Crescent City by Belva Plain

husband who sat beside her. “Isn’t that so, Sylvain?” she asked after every observation, every slight remark: “Isn’t that true, Sylvain?” To which Sylvain, a severe young man with prominent features, a fashionable cravat, and perfect linen, would nod his approval. But then, David thought, she never says anything one could disagree with!
    And he amused himself with silent appraisals as his eyes moved down the row. That bored old man, now, he was someone you would like! He twinkled. The woman in blue looked as if she had been crying; no doubt her husband was nasty, he looked it. Eulalie, Aunt Emma’s elder daughter, now, she—no, I don’t care about her at all. She had angry eyes, two black lumps under a high forehead rounded as a dome. Her dress was hideous; he knew nothing about clothes and cared little, but he could feel color in his soul, and the violent green of this woman’s dress was terrible. A lumpy necklace collided with her collarbone. Catching his concentration on her, she stared back angrily so that David had to lower his eyes. He rested them on her white, bony knuckles. We do not like each other, he thought, but it’s she who began it. I might try to like her if she would try, but she will not. He had known that on the very first day, in the first hour in that house. He didn’t know why; he had done nothing wrong. Was it because she did not like Jews? Naturally, that was the first thing experience had taught one to think of.
    It was astonishing: He had never in his life been in the company of so many people who were not Jewish. To be exact, he had never sat down to eat with anyone who wasn’t Jewish, not even once. The peasants at home never invited you into their houses, and he knew no one else. The man and woman between whom he now sat were the only other Jews at the table. They were Henry and Rosa de Rivera, she the sister of his friend Gabriel from the
Mirabelle.
Papa had invited them to this Sunday dinner.
    Beneath the louder flow of Emma’s voice Rosa de Rivera murmured, “You’re very like my brother, I think, a serious young man. Old for your age. Although, I don’t know, I haven’t seen Gabriel for three years.” She had a lively, amused expression and the familiar, vivid, heavy-lidded eyes of her people. Amber jewels swung from her ears and glistened at her wrists. “So thoughtful. Of what are you thinking this minute, may I ask?”
    “How strange all this is. I don’t know what to say to these people, what they expect of me.”
    “Expect? Just smile and mind your manners. They don’t expect anything more than that.”
    “But,” he stammered, “I’ve lived in a different world, so small, shut in—”
    “Then, this will be good for you. Just be yourself. You’re very keen. You’ll get along.”
    “You and your husband are the only Jews here .…”
    “There’s Marie Claire Myers, the little girl sitting with her mother. They’re visiting from Shreveport.”
    “That’s her mother? But she’s wearing a cross.”
    “Her mother is a Catholic.”
    “Then she can’t be Jewish.”
    “She’s Jewish.”
    “She can’t be! That’s the Law and has been since Moses,” he protested.
    “I know. But it’s different here.”
    How many more times would he be told that things were different here?
    “Her father, although he married her mother in the cathedral, wanted their children to be reared as Jews.”
    David regarded the girl. Three or four years older than Miriam, she had a long freckled face and a mass of pale curly hair. He felt confusion. A Jewish girl whose mother wore a cross!
    “We’ve had to make our own rules here,” Henry de Rivera explained. “Our synagogue’s only ten years old, Shanarai Chasset, Gates of Mercy. Thirty-four of us men got together and started it. Manis Jacobs—he was the first president—had a Catholic wife, but he didn’t want his children excluded, so he had the synagogue’s constitution read that no Israelite child should be