Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2)
Read Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2) Online
Authors: Barbara Bretton
Tags: #Women's fiction, #Mid-Century America
Stranger in Paradise
Barbara Bretton
USA Today
Bestselling Author
Acclaim for the novels of
Barbara Bretton
“Bretton’s characters are always real and their conflicts believable.”
— Chicago Sun-Times
“Soul warming... A powerful relationship drama [for] anyone who enjoys a passionate look inside the hearts and souls of the prime players.”
— Midwest Book Review
“[Bretton] excels in her portrayal of the sometimes sweet, sometimes stifling ties of a small community. The town’s tight network of loving, eccentric friends and family infuses the tale with a gently comic note that perfectly balances the darker dramas of the romance.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A tender love story about two people who, when they find something special, will go to any length to keep it.”
— Booklist
“Honest, witty... absolutely unforgettable.”
— Rendezvous
“A classic adult fairy tale.”
— Affaire de Coeur
“Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”
— Rocky Mountain News
Publishing History
Print edition published by Harlequin
Copyright 1990, 2014 by Barbara Bretton
Digital Edition published by Barbara Bretton 2014
Cover design by
Tammy Seidick Design
Digital formatting by
A Thirsty Mind Book Design
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Christmas Day, 1990
The house on Hansen Street had seen many Christmases, but this Christmas would be its last.
The three women climbed the steps to the attic slowly, each one lost in her own world of memory. The Wilson house had been part of their childhood, the one constant in a world that didn’t put much stock in stability and continuity.
World War II. The Korean conflict. The tragedy of Vietnam. The old house had borne silent witness to the sorrows and joys of the Wilson family and their friends for more than seven decades. Marriages had taken place in the front parlor. Babies had been conceived and delivered in the upstairs bedroom. Deaths had been mourned at the scarred kitchen table while the room filled with the aroma of percolating coffee and sweet memories.
Decades of change. Years of turmoil. The three women knew nothing was forever, but somehow they’d always believed there would be one exception to that rule, and the Wilson place would endure.
The house on Hansen Street had almost defied the odds. When their neighbors relented and sold their properties to the highest bidders, the Wilsons had held on. When the neighborhood grew narrower and more violent, the Wilsons clung to tradition. The Weavers had sold their home in the early sixties, intent upon seeing the world from their Winnebago, but although the Wilsons wanted to see the world, too, they wanted the security of a home base.
Not even Tom’s death five years ago had convinced Dot Wilson to relinquish her home.
Progress, however, was both ally and foe, and in the end it had been progress that was Dot Wilson’s undoing. “The house has got to go,” said the nice young man from the Department of Housing. “We’re putting up a ten-story co-op and your property’s the last to fall into line.”
And so Dot had sold her beloved home to a man with red suspenders and a beeper attached to his belt and was now going to live with her daughter Nancy in Connecticut. “One last holiday,” she had told the young man with no humor in his soul. “January second it’s all yours.”
They had said it would be the death of her. “We’ll hire help,” said Catherine, ever the businesswoman. “You shouldn’t be doing all of that, Mom.”
Eighty-six-year-old Dot was having none of it. If this was to be her last Christmas in the house on Hansen Street, she would make certain it was the most wonderful Christmas ever. She scrubbed and polished, waxed and dusted, until every last surface gleamed. She baked fruitcakes and sugar cookies and the gingerbread men her great-grandchildren loved and roasted a giant tom turkey they’d still be talking about at Eastertime.
But there was one thing she couldn’t do, and it was why her two favorite granddaughters and her dearest godchild were braving the dusty attic.
“A lot of memories up here,” said thirty-seven-year-old Christine Danza Monahan, Catherine’s daughter.
Her cousin Linda Sturdevant Morris, Nancy’s eldest daughter, gazed around the huge room. “You can almost hear the walls talking, can’t you?”
Wilson blood didn’t run through Elizabeth Mary Weaver’s veins, but that was only a technicality. Liz had been steeped in Hansen Street history from the day she was born. Blood ties were important, but ties of the heart sometimes bound families together even more tightly. Years and years ago, back before the Second World War, her father’s brother had been engaged to marry Christine’s mother. Uncle Douglas had died somewhere in the Pacific, taking with him her grandparents’ hope of uniting the Weaver clan with the Wilsons.
But, as she stood there in the quiet attic with her two dearest friends, it seemed to Liz that the distinction between friend and family grew less important with each year that passed. She had inherited her father’s wanderlust and her mother’s beauty; and from both of them had come a love of words. Her career had taken her from Bangkok to Borneo and back again, but her heart always brought her back to Hansen Street.
To this house. This musty attic room.
To the letters and diaries in the trunk by the window.
It was all there, all the beauty and wonder and sorrow of life, there in the papers and scrapbooks and photographs packed away with wedding dresses and pressed corsages. Somehow the Wilson attic had become the repository of memories for two families and, in a fashion, of a way of life long gone.
Beauty wasn’t all Liz had inherited from her English-born mother. The need for family, for connection, was ingrained in her soul, as much a part of her genetic makeup as the dark color of her tousled hair or the soft blue of her eyes. Fate hadn’t seen fit to bless her with husband or child, and so she had taken on the responsibility of historian. It was Liz who had listened to all the stories, Liz who had shared the letters and diaries, Liz whose modern and practical heart yearned for a love of her own.
“Will you look at these?” Christine knelt near the open trunk and lifted a thick stack of letters tied with a faded red ribbon. “Seaman Gerald Sturdevant and Miss Nancy Wilson.” Grinning, she handed them to her cousin. “Remember when we used to say our parents didn’t think that way?”
Linda’s eyes widened as she looked at the yellowed pages written during World War II. “So it’s true,” she said, her voice soft with wonder. “They really did fall in love through the mail.”
“You didn’t believe it?” Liz had never once doubted the possibility of such things, although she’d never been fortunate to experience them herself. She liked to believe that somewhere out there was the one man she was meant to love. She also liked to believe, although it seemed less likely with every passing year, that she would one day find him.
“Who would believe it?” Linda countered, her attention riveted on the love letters. “I can’t remember ever receiving a love letter in my life. You can’t wrap a red ribbon around a long-distance phone call.”
“Poor baby,” said Christine, rummaging through the accumulated memories in the trunk. “Married to the most handsome man in all of New York City and she’s complaining.”
Liz knelt next to the trunk. “Over there,” she said, pointing at a bundle of pale pink envelopes banded together with a lilac grosgrain ribbon. “That’s Aunt Cathy’s handwriting.” She remembered those letters, so stiff and formal at first as Catherine recovered from the death of her fiancé, then gradually warming into a friendship destined to blaze into love.
Would it ever happen for her, that wonderful moment of recognition where past and present come together to make the future possible?
Christine lifted the stack of letters, then retrieved the thin airmail sheets from her father. “Amazing,” she said, with a shake of her head. “All these from a man who’s never so much as written a grocery list in all the years since.”
Open your eyes
, Liz thought.
Can’t you see the people who used to be?
Love wasn’t a modern invention. Before computer chips and microwave ovens and VCRs, men and women had fallen in love and married and somehow managed to make happily-ever-after come true....
June 1953
Mac Weaver hadn’t seen a crowd like this since V-E Day eight years ago. He’d led off yesterday’s story with that statement and he could lead off today’s story with it, as well. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant British subjects jammed the narrow streets, all vying for a glimpse of their brand new queen. They were a good-natured crowd, even those who believed the monarchy should go the way of the dinosaur, a crowd banded together by centuries of tradition, generations of civility, and years of war. A far cry from the chaos he’d experienced in Korea just three short months before.
“Shove over, Yank,” said a wiry reporter in a Harris Tweed jacket. “Can’t expect me to see over a skyscraper.”
“Sure thing.” Mac stepped back and let the English reporter move in front of him.
“Grow them tall in the States,” the reporter said over his shoulder. “Texas?”
“New York.”
“Same thing, isn’t it, Yank?”
“Yeah,” said Mac with a rueful laugh. “In a way it is.”
When you were three thousand miles away from home, it really didn’t matter what state you were from. As it was, Mac stood out like a six-foot-three sore thumb as he waited in front of Westminster Abbey for the procession to arrive. An all-American sore thumb.
He thought like an American, he moved like an American, he talked and joked and worked like an American. Hard to believe he hadn’t been back home in more than seven and a half years. He patted the ticket in the inside pocket of his battered trench coat. Well, that was about to change. Last night he’d managed to pull some strings and book passage on the
Queen Mary
. In less than a week he’d be back in New York where he belonged.
That was, if he belonged anywhere at all.
One of the drawbacks of being a foreign correspondent was the fact that you spent a lot of time in hotels with room-service dinners and tattered guidebooks for company. Not that he didn’t enjoy the life of a rolling stone. He’d never given a lot of thought to things like families and permanence. His folks had enough permanence for the entire Weaver clan. Les and Edna had been in the house in Forest Hills for almost forty years and, God willing, he knew they’d be there another forty more. And if his kid brother had lived, Mac had no doubt Doug would have followed suit.
Someone in the Weaver family had to blaze new trails and see the world, and that someone was Mac. His first job had been as a cub reporter for the
New York Daily News
, and his coverage of a major garment district fire had attracted notice. One thing led to another and before he was twenty-five, he was working in the Paris office of the
New York Times
. Then the war came and duty called. His reputation as a journalist had cushioned Mac from the worst of it. He’d been in danger—but not too much danger. He’d smelled the gunfire—but not up close. He’d covered the war—but he’d never really been part of it.
When his brother died, Mac wondered why in hell the Almighty had chosen to take Doug’s life and spare his own. But of course there were no answers to that question—at least none he could come up with. So Mac drank a lot and swore a lot and wrote some of the best war stories of his career while he was drinking and swearing.
Those stories had made his name and now, eight years after the Allied victory, he was still riding high on them. He could probably parlay his credits into another few years on the foreign beat, but he knew when it was time to hang up his passport and move on. Of course, that wasn’t the entire truth. His bureau chief had made it patently clear that Mac’s presence was getting to be a bit of a problem.
“It’s not that we don’t respect your work, Weaver,” the old boy had said during their last meeting. “It’s just that the higher-ups think it’s time for a change, what with the problem in Korea almost over and all that.”
The problem in Korea
. That said it in a nutshell, didn’t it? You couldn’t go around telling everybody that the emperor had no clothes before they finally asked you to look the other way.
Besides, the strangest thing had happened: he was homesick. He was tired of fighting, tired of running, tired of seeing young men die. All the lessons we should have learned during the last war seemed to have been put aside like yesterday’s news. The players may have changed, but the script was still the same: the perennial struggle to see who is king of the mountain.
America’s isolationist days had disappeared with the first bomb dropped on Pearl Harbor. There was no turning back to the days of smug security, sure in the knowledge that Americans were inviolate. With power came responsibility. With prosperity came ambition.
We overstepped our bounds. We made mistakes. Mac wrote about them. The McCarthyites read about them and made a note of his name. And that was why it was time to move on.
This time moving on meant moving back to where it had all begun: New York City. His hometown. For weeks now he’d had the feeling he was on the verge of something big. Something exciting. Something different from anything he’d ever done before. An adventure. He didn’t know what it was exactly, but he knew it was right around the corner, if he only knew where to look.
London, however, was a demanding mistress. If you looked closely enough, you could still see the scars of war on the magnificent old city, but those scars only added to her luster and brilliance. He’d done his best work there in London, written his best stories, seen the best that mankind had to offer. His admiration for the British people was boundless. Their bravery was the stuff of which legends were made. Not that Mac had committed any acts of bravery himself. Bravery required a certain involvement, and Mac had danced through most of his life, avoiding exactly that.
It hadn’t taken Amy Sterling, his hometown girlfriend, long after V-E Day to figure that out for herself.
I need someone who’s there for me, Mac,
Amy’s letter had said.
Someone who’ll be there when I need him, not running all over the globe
....
Well, Amy had gotten her wish. She had a husband and a house and three kids. Rumor had it she went to PTA meetings and drove a Ford station wagon and made the best apple pie in Richmond Hill. And if she ever thought about Mac it was probably with a touch of pity that he was all alone.
You’d think he’d have learned, wouldn’t you, by the time he found Suzette. But, no. Same mistakes. Different continent. Suzette and her husband, Bernard, now lived with their children in a château in the Loire valley.
Even his rowdiest friends had all settled down into marriage and their own personal baby booms while Mac covered everything from murders to movie stars to coronations. “You’ve got the life, pal,” they’d said when he’d gone home for a visit in 1946, all hail-the-conquering-hero. “No mortgages for you. No dirty diapers and 2 a.m. feedings for our Mac.” Mac Weaver shoveling snow in the driveway?
Not on your life
. Punching a time clock in some dreary office?
You’ve got to be kidding
.
Mac Weaver with someone who cared about him?
Sorry. Can’t help you there, Mac.
Maybe it was the thought of going home that was getting to him. For thirty-five years being alone hadn’t bothered him. Lately, however, he’d begun to feel the pinch of time as he watched colleagues go home to wife and kids while he spent his nights in pub after pub, bemoaning the state of the world.
Or maybe he’d seen one war too many. Sure as hell nobody had been ready to go to battle again so soon after the end of World War II. It had been hard to tackle the issue of Korea. First of all there was the question of nomenclature. Washington balked at the word “war.” “Police action” had a certain arrogant cachet while “conflict” implied a battle of words not weapons. The carnage he’d seen had been anything but a war of semantics.
Once again a generation of young men were laying down their lives, and this time it was difficult to figure out what they were fighting for. Europe was still struggling to recover from the ravages of World War II—and starting to wonder if they should watch their eastern borders as the USSR gathered strength and purpose.
Panmunjom. The Yalu River. Inchon. Places that had been unknown three years ago were on every tongue today. The fledgling United Nations was stretching its wings with this conflict, and Mac didn’t have a hell of a lot of confidence that the outcome would be what everyone hoped for.
He liked his battles clearly defined, with good guys and bad guys, and an ending like one in a Hollywood B-movie. When you can’t even call a war a war, you’re in big trouble. He’d made reference to those feelings in a column three months ago and, before he knew what hit him, he found himself transferred back to the European beat.
At least with a coronation, there was no doubt about who the good guy was, not when she wore a frilly white dress and a crown of diamonds and emeralds and rubies. Leave it to the English: they moaned about the obsolescence of royalty in the nuclear age, but give them an occasion to break out the glass coach and the high-stepping horses, and they come out in number to cheer their monarch on.
All you had to do was look around at the faces in the crowd and you’d see he was absolutely right. The wiry reporter in front of him was probably from a working-class family in Birmingham. That gent over by the bobby had Oxford written all over his aristocratic face and a bloodline bluer than the Danube. Charwomen mingled with society grande dames—at least the grande dames who hadn’t received an invitation from the queen. Rich man, poor man, beggerman, thief. They were all represented in the throng. School kids, young mothers, beautiful women with glossy black hair tumbling over their shoulders—
Wait a minute. His gaze returned to the vision jockeying for a front-row position in the dense knot of people near the bobby...
she’d smell like rose petals in the spring... her voice would be gentler than a summer rain...
Small delicate features in a fine-boned cameo of a face framed by a silken cascade of lustrous waves. If she topped five foot two, she was lucky...
candlelight and soft music... she’d step into his arms, her head resting against his chest as they danced...
It was a wonder she hadn’t been trampled by the mob. In New York, she would have been flattened in a minute.
But this wasn’t New York. This was London. Girls with porcelain skin like that didn’t live in Queens or Brooklyn.
Her eyes are blue
, he thought, ignoring the roar of the crowd and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves approaching.
Cornflower blue...
“Hey, Yank! Where you off to? The queen’s about to arrive.”
Mac no longer cared. He pushed his way into the crowd to meet the woman of his dreams.
* * *
Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, wife of Prince Philip of Greece, the Duke of Edinburgh, mother of Prince Charles and Princess Anne, was about to be crowned Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories, head of the Commonwealth, defender of the faith—and Jane Townsend, loyal subject and hardworking newspaper reporter, could think of nothing but her feet.
And why shouldn’t she? Stylish shoes were dreadful things, really, but Jane had never been one to sacrifice vanity for practicality. For three days now she’d been running all over London, from Covent Garden to Downing Street to Hyde Park, covering the story of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and she had come to one very important conclusion: high heels were the devil’s own invention. She glared down at the feet of the male reporters who flanked her. Sensible brogans. Casual Italian loafers. One enterprising soul actually wore field-hockey shoes.
She sighed. It was a man’s world. No doubt at all in her mind. She wondered how successful Lowell Thomas or Edward R. Murrow would have been had they been forced to track down their big stories while wearing three-inch heels.
Not that she was about to stop wearing her fashionable shoes. When you were only five foot one and a quarter, you did everything you possibly could to gain extra inches and sought to repair the damage later with a long soak in a hot tub and the fortification of a dry martini. But even with the dreadful high heels on, she still was having one bloody awful time getting a glimpse of the avenue in front of Westminster.
For all she knew, Lillibet, as the new queen was known to her family and friends, was doing a jig right there for all the world to see.
All the world save Jane Townsend.
Not that it came as any surprise to Jane. She had known coming back to London would be difficult at best. If it hadn’t been for the grand nature of the event, she would have told Leo to cover the story himself. She was too practical a girl to write about fairy tales and happily-ever-after. She knew there were no happy endings. You didn’t lose your mother when you were a little girl of six and believe in nursery stories for long.
It seemed to Jane she had done her best work on the very first day of the festivities. The sight of families camping out along the sidewalk with blankets wrapped around them against the chill drizzle called to mind the darkest days of the war. Families had huddled under blankets then, too, down below the streets in the underground tube stations. Instead of fireworks, it had been the Luftwaffe lighting up the night sky with terror. Her brother, dead on the beaches of Normandy. Her father, lost in an air raid not two blocks from where she was standing right now. The streets were filled with ghosts of friends long gone, and Jane marveled that she had let her editor convince her to return to the city of her birth. Even the queen wasn’t enough to erase the sorrow in her heart.
“Give us a smile now, will you, lovey?” A rosy-checked man with a big fat cigar winked at her. “No need to look so serious on such a splendid day.”
Ha! Jane fought down the urge to kick him in his stubby shins. There was nothing like a lecherous old man to bring one back to the matter at hand. If she didn’t return home to Liverpool with a smashing feature story, her editor would have her head on a silver platter. Leo Donnelly had handed her the plum assignment of the century, and here Jane was, dithering on about her sore feet and thinking longingly of a warm bubble bath and a cool martini.