Read Online The Whipping Club by Deborah Henry - Free Book Online Page B

hanging on her face. Ben could never predict what frame of mind she would be in when he got home. More often than not, though, it was not the sexual mood she was in last night. What was up with women and their moods? he jokingly said. On more than one occasion. He’d even asked Jerry, but Jerry only offered a sheepish grin. His wife was the same. The honeymoon was long over, and Jerry and Marcia didn’t even have a kid yet. He would walk past his old, cobblestone street soon. His mother would probably be waiting for him. Was Ben lying? Was this, in truth, the third Friday in a month that he’d made his way to synagogue following this route? The loneliness for the familiar smells, the jokes, the people, all of it, was eating him up inside. As it was, he’d brought Jo to meet his mother twice already, and she would soon blurt this out, no doubt. Johanna saw Marian’s Ma at least once a month. Why should she be denied her other grandmother? “Where is my other Gran? Why doesn't my other Gran come over?” Johanna asked incessantly before the visits to Little Jeru-salem had begun.
              Women, Ben concluded recently, would have to get over it. He’d be the one to lead the way, he added. “You and Mammy might actually like each other now,” he said. “Who could know?”
              If Marian had been a Jew, it would certainly have been easier, yes. She could hear the Jewish community arguing with him, but better ? He had fallen for Marian the second he’d seen her on the Zion School playground, of all places. It had been a hazy September afternoon and he’d remarked to some of the older students about the redhead teaching in this Jewish institution. Marian had retorted that it seems some of us haven’t learned that we don’t judge the book by the cover, and the kids had said she was hot under the collar when she’d made her hasty retreat. From that moment on, he knew she was the one. Love is like that. It felt like a strange familiarity, as if they’d waited their whole lives for this chance encounter, as if they’d somehow met before. He had made his choice in love, so what woman could be better than her? What child could be better than Johanna? No, there was no one better, even on her bad days, he joked. Still, she felt a private unhappiness. She wished things had gone slower, that their delirious love hadn’t got out of whack.
              If he passed the Hatch Street Nursery where he was born, no doubt he thought of Tatte and Johanna. Marian pictured his maidelah walking hand-in-hand with him, up and down the bustling streets, just like he’d done with his own father. She felt the deep melancholy of missing someone. A flash of embarrassment went through her as she remembered that Ben had once spied her cradling a doll in her arms, listening to some old fogie tune of her da’s, and he’d gone upstairs without a word. With their ambiguous start, she’d lost so much more than he had, really. Her miserable guess was that she was living in a state of heartbreak more often than she let on.
                  “Marian, you look benkshaft these days,” Ben said last week.
    Johanna was a handful since she’d learned sports, which she somehow couldn’t keep outside. Always the basketball bouncing in the kitchen or those damn tennis balls underneath Marian’s feet. That one was so fast that it was hard for either of them to keep up. In private, this was surely a source of pride for him; he’d been an athlete once, too. But for her, Jo’s headstrong ways were taxing. She went to the emergency room twice in four months from the bangs Johanna had taken on the playing fields. She needed some quiet time away from the noise of raising a child. She decided that as soon as he got home, she would suggest that he take her dancing or to the cinema, or to sit up very late at the Green Tureen on Harcourt Street. She remembered when they first dated, he took her