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drama club of her own with a few girls from the neighborhood. Th ey met once a week on the weekends, each week at a different member’s house. Each week a different member would choose the songs they’d sing or the scenes they’d stage. Sometimes they told jokes, and sometimes if the space was large enough they danced. But no one, not ever, was allowed to bring in poems to recite. Th at was Miriam’s one restriction. Mrs. Pinkerton had given her enough of that. She named the club the Mattapan-Manhattan Club—the Manhattan Club for short.
    One Saturday in May at Dottie’s house off Talbot Square, they were learning a new hit song, “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” when a boy showed up—his name was Frankie Kaufman, and he was Dottie’s cousin. Twenty-two years old, he was tall, stoop-shouldered, and shy, with thick dark hair falling over his forehead, which he combed back with his fingers. He couldn’t take his eyes off Miriam. She loved how it felt being watched that way, being listened to. Dottie, too, saw how he was watching Miriam and asked if she would stay for supper. And before Miriam knew it, she and Frankie were sitting side by side at the dinner table, and he was telling her about his life, his dreams, how he lived with his mother and sister, that his father had died a few years back, and that he was determined someday to travel the world, then go to college and become a teacher. He wasn’t sure, though, if any of that would happen anytime soon, not with the war coming, and besides, his little sister was crippled from a childhood accident, and his mother’s eyesight was failing, and right now he was all they had—so he was working in a downtown shoe store.
    Miriam could already see herself as Mrs. Frankie Kaufman; Miriam Kaufman—the name had a nice ring to it. It startled her how quickly the dream took shape, the two of them in Watertown or Newton, maybe Natick—Mrs. Kaufman, the teacher’s wife. She could do theater on the weekends or maybe teach it in the schools. And they would travel in the summers till the children came. With a father like that, what brains they’d have!
    So lost was she in that imagined life, she hardly heard a word he said.
    After dinner, Dottie put “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” back on the gramophone. Frankie asked Miriam to dance. A great dancer he wasn’t, but she could teach him. When the song was over, he asked Dottie to play the song again, and they kept dancing. Miriam sang as they danced. Every now and then, Frankie would tilt his head back and look at her adoringly as she sang: he couldn’t believe his great good luck—that’s what his look said. Dottie and her parents watched them. Miriam could feel the envy they must be feeling, watching her glide back and forth across the floor, which could have been a stage, with Frankie, too, now singing “Polka dots and moonbeams around a pug nosed dream.”
    N OW IT WAS summer, and if she wasn’t working at the store for her mother, she was with Frankie. Th e Mattapan-Manhattan Club dissolved without Miriam’s intensity holding it together. Sometimes it disturbed her to think how easily her passion for Frankie had displaced her passion for the stage. But they went to shows and pictures. He loved the theater as much as she did. He loved to dance, and he loved it when she sang to him. Once they were married, and Frankie had found a teaching job worthy of his smarts, maybe then she would return to school.
    In the meantime, she worried. Th ey’d been dating for several months and still he hadn’t introduced her to his mother and sister. By then, he’d met her mother and Zaydie and Bubbie. She’d even brought him to the butcher shop in Brighton where her father worked, though he was too busy to come out from behind the counter. He had apologized and smiled shyly and said, as he always did, that soon they’d get together. Everyone of course approved. Her mother said he was a catch; well, what she said was “he’s a safe