Next to Love (12 page)

“Kick, Amy, kick,” she shouts. The spray cascades over them, and she feels the water-lightened weight of her daughter’s body on her outspread hands. Beyond Mrs. Huggins, Sam Shaker starts toward the pond. He is wearing heavy shoes that remind her of combat boots. Combat boots. The fear obscures her view again, but she goes on holding Amy afloat, while Mr. Shaker keeps coming, moving from the hard yellow light into the green shadows and back again.

Mrs. Huggins looks up from her knitting. The other matrons stop talking. What is the proprietor of the hardware store doing at the pond in the middle of the afternoon? He hasn’t come for a swim. He’s dressed in a suit coat and straw hat.

He stops beside Millie. She is sitting on a blanket with her legs crossed and Jack caught in their embrace. As she lifts her face to Mr. Shaker, her straw hat falls off. She shades her eyes with her hand, though she is wearing sunglasses. Mr. Shaker takes off his own hat. His mouth moves. Grace strains for the words, but though the afternoon is still enough to hear a hummingbird’s wings, Amy is sending up a racket.

Mr. Shaker holds out his hand to help Millie up. She puts Jack on the blanket, takes Mr. Shaker’s hand, and pulls herself to a standing position, then reaches down and tugs the leg of her bathing suit into place. Grace will always remember that instinctive gesture of modesty.

Mr. Shaker’s hand moves to the pocket of his wrinkled seersucker jacket. He feels around for something and draws it out. The sun glints off the cellophane insert of the Western Union envelope. Grace takes one hand from under Amy to shade her eyes. She cannot be seeing what she thinks she is seeing.

Mrs. Swallow’s hand flutters to her chest.

Mr. Shaker holds the envelope out to Millie. She rubs her hand on the side of her thigh as if to clean it but does not reach for the telegram. She goes on staring at it in his hand.

Mrs. Swallow tries to stand, but she cannot struggle up from the low canvas chair.

Grace lifts her daughter out of the water and holds her against her chest.

Mr. Shaker moves the envelope an inch closer to Millie.

Don’t take it, Grace wants to shout.

Millie’s thumb and forefinger close on it.

Grace stands holding Amy to her, transfixed by the pale yellow envelope.

Millie turns it over and runs her finger under the flap. She takes out the piece of paper.

Grace is struck by how small it is, a few inches long, a few more wide. How can something that small upend the world?

Millie stands staring down at the telegram. Jack lets go of his pail, winds his arms around his mother’s leg, and pulls himself to a standing position. Unsteady as a pint-size drunk, he lifts his arms to his mother.

Millie slides the piece of paper back into the envelope, and bends. She is still clutching it when her arms go around the boy. She lifts him and folds his body to hers. His small head, under the sun-whitened hair, settles into the safe haven between her neck and shoulder.

Grace starts out of the water to her, then stops when she sees Millie has already turned away. She is heading toward the stand of willows. Her mouth is moving, but Grace cannot make out the words. They are a secret between Millie and her son.

Grace goes on standing in the water, holding Amy to her, waiting for Mr. Shaker to head back to his truck. It is not his fault, but she wants him away from here. And she wants Pete back. A moment ago he existed. Now, in the ripping open of an envelope, he is gone.

Mr. Shaker turns toward the pond. He is moving with the slow-motion ponderousness of someone in a dream. Grace shifts Amy to her hip. At the edge of the pond, Mrs. Huggins puts down her knitting. Beside her, Grace’s mother-in-law tries to set her glass of lemonade on the ground and spills it.

Mr. Shaker is still coming toward them, his long morose face going on and off like a lightbulb as he moves from the shade of the trees into the open and back again.

He is abreast of the women sitting in a line. The telegrams will not be handed to them. They gave birth to the boys. They raised them to be men. But the men belong to other women now. The mothers will get the news secondhand. Unless there are two for Mrs. Swallow. But that cannot be. Not two sons in one day. Even in wartime, life cannot be that cruel.

He takes a step past the women.

Go back, Grace wants to shout. Go away from here. He takes a second step, then a third. When he reaches the edge of the water, he stops.

Grace sees his hand move to his pocket. It disappears into the fabric. She does not wait for him to draw it out. She turns and begins to swim.

She is clutching Amy with one arm and thrashing the water with the other. Her legs churn. Water surges up her nose and down her throat. The sunlight splintering off the surface of the pond blinds her. Amy begins to cry. Grace beats the water with her hand and kicks it with her feet. Her daughter’s nails dig into her shoulder. The cries turn to howls. She keeps going. She will outswim him.

She is almost at the other side of the pond. Her knee sinks into mud. She tries to stand, stumbles, tries again, falls again. She crawls toward the shore, dragging Amy through the mud, feeling it oozing into her bathing suit. She catches a branch with her free hand and pulls herself up. She is standing. She has made it to the other side of the pond.

She pushes the hair back from her eyes and looks up the incline of the bank. Mr. Shaker is standing above, holding the Western Union envelope out to her.

A FEW WEEKS LATER
, the letters begin coming back. Grace gets thirty-eight; Millie, thirty-two. The word stamped on each envelope is so bold and black it might have been put there with a branding iron.

DECEASED
.

After that, Babe never again thinks about playing God and withholding telegrams. And she never writes another letter to Claude without wondering whether she is already too late.

SEVEN

Babe

JUNE
1945

T
HE BOYS ARE COMING HOME. THE TOWN SIMMERS WITH THE NEWS
. In the big Tudor and Victorian and colonial houses behind the money-green lawns on the west side of town, in the respectable frame houses perched on handkerchief squares of grass on the east, and in the run-down flats south of Sixth Street, wives and girlfriends and mothers and fathers sit over cocktails in living rooms before dinner, around kitchen tables after supper, on porches and stoops any time of day, and study the points system—so many points for months or years in service, so many for combat duty, so many for having a wife and child—trying to calculate when their particular boy will return.

They get letters from Camp Lucky Strike and Camp Philip Morris, staging areas in France; cables from England; and long-distance calls from Fort Dix in New Jersey. I’ll be there as soon as I can wrangle a berth on a ship, hitch a ride on a plane, get on that bus or train.

Babe sits in the Western Union office and cuts and pastes the cables from the boys. They’re a relief next to the wires that continue to arrive from the war department. The fighting is still going on in the Pacific. Those islands with strange names thousands of miles away are not so distant when local boys storm them. Pete’s brother, Mac, is a battalion doctor. When Babe goes next door to the pharmacy for her Cokes, Mr. Swallow reads her parts of fiercely cheerful letters about performing surgery in a cave and endless attempts to outsmart the pesky local fauna, which is even more challenging. Mac says not to worry about malaria, because he takes his Atabrine religiously. Mr. Swallow nods approvingly as he reads the words. He knows about Atabrine. The knowledge makes him feel connected, almost useful.

Rumor says some of the local boys who survived the war in Europe will be sent to invade the Japanese homeland. Rumor also says it will be a slaughter. Later Babe will read that the government made half a million Purple Heart medals for the invasion. But she does not have to worry about Claude. He has four years of service, eleven months of combat, and a wife. He is a sure thing. Only a child could make him a safer bet. She has heard stories of men who fought in Europe and turned around and signed up for the Pacific, but Claude will not do that. He has changed, she knows that from his letters, but he is not crazy.

The changes are subtle. She has to read between the lines for them. He no longer makes plans for the future. He lives in the present. He writes about having his fingers freeze in winter, and crawling through mud in spring, and being parched in summer; about dirt-encrusted, lice-infested uniforms, and lousy K rations, and the sheer pleasure of a shave, even with cold water in a helmet with a piece of tin for a mirror. After D-Day, he wrote about Pete never making it to shore and Charlie being blown up by a German shell. He also wrote to Millie and Grace saying they both died instantly. Neither suffered. But as he moved on through France and into Germany, he never mentioned casualties again. Only after several weeks did she notice that his buddy Herb, and Joe Ritter—as opposed to the other Joe, Dumbrowsky—and the new kid from Cleveland, who was recently attached to their outfit, disappeared from his letters. She would not call him secretive, but he has become more closed.

Then, after all the anticipation, the boys suddenly begin showing up. Some call or wire to say they’re on the way; others simply walk in the front door or the back. Why didn’t you warn me? the girls cry as they run to them. I just managed to grab a transport, train, bus, and didn’t have time, the men answer as they catch them. All over town, men and women, stunned by their good luck, embrace and cling together for dear life, then take a step back and stand staring at each other like the strangers they are.

Babe keeps herself ready. Her hair is always clean and neatly curled under. Each morning she dresses for work as if he might walk in the door at any moment. When she wears skirts rather than the slacks he wrote he liked, the crayon seams down the backs of her legs are straight.

She hovers over the teletypewriter. Before, she hung over it with dread. Now she hears Fred Astaire tapping again. One of the Wohl boys, the older brother of the one who died, is on his way home; and Grace’s brother; and two of Babe’s cousins; and Millie’s uncle, not the one who raised her but a younger one, though not so young that he could not have kept out of it if he had wanted. But no cable comes from Claude saying he is on the way. She does, however, get a telegram.

She is about to go next door to get a Coke to go with her sandwich when the teletype machine begins spewing tape. She leans over to look at the check. It is from the Western Union business office. The second line reads
MRS CLAUDE HUGGINS
.

YOUR SERVICES NO LONGER REQUIRED AS OF LAST DAY OF JULY STOP

Millie comes into the office while Babe is reading the tape, a bandbox of a girl in a straw hat with a striped ribbon and short white gloves. She has taken a job in the cosmetics department at Diamond’s and often brings her lunch to the Western Union office so they can eat together.

“I can’t say I didn’t know it was coming,” Babe says.

Millie puts the brown paper bag down on the counter. “Didn’t know what was coming?”

Babe hands her the tape.

Millie glances down at it, then back up at Babe. “Perfect timing. Claude will be home any day now. You’ll be pregnant before the summer is over.” Her smile is wide, bogus, and tragic as a clown’s. Babe has to stifle the impulse to say she’s sorry.

After they finish their sandwiches, Millie reapplies her lipstick, pulls on her white cotton gloves, and stands, but when she reaches the door, she turns back.

“Babe?”

She looks up from the pile of forms she is straightening and waits.

“Have you ever heard the word
shiksa
?”

Babe remembers a family she worked for on Saturday afternoons when she was a kid. “It rings a bell.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“I think it’s what Jewish people call a Christian girl. Why?”

Millie shrugs. “I was just wondering.”