She's Up to No Good(8)

I shuddered. “Just tell me this Tony guy isn’t actually my grandfather. I couldn’t handle that.”

My grandmother was indignant. “I wouldn’t do something like that!”

“Are you telling the truth?”

“Of course I am! I would never lie.”

“You lie all the time!”

“True.” She grinned. “But I would never cheat.” And with that, she began to tell me about the day she met the first love of her life.





CHAPTER FIVE


February 1950


Hereford, Massachusetts


Evelyn Bergman wasn’t the smart sister. That was Helen. She wasn’t the beautiful sister, Gertie. Nor was she the sophisticated one, Margaret, or the baby, Vivie. But no one remembered that she had four sisters when she walked by and flashed that wicked smile of hers, her brown eyes twinkling with a spark so full of humor and life that the recipient felt like he was the luckiest person in the world.

And she knew it too.

So when she first saw the boy leaning against the wall outside the drugstore, she didn’t hesitate. Never mind that he wasn’t alone. She had noticed him before. And that day she decided she wanted to get noticed in return.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Vivie and their friend Ruthie. Vivie was eighteen months younger than Evelyn. Ruthie was exactly halfway between their ages.

“Where are you going?” Their mother had tasked Vivie with keeping Evelyn in line; an impossible assignment, which she was destined to fail daily.

“I have a date tonight.”

“With who?” Vivie squeaked. Gertie and Helen, at twenty-three and twenty-six, were married. Margaret was in college—Joseph insisted all of their children attend, though Miriam deemed it wasteful. But Joseph was equally firm on one other point: there would be no dating before college.

Evelyn inclined her head toward the two boys, who were in the process of lighting cigarettes from a shared pack against the wind. “The one on the left.” She started across the street, then called back over her shoulder. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

She stopped directly in front of her target, who lowered his cigarette to avoid blowing smoke in her face. “Can I bum one of those?”

Tony’s breath caught when he looked at her. He knew who Evelyn was. You didn’t live in Hereford and not know. But he’d never spoken to her, let alone been on the receiving end of that smile.

“Good girls don’t smoke,” his brother Felipe said.

Evelyn laughed merrily. “I don’t think anyone has ever called me good before.” She leveled her gaze back at Tony. “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not fast. And I’ve got two older brothers, so I know how to take care of myself fine. I’m just not one for following rules. Now, how about that smoke?”

Tony tapped one out of the package, lit it, and handed it to her. She held it but didn’t put it to her lips and extended her right hand. “Evelyn Bergman.”

“I know.” Tony shook it. “You’re the girl who crashed into the movie theater.”

She laughed again. “My goodness, that was ten years ago. You’ve known who I was for ten years, and I don’t know your name?”

“Tony,” he said. She cocked her head to the side, asking a nonverbal question. “Antonio.”

“Portuguese?” It wasn’t a random guess. He wasn’t Jewish, or she would know him already. And the Portuguese community in the coastal fishing towns was large. They had been there longer than the Jews, who mostly fled the pogroms of Russia and more recently the Germans, and they were a dominant portion of the fishing industry. Felipe was dressed for the docks, though he didn’t smell like he had been there yet that day.

Tony nodded, knowing that would be the end of it. Evelyn wasn’t the only Bergman everyone in town knew. Joseph, in the more than thirty years since he had arrived in the sleepy seaside town, dirty and tired from his voyage, had established himself as a pillar of the community. He began by working for Mr. Klein in his dry goods store, first by stocking the shelves, then working the register as he gained Mr. Klein’s trust. He was a fast learner, studying first English, then business, then how to charm the people of Hereford. And when Mr. Klein dropped from a heart attack one day, his widow sold Joseph the store—what he couldn’t afford outright, she allowed him to pay off gradually.

Once he was a business owner, he met and wed Miriam, the daughter of a wholesaler with whom he did business, and set about populating the town with his seven offspring. He sat on the town council, the only Jew and the only immigrant to do so. He believed in the country he had made his own and appreciated a place where an immigrant could rise and be respected. He was honest and fair, respecting hard work above all else.

Except with any man courting one of his five daughters, in which case the young man needed to be Jewish and college educated in addition to hardworking. Joseph himself would only have passed two-thirds of that test, but religion was the area where he refused to budge on any form of assimilation. And the young men of the town learned that quickly when the elder Bergman girls came of age.

“Do you like Frank Sinatra?” Evelyn asked.

“I—yes?”

“Great. We’ll see that movie with him and Gene Kelly tonight.”