The Last Embrace (29 page)

Frustration exploded in me then. I was caught between them, when the truth was I didn't want—or need—to belong to anyone.

Teddy and I started from the room. As we reached the hospital lobby, I stopped. “Teddy, wait. About this trip—”

“You want to do this alone,” he said.

“Yes.” I glimpsed Claire watching us from across the parking lot.

“Marry me, Ad,” Teddy said, and as he looked up at me, his eyes were bright and hopeful as a child on Christmas morning. He stood before me, palms raised plaintively. I saw then the life that could be mine. A normal life. Not boring—Teddy would undoubtedly keep traveling and getting into the scrapes chasing stories for which he was known and I could go along with him. Or we might have a family. He would love me unconditionally. Why couldn't I take that and run with it?

I opened my mouth to tell him yes. The life he offered appeared once again, gleaming like a shiny jewel. But something stopped me, seeming to hold me back, the dream just beyond reach.

“Teddy...”

“You're not coming back, are you?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, realizing even as I spoke that I was not.

“I've known for some time I couldn't win,” he admitted.

I tried to ignore the feeling of being a prize at a fair. “Since when?”

“When you were in the hospital. You were calling out in your sleep,” he said, and I could tell by the skip in his voice that it wasn't his name I had been calling.

But that had been weeks ago. Even after, he had played along and said nothing, just happy to have my company. For everything that I had done, he still loved me and wanted me to be his. Remorse filled me then. He deserved so much better than this. He deserved someone who could love him wholly.

But I could not hide in his affections either. It was time for me to know myself instead. I reached out and Teddy's eyes lifted with hope in a way that broke my heart. I bypassed his lips and kissed him firmly on the cheek. Then I stepped sideways, moving away from him and Charlie both.

“I'm sorry.” And I walked from the hospital by myself, knowing it was time, finally, to go home.

Atlantic
City
August 1944

I sit at the top of the street, gazing out at the row of shore houses, still lost in memories. What am I doing back here? I should be in London, working at the paper and starting a life with Teddy. I start the engine and turn the wheel, headed back. But something steadies me.
You made the right choice
, a voice too calm and sure to be my own seems to say. I start forward.

It has been more than a week since I'd walked from the hospital in England. I had not gone alone: Claire had followed me as the guard hailed a taxi for me just outside the base. “So you're leaving?” I cringed, waiting for her to rebuke me for throwing away Teddy's love so callously and running again. But she had smiled. “I'm proud of you, lass. You're standing on your own two feet now. I don't know what you're looking for. But I hope you find it.”

I'd left Claire with kisses and gratitude and promises to write, and made my way north over her insistence that I could not possibly go alone. I stopped at my flat to pack a bag, but there had not been time to visit the orphanage. As my train pulled from Waterloo Station, I looked in the direction of Theed Street. Leo's sister and the others should be arriving anytime now and I wouldn't be here to see them, or his joy at their reunion. I'd done what I could. I sent up a prayer for them and imagined it blowing north with the wind.

During those long days as we crossed the Atlantic, Charlie's face kept appearing in my mind. Though I had chosen to leave, I could not help but be angry at him. He had professed to love me, but he had fallen in with Grace so easily. And not just a fling—he had asked her to marry him.

It was late when we docked in New York, the Statue of Liberty shrouded in fog. I cleared Immigration easily this time with a wave of my US passport, so different than my arrival as a girl. I made my way into the city and found a room. The next morning I caught the first bus from the Port Authority to Philadelphia. I approached Porter Street in the still of pre-dawn and found the slanted row houses unchanged. I let myself into the house. Perhaps Aunt Bess was at the hospital. I dreaded the notion of going there and reliving that most awful of nights when we lost Robbie. But I found Aunt Bess in the living room. She sat on a low chair, wearing a dark dress. The clocks and mirrors were covered with black cloth.

“Oh, honey,” Aunt Bess cried, standing up. I was too late. Uncle Meyer had died before my aunt's telegram ever reached me. The neighbors who had come for shivah had departed, leaving now-dried-out kugel and desserts in good dishes they would collect later.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I wish I could have gotten back from London in time.” My voice was suffused with guilt.

“That's all right. It wouldn't have changed anything.” Aunt Bess's face was pale and drawn, eyes ringed from days without sleep. She looked older and fragile. I had never before stopped to think about my aunt and uncle's relationship. But in her grief, I saw the richness of their marriage that had played out alongside me while I had been oblivious, caught up in my own life. I remembered Uncle Meyer as he followed me to the bus stop the day I left. How I wished I might have the chance to thank him once more for the camera and letting me go.

It was too late for my relationship with him, but not for Aunt Bess, who suddenly looked so small. “I love you.” I put my arms around her. “We're the only family we've got.”

I helped Aunt Bess clean up the shivah dishes and persuaded her to rest while I returned the special low chair she'd sat in during the eight days of mourning to the shul. When I was done, I found myself walking the old familiar path to Pennsport, winding past the kosher deli and across the trolley tracks. The neighborhood was the same, only with new products in the old shop windows, advertisements touting cigarettes and new appliances instead of war bonds. Closer to the Irish neighborhood there were more cars, some sleeker models I did not recognize.

I pushed on, assaulted by the old smells of onions cooking in houses and too-warm garbage rising from the curb. Walking the familiar streets, I felt renewed. Whole, in a way I hadn't for years or maybe ever. But as I reached the Connallys' block, I stopped. Ghosts of the boys were everywhere, playing stickball in the street, sitting on the porch. Robbie might come bounding down the stairs as he always had, not sullen and sleepy like his brothers, but bright-eyed and hungry for breakfast and the day that lay beyond.

I had expected the Connally house to be boarded and shuttered. The porch was freshly swept, though, and fresh flowers were in the windows. My heart skipped a beat. Had the Connallys returned? I walked to the door, nearly opening it as I once might have before I caught myself. I knocked. A large, unfamiliar woman appeared in the doorway. “Yes?”

I stepped back. “I'm looking for the Connallys.” I prayed silently that the woman was a maid or some relative I had never met.

But the woman shook her head. “People who used to live here? We bought this through a broker. Owners were long gone and I can't say where.”

I walked away deflated, the windows seeming to stare after me. I could not bear to look back at the house that now belonged to someone else. “They're gone,” I said aloud, needing to hear the words to believe them. They had left long ago. But seeing it made it hurt more and the realness of it all seeped through me, as though I was losing them all over again.

“I tried to go to the Connallys' house,” I confessed to Aunt Bess later that morning as I helped her finish cleaning up. The
Breakfast Club
program played low from the radio on the table. “It isn't theirs anymore.”

She nodded, as though she already knew. “About that— Addie, there's something I have to tell you.”

I raised my hand. “If it's about Charlie, I already know.”

“Not Charlie, but Liam.”

But my head swam, the idea of more memories too painful. “I don't want to hear it.”

“Another time, perhaps.” She raised her hands, retreating. “There's something else. I want to sell the house.” I looked around in disbelief. Though I'd run so far, I had always taken for granted my aunt and uncle's home and the fact that it would be there. “The stairs have become difficult and without Meyer, I just can't bear to stay.” She trailed off, her eyes wet.

“Where will you go?”

“They've built some senior apartments in the Northeast. My friend Trudy moved there.” She was watching me, asking permission.

“Of course I'll help you. What do you need me to do?”

“I can manage the house here, straightening things to put it up for sale. But I left so much at the shore.”

I tensed up at the word. “I thought you didn't go down this summer.”

“We didn't. We had planned to but then Meyer started feeling poorly.” I had thought his illness was sudden. Why hadn't she written to me sooner? She continued. “But we already paid, so the owner let us keep the rooms and the shed, too. Our things there need to be retrieved. I couldn't manage it myself.”

Nor could I, I thought. The emptiness here was nearly unbearable—how could I stare at the memory of what had been right next door at the beach? But looking at my aunt's face, which had been hollowed out by grief, and her pleading eyes, I could not refuse. “I'll do it.” I regretted the words the moment I spoke them.

“I don't need everything. You can give away the beach things. I just want the photos—and anything that was your uncle's.”

“Okay.”

“Take the car.”

I hesitated. Uncle Meyer had taken me driving a few times during my senior year of high school in the abandoned lots down by the shipyard, but I did not have a license. It would be quicker than the train, though, and I could leave whenever I wanted.

The weatherman came on the radio then and we grew instinctively quiet, as though Uncle Meyer might be here to shush us so he could hear the forecast. We both chuckled. Then Aunt Bess's face grew somber. “What is it?” I asked.

“I know you have your own life and you'll be going back to London. But, well, I miss you.”

“I'll be back,” I promised, meaning it. I thought back to the letters I never received from Charlie that would have changed everything. And I wanted to ask if it was her who had kept them from me, and if so, why? But she had done what she thought was best and reopening the past would not change things now. I exhaled, letting go of the anger, and started for the car.

So I had come, driving the route to the shore that had always meant such happiness. I stopped at a five-and-dime on the way to get a couple of changes of clothes and at a gas station in Egg Harbor, grateful that the car, which Uncle Meyer used as a traveling salesman, had an A-sticker, which exempted it from much of the gas rationing.

Pushing down the waves that loom dark in my mind, I focus once more on the narrow strip of Sunset Avenue in front of me, the last few steps of this journey the hardest. I park in front of the house where we once rented rooms and step out of the car into the bright sunlight. Beside it, the Connally place looks as though it has been frozen in time. It has a fresh coat of blue paint the exact shade it had always been. Even the porch swing still hangs at the same angle.

I stand motionless. If I do not move the Robbie might come running out the door at any moment, zeppelin in hand zooming high above his head.

I exhale. Everything is not the same. There has been work done at the house: a pile of cut boards by the steps, the smell of wet paint. Another new family, undoubtedly, has bought the shore house like the one back in Philly, people who have no idea what the property meant, the things that had taken place there.

Forcing myself to look straight ahead, I walk to the boardinghouse where we had rented rooms. I take the key that Aunt Bess had given me and open the door to the storage shed. My nose is instantly filled with the camphor smell of mothballs. I pull a damp box from the shed and brush a cobweb from it. Then I stop uncertainly. Aunt Bess had not asked me to sort the boxes, just to bring them home. I can just put them right in the car. But perhaps I can get rid of some of the things she does not need. I am curious, too, about what's left behind after all of this time.

I lug one of the boxes to our rooms upstairs. My eyes travel through the screened window, down to the patch of grass between the houses where the boys once played. Swallowing over the lump in my throat, I force myself to look away. The smell of musty cardboard rises as I open the box. There is a framed photograph of Aunt Bess and Uncle Meyer standing in front of a car, an older model than the one I drove down here, dressed for some sort of excursion. They are smiling in a way I had never seen and even though he was wearing a hat, I can see that my uncle had a full head of hair. Younger people, with their own hopes and dreams.

I cough to clear the dust from my throat, then continue sorting. They are mostly vacation things, like the old woven blanket Aunt Bess used for the beach, the now-cracked bucket and shovel she had gotten me with the best of intentions, not realizing I was too old for such things.

Sometime later, I look up. Outside the sun has dipped low behind the houses along the bay. There are no lamps here and soon it will be impossible to see what I am doing. It is later than I thought and I should head back before dark. But I have only made it through one box and there are still four more to go. Some part of me, too, is not ready to leave yet. I could stay the night and finish up in the morning. Why not? I pull a musty blanket from one of the boxes and curl up on the empty bed on the sunporch. Through the open screen I can almost hear the boys' voices, mixed in with the crashing of the surf. The salt air fills my lungs like a lullaby and despite my closeness to the sea, I do not dream at all.

I awaken early, bright sunlight shining through curtainless windows. My body is stiff from sleeping on the thin mattress in a way it hadn't been a few years earlier. I lie motionless, assaulted by the familiar brackish smell, rolling back through the years. I am caught up in a cyclone of memories, taking me back to places I don't want to go. I sit up. I need to finish the boxes and go. There is noise below, different than the cars on the street, a low, repetitive swishing. Someone must be working on the Connally house next door. My heart aches as I think of the changes they are making, heedless of all that came before. I sit up and crane my neck out the window, but can see nothing. My soul cries out for coffee. I put on my shoes and make my way down to the street.

I start in the direction of the coffee shop at the corner of Winchester Avenue. The counter looks unchanged and I half expect to see the boys at the counter, ordering milk shakes. I buy coffee, then go to the phone booth in the back, put in some coins and dial.

“Addie, thank goodness.” Aunt Bess's voice floods the line with relief.

“I'm sorry I worried you. I got caught up sorting and decided to stay. I should finish up later today.”