We Are All Welcome Here (23 page)

A beautiful new novel about the strength of family, the horrors of World War II, and love against all odds, from the bestselling and beloved author Elizabeth Berg

Dream When You’re Feeling Blue

COMING SOON FROM RANDOM HOUSE

PEOPLE WERE PACKED IN SO TIGHTLY
at Union Station that Kitty had to hold on to her hat lest it be jostled off her head and trampled. Elbows poked her; suitcases banged into her legs and she feared mightily for her very last pair of silk stockings. The noise level was so high, Julian had to lean in toward Kitty and practically shout to be heard. “Gonna write me every day?” he asked, grinning, and she nodded that she would. “Are
you
going to be
careful
for a change?” she asked, and he told her not to worry. He looked so handsome—there
was
something about a man in uniform—standing there with his duffel bag over his shoulder, his hat rakishly positioned at the side of his head.

Earlier that morning, Kitty and Julian and Louise and Michael had taken a Green Hornet streetcar to the train station and then breakfasted together at Fred Harvey’s. Both men ate every bite of food on their plates, but the sisters could hardly swallow their coffee. Now it was time to say good-bye—Julian was on the 8:11 to San Francisco; Michael would leave just a few minutes later, on his way to New York City.

“Boooard!”
the conductor cried, then made his announcement again, more urgently. “Okay, kid,” Julian said. “I guess this is it.” He waved at Michael and Louise, who were holding hands and standing nearby, then kissed Kitty quickly. “Take care of yourself.” He spoke seriously, his voice thick, and for the first time she saw a glint of fear in his eyes. She stepped back from him and made herself smile brilliantly. She tossed her black hair and stuck out her chest. Already she knew how she’d sign the first photo she sent of herself:
Hi, Private.

Louise was holding on to Michael and crying her eyes out, though she and Kitty had agreed
not
to do that,
under any circumstances.
They had agreed to look as pretty as they could, to wear their best outfits, to be cheerful and smile and wave at the boys as they pulled out of the station. They had agreed that it was their patriotic duty to behave in this fashion, and they had vowed to help each other be strong. But now Louise sobbed as Michael pulled away from her and ran for his train, and finally Kitty pinched her to make her stop.
“Ow!”
Louise said and pinched her sister back.

“Is this what you want him to remember?” Kitty asked.

Louise wiped at her nose with her sodden hankie. “I can’t help it.”

“You can!” Kitty told her angrily and then looked at Julian’s train, where she saw him hanging out a window and motioning for her to come over to him. He was packed in among so many other men, all those boys with all their caps, sticking their heads and their arms out of the windows, but she could have found Julian in the middle of ten thousand men. She ran over and grabbed his hand. “Good-bye, Julian. Be careful. I mean it.”

“I will, I promise. But Kat, listen, I almost forgot, I need you to do something for me. On Monday afternoon, go over to Munson’s jewelry store and tell them to give you what I left for you there.”

“What?”
She laughed. “What do you mean?” A
ring
? Oh, it would be just like Julian, to do it this way! No bended knee, no flowery words of love. Instead, a cocksureness that Kitty found irresistible. Only a girl who had wrapped many men around her finger would be delighted by such cool assurance.

The train hissed loudly and began moving forward. Kitty ran alongside, mixed in with a crowd of mostly young women, some smiling, some weeping, all reaching up toward the hands of the boys who were leaving them behind. “I love you!” Kitty shouted. “Julian! I love you!” The words were new, shiny inside her.

“Munson’s Jewelers, on Wabash near Harding’s,” he shouted back. The train picked up speed, and Kitty stopped running. Then she and the others on the platform stood still, watching the train grow smaller and finally disappear. It had become so quiet; a place that moments ago had reverberated with sound was now still as a chapel. Pigeons fluttered up onto steel beams and sat silent in rows, their feathers ruffled in the morning cold. Kitty became aware of the dampness of the place, the basementy smell, the spill of weak sunshine through the high, dusty windows onto the tracks below. And then, slowly, people began walking away, talking quietly to one another. One woman was holding a brown bag and crying to her husband about their son forgetting his lunch. “The other boys will share their food with him,” the father said, and the mother said but she wanted him to have the lunch she had packed, his favorite cookies were in there. “Someone else will have cookies,” the man said, and the woman said no, no one else would. She bumped into Kitty, crying hard, and apologized. Kitty touched her arm and said it was all right.

Louise stood forlorn and dry-eyed, holding her pocketbook hard against her middle. Kitty linked arms with her.
“Now
you stop crying,” she said, and Louise said, “I know. I’m a dope.”

They took a cab home, an extravagance. But they didn’t want to wait for the next streetcar, and anyway, Julian had given Kitty money so they could do exactly that. At first she’d thought about using the money for something more practical, but now she luxuriated in the fact that the cab would take them exactly where they were going, directly from where they had been. It was swell. She was Rita Hayworth, and Louise was Dorothy Lamour. She leaned back and looked out the window. There were their fans walking down the sidewalk, wishing they’d come out and sign autographs.

At a stoplight, Kitty pointed to the spring dresses in the window of Marshall Field’s. “Look how boxy sleeves are getting,” she said, and Louise snapped back, “Jeez! How can you even think about that now?”

Kitty fell silent, but in her head, she started the Mills Brothers singing “Paper Doll.” You couldn’t think about those boys and where they were going. You had to think about something else. Louise began to weep again, and the driver reached back over the seat to give her his handkerchief, frayed at the edges but clean and neatly folded. “Dry your eyes now, darlin’; he’ll be back before you know it,” the man said. He was Irish, as they were.

Louise cried harder, but through her tears she said, “Thank you very much. I’ll wash it and iron it and send it right back to you.” The Heaney girls were nothing if not polite—their mother made sure of that. The Dreamy girls, the sisters were called, for their considerable beauty; and their mother seemed to feel it was her duty to prevent their good looks from going to their heads. You didn’t want to be caught lingering before a mirror when Margaret Heaney was anywhere nearby. “Well, now,” she’d say, her arms crossed. “Don’t we find ourselves a fascination.” And then she’d suggest that if you had so much time on your hands, you might find a way to make yourself useful, and if you couldn’t think of something to do, she’d be glad to help you. Rugs didn’t beat themselves, you know, there was that. The refrigerator needed defrosting, the bathroom and kitchen floors had to be scrubbed.

But their mother was also proud of them. And she not infrequently remarked on how the beauty found in all her children—the dimples, the long lashes, the thick, lustrous hair, the clear skin—didn’t come from
no
where. Whereupon their father would inflate his chest, stick his thumbs under his suspenders, and say, “’Tis true! And no need to look any farther for the source!”

“You’re going to give yourself a headache with all that crying,” Kitty told her sister, and Louise said, “I don’t care! I
want
a headache!” Indeed, Michael’s mother lay at home on her living room sofa with a sick headache, a cold rag across her forehead, a throw-up bucket at her side—she’d been unable to come to the station, and Michael had told his father to stay home and take care of her. Julian’s parents had not come to the station, either. They’d said they wanted to give Kitty and Julian that time alone, but Kitty knew that, although they were proud of their only son, their hearts were broken at his leave-taking. They needed to keep their good-byes—and their anguish—private. Kitty turned to stare out the window again. Louise really ought to look at the beautiful things in the store windows: the hats lodged nestlike on the mannequins’ heads; the red open-toed shoes with the ankle straps. Or she ought to think about what she might say in her letter to Michael that night. They had agreed they would write to their men every night until they were safely back home: they’d put each other’s hair up and get into their pajamas and then sit at the kitchen table and write at least two pages, every night, no matter what. Tish was already writing to three men she’d met at USO dances.

Kitty snuck a look at her still-weeping sister. What weakness of character! Louise needed to stop thinking about herself. She could think about her job as a teacher’s aide, or her friends, or their three little brothers, only eight, eleven, and thirteen but out almost every day with their wagon, collecting for the metal drive. They got a penny a pound, and they’d raised more money for war bonds than any other kids in their Chicago neighborhood—they’d even had their picture in the newspaper. It didn’t do any good for Louise to carry on this way. It didn’t help Michael or even herself. But then Kitty’s throat caught, and she reached over to embrace her sister, and she began to cry, too. Julian with the sun in his hair, saying good-bye, perhaps forever.

“Ah, now, girls,” the cabbie said. “Get hold of yourselves, won’t you. We’ll take care of them Japs in short order, don’t you doubt it! And then wait and see if I’m not the very one taking you all home again! And won’t we be celebratin’! You keep my handkerchief; I’ll collect it from you on that far happier occasion.”

“Germans,” Louise said, her voice muffled by the handkerchief.

“What’s that, now?” the cabbie asked.

“Mine will be fighting the
Nazis
!” she wailed.

“Well, I meant them, too!” the cabbie said. “Germans, Italians, Japanese. What d’ya think any of them scoundrels can do against our fine boys?” He looked into the rearview mirror at the girls, and Kitty saw the worry in his blue eyes, the doubt. It came to her to say, “My boyfriend will be fighting the Japs.” But it didn’t seem to make much difference, really. She and Louise stopped crying, but they held hands the rest of the way home.

ELIZABETH BERG
is the author of fifteen novels, including the
New York Times
bestsellers
The Art of Mending, Say When, True to Form, Never Change,
and
Open House,
which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000.
Durable Goods
and
Joy School
were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and
Talk Before Sleep
was short-listed for the ABBY Award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Booksellers Award for her work, she is also the author of a nonfiction work,
Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True.
She lives in Chicago.

Also by Elizabeth Berg

The Handmaid and the Carpenter

The Year of Pleasures

The Art of Mending

Say When

True to Form

Ordinary Life: Stories

Never Change

Open House

Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True

Until the Real Thing Comes Along

What We Keep

Joy School

The Pull of the Moon

Range of Motion

Talk Before Sleep

Durable Goods

Family Traditions

Praise for
We Are All Welcome Here

“Valuable lessons about love, honor and the real meaning of family…[a] charming tale of a girl growing to realize just how much she is her mother’s daughter.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“[Berg’s] inner poetry and eloquence never falter…. She leaves us just enough room to draw from our own well of tears.”

—The Boston Globe

“Put away your bookmarks. You won’t need them.
We Are All Welcome Here
grabs you on page 1 and never lets go.”

—
Fort Worth
Star-Telegram

“Deftly told, this tale turns on a painful, liberating transition that allows each character to come wholly and appealingly alive on the page.”

—People
(starred review)

“[Berg] handles her material well…. In the charming and idealistic world Berg creates, there’s room for a little magic.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Paige, Diana and Peacie are the kind of characters you’d like to have over for sweet tea and a glide on the porch swing.”

—USA Today

“
Welcome
not only highlights the extraordinary power that a mother—paralyzed or not—has over her daughter, but offers a unique perspective on polio’s cruel legacy.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Berg finely draws all the characters in this story of acceptance, love, sacrifice and generosity of heart. It’s the story of the struggle for freedom and the ties that bind. And, if the end seems like a fairy-tale ending, well that’s just fine.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“A warm, satisfying read.”

—The Charlotte Observer

“Berg’s latest novel of ordinary women made extraordinary by a steely nobility covers a lot of territory…and her signature gifts for depicting strong women and writing pointed dialog are as acute as ever.”

—Library Journal

“[A] carefully calibrated domestic drama.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The prolific Berg pulls out all the stops in this family story…. There’s a lot of bang for the buck here.”

—Booklist

“[Berg’s] work of fiction,
We Are All Welcome Here,
is as compelling as the truth…. [A] vivid portrait of a mother-daughter relationship.”

—The Columbus Dispatch

“A quietly keyed story reminiscent in places of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
”

—BookPage

“It couldn’t be sweeter.”

—Deseret Morning News
(Salt Lake City)