Next to Love (38 page)

Grace

MAY 1962

L
ATER AMY WILL BLAME HER MOTHER, BUT HOW CAN IT BE GRACE’S
fault? She did not force Amy to do anything. She did not even express disapproval. Perhaps her face showed concern, but what mother’s would not when her daughter comes home from school three weeks before the wedding and says she is going to call it off?

Grace does not mind the embarrassment of sending out the cancelation cards; or the bother of returning the gifts; or the waste of all that money for a wedding dress Amy will not wear, food no one will eat, and music that will not be played. Well, she minds, but what really upsets her, what terrifies her, is that Amy is making a mistake she will regret for the rest of her life. Roger is a wonderful catch, as the term goes, though Grace would never use it. Good-looking but not too handsome, which is always dangerous; considerate; well mannered; from a solid family; headed toward a good future. He is about to graduate from Yale Law School. More to the point, because Grace is not a fool—she, of all people, knows the difference between appearance and reality—he adores Amy, and not in a brotherly way. He is also an anchor for her. The first time Amy brought him home, Grace felt as if she had navigated the vessel that was her daughter’s life through rough seas and finally steered her into a safe harbor.

“Did you have a fight?” she asks now.

They are sitting in the window seat of Grace’s bedroom, the same room where they clung together and cried after Grace returned from her wedding trip. Morris is at a meeting of the county medical association.

Amy hugs herself and shakes her head.

“Then what?”

“I just don’t think I can go through with it.”

Grace lunges for the lifeline. Amy did not say she cannot go through with it. She said she doesn’t
think
she can go through with it.

“Oh, sweetheart, everyone has pre-wedding jitters.”

Amy looks up from behind the curtain of hair. Her face is white and drawn. Three angry red pimples deface her usually flawless skin. “You call spending every night for the past two weeks crying in a bathroom stall jitters? Every time someone comes in, I have to flush the toilet so they won’t hear me.”

“That’s exactly what I call it.”

“If everybody has them, how come the two other girls in Northrup House who are getting married after graduation don’t spend their nights sitting in the bathroom crying?”

“What other girls do or don’t do is beside the point. Only one thing matters. Do you love Roger? I know he loves you, but do you love him?”

Amy drops her head and the curtain of hair shrouds her face again. “Sometimes I think I do. But other times I know I don’t love him the way other girls love their fiancés.”

Grace wishes she would stop talking about other girls.

“Not because there’s anything wrong with him.” She fingers the pimples. “Because there’s something wrong with me.”

Now Grace understands. The problem is not jitters, or Roger, or other girls; it is Amy. It is the two of them. They are a blighted family of widows and orphans and mental hospitals and broken engagements.

Grace takes Amy’s hand from her face. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“There is, but that’s the funny part. When I met Roger, I thought he could fix it.”

Hope beats its puny wings in Grace’s chest. Morris could not make them whole, but Roger is not Morris. She reaches an arm around Amy’s shoulders. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she repeats, “nothing that marriage to a wonderful boy like Roger won’t fix.”

Amy’s doubt is no match for her mother’s certainty. It carries her to the front door when Roger shows up later that evening, though she told him not to; and through the days to the wedding; and into the moment she slips her hand through Morris’s arm to walk down the aisle in the white organdy dress embroidered with tiny roses and forget-me-nots that won’t go to waste after all.

TWENTY-ONE

Millie

MAY 1962

M
ILLIE SITS IN WHAT WAS ONCE KING GOODING’S DEN. DURING
the commercials, she cannot help glancing around the room, admiring what she has made of it. The newly installed French windows open into the garden and bring the outdoors inside. The wicker chairs and sofas seem to float in the space. Their chintz-upholstered cushions are light as clouds. She worried that the big television would ruin the English-country-house aura of the room, but when she closes the doors of the tall oak armoire, no one even knows it’s there. The doors are open now, and the television is tuned to
Perry Mason
, and she and Al sit on one sofa while Betsy and Susan sprawl on the other, twined together, supple as kittens. Now that each has a room of her own, they rarely squabble.

It’s only a house, Al said, when he thought they had lost it. There are other houses, Grace assured her. A house does not solve problems or bring happiness, Babe warned, and looked as if she was about to say more but didn’t.

Millie tried to believe them. She went to look at other houses. Some were bigger, some more architecturally impressive, but none was right. Even if the engineer’s reports on those houses vouched for roofs and foundations and plumbing, those houses struck her as flimsy. Only this house withstood the test. Since she was a little girl, before her mother went into the hospital, before her father drove into a tree, the big house at the end of the block, the Gooding house, was solid. That was why she was heartbroken when they lost it. And that was why Al got it for her.

The idea was simple, he told her after he pulled it off. Anyone could have thought of it. She disagrees. She is not saying Jews are more clever. More devious, she now knows is how other people put it. But she does believe you have to have oppression bred in your bones to find ways around or under or through it.

At first he worried his lawyer would not go for the idea. There was no reason to assume George Givens was not a card-carrying anti-Semite. The lunch club in Boston where he could not take Al as he did his other clients, and the course where he played golf, and the hotels where he and his wife vacationed were all restricted. But there is no accounting for people’s flashes of generosity or gratuitous acts of cruelty. The war was full of them. Al heard of soldiers defiling enemy bodies, then turning around to shelter a mangy stray dog. Aboard ship, he saw men bully other men for no reason other than the scent of weakness, then risk their lives to pick up a lifeboat full of strangers. The cousin his uncle brought over after the war said the camps were full of small atrocities and minute acts of kindness, though he does not elaborate, and Al has never asked him to. Perhaps the really surprising fact is that Al is surprised when George Givens agrees to the plan. Where did he get the idea that anyone, even an anti-Semitic lawyer, if he is an anti-Semite, is of a piece? Or maybe Givens just wants to hold on to him as a client.

Whatever the reason, Givens takes the money Al lends him without interest, buys the house from Dorothy Gooding, then turns it over to Al as payment for the loan. Millie is over the moon. The expression comes to her from out of the blue. Then she remembers how she knows it. Pete used it in his letters from England. The house has opened her even to that.

When Jack took one of the old photographs of Pete from the box he had found and put it on the dresser in his room here, she did not protest. She even bought a frame for it. Sometimes, when she goes into Jack’s room for one reason or another, though now that he is away at school she has fewer reasons to do that, she stands in front of the photograph staring at it. She is glad it’s there. If it weren’t, she would not remember what Pete looked like.

She glances from the girls to Al again and suddenly remembers sitting on the steps of that cramped apartment over the garage where she and Jack lived at the end of the war. I can do this, she thought then. It may not be love, but it’s right. And now it is love. The change, the growth, strikes her as at once an inevitable outcome and an outrageous stroke of good luck.

The phone rings and both girls spring for it. Susan gets there first, but it must be someone they both know, because they hold the receiver between them, each putting an ear to it, and launch into a duet of talking, giggling, and whispering.

Millie stretches her legs along the sofa and kneads Al’s thigh. He does not take his eyes from the television screen but winds one hand around her foot.

“That was Jack,” Betsy says after they hang up.

“Why didn’t you let me talk to him?”

“He said he was in a hurry. He just wanted to let you know he’s coming home for the weekend.”

“Is he bringing that girl again?”

“
That
girl.” Al winks at his daughters. “Unless a girl is descended from the founding fathers on one side, robber barons on the other, and is a glamour-puss herself, she’s not good enough for your brother.”

“I’m glad I’m such a source of amusement to you all. Did he say he’s bringing her or not?”

“All he said,” Betsy tells her, “is that he’s coming home because he wants to talk to you about something.”

“Maybe he wants to talk to you about
that
girl,” Susan says, and grins at her father.

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON
, Millie drives to the railroad depot to meet Jack’s train. She stands leaning against the hood of the station wagon under a sky so clear it looks like tinted glass, feeling the lemony sunshine on her face. She hopes he is not bringing the girl. She certainly hopes the girl is not what he wants to talk about. He is much too young to be getting serious. He still has two more years of college.

He steps down from the train, stands for a moment combing the platform, spots her, and starts toward her. Even his walk is like Pete’s. For years she tried to persuade herself he was imitating Al, but Al springs while Pete loped. As Jack lopes toward her now, she remembers driving up to Dartmouth with Al last year to pick him up at the end of the term. The friends he introduced them to called him Pete. So did the girl he brought home a few months ago. At home, he is still Jack. She did not mention the split personality to him or to Al.

When he reaches the car, he bends to kiss her on the cheek, and for a moment that passes so quickly she cannot catch it, Pete is stooping to her, and a pain she thought she was immune to goes off like a flashbulb, then dies.

She hands him the keys. He takes them, tosses his suitcase in the back, and gets in behind the wheel. He puts the key in the ignition but does not turn it. All around them, cars are pulling out of the parking area, but he goes on sitting there. Finally, he turns to her.

“I might as well get this over with,” he begins. “Before we get home. This has nothing to do with Dad or Betsy or Susan. Especially not with Dad. I’m grateful to him. I don’t want to hurt him. But this is about me. About my real father and me.”

“Dad is your real father. He raised you.”

“You know what I mean. If you want to help me, that’s okay. If you don’t, I’m still going to do it.”

She waits. He can call himself Pete, but she will not let him change Baum back to Swallow. She will not let him wound Al.

“I’m going to bring his body home from France.”

She is surprised at the feeling of relief that washes over her. This is less than she feared.

“I’ve already started the paperwork,” he goes on. “Uncle Claude is helping. Before you get angry at him, I’m the one who’s doing it. I went to him a couple of years ago, and he said if I still wanted to do it when I turned eighteen, he would help, but before that it was up to you.”

Just as the rush of relief surprised her, so does the feeling of gratitude. For all their differences, she can trust Claude and Babe. She is glad he turned to them, though she cannot help wishing he had come to her.

“You never asked me.”

“What would you have said if I did?”

She does not answer.

“You wouldn’t even talk about it. I remember once when I was little and Aunt Grace brought home Uncle Charlie’s body, she said something about bringing home my father. You shut her up as if she’d said a dirty word in front of the children.”

“That’s not fair.”

He shrugs. The callousness of the gesture is like a slap in the face, that he can hurt her this way and then shrug.

“I’m not saying you didn’t have your reasons. You probably thought you were doing what was best for me. But you weren’t. So now I’m going to do it whether you like it or not. I don’t mean that harshly, just as a fact. I’m going to do this no matter what anyone says.”

“It’s that important to you?”

“Apparently.”

Apparently. Where is this cruelty coming from? All the same, she is not an unreasonable woman. She knows when to yield.

“Then we’ll do it together,” she says.

The more she thinks about the idea on the way home, the more she warms to it. Maybe Jack’s reinterment of Pete’s body will let him finally bury the past.

TWENTY-TWO