Next to Love
Next to Love
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ellen Feldman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
S
PIEGEL
& G
RAU
and Design is a registered
trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc., and Spirit Two Music, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew” by Johnny Burke and Harold Spina, copyright © 1934 (renewed) by Marke-Music Publishing Co., Inc., My Dad’s Songs, Reganesque Music Company, Pocketful of Dreams Music, and Spina Music. All rights on behalf of Marke-Music Publishing Co., Inc., administered by WB Music Corp. All rights for My Dad’s Songs, Reganesque Music Company, and Pocketful of Dreams Music controlled and administered by Spirit Two Music, Inc. (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc., and Spirit Two Music, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Feldman, Ellen.
Next to love : a novel / Ellen Feldman.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64369-2
I. Title.
PS3572.I38N49 2011
813′.54—dc22 2010052486
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Jacket design: Greg Mollica
Front-jacket photograph (woman): Ricardo Demurez/
Trevillion Images
v3.1
War … next to love, has most captured the world’s imagination
.
—
ERIC PARTRIDGE
, 1914
It’s all so terrible, so awful, that I constantly wonder how “civilization” can stand war at all
.
—
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
, 1944
They fed us with all this crap about John Wayne and being a hero and the romance of war.… They set up my generation, they set us up for that war
.
—
RON KOVIC
, 1986
In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war
.
—
WILL DURANT
, 1968
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
PROLOGUE
JULY 17, 1944
I
N THE YEAR AND A HALF BABE HUGGINS HAS WORKED FOR WESTERN
Union, she has been late only once before. Maybe that’s why in the months to come she will occasionally persuade herself that some premonition delayed her this morning. But in her more rational moments, she knows her tardiness has nothing to do with a sixth sense, only an unsteady hand when she draws the line down the back of her leg to simulate the seam in a nylon. The odd thing is that before the war made off with nylons, her seams were rarely straight, but this morning she washes off the crooked line, starts over, and is late leaving for work.
The walk uptown from her parents’ house, where she moved back after Claude shipped out, takes fifteen minutes, and by the time she turns onto Broad Street, the clock on the stone façade of First Farmers Bank says eight-ten. As she passes the open door of Swallow’s Drugstore, the familiar mix of fresh coffee and frying bacon and medications wafts out to meet her. Later in the day, when she goes in to get her Coke, the store will smell of tuna fish and grilled cheese and medications.
Late as she is, she cannot help slowing her pace to glance inside. A line of men sit at the counter, their haunches balanced precariously on the red leatherette stools, the backs of their necks strangely vulnerable as they hunch forward over their coffee. In the four booths along the wall, men lean against the wooden seat backs, polished day after day, year after year, by the same shoulders. Swallow’s is not the only drugstore and lunch counter in South Downs. There are three others. But Swallow’s is the best, or at least the most respectable. All the men there wear suit coats and ties, though this morning some of them have taken off the coats. Mr. Gooding, the president of First Farmers, who lives in a large Tudor house on the western edge of town where wide lawns rise and dip like waves in a clement green ocean, is already fire-engine red with the heat. Only Mr. Swallow, standing behind the prescription counter in his starched white coat with his fringe of white hair like a monk’s tonsure, looks cool, or as cool as a man with two sons in the service can look.
Mr. Creighton, the undertaker, waves to her from his usual stool near the door. She waves back and quickens her pace again as she digs the key out of her handbag with her other hand. The key feels greasy. The mayonnaise from her egg salad sandwich has seeped through the waxed paper and brown bag.
She unlocks the door and steps into the Western Union office. It’s like walking into an oven. Without stopping to put down her bag, she crosses the room, switches on the fan, and turns it toward her desk. A heavy metal paperweight shaped like the god Mercury holds down the stack of blank telegram forms, but the breeze from the fan ruffles their edges. When she goes next door to get a Coke to go with her sandwich, she will ask one of the soda jerks to give her a bowl of ice to put in front of the fan. Mr. Swallow never minds. Sometimes he sends a bowl over without her asking.
She walks around the counter where customers write out their messages, puts her bag in the bottom drawer of the desk, and takes the cover off the teletypewriter machine. Only after she folds the cover and puts it in another drawer does she turn on the machine. It clatters to life, quick and brash and thrilling as Fred Astaire tapping his way across a movie screen. The sound always makes her stand up straighter. She’s no Ginger Rogers, but as long as she stands over that teletypewriter machine, she feels like somebody. She certainly feels more like somebody than she used to when she stood behind the ribbon counter at Diamond’s department store. She never would have got the job if all the men hadn’t gone off to war. Even then, her father laughed at her for applying. Who did she think she was? He said the same thing when she went to work at Diamond’s rather than at the five-and-dime. Who did she think she was? It is the refrain of her life. She has heard it from teachers, though not Miss Saunders in tenth-grade English; and nuns; and a fearful, suspicious gaggle of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Rumor has it that, after the war, Western Union is going to install one of those new machines that automatically type the message directly onto the blank form. They already have them in Boston, but Boston is the big city, ninety-one miles east and light-years away. She is not looking forward to the new machines. She likes cutting the ticker tape and pasting it on the telegram forms. She takes pride in never snipping off a letter and in getting the strips in straight lines. Not that it will matter to her what kind of machine Western Union installs after the war. She had to promise, as a condition of being hired, that once the men started coming home, she would give up the job to a returning veteran and go back where she belonged. She wanted to ask the man who interviewed her exactly where that was, but didn’t.
The ticker tape comes inching out of the machine. She leans over it to read the check. To most people, it’s the first line, but since she started working in the telegraph office, she has picked up the lingo. The check tells where the telegram comes from. She lifts the tape between her thumb and forefinger.
WMUC200 44
GOVT=WUX WASHINGTON DC
She drops the tape as if it’s scalding. Grace and Millie and the other girls she went to school with say they could never do what she’s doing. They try to make it sound like a compliment, but what they really mean is their hearts are too soft, their skin too thin, their constitutions too delicate to serve as a messenger of the angel of death. She does not argue with them. She stopped arguing with them, except in her head, in third grade.
She picks up the ticker tape again to read the second line, the one with the recipient’s address. In the cables from the war department, that’s the killer line. Fear, hard and tight as a clenched fist, grips her chest as the letters inch out. If the first few spell
MR AND MRS
, she is safe. The dead boy has no wife, only parents. If they form
MRS
, the fist in her chest clenches so tight she cannot breathe. Only when she has enough letters to read the name and see it is not hers can she suck in air again.
She has never told anyone about the giddy relief she feels then. It’s too callous. She has never told anyone about the sense of power either. As she watches the words inching out of the teletypewriter, she is the first one in town, the only one until she cuts and pastes the words, puts the telegram in an envelope, and gives it to B.J. to deliver on his bicycle, who knows something that will knock whole families’ worlds off their axes. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if she did not deliver the telegram. Could people be happy living in ignorance and illusion? What if she delayed handing the telegram to B.J.? Is it a crime or a kindness to give some girl another day of being married, some mother and father an extra few hours of worrying about their son? Would she buy that extra day or hour if she could?
