Next to Love (16 page)

She has never seen King uneasy, but he is uneasy now in his den with the heavy leather sofa and the massive desk and the dark Turkish carpet. She knows because he starts to sit behind the desk, then thinks better of it, takes the other end of the sofa, and turns halfway to face her. He asks her if she minds if he smokes. King never asks anyone if he can smoke. When she says she doesn’t—though she does—he picks up a cigar, then puts it down again without lighting it. They are both ill at ease.

“I hear Millie Swallow is getting married.”

He does not have to say another word. She understands.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I have no intention of remarrying. Ever.” The photograph on King’s desk swims into focus. Charlie is standing on a dock, grinning into the sunlight, holding a big fish. “Not after Charlie.”

He opens his mouth to say, you’re a young woman, of course you will. “You may change your mind” comes out.

“I won’t.”

She starts to stand. He clears his throat. There is more. She cannot imagine what. He is not interested in Amy, though he thinks he is. He never talks to her about finances. He sends her checks and pays her bills, but he never discusses those matters. Her mother-in-law says he is the same with her.

“Let’s assume,” he says, “just for argument’s sake. Let’s assume that some man comes along—after a respectable period of time, of course, not like Millie Swallow—and wants to court you.”

“I have no interest in being courted.”

“For argument’s sake,” he repeats, then hesitates. “Forgive me if this is embarrassing … Grace … dear. But you’ve led a sheltered life, thank heavens. You went from your parents to Charlie.”

He stops again. Charlie. Sometimes he thinks he will choke on it. Charlie. Sometimes he rolls it around in his mouth and can barely keep from shuddering with the ecstasy of the sound. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. He gulps down the word and goes on.

“You don’t know about men. But I do. I’m not saying they’re all bad or all after one thing. But you have to be careful.”

As he reaches up to rub his chin, his shirt cuff pulls back. She sees the fine dark hairs on his wrist, and her stomach curls over on itself. She is looking at Charlie’s wrist.

“The men you meet won’t be boys. They’ll be grown, experienced, war veterans probably.” He stops again. War veterans. They’re all over the place, with their cocky smiles, and long loping strides, and greedy hunger to make up for lost time. They’re noisy and brash and arrogant, and not one of them can hold a candle to Charlie. Why have they come home when he has not? He closes his eyes and sees Charlie. He opens them. He has to get on with this.

“I don’t want to be indelicate, but once a man has known, well, carnal passion, he will have difficulty controlling himself.”

She looks past him to the photograph of Charlie with the big fish. She does not understand what King is trying to tell her. Charlie knew what King calls carnal passion before her, he told her that, and he never had any trouble controlling himself until they were married. But Charlie was not like other men. Still, it gives her a shudder of pleasure to think she knows something about Charlie his father doesn’t. She owns more of Charlie than King or Dorothy do.

“And when it comes to experience, they may make assumptions about you. After all, you’re a widow.”

Charlie’s widow, he thinks, and the rage rises in him again at the thought that she goes on living without Charlie.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that any decent man, any man who truly cares for you, will not try to take liberties. He will treat you with respect.”

She thinks of Millie and Al. He cannot keep his hands off her. The two of them make her uncomfortable. The other evening she could not wait for them to leave. Then she ended up dreaming about them.

“So I want you to be careful … dear. You and Amy are all we have of Charlie.”

This girl is not Charlie. Not even Amy is Charlie.

He pushes himself up from the leather sofa. “And now I won’t mention the subject again.”

He never does, but later, after he has his heart attack, she will blame him and this talk for the way things turn out.

AUGUST
14, 1945

Grace goes through the house, closing the windows against the noise. When she turns, she sees Amy watching her, her long almond eyes widened with fear.

“I’m afraid it’s going to rain,” she says. “A thunderstorm.”

Amy looks from her mother to the window. A ray of sun beats against the glass. “It’s hot.”

“I’ll turn on a fan.”

“I want to go out. I want to go out and play.”

“Not now,” Grace says.

Horns blow, and church bells toll, and fire sirens slice the early evening air. She closes another window. The sounds still rattle the house.

“I want to go out,” Amy says, and begins to cry.

Grace sits in the big Queen Anne chair that was Charlie’s chair, pulls her daughter onto her lap, and holds her.

Years later, that will be Amy’s memory of V-J Day. When a boy she never should have got mixed up with tells her about setting off firecrackers on the day the war ended, she will remember sitting on Grace’s lap, crushed by her embrace, as her mother sobbed into her hair.

KING HAS PARKED
on a side street, around the corner from the bank. He does not want anyone to find him sitting in his car, his arms on the steering wheel, his head on his hands, while the rest of the town celebrates. He sits up, takes off his glasses, and wipes his eyes with the heels of his hands. He has to go home. It is cowardly of him to leave Dorothy alone now. Charlie is—was—her son too. But not the way he is his.

He knows what people think. That he was son proud, the same way he was bank proud, and power proud, and even house proud. They think he was vain of Charlie. Son and heir. Chip off the old block. Following in my footsteps, even if he didn’t go into the bank. But Charlie was not a chip off the old block. That was why King never tried to make him go into the bank. Charlie was better than he was. Charlie was the best thing about him. And Charlie made him better, because Charlie filled him with love. Charlie was the only selflessness he ever knew.

He ought to go home to comfort Dorothy. Thirty-four years of marriage. She is entitled to an arm around her shoulder, a few words of consolation, as if either of them can be consoled for this. But he cannot touch her. He cannot even look at her. He is too ashamed. Their young bodies made Charlie together, and now Charlie is gone, and he cannot understand how he let that happen.

He thinks of what is in the trunk. He will not do that to her. He will not leave her alone. But the idea that he can is the closest thing he knows to solace.

NINE

Millie

JUNE
1945

T
HE MEN ARE COMING HOME. EVEN STANDING BEHIND THE COSMETICS
counter of Diamond’s, Millie is not immune to the fever of excitement. She is in the thick of it. She watches the women slick lipsticks over their mouths, and blot with tissues, and pucker up into the mirror. Millie smiles at them until she thinks her face will crack, tells them the pink is lovely but with their coloring the coral is warmer, and assures them their husbands and boyfriends and even sons will love it.

The store has not yet opened this morning, and she is arranging a display of compacts when the manager comes over and tells her Mr. Diamond wants to see her in his office.

“Now?”

“He said as soon as you got in.”

She is glad she came in early this morning. Then she realizes. The time she arrived does not matter. Mr. Diamond can have only one reason for wanting to see her. The firings are beginning. She did not think he would do them himself, but then what does she know about getting and losing jobs. She never thought she would even have a job. She does not need the money. Pete’s death benefit—she hates the term—is ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars will last a long time, at least until she marries again. And she does not like the idea of leaving Jack with her aunt. But she hates staying home with her aunt even more. The house reeks of grief. The smell and the taste and the gloom remind her of the way it felt when she went there to live after her mother and father died. It is worse now. Then they made allowances for her childishness. Now she is not let off so easily. She is expected to grieve. She is grieving, but that does not mean she does not go on living. She is desperate to go on living. She has spent too much of her life in bereavement. That is why she has to get out of that house of mourning. She will pick up Jack from her aunt’s at the end of the day and the two of them will go to their own home, where they can raise their voices, and laugh, and breathe. She does not care how cramped the apartment is, as long as she can chase Jack around the place, let him ride her like a pony as a father would, and tickle him until he shrieks. He is missing so much. She can at least give him that.

She took the job at Diamond’s to get money for a small apartment or even a room. Her uncle would have lectured her darkly if she tried to use Pete’s death benefit for such a frivolous purpose when she had a perfectly good home with them. The money must rest in a bank, as in rest in peace, where it will accrue three-and-a-quarter percent interest for Jack to go to college, or a rainy day, whichever comes first.

She planned to start looking for a place as soon as her aunt and uncle, and Pete’s parents, and the rest of the town got used to her working, but now she will not be able to. And she cannot even get angry about it, because she believes she ought to be fired. All those returning vets are entitled to jobs. True, they cannot have a man selling cosmetics, but when they give the vets back their jobs in the men’s departments, the women who have been working there will return to their old jobs in cosmetics and hats and foundations.

She steps into the elevator and faces herself in the mirror. Her makeup is still fresh, but she takes out her compact and powders her nose, then removes the top from her lipstick and runs it over her mouth. She does not know why she wants to look her best to be fired, but she does. Later she will say she’s glad she did, because Al never would have given her a second glance if her nose was shiny or her lips pale. Baloney, Al always answers.

She has never been in Mr. Diamond’s office. It’s small and dusty and crowded with too much furniture, too many papers and ledgers, and odd articles of clothing hanging from the backs of chairs and the ends of shelves. The one plant on the windowsill is dead.

Mr. Diamond does not stand, or ask her to sit, or close the door. This will not take long.

“Around the bush I don’t believe in beating, Mrs. Swallow,” he says, and rubs his chin. It is not even ten o’clock in the morning, and his jaw is sooty with five-o’clock shadow. “You’re a widow, right?”

She hates the word. The
o
opens like a howling mouth. “My husband died in the war.”

He leans back in his chair and looks at her. “I’m sorry. My heart breaks to bring up such a painful situation. But I got to make sure. Married women I don’t hire. Not now the war’s over. Almost over.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand? A girl got a husband, she should be home taking care of him. A girl got a husband to take care of her, she shouldn’t take a job away from a man.”

“I agree.”

“Good. But a horse of a different color we got here. You like pretty clothes? Sure you do. What girl looks like you don’t? Well, now that the war’s over, Diamond’s is going to have plenty of pretty clothes. Now we don’t have to worry about those crazy regulations: No pleats. No ruffles. One measly patch pocket per blouse. No skirt more than seventy-two inches around. No hems more than two inches. Merchandise like that I was ashamed to sell. But from now on it’s going to be different. Already I’m seeing some of the samples. Couple of months from now, weeks even, Diamond’s is going to be full of dresses and suits and gowns with pleats and pockets and real hems. Quality goods. And all you got to do is walk around the store wearing the merchandise. Hats too. No raise. We got to watch out for inflation. But it’s a nice job. You smile. You look pretty. You make people happy. You sell clothes. What do you say?”

She says fine.

He rubs his hands together. “Good, we got a deal.” He glances past her through the open door. “Now you got to excuse me. You got a counter to cover, and I see my brother-in-law, you know, Baum from men’s shoes, out there with his son. A regular war hero I don’t keep waiting.”

Mr. Baum from men’s shoes is already coming in the door as she starts to go out, but the younger man in navy dress whites steps back to let her leave. He is dark, with a lean face and a long jaw that, like his uncle’s, wears a midnight-blue shadow, though it is clear from the nick on his chin that he has recently shaved. As she goes through the door, the memory of Pete’s cheeks after he shaved, smooth as a baby’s, makes her rub her fingertips against her skirt.

“Come on in, Al,” she hears Mr. Diamond say as she heads for the elevator. “What’re you standing there looking at? A shiksa in the family we don’t need.”