Tiger Heron

Wearing Mother’s High School Ring

38 Wearing Mother’s High School Ring I Her maiden name, etched in the ring, means wine merchant in Yiddish, so I toast her inaugural self— arching and graceful as maiden grass, a filly who hasn’t won a race but carries the gene for heart and mildness, the middle, dutiful child of three, the peacemaker, translating from Yiddish for little Bubbe upstairs. When Germany fires on the Polish army at Danzig, when Gandhi starts a hunger strike protesting British rule, she’s eighteen, walking the boardwalk in Atlantic City with the man I found on Ancestry.com. 39 II Because I want to think that she felt joy, because she will marry my father nine years after the annulment, I choose her senior year, 1939. This blond, Jewish, Lithuanian boy with the great body takes her to the prom. She wears the Olney High onyx and gold class ring on a slender finger. He likes to dance, so she complies. Self-consciousness usually cripples her but not tonight, not tonight, oh please! Let her find her voice like Marian Anderson, denied a concert hall, singing outside to 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial. 40 III Let’s leave her in Fralinger’s, on the boardwalk, buying salt water taffy to take home. I take her guy aside, ask him, What makes her happy? What music does she like? Where in the world would she like to go? And you, Mr. X! Why do you love her? We’ve got the rest of our lives to be sad, he says. I’m teaching her to drive a car. After the World’s Fair, we’ll go to the Bronx, listen to Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man alive. Listen. It’s going to get bad. Jews living in occupied Poland will transfer to ghettos. On the radio, Billie Holiday sings “Strange Fruit.” 41 IV She wakes to the headline: U.S. Denies Access to Jewish Refugees. She knows it’s going to get bad. In love, she wants a home of their own, war jobs to fund new lives. She still believes it’s possible to dream big dreams, and I would leave her there with that belief, twirling the high school ring, spinning before the mirror in her room, a tomboyish beauty with no knowledge yet of crematoria and the Neutrality Act Franklin Roosevelt will advocate. The Wizard of Oz hits Philly theaters and “Over the Rainbow” makes the charts. ...