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is about a dream?”
    “You were the man and Ruth was the one he never should have married. Vanya, it won’t work out. This is not the right girl for you.”
    “Mother, she
is
, you just have to trust me on this.” Impulsively he bent down and kissed his mother’s cheek. “I love you, Mother,” he said.
    When he stood straight again, he saw that tears dripped down her cheeks. He realized that it was the first time he had kissed his mother in years, the first time he told her he loved her since—maybe since he was eight or nine. Or younger.
    But she wasn’t crying because of his kiss. “Do what you do,” said Mother softly. “When the time comes, you must trust
me
.”
    “
What
time? What is this, a game of riddles?”
    She shook her head, turned away from him, and left the room.
    Of course he told Ruth all about the conversation. “Why shouldn’t I know your Jewish name?” asked Ruth, shaking her head, laughing.
    “It’s not like it was my real name,” said Ivan. “I never even heard it until we were about to emigrate. We aren’t very good Jews, you know.”
    “Oh, I know,” she said. “As I recall, at Denise’s wedding you were reaching for a shrimp.”
    “So were you,” he said. “But I’m the one that got it.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “I was reaching for
you
,” she said. “So I got mine, too.”
    He laughed with her, but he didn’t really like the joke. Their meeting was pure chance, or so he had always thought. But now she had raised another possibility, and he didn’t care for it. Was I set up? If she manipulated that, what else might she have plotted?
    No, no, that was complete nonsense, he told himself. It was Mother’s weird objection, that’s what made him suspicious. And besides, what if she
had
plotted to meet him? He should be insulted? Beautiful, intelligent girl maneuvers to meet awkward, penniless grad student—how often did
that
happen? Oh, all the time—in grad students’ dreams.
    Mother was so eager for him to get out of New York—and away from Ruth—that for the last week he had to keep asking her for clothes each morning because she had already packed everything. “I don’t need to take all my clothes with me,” he said. “I’m a student. Everyone will expect me to wear shirts for several days between washings.” She shrugged and gave him a shirt—but from her ironing, not from his luggage.
    All of Ruth’s family came to the airport at Rochester to see him off, and so did Father. But Mother wasn’t there, and that made Ivan a little angry and a little sad. All these years, he had thought that Mother’s amused smile was because she was secretly smarter than Ivan or Father. But now it turned out that she was superstitious, troubled by dreams and folktales. He felt cheated. He felt that
Mother
had been cheated, too, not to be educated better than that. Was that something she picked up from her Jewish grandparents? Or was it deeper than that? Not to see her son off on a trip that would take at least six months—it wasn’t right.
    But he had other things to worry about. Being jovial with Ruth’s mother and father, saying good-bye in restrained and manly fashion to his father, and then prying Ruth away as she clung to him, weeping, kissing him again and again. “I feel like I’ve died or something,” he said. She only cried harder. That had been a stupid thing to say, as he was about to board a plane.
    After all her mother’s remonstrances and her father’s patient instructions to let the boy
go
, it was Ivan’s father who was finally able to lead her away so Ivan could get on the plane. He loved Ruth, yes, and his family, and her parents, too, but as he walked down the tube to the plane, he felt a burden sliding off his shoulders. His step had a jaunty bounce to it.
    Why should he feel like that, suddenly lighter, suddenly free? If anything, this journey was a burden. Whatever he was able to accomplish in his research would be the foundation of his