Free The Road Taken by Rona Jaffe Page A

her, and that was why their interest in her private life persisted. No one knew what the relationship was between her and Ben, the good catch. Were he and Rose just good friends, or was he a man obsessed by unrequited love? The truth is that Rose herself didn’t really know, since she chose not to think about it at all.
    What she did think was that these days the center of her loving family had scattered. Maude and Walter had four children already, red-haired and blonde, and Walter had bought an automobile so large that their entire family could ride in it. She also missed Hugh, even more than she missed Maude, because he was really away, at college—gone off to become an adult, majoring in English Literature and Art History, coming home dressed in a dapper white jacket and a straw boater, praising his roommate to the skies.
    “Well, you must ask him to come to visit us,” Celia said.
    “We’ll see . . . ,” Hugh said vaguely.
    “Perhaps we’re not good enough for this paragon,” Celia said, with a raised eyebrow.
    Hugh just smiled.
    Rose had begun to depend on Ben’s visits more than she used to. They would sit in her family’s parlor for hours talking about the world outside, where he spent his time, and sometimes she was just a little envious. She served him lemonade and sandwiches if it was summer, or cider and cookies by the fire it if was winter, and he brought her small gifts: a record of Caruso singing, postcards of Impressionist paintings he had seen in a museum, a beautiful platinum negative photograph of a New York street, and he even brought her a lavish gift for her birthday—a table radio of her own. It was almost too generous to accept. Many homes had radios today, but now the Smith household was the only one in town with two.
    So far, he had not brought any young woman home to present as his fiancée, nor had he become serious about any of the younger women in Bristol, many of whom would have been glad to have him. He had graduated from Yale Law School, and served an apprenticeship in a New Haven law firm, and then, to no one’s surprise, because he was known as a go-getter, he had been offered a position in the prestigious New York City law firm of Delafield, Cross, and Ward, in their wills and estates department, and he had accepted it. He had sold some of his rapidly rising stocks, and, due to a propitious estate sale, he now owned a town house, on West 10th Street in New York, where he would live when he went to work there. It was natural and apparent that in only a matter of time he would fill up that large house with a wife and children, and if things didn’t clarify between him and Rose then she could bid her one and only suitor (if that was what he was) good-bye.
    “New York!” Celia said. “Oh, I would like to see New York before I die! Rose, if I had your life I would know what to do with it.”
    It was boom time in America. The stock market kept rising, and even Celia had bought some stocks, with money William gave her. Because of Prohibition, people who had never drunk at all wanted to drink, and the ones who had enjoyed a cocktail before now became voracious about it. Skirts were shorter, so was hair. Curvy women were out, and Rose’s slim figure was finally fashionable, thanks to the rage for flappers. Men wore debonair wristwatches instead of the heavy, old-fashioned pocket watches they used to carry. Time itself seemed to be going faster, in some strange way, as if people had suddenly come awake. The new music was jazz. From Rose’s open windows you could hear Duke Ellington’s rendition of “The New East St. Louis Toodle-oo.”
    It was spring, the time of nostalgia and changes. Ben had come to call on her before he left to start his new job. She looked at him admiringly in his sober but fashionable suit, his carriage erect, his dark hair neatly parted in the center, his eyes always interested in what she had to say.
    “I want to have a talk with you, Rose,” he