A Fireproof Home for the Bride (14 page)

“Good for her?” Emmy supposed. Bev bit her lower lip and wrung her hands together, as though wrestling with an internal thought that was about to win.

“Look,” she said, blowing at her reef of bangs. “I’m not supposed to say anything, but Josephine’s your great-aunt. She lives north of Moorhead and married her first cousin Raymond.”

Emmy blinked down at the orange box in her hand; the cameo of a cow smiled up at her. Josie. She blinked back. “What do you mean?”

“Your grandmother’s sister.” Bev squinted. “I promised not to tell you, but really I don’t get why it’s such a
secret.
From what they say, it all happened so long ago I figured you probably knew all about it anyway.”

Emmy thought about her grandmother’s confession, her mother’s confirmation. “I don’t know much of anything.”

“Oh, dear,” Bev said, stroking Emmy’s arm. “Mother insisted you wouldn’t know, and now I’ve gone and done it. She said your parents should be the ones to tell you.”

Emmy shook her head. “My mother never tells me anything.”

Bev blinked twice, a thought maturing into decision. “Well, it was quite a falling-out, apparently.” She set the dry ingredients on the counter one by one. “Adelaide—that’s your grandmother, right?”

“Yes,” Emmy said, setting the box of gelatin next to the sugar canister. “We call her Lida.”

“Well, when she and Josephine were younger, they were courted by the same man—some sort of traveling preacher.” Bev said the words as though they tasted sweet. “I don’t know the details, but it was during the war, and I think he either moved on to the next town or went to Europe to fight. Lida married your grandfather and never spoke to Josephine again. It’s all so silly because all along Josephine only ever loved Ray—she just couldn’t tell anyone or do anything about it, because they were cousins, like me and Howie.” Bev sighed and touched a small silver heart on a chain around her delicate neck. “Jo’s a friend of the family. Wait until you meet her. She’s the limit.”

“That’s what Grandmother said,” Emmy echoed. “Stephen loved Josie, but Josie loved Ray.”

“So romantic,” Bev said, and began to order the selected ingredients into a neat row on the counter, writing down the things they would need Mrs. Hagen to purchase for Thursday’s class. Bev stopped her busy movements and turned her full green eyes on Emmy. “Speaking of, I need a favor,” she whispered.

“Of course.” The bell rang. Emmy looked up at the clock; it was three forty-five.

“Can I come over to your house after school?” Bev said, tidying up their workstation so it would be ready when class resumed on Thursday.

“There’s no one there, so I can’t ask,” Emmy said.

“Perfect,” Bev said. “I really need someplace to meet Howie without my parents finding out.”

Emmy smiled shyly at the feeling of being needed by Bev. She knew her father wouldn’t be home until at least eight, and her mother and Birdie were out at the farm. “I don’t see why not.”

“Thanks, kid.” Bev grinned. “You’re a real peach.”

*   *   *

Bev drove north on Eighth Street and crossed over Main. As they passed the winter-shuttered windows of the Dairy Queen, Emmy saw Howie’s sleek hot rod glide out of the empty parking lot and into the lane behind them. A train was crossing up ahead, and Bev coasted to a stop as they waited for a long line of freight cars to rattle by. They were loud and heavy, and Bev had turned the radio up full the moment she’d started the car. Jerry Lee Lewis was blasting out of the speakers, his throbbing voice and the vibrations from the thundering rails putting Emmy on the edge of the aqua seat. Bev pushed the lighter into the dash and pointed at the glove compartment.

“Do me a favor, would you,” she shouted. Emmy pulled out a fresh pack of Camels. Bev took them from her and tapped the small square box daintily against the palm of her hand before extracting two cigarettes and lighting both at the same time. She gave one to Emmy and turned down the radio.

“Want to hear more about Jo? I have to admit, I’m a little obsessed with her,” Bev said, exhaling a thick cloud into the space between them. She then continued to talk without waiting for Emmy’s response. Her heart jumped greedily as Bev began to pour out the details of Josephine Randall’s life, including her days as a suffragist with Bev’s grandmother, and how she started a newsletter just for women during the Second World War—information on rations, war effort meetings, help for new widows, and other ways to get assistance while the men were so far away. According to Bev, Josephine also took care of her elderly relatives, and for the longest time never married or showed any interest in men. “Which led to the kind of gossip you might expect about a woman who always wore pants,” Bev said with a knowing smile.

Emmy wasn’t sure what kind of gossip she was supposed to expect, so she kept quiet as her cigarette burned unsmoked in her hand, the paper slowly receding into rings of ash as Bev rambled on about Josephine’s love for her older cousin Raymond, who was sent off to Minneapolis, with the parental expectation that he would find other interests. Bev tapped her fingers on the steering wheel in time with the passing train. “That’s what my parents want.” She glanced in the rearview mirror and smiled with her lips pursed. “Anyway, Josephine stayed on the family estate, living with Raymond’s widowed mother while taking occasional trips east and beyond. I think she lived a sort of double life, wandering for a few weeks in Morocco or Prague, then coming home to spoon-feed Raymond’s mother on her deathbed. Can you imagine?”

“No,” Emmy said. She marveled at the details of Bev’s storytelling, suspecting that just a smidge of it might be embossed with her friend’s romantic gilding.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she secretly went on those trips with Raymond,” Bev said wistfully. “At least I hope she did. Otherwise it would be just too, too desperate a life to live without him.”

“But you said they married,” Emmy said, dropping an inch of ash into the tray before extinguishing the stub.

“Right, they did, about ten years ago, after his mother finally died. There was a bit of gossip, but Josephine has never cared what people say about her.”

Emmy leaned against the seat. “At least they’re together.”

“Not exactly,” Bev said, rolling down the window and tossing her cigarette out into the street. “Raymond died two years ago, heart attack. He was quite a bit older, but the years they had together were good ones. And like I said, I’m pretty sure they didn’t go all that time completely without contact, though it is tragic to think so.” She looked again into the rearview and pressed her lips together, corrected a small curl that had flipped the other way on her forehead. “How do I look?”

“Perfect.”

“‘Chances Are’!” Bev said, cranking the radio dial. “Oh, God, Mathis is my absolute favorite!” The train ended and the gates went up. The cars in front of them crept and then moved forward more swiftly. Emmy listened to Bev’s sweet harmonizing as they bounced up and over the rails, into the north side of Moorhead, where the houses quickly diminished in size and quaintness. These were modest two-story homes with atticlike second floors, mostly square boxes with small square yards, many built in the years after the war to provide cheap housing for veterans. Emmy thought about her great-aunt, whose life was so different from Lida’s. At the last note they swung in front of the Nelson house, and Emmy suddenly realized how tiny and careworn her life looked from the outside. In the wake of Bev’s colorful love story of Josephine Randall, here Emmy could see only the brackish end point of Adelaide Randall’s choice. Having the family’s history revealed changed nothing for Emmy.

Bev killed the engine and in the side mirror Emmy could see Howie already leaning against the front of his car, carefully combing his hair into place. Bev shook some tiny Sen-Sen squares into her hand and tossed the pack to Emmy before bolting from the car.

Emmy watched in the reflective oval as the scene unfolded. She considered what forbidden love must taste like, and how it could unravel even the most neatly woven lives. It looked a good deal more exciting than kissing Ambrose. The idea of his stiff frame bending enough to accommodate the kind of temperature that existed between Bev and Howie made Emmy feel something akin to despair. A spiraling sense of panic wormed inside of her, and her eyes filled with the frustrated tears of hewing too closely to her mother-manicured life.

Emmy dried her eyes on her beige sleeve and opened the door. Bev spun around and smiled, her hair messy, her coat undone. The couple’s happy gaze fell upon Emmy and she let herself feel the pull of it and its heat, moving her forward, into life.

*   *   *

At half past five Emmy meticulously refolded the note from Bobby Doyle and yelled upstairs to Bev that it was nearing six o’clock. For the previous hour Emmy had been alone in the kitchen, first finishing her homework, and then preparing her father’s supper from a slab of veal that Ambrose had sent home with them on Sunday. Stroganoff, that’s what she’d made, from a recipe in
The Fargo Forum
. She didn’t have any broad noodles, though, so potatoes would have to do. As the sauce had simmered, she’d read Bobby’s neatly penciled words for the millionth time, even though she knew them all by heart, and also knew that they were nothing more than a collection of symbols that over time would point to a tiny moment of her premarriage history.

For the third time she heard her own bed scraping in little bursts against the floor above, Bev’s shrieks and giggles, Howie’s low “atta girls’” growled as much as spoken. Intercourse had never been a great mystery to Emmy, who’d seen plenty of couplings on the farm, but this was different. Though she had been embarrassed by the noise at four o’clock, now she was sighing in boredom, having finished her homework and exhausted all the possible ways she could think of to ask her father about Josephine. He had never been much of a storyteller, and besides, they clearly considered it a closed subject.

Minutes later the couple came racing down the stairs, Bev pushing Howie in front of her and out the door before she circled back over to Emmy and drew a small but thick black book from her schoolbag.

“Thanks,” Bev said, her lips fuller, her cheeks redder than they had looked earlier. “This is for you. I just finished it. It’ll blow your mind!” On the cover of the book was a striking image of a train station with a woman standing on the platform under the large letters
Peyton Place
. Just the Sunday before, Pastor Erickson had decried the book as filth to the nodding congregation.

“Oh, I can’t have this in the house,” Emmy said, backing away from it with her hands up. “My mother would kill me if she found it.”

“So don’t let her find it,” Bev said with a wink, and dropped the book onto the table. Her nonchalance was emboldening. “You are the best friend,
ever
.” She hugged Emmy quickly to her chest and went out to her car, giving a little wave as she disappeared into its plush interior. That car is bigger than this room, Emmy thought, swinging the door shut and lifting the book from the table. She had two empty hours to fill before anyone would be there to object.

*   *   *

During study hall the next morning, Emmy was asked by the monitor to report to Mr. Utke’s office. Emmy had assumed that after her parents had shown no interest in the high scores she had routinely earned on the aptitude tests, she had fallen off of Mr. Utke’s radar completely. It was with dread that Emmy approached the window-paned door stenciled with
REINHOLD UTKE,
and saw five other kids, four boys and a girl, waiting in the hard-backed chairs. Just as she leaned against the wall, Mr. Utke opened the door and Katie Howell, the Moorhead Spud most likely to succeed, walked out, laughing as though she’d just been visiting an old friend.

“I’ll certainly try!” she exclaimed, and gave Emmy a warm smile as she passed. No wonder everyone likes her so much, thought Emmy. She doesn’t need to give me the time of day, yet here she is, smiling at me as though we are friends. Emmy stood up straight and returned the smile as Katie sailed past her and yelled down the hall to one of her actual friends. Mr. Utke glanced over the seated group, a look of exhaustion on his face, and then brightened when he saw Emmy.

“Miss Nelson, come right in,” he said. “The lot of you can wait.” As he closed the door behind her he said, “What you have there is the Society for the Prevention of Doing Anything Constructive. They’ve been meeting in the chemistry lab at lunchtime and leaving cryptic formulas and obscure quotes on the chalkboard. Mr. Stenoin has asked me to put them someplace else.”

“Oh,” Emmy said, still standing as Mr. Utke wheeled his chair up under him to his desk with a harsh creak. He looked at the papers on his blotter for a moment, motioned for her to sit down and it was then that she saw it: a copy of
Peyton Place
on the left side of his desk. She suddenly felt sweat drip down her spine and she knew she must have been the color of a freshly cut beet. The bookmark that was sticking out of the pages was Bobby Doyle’s well-folded note. She straightened her skirt over her knees and sat as still as she could.

“Miss Nelson,” Mr. Utke said, still looking through the glasses on the tip of his nose at an open file. He had straggly gray eyebrows, and a small brown mustache lined his thin top lip. He was somewhere around her father’s age, Emmy guessed, but stouter and with slightly more hair. “Is it possible that you are unaware that this book”—he laid his hand on it and paused, as though trying to remember which one he meant—“this book is not allowed on school grounds?”

“Yes,” Emmy said, staring down at her damp hands. He quickly looked up at her, over the lenses.

“Yes, you are unaware, or yes, it’s not allowed?”

“Sorry. Yes, I’m unaware.”

“Well, it was banned by the PTA. Imagine my surprise when it turned up during locker check this morning, in your possession. You’re one of the few kids who has never missed a day or given any teacher any trouble, Miss Nelson. Don’t think that goes unnoticed.” He folded his hands. “We’re very disappointed in you.”