Among the Living by Jonathan Rabb

He didn’t know.
    “Yes,” he said with perfect certainty.
    “I like that one, too. I don’t think I’ll talk about the weather, although it has been surprisingly cooler. I hope you’re feeling the change.”
    “I am. Yes.”
    “It becomes quite lovely in the next month or so.”
    “I’ll look forward to that.”
    She smiled as if she, too, knew that anything beyond this simple back-and-forth was beyond them. Even so she couldn’t help but add, “Mother always appreciates when the holidays are late. Easier for everyone without the heat. Unfortunately this year they’re so very early. Will you be planning on joining the Jeslers at the AA for the holidays?”
    Mention of the Jeslers chafed at him for a moment. He said daringly, “I knew you would come again.”
    Her silence nearly stopped him.
    “Did you?” she said. “I’m glad.”
    Real or not, he now felt her closer at his side.
    They reached the square, where the trees showed a moment of wind. Stepping across the road, they found a bench andsat. They both looked out at the park and watched as a young mother placed her baby in its pram. The woman’s maid stood at her side. Goldah set the envelope between them.
    Eva said, “One of the articles is about you. I hope that’s all right?”
    “Of course.”
    She pulled the pages from the envelope and began to leaf through them, even as he continued to watch her.
    “There wasn’t much detail, but people know how to fill in the blanks these days. Easier with a plane or a boat going down — ‘thirty of the crew of twelve hundred’ — that sort of thing. I suppose we all grew used to that, but yours was something entirely different.” She stopped and looked up at him. “I hope you don’t think I’m making light of it?”
    “Not at all.”
    “You must know how terribly shocking it was. The horror of it.”
    “Yes.”
    “And then, of course, here you are.”
    Goldah couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
    Filling the silence, she said, “It wasn’t a terribly good picture of you.”
    Goldah knew the photograph — Pearl had shown it to him — along with the article: “Welcome from the war,” “The warmth of newfound family,” “The courage of a single man,” and so forth. The photo had been taken at one of his first DP camps, suit and tie and hair smoothed down, and eyes with a look of absolute vacancy. His face had been so gaunt then, so tired and yellowed, and all he had been were those eyes and that nose caught in the eternal grain of black and white.
    The woman across the way pulled the hood up on the pram, and she and her maid began to move off.
    “I thought it was an excellent picture,” Goldah said with a first stab at charm.
    “Did you?” Eva looked out at the square again and followed the path of the woman. “It’s funny, but Savannah gets its hottest in the late afternoon, five or six o’clock. Have you noticed?”
    He hadn’t.
    “You will. It’s a surprise at first, but then you know it. It’s as if the heat can’t find anywhere else to hide and just lets itself go. You can’t really find fault with something if it can’t be helped, can you?”
    He was enjoying the effortlessness of this, the kind of ease the untested and the very young confuse with love. And he liked the way she spoke of the city as if it were her intimate, a friend who needed protecting, or at least one who deserved the admiration she felt for it. Goldah remembered having greatly admired that quality in people.
    She said, “Have you seen the pavilion out on Tybee Island?”
    “I haven’t. No.”
    “We’ll have to remedy that, won’t we?”
    They glanced through several of her father’s editorials, the first few written during the war, one simply titled “Did They Know?” There were more recent ones about the GI Bill and Mrs. Roosevelt — her father was a great enthusiast when it came to Mrs. Roosevelt — and a cautionary series on the future of Palestine. The man wrote in crisp,