Free Always and Forever by Cynthia Freeman Page A

things.”
    “Why not? But I can’t stay all night.” Even knowing she was marrying Phil, Mom and Dad would be horrified if they thought she had spent the night with him.
    “My folks won’t believe it.” Phil was amused. “They’ve been trying to marry me off since I finished college. And here I’m bringing home a nice Jewish girl. Mother was sure I’d marry a shiksa. Dad figured I’d play the field forever.”
    How would his parents feel about his marrying a girl whose father ran a candy store in Brooklyn, Kathy asked herself. At intervals she worried about his parents’ reaction. She’d grown up in an apartment above the candy store. Phil was raised in a mansion in Greenwich.
    Aunt Sophie had said it was important for her to go to a prestigious college—translation, where the students came from rich homes. If she hadn’t gone to Barnard, she wouldn’t have been part of the group that went to Hamburg. She wouldn’t have met Phil. She wouldn’t have met David, she thought involuntarily.
    Their ship docked early in the afternoon. Their group exchanged fervent good-byes and promises to stay in touch. Duffel bag over one shoulder, Phil insisted they find a cab to take them to Lindy’s for a late lunch before she headed for Brooklyn and he went to his father’s office and a ride to Greenwich.
    “Oh, let me get my film out of your valise before we eat,” he said as they climbed out of the taxi and the driver circled to the trunk to bring out their luggage.
    “Phil, you’re opening my valise right here on Broadway?” she reproached with laughter while he reached for the valise that contained his package.
    “Why not?” he shrugged, ignoring the curious glances of passers-by. “Here it is.” He withdrew the package and closed the valise again, shoving the package into his duffel bag. “We could go to a hotel—” He managed an appealing grin. “Walking into Lindy’s with all this gear could be awkward.”
    “I hadn’t thought of that.” She was too excited over being home to think straight about anything, she admitted subconsciously.
    “We’ll go over to Seventh Avenue to the Taft,” he decided, his eyes amorous. “We’ll make love, then call room service for thick roast beef sandwiches and real coffee. I dare you to say no.”
    “Roast beef and real coffee?” She pretended to be weighing this. “Now how could I turn down an offer like that?” So she’d arrive in Borough Park two hours later.
    At shortly before 5 P.M. , Phil put Kathy into a taxi and gave the driver instructions to take her to her address.
    “In Brooklyn,” he repeated, and erased the driver’s grimace with the bill he dropped onto the seat.
    “Drive carefully,” he ordered. “This is my bride-to-be.”
    He watched the taxi pull away from the curb, then flagged down another to take him down Seventh Avenue to his father’s office. He hated that drab area, the ugly manufacturing loft that was set up around his father’s lushly furnished oversized office, plus the loft on the floor above where the furs were dressed and dyed. All the worktables and machines were set up around the old man’s office like a colony of peons around an exalted master, he thought with a touch of humor.
    He’d heard a million times about how his grandfather Peter had come to America from Russia back in 1881 to build a fur empire, as his father and uncle had done in Russia. “Your great-grandfather Nathan was furrier to the Czarina herself, as well as to the Royal Court,” his father loved to brag. “Your grandfather on my side came to New York, he learned the place to trade was Alaska — and he went there and bought raw furs from the natives on the mainland. That was the beginning of the Kohn Fur Company. And I don’t do so bad myself. Look at the movie stars who come to Julius Kohn.” It became Julius Kohn Furs at the death of his grandfather.
    His duffel bag over one shoulder in the image of the returning GI, Phil walked into the