Next to Love (15 page)

The sirens are still screaming, and the horns honking, and the bells pealing, and as she stands watching King Gooding, he crosses his arms over the steering wheel and puts his head on his hands. His big shoulders heave.

BABE CLOSES THE APARTMENT
door behind her. The streets are pandemonium. Across the way, someone has brought a Victrola out on the porch, and people are jitterbugging up and down the block. A small boy marches along the sidewalk, banging two pot tops together. A dog yelps after him deliriously. As she stands just inside the door to the apartment, she hears the noise outside but feels the hush in the dusk-gray room.

She does not switch on a light, though she does not yet know her way around the furniture-stuffed apartment by instinct. They moved in only last week.

“Claude,” she says quietly.

The hush deepens.

He had a meeting at school. Classes start the day after Labor Day. But he should be home by now. She tries to remember if she passed the car parked in front of the house. She was too busy waving back at her neighbors.

“Claude.”

She switches on the light. The worn sofa with the shiny arms, the standing lamp with the fringed shade, and the small table they use for meals spring out of the gloom. No one else is there.

She goes to the window and looks out at the street. His car, their car, is parked in front.

“Claude,” she calls again.

She hears a rustling sound in the bedroom and starts toward it. The door is open a crack. She pushes it wide and steps into the room.

It faces the tree-shaded back of the house and is darker than the living room. She turns on the light. A movement catches her eye. She looks down at the carpet. One combat boot is sticking out from under the bed. Some mornings he forgets and puts on his boots. Usually, she notices and reminds him to change to his brogues or loafers, but she was preoccupied this morning. She got her period, damn it.

She gets down on her hands and knees and peers under the bed. He is lying on his stomach with his arms crossed over his head.

“Claude.”

He does not answer. He does not even take his arms from over his head.

She lies flat on her stomach. The carpet smells faintly of dog. The bristles scratch through her thin summer blouse. She shimmies a little way under the bed until she can reach him and puts her hand on his back. He shakes it off. She puts it there again, gently, as gently as she knows how.

“Claude, sweetheart, it’s all right.”

He does not move.

“It’s not gunfire. It’s a celebration. The war is over.”

EIGHT

Grace

JUNE
1945

“H
ELP,” GRACE SAYS AS SHE STANDS OUTSIDE THE SCREEN DOOR
of her kitchen, her hands full of packages.

Babe pushes open the door and takes two of them from her. Naomi takes the rest.

“You’ve been on a spree,” Babe says.

“Just getting some more pictures framed.”

Grace crosses the kitchen to where Amy is sitting with her milk and brownies and leans down to kiss her. “Wait till you see what I got. More pictures for our wall. You can help me after you finish your milk.”

At first she was afraid to let Amy near the wall. She does not want the photographs damaged. But the wall is for Amy as much as for her. She wants her daughter to remember her father. As they put up each photograph, Grace tells Amy stories about Charlie. Amy probably knows more about her dead father than most children do about their living parents.

“Did Amy show you our wall?” she asks Babe.

“What wall?”

“Come on.” She leads Babe through the dining room, front hall, and living room, out to the sunporch, and stands for a moment facing the windows. She likes to sneak up on the wall, to surprise herself with it. She turns to face it and shivers, though the room faces west and is warm at this time of day, even with the windows open. But that’s the effect it has on her.

Framed photographs cover the top two-thirds of the wall. The last row, about three feet from the floor, stops halfway across. She is working from top to bottom, left to right. The pictures are in chronological order. At the top left, an infant Charlie peers out from a baby carriage. In the last frame she has hung so far, he is wearing a cap and gown and holding a diploma. At first she could not decide whether he was graduating from high school or college, but she showed it to his mother, and they agreed it was from college.

“I was thinking I’d frame some of his newspaper pieces too, but I’ll probably have to do that somewhere else in the house. I don’t have space in here. The windows take up too much room.”

“The windows don’t take up too much room. It’s a sunporch,” Babe says, because she does not know what else to say.

Grace does not hear her. She is too busy staring at the pictures.

“I think I’m going to have to move them one place over though. These are all of Charlie alone, but some of the ones I just brought home are of Charlie and me and Charlie and Amy. That’s what made me realize I hadn’t put up any pictures of Charlie with his parents. I don’t want them to be hurt when they come over to see it.”

Babe has stopped looking at the wall. She is staring at Grace, whose eyes are fastened on the photographs. “Grace,” she says gently.

Grace’s head whips from the wall to her. “What?”

“Nothing.”

AUGUST
1945

Grace is in the yard with Babe, struggling to untangle the hose, when she feels the emotion welling up, as overpowering as nausea. She drops the hose, pounds up the back steps, and reaches the powder room under the stairs just in time. The sobs explode from her like vomit from Amy when she has a sick stomach, but there is no one to hold Grace’s head to keep her body from thrusting forward. She stands hunched over the sink, her shoulders heaving, her misery spewing out like a foul-smelling bodily fluid.

She has stopped trying to make sense of her misery. At the memorial service, she did not shed a tear. She pressed her back against the pew until it hurt, and dug her nails into her thighs, and managed to restrain herself. But the sight of the snarled hose blindsided her.

If you just wind it up, it won’t get tangled. She can still hear the exasperation in Charlie’s voice.

But you do it so much better, she teased him.

She stands over the sink, holding on to the sides while she rocks back and forth, waiting for the sobs to subside. She knows by now she cannot force them back. When they finally die, she takes off her dark glasses and runs water over them to get rid of the tear stains, then washes her face, dries it and the glasses, puts them back on, and goes out to the yard.

Babe has managed to untangle the hose and drag it across the yard. She is sitting in one of the low canvas chairs, holding the nozzle so the water arcs over the lawn. Amy and Jack, whom Babe has taken for the day because Millie is still working at Diamond’s, dance through the spray, squealing with delight. The water winks and glistens on their brown bodies, and the soles of their feet glint pale and, it seems to Grace, terrifyingly vulnerable in the afternoon sun.

She sits in the other canvas chair, then raises her bottom to tug down her shorts. With her free hand, Babe is taking the cubes from her glass of iced tea and holding them to her forehead and neck. The afternoon festers around them like a piece of rotting fruit. It would be cooler at the pond, but Grace cannot bring herself to go to the pond, and Babe does not insist. Grace has to give her credit for that.

She thinks of going in and getting more tea and some cookies, but she does not move. She has seen the way Babe sometimes looks at her when she’s eating. Let her look. Babe has someone to watch her figure for. Babe doesn’t know what emptiness is. But she, Grace, knows the breadth and depth and yawning horror of it. After the telegram came, she could not bear the sight of food. Her stomach lurched, her throat closed, and when Millie or Babe or one of the others urged her to eat something, her insides howled in protest. But after a few months, the hollowness set in. Now she eats and eats and eats and still cannot fill it. She has put on twelve pounds, and all her clothes are too tight, and she doesn’t give a damn. She stands, goes into the house, comes back carrying a tray with a pitcher of iced tea and a plate of cookies, and puts it on the grass. Then she says the words that have been on her mind for days now.

“Someone has to speak to Millie.”

“About what?” Babe asks.

Isn’t that Babe all over? She knows perfectly well about what.

“That Al Baum.”

“
That
Al Baum? You mean the one with horns?”

“I didn’t mean it that way. You can’t say I haven’t been perfectly nice to him every time I’ve seen him. But Millie can’t marry a Jew. She never would have dreamed of it before the war.”

At least Babe has the sense not to argue with that.

“Besides, she’s only known him a few months.”

Babe lifts the hose and makes figure eights in the air. The children chase the spray, trying to grab it with their hands. “During the war, lots of people got married faster than that.”

“And all you have to do is look around you to see how well some of those marriages are working out. But it’s not just how long she’s known him; it’s how long Pete’s been gone. How can she even think of getting married again so soon?”

“It’s more than a year,” Babe says, and Grace wants to shout at her: You think a year is any time at all? You think a year is long enough to stop reaching out in half sleep and finding that the sheets beside you are cold and empty? You think a year can make you feel whole? Instead, she says, “Just because she put away Pete’s things doesn’t mean she’s over him. Mac agrees with me. And he had a psychiatry course in medical school.”

“How do you know what Mac thinks?”

“He wrote to me after he heard about Charlie, and we’ve corresponded a little since. I told him about Millie—after all, he’s Pete’s brother—and he agrees with me. It’s too soon. That’s why you have to talk to her.”

“How did we get from someone has to talk to her to
I
have to talk to her?”

“Because she’ll think I have an ax to grind.”

The sound of a car honking up the driveway almost drowns out Grace’s words. The children forget the spray and run shrieking across the yard. Uncle Claude, Uncle Claude, Uncle Claude, they scream.

He scoops them up, one in each arm. Grace notices the way his left hand cups Jack’s small bathing-suit-clad bottom and thinks, two fingers, only two fingers, such a puny loss.

Jack clings to Claude for a moment, then wriggles down, but Amy winds her skinny arms around his neck and hangs on for dear life.

Grace squints at the sight, and in her narrowed vision, Claude becomes Charlie. The sun bounces off his hair, iridescent as a crow’s, and his face breaks into a grin, and she sees herself rising from the chair, crossing the yard, and walking into his arms. The three of them stand there, she and Charlie and Amy, holding one another under the rainbow of water from the hose, which later she will wind up and carefully put away.

SOMEONE HAS TO TALK
to Grace. King knows that as soon as he hears the rumors about Millie Swallow. Poor Pete is barely in his grave, and his widow is running around with somebody new. A Yid no less. King saw them coming out of a movie one night, holding hands. It made him sick to his stomach. Grace is a sensible girl, no Millie Swallow, but he is not taking any chances.

THE FIRST THING
Grace sees as she comes down the back steps is the hose. She did not put it away after Babe left yesterday. It coils across the yard, menacing as a snake. She takes Amy’s hand and gives it a wide berth on her way to the garage.

In the car, Amy sits at the other end of the front seat, her small face set in a long-suffering mask, her thin body squirmingly hot in her pink dress with the smocked top and puffed sleeves. Grace should have put her in a pinafore, but King and Dorothy take Sunday dinner seriously.

“Don’t lean against the door.” She does not mean to snap. She is not looking forward to this any more than Amy is. But pleasure is beside the point. They are Charlie’s parents. Charlie is alive in that house as much as he is in theirs. In a way, he is more alive. She is so inured to the photographs of Charlie in her house that sometimes she cannot see them. The thought shocks her. But the pictures in King and Dorothy’s house are less familiar. Charlie ambushes her from end tables, and hutches, and the big portrait in the entrance hall. King commissioned it when Charlie was six. It is the one possession of her mother-in-law’s she covets. Dorothy has told her more than once that she will get the pearls, the diamond clip, and her other jewelry, the silver and the linens and the crystal, all of it in safekeeping for Amy, but what she cannot wait for is the portrait of a six-year-old Charlie, sitting with one leg tucked under him, his level—even then—brown eyes staring out at the world.

They stand under the portrait now. It hangs over them, golden as the sun, hallowed as a cross. He is with them. Grace can feel his presence. Then Amy darts away to find Naomi in the kitchen, King says he wants to talk to her, and Charlie slips away. He is always doing that to her.