The Old Man IV

“You never did get to tell me how it was your wife came to this country,” I reminded the old man as he waited for his coffee.

“She came across with a family to watch their children. She left her own children with her mother. She couldn’t afford their trip over here and once we did have the money they didn’t want to come over here. They had grown to love Hungary and they wanted to stay with their grandmother. I wonder if they weren’t also scared of me, a strange American man that their mother had married half out of necessity.”

“Half out of necessity?” I asked. The way that he spoke of his wife I could only imagine the old man being very much in love with his wife, and I hadn’t imagined that it had been anything but love that had brought them together. Instead now he was being extremely blunt about it being at least a small amount a marriage of convenience.

“Her bosses had thought that they would do better in America, they had spent a lot of money it turns out that they didn’t have and so they had to let go of their servants. They had just given my wife her month’s notice when she decided to have a bit of a fling to get her mind off of things and went out dancing. I was at the dance hall that night too, and we got to talking.”

“So you were a farmer?” I asked, I knew I was interrupting but I wanted to clarify.

“That’s right. My father was already dead and so I was the one running the farm, though my mother was still alive. I was in my thirties and unmarried, she was starting to wonder what was wrong with me. I had mostly gone to the dance to make her happy, I’m not big on the social scene, I sure didn’t expect to meet someone I would love the rest of my life,” the old man sounded wistful.

“How did you start talking to her?” I asked.

“I asked her to dance; she was standing so sad and lonely up against the wall that anyone would have felt sorry for her. After the dance I took her back to her seat and we started talking, in a polite way. I asked her if she was married, she told me that she had been at one time. Back then it meant the man had died, and nothing else, there was none of this divorce thing going around, or at least not a lot of it. I asked her if she had any children and she burst into tears. It made me awkward let me tell you, I had no idea why she had started crying but people had started to stare so I offered to take her outside until she had calmed down and she welcomed the suggestion. While we were standing out there under the moon, in the very chilly night she told me everything. About how she had been forced to leave her children, about the fact she was about to lose her job. I just listened to her talk and at the end of the night I drove her home.”

“How did her bursting into tears and having to be taken home lead to you getting married to her?” I asked.

“Well we talked in the car then too, and by the time we got to where she lived I knew I liked her and had the courage to ask her if she would go out with me again her next week off to go dancing again. She agreed, I think she liked me at least a little too.”

I wanted to hear more but the coffee was done and I couldn’t hang around any longer. The owner of the store had video cameras set up to watch us and if I wasted enough time I knew I would be called into the office and yelled at. So I handed the old man his coffee and he went to go sit down like always.

To be continued...