Next to Love (14 page)

She runs for it, her heart thumping like the tire on Grace’s car when she got the blowout and kept driving for a block. She picks up the receiver and says hello.

Silence comes down the wire.

“Claude?”

More silence, then finally a voice, tentative but unmistakable.

“Babe.”

She grips the receiver.

“Where are you?”

He does not answer.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah … sure.”

He does not sound all right.

“Where are you?” she asks again.

“Here.”

“Where’s here?” She tries to keep the impatience out of her voice.

“Boston.”

“Where in Boston?”

He does not answer. She waits. The silence drags on.

“Claude, please, tell me where you are.”

“In a phone booth.”

“I know that. A phone booth where?”

Another silence.

“Claude,” she begs, “where are you?”

“In a recruiting office.”

“What?” She has not shouted. She is sure of it.

“I’m in a recruiting office.”

Her hand is wound around the receiver so tightly that her nails, freshly manicured for this day, dig into her palm.

“You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t do anything.” An undercurrent of a sob runs beneath his voice. “I can’t seem to do anything. I’m just sitting here.”

She beats back the panic she feels rising. “Claude,” she says quietly, “listen to me. Hang up the telephone and get out of there. Now,” she adds softly. “Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you want me to come get you? Tell me where the office is.”

“I can’t.” His voice cracks.

“Then you come here. I’m at the Copley Plaza Hotel. You reserved a room, remember? I’m waiting here.”

He says nothing.

“Claude.”

She hears his breathing. At least he has not hung up.

“Get out of there, please. Get out of there and come here.”

She waits through another silence.

“Everything is going to be all right. I promise. As soon as you get here, it will be all right.”

She hears the click at the other end of the line, sits listening to the silence, then hangs up the receiver and begins pulling out the drawers of the night table. The phone book is in the bottom one. Is it under
U
for U.S. Army Recruiting Office or
A
for Army Recruiting? Her fingers fly through the pages, but her mind races ahead. She cannot go looking for him. What if he listens to her and comes to the hotel? He’ll think she has abandoned him. She cannot even use the telephone in case he tries to call back. And what if he doesn’t call back or show up? How will she pay for the room? An insane thought at the moment, but Claude is not the only one who has gone crazy tonight. She thinks of a quick call to the police. What’s the problem, ma’am? My husband is reenlisting. She can do nothing but wait. She has been waiting for thirty-two months. Another twenty minutes or half hour or hour will not make a difference. Only she does not think she can stand it.

She hears the elevator open down the hall, goes to the door, and leans out. An elderly couple in evening dress make their way toward her. She closes the door, goes back to the open window, and sits on the ledge. Below, a handful of people go about their business. A man walks a Scottish terrier. A couple, the woman’s arm through the man’s, turns in to the hotel. A driver leans against his taxi. She remembers—crazy to remember it now—that night in the movie before she and Claude made love for the first time. She could not understand how all those people were behaving as if the world was spinning as usual when her life was stopped.

A man in uniform comes striding up Huntington Avenue. She braces herself against the window frame and leans out an inch more. His head is down, and she cannot see his face, but she knows the walk is not Claude’s.

The knock on the door startles her. She has been busy concentrating on the scene below. She is across the room in a second. It has to be Claude. It cannot be a bellboy with a telegram.

She pulls open the door. A stranger stands in the hall. She recognizes the features, but she does not know the man. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes are hard as walnut shells. His mouth is a thin zipper in his face. His cheeks are hollow.

She wants to hurl herself at him. She stands rooted to the thick carpet of what was supposed to be their honeymoon suite.

“Sweetheart,” she manages. The sibilant word hisses in the quiet.

He goes on standing there, staring at her with those dead eyes.

She reaches for his arm. As she starts to pull him toward her, his hand comes out of his pocket. She sees the two stubs where his middle fingers used to be and knows this is a test. If she stares, she is in trouble. If she looks away, she is doomed.

She takes his hand in hers and holds it against her cheek.

CLAUDE’S HAND
. Two missing fingers. Not much to lose, not these days. But that maimed hand cups their first hours together as if the time is water. How easily she could spill it and lose everything.

She clings to that poor damaged hand, and it clings to her. In the dim lights from the night-table lamps—they do not turn them off; they have to see each other to make sure they are real—she watches the hand, browned by the sun, against her skin, and feels it on her body, and by morning, she is sure they are going to be all right.

AUGUST
1945

Babe puts the book on the night table, turns out the light, and lies in the dark, waiting. She wants him to reach for her—she no longer reaches for him; it is too dangerous—but she is afraid of what it will be like if he does. It is not only that they make love less often. During the months when she followed him from camp to camp, they could not get enough of each other, but marriage was new then, and the war was a looming fear rather than a poisonous memory. It is the way they make love. He is not inconsiderate. He is careful to pleasure her. But once he has, he is gone. Eyes closed, face averted, he is alone, and angry. Her flesh knows that, even if her mind tries to deny it. Her body feels the fury in his thrusts. Sometimes she watches him—she refuses to close her eyes—and sees the brutality in his face and is back in the railroad-station bathroom. Sometimes when that happens, she cries silently. He does not notice. He is in his own world. She could be anyone. And she knows now there were anyones.

She found the evidence by accident, or perhaps her discovery was not unintended on his part. He is a deliberate man. Perhaps he left it there as a confession, or a taunt.

The proof was tucked among the army-issue shirts and trousers and underwear. It was army issue too. She got up and closed the door to their room. They were still living with his parents and looking for an apartment of their own, no easy quest given the housing shortage triggered by all those war-minted husbands and wives and babies who needed a place to live. Millie seemed to have rented the last vacant space in South Downs. It was not much, one room above the Millers’ garage on the east side of town, with a kitchen and a sleeping alcove, but it is the story of Millie getting a job that no vet can fill all over again. No one would call Millie lucky, but she does have a knack for survival.

Babe locked the door—she did not want her mother-in-law walking in and finding her with this—and sat cross-legged on the floor among the contents of the duffel. She picked up the brown paper package.

PRO KIT CONTENTS

1. Tube containing 5 grams ointment

2. Directions sheet

3. Soap-impregnated cloth

4. Cleansing tissue

COMFORT MANUFACTURING COMPANY

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A
.

The kit meant nothing. He had not even opened it. But he had opened the other box. There was a list of contents on the outside of that too.

Three prophylactics

She opened the lid. One foil packet lay inside.

She could not say she had not been prepared.
Your man has been through a difficult time
, the magazines warned.
Do not ask if he has been faithful
, the pamphlets cautioned. Her favorite was an article by a psychiatrist.
Often the man who loves his wife most dearly is the most likely to stray. He is the man most responsive to a woman’s love, most in need of a woman’s support
. When it came to absolution, the church had nothing on that psychiatrist.

She sat on the floor, trying to figure out what she felt. He had not exactly lied in his letters.
The prospect of war has the opposite effect on me. I want the real thing. And that’s you, Babe. As the ads say, I will accept no substitutes
. For all she knew, he meant it at the time. But that was before he watched them die, one after another, Charlie, Pete, his buddy Herb, others she never met, more she never heard of. She cannot begrudge him a moment of escape from that any more than she can resent the water he drank when he was thirsty, or the rations he ate when he was hungry, or the sleep he snatched when he was exhausted. It was sex and death all over again.

There is another reason she does not blame him. She remembers her own loneliness. Maybe she was just lucky that the strange men who came into the Western Union office tended to be on-the-make traveling salesmen and slick black-market Johnnies dangling nylons and good times.

She does not begrudge him those moments of respite during the war, but she does resent being nothing more than that to him now. Open your eyes, she wants to scream. Look at me. I’m your wife, not some girl you picked up for a moment’s release. She does not scream, at least not at him. The battle she wages goes on in her head, a place where no one wins.

That morning she was about to put the packets back in the duffel to be stored in his parents’ attic with the other things they would never need. Then her mind skidded ahead. Mommy, Mommy, what’s this? the small boy playing soldier in his father’s uniform asks. She wrapped the packages in an old issue of
Newsweek
that was on the night table, carried them down to the kitchen, and put them in the trash, way at the bottom, under the coffee grounds and eggshells.

AUGUST
14, 1945

One of the soda jerks has turned up the volume on the radio behind the counter at Swallow’s, and the announcement comes rolling out the open door and stops Babe on the pavement.

“President Truman has announced that the Japanese have accepted our terms unconditionally. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the end of the Second World War.”

People are spilling out of buildings, shouting, cheering, waving flags. On the street, drivers lean on their horns or honk them to a staccato beat. The kids at the counter abandon their sodas, sundaes, and malteds to form a conga line that comes snaking out the door. One of the older boys tries to grab Babe, but she steps out of the way. Men are throwing their hats in the air. It is a common expression, but Babe has never seen anyone do it, except in newsreels of Annapolis graduations. People are embracing. Not just the kids in the conga line, but couples and friends and people who barely know one another. Mr. Creighton, the undertaker, grabs Miss Hammond, the librarian, and plants a kiss on her mouth. For the rest of her life, Babe will not be able to look at the famous picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square without remembering Mr. Creighton in his somber black suit and hat and Miss Hammond in her dowdy print dress, locked in an embrace. The librarian even has one lisle-stocking-and-oxford-clad foot raised in girlish exuberance. Then the fire department sirens begin going off, and church bells are tolling. The boy who plays the tuba in the high school band is marching down the street beside the stopped cars, playing “God Bless America” to the same martial beat as Kate Smith, America’s patriotic songbird, sings it.

Mr. Swallow comes out of the drugstore and stands beside Babe, his starched white pharmacist’s coat glowing in the slanting rays of the setting sun, his scalp rosy inside his tonsure of white hair.

“Mac will be coming home,” she says.

“Mac will be coming home,” he agrees. Then he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Everyone, even Mrs. Swallow, thinks Mac, the diligent son, the dutiful son, the doctor, is his favorite, and he is in a way, but even when Mr. Swallow had to spank Pete as a little boy, or discipline him as a teenager, or have a serious talk when he was in college, he had been in secret thrall to his younger son’s spirit. Perhaps Babe Huggins guesses his secret, because she puts her hand on his arm for a moment. His daughter-in-law Millie, for all her sweetness, never does that.

Babe takes her hand from Mr. Swallow’s arm—it rested there of its own sudden will—and moves off down Broad Street, through the soft August evening that trembles with the vibrations of half a dozen church bells. She has to get home. She has to get home to Claude. She starts to run and remembers the last time she hurried down Broad Street, careful not to run then, because she did not want to start a panic. There is no fear of that now.

As she turns the corner onto Elm, she notices King Gooding’s big gray Cadillac parked halfway down the block. She cannot imagine what it is doing there. He always parks directly in front of the bank, not around the corner from it.

Someone is sitting behind the wheel. As she gets closer, she recognizes the wide shoulders beneath the tan linen suit jacket and the big head under the straw hat. She stops. She does not want to see him. She will have to speak. At this moment in time, you cannot pass someone you know, you cannot pass even a stranger, without speaking. But she is too angry at King Gooding to speak to him.

A week earlier, she and Claude were walking down the street, and Claude was in a good mood, because they had finally found an apartment. They were laughing and kidding around, and she ducked her head at something he said, and when she looked up, she saw King Gooding coming toward them. He saw them at the same moment. Without missing a beat, he crossed the street and continued down the sidewalk on the other side. He has known Claude since he was a boy. Claude and Charlie grew up together. And now he crosses the street to avoid having to say hello to Claude, having to look at Claude, because Claude is alive and Charlie is dead. She feels sorry for Mr. Gooding. But it isn’t Claude’s fault. Except Claude saw King cross the street and remembered that it was.