suddenly cold. David knew she had married Phil. She should have realized that. Why did she feel this sense of guilt? David and she had just been close friends. He’d shown no interest in making it anything more.

  “David sent his best wishes to you and Kathy,” Julius broke into her thoughts. “Better he should have sent you a wedding gift.”

  “I doubt that David has money for that.” Faint rebuke crept into her voice.

  “David’s a schmuck.” Julius ignored his wife’s low sound of annoyance at his Yiddish vulgarity. “He’s an American citizen. He could make a lot of money here in this country. Why does he waste his time in Berlin?”

  Gail turned to her mother after a scathing glance at her father. “Are you going to Palm Beach with Brenda and me in January?” she asked. “We have to make reservations within the next few days if we’re to have decent accommodations.”

  “The Breakers is already booked for all of January,” Brenda sulked.

  “I’d been thinking about running over to Paris the end of January,” Bella said with a covert glance at Julius. “Geraldine tells me she’s going over to see the collections. Christian Dior—who’s done such marvelous things for Lucien Lelong—is opening up his own house. Geraldine says his first collection is sure to be sensational.”

  “Like his prices,” Julius said grimly. “Geraldine Somers’ husband has Texas oil wells. I sell furs.”

  Now Bella and her daughters dominated the table talk. Kathy gathered Bella had been pressuring her husband to approve the Paris jaunt. She guessed that he would.

  Kathy was relieved when Phil insisted—against his mother’s objections—that they leave early. The talk of David had been oddly disturbing. And she’d fought to stay awake during after-dinner conversation. Tomorrow was not a day off for her, though Phil said nobody would be making rounds. Phil slept till ten every day. He said nothing happened in theatrical offices before eleven or twelve.

  Fighting yawns, Kathy prepared for bed. Phil was listening to the news on the bedroom radio.

  “Hey baby,” he scolded, “what’s taking you so long?” He switched off the radio and came into the bathroom, where she stood before the mirror brushing her hair into the silken sheen that he loved. “My sisters hate you for having such a great figure,” he said complacently, sliding his arms about her waist as his body nestled against hers. “Prettiest little rump, most gorgeous boobs in all New York,” he crooned, and maneuvered one hand down the neckline of her black chiffon nightie, a shower present from Marge.

  The one time when she felt secure in her marriage was when they made love, Kathy thought, while Phil lifted her off her feet and carried her to their bed. Then life seemed so glorious for them. In Phil’s arms, blending into one with him, she could forget all her apprehensions about their future.

  A few days later—still fighting constant drowsiness and now aware of a faint morning queasiness—Kathy guessed that she was pregnant. She was alternately ecstatic and anxious. She could work for a while, yes, but what about when she had to stop? Phil would never discuss the details of their financial situation though they both knew that, like all his actor friends, most of whom worked at side jobs, they couldn’t count on the theater for a living at this point.

  First, she told Marge when they met for lunch. Then, in a phone call from the office, she told her mother that she suspected she was pregnant. Her mother was joyous and tender.

  “Phil must be so excited!”

  “I haven’t told him yet,” Kathy confessed. “I just realized it this morning, and he was asleep when I left.” She visualized her mother’s almost imperceptible frown. Mom thought Phil ought to look for a real job, she surmised, but she’d never say that. “I’ll tell him tonight.”

  Kathy meant to wait for a romantic moment to tell Phil, but the words spilled out as she
slid a steaming plate of spaghetti before him.

  “Phil, I’m pregnant.”

  He stared at her in disbelief.

  “You’re sure?” he asked after a moment that seemed endless.

  “I’m sure.” She nodded. Her face was aglow with joy. She tried for casualness, but her heart was pounding.

  “I thought you always took care of that.”

  “Nothing’s a hundred percent safe except abstinence,” she said lightly. “And that’s not our style.” He looked shocked, she thought with sudden unease. But that was natural. And he was worried about the money situation when she had to stop working. “Phil, are you upset about the baby?”

  “Honey, no!” With a reassuring smile he reached for her hand. “I’m just—just surprised. I figured we’d wait three or four years. The folks will be pleased. One more chance for a grandson. Brenda and Gloria insist they’ve closed up shop. We’ll manage,” he said. “I’ll just have to land a part before you quit work, that’s all.”

  After an obstetrician had confirmed Kathy’s suspicions, Phil telephoned his father to say that they would be near Greenwich on Sunday and would drop by in the afternoon.

  “Come for dinner,” his father ordered. “I want to show Kathy the sable coat I had made up for your mother.” He chuckled knowingly. “She’ll be like Brenda and Gail. Drooling. I want my competition to know my wife wears only the best.”

  The old man didn’t suspect why they were coming up, Phil told himself, pleased. Tell him face to face. If Kathy delivered a boy, their stock would rise sky-high. Maybe now Julius would give them a house. Give him a house, Phil amended mentally. Gail and Brenda held the deeds to their houses in their name only. No in-laws sharing. Phil remembered his father’s explanation. “Look, if there’s a divorce, I want to be sure the houses stay in the family. Why should I let those two schmucks get something for nothing?”