“You took that as a good sign, meeting at church?”

“I think it was the only reason Walter went to Mass, to meet a girl with golden hair. He stopped going once he had me, and I stopped since we were living in sin, not married in the Church.”

“You believe that, you were living in sin?”

“Not really. It was more like living a life of penance. I’ll tell you though, I did like his looks, the way he dressed, his little glasses pinched on his nose, he was so different. I’d never met anyone in my life like Walter Schoen. I think I might’ve felt sorry for him too, he seemed so lonely. He was serious about everything and when we argued-we argued all the time-I’d keep at him, whatever we were talking about, and it drove him nuts.”

“Determined to change him,” Kevin said.

Honey sat up to look past Kevin. She said, “There’s his market,” and sat back again. “With a sign in the window, but I couldn’t read it.”

“Announcing no meat today,” Kevin said. “I passed it on the way to your place. So, you thought you could change him?”

“I wanted to get him to quit being so serious and have some fun. Maybe even get him to laugh at Adolf Hitler, the way Charlie Chaplin played him in The Great Dictator. Chaplin has the little smudge of a mustache, the uniform, he’s Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania. But the movie came out after I left.”

“You think he saw it?”

“I couldn’t get Walter to listen to Jack Benny. He called him a pompous Jew. I said, ‘That’s the part he plays, a cheapskate. You don’t think he’s funny?’ No, or even Fred Allen. We were at some German place having drinks, I said, ‘Walter, have you ever told a joke? Not a political cartoon, a funny story?’ He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, ‘I’ll tell you a joke and then you tell it to me. We’ll see how you do.’”

Kevin Dean was looking straight ahead grinning. “You were married then?”