Next to Love (17 page)

Millie makes up her mind on the way home from the store that evening. It has nothing to do with the man in dress whites. Grace is the one who drives her to it. Grace and her wall.

She sits in her room, waiting until she hears the big console radio in the living room go silent and her aunt’s and uncle’s tread on the steps, then for another ten minutes while feet go back and forth to the bathroom at the end of the hall, and water runs, and doors open and close. Finally, when the house is silent, she makes her way down one flight of stairs, then the second, to the basement, where her uncle keeps the empty boxes for storing old magazines. The attic is full of cartons of
Life
s and
Saturday Evening Post
s and
Reader’s Digest
s. She takes an empty box and carries it up to her room, careful to avoid the step next to the top, the one that creaks badly.

She closes the door to her bedroom quietly, sits on the floor with the empty box, and pulls open the bottom drawer of the dresser. A wedding picture of her and Pete stares up at her.

Everyone said he would never marry her. Her uncle warned of the folly of waiting for a boy to sow his wild oats. Her aunt used the word
wild
and let it go at that. Every time Pete took up with a new girl, Grace and Babe insisted he wasn’t half good enough for her. But goodness had nothing to do with it. She could not explain the attraction. Who can explain love? He’s handsome, girls say. He’s a snappy dresser, or a swell dancer, or the life of the party. He comes from a good family, mothers pronounce. He has fine prospects, fathers predict. And none of it matters. At least it didn’t for her.

She was supposed to fall for Mac, the older brother, the good brother, the one who would take care of her, because heaven knows she’d had enough hardship in her life. Grace kept throwing them together. But the more Millie saw of Mac, the harder it was to take her eyes off Pete. Maybe it was the smile. Maybe it did come down to something as simple as that. Both Swallow boys had smiles that could light up a moonless midnight sky, but there the similarity ended. Mac’s smile—easy, warm, true—seduced mothers. Pete’s grin made them want to lock up their daughters. People said he would never settle down. People had not counted on the war.

She puts the photograph in the box, takes out a handful of letters, taps the edges to align them, puts them on top of the picture, and reaches into the drawer for a second batch. One slips out onto her lap. She places the second batch in the box, then picks up the stray that has fallen in her lap and slides it out of the envelope.

Hi, Millie Mine, my heart, my soul, my blood, my cheeseburger with fried onions, my chocolate chip cookie the way only you can make them
.

The words rustle through the room as if he is whispering them. He used to do that, lie in bed murmuring strings of absurd endearments in her ear, and she would giggle and tell him to be serious, because she wanted him to tell her he loved her the way they did in the movies. What a dope she’d been, begging for lies when she had the real thing.

She folds the letter along its creases and puts it back in the envelope. She will not do this. If she starts reading the letters and looking at the pictures, she will never finish.

She places the envelope in the box and turns back to the drawer. It’s a jumble of papers and pictures and sketches. She is usually neat, but after the telegram, she began shoving things in any which way. As long as she got them out of sight. She will sort them now, and that will be the end of it.

She spreads several pictures on the floor and sits staring down at them, though she just swore she would not. How did she miss the change? The first photograph was taken right after he was called up. In it, the Pete she fell in love with stares out from candid eyes, set far apart in a square face. He is smiling at a world that he knows cannot help but smile back at him. The next picture was taken in North Carolina. He is still grinning, but now his mouth is lopsided, as if the joke is on him. In the next two photos, the grin has shrunk to a bemused grimace. The last picture was taken in England. He is squinting into the camera, and his smile bears as much resemblance to the real thing as powdered eggs do to fresh. He used to write how much he hated powdered eggs and dreamed of a couple of eggs over easy, the way she served them up. The photos make a progression. If she holds them together on one side and riffles through them on the other, they will be like one of those penny books that simulate moving pictures. The Last Days of Peter Swallow.

She cannot do this. She scoops up the pictures and puts them in the box.

The sketches are easier. Most of them are of strangers, British children she will never know, other men she has not met. She wonders how many of them are still alive. She will not do this. She will not turn into Grace, hoarding her pain.

She kneels over the open drawer and begins working quickly, scooping the letters and photos and sketches up out of the drawer, stacking them in the box. She wishes she could do it with her eyes closed.

She reaches the bottom of the drawer. Only a handful of envelopes remain, all addressed in her handwriting. The big black letters stamped across them stare up at her.
DECEASED. DECEASED. DECEASED
. The flaps are still sealed. She could not read what she had written to him after he was dead. The words would jeer at her.

She starts at the noise and turns to the door, but it is still closed. The sound came from her, an escaped moan.

She takes the envelopes with the cruel brands in both her hands and dumps them in the box. To hell with neatness.

As she starts to close the drawer, she notices a single letter stuck in the back. It will not hurt to read one.

She takes out the envelope and extracts the letter. The words crawl across the page. She can hear them in his voice, though this is not something he whispered in bed. This is not something he thought of, until he went to war.

One more thing, honey, in the unlikely event anything does happen, I don’t want you sitting around pining. What I’m trying to say, and it feels funny as heck to write, is if anything should happen to me, I want you to marry again. You’re too wonderful a wife, you’re too swell a girl, to go to waste
.

She folds the letter, puts it back in the envelope, and puts the envelope in the box. Then she closes the carton and seals it with the roll of tape she brought up from the basement. She does not label it. The contents are nobody’s business.

By the time she comes down from the attic, a ribbon of pink, hot as a fever, lies on the horizon. But she has finished the job.

AUGUST
1945

She is sitting on the steps that lead up to the apartment over the garage, shelling peas into a bowl on her lap. Al is behind her, one step up, leaning back on his elbows with his long legs stretched out beside her. Every now and then, he sits up and massages her neck and shoulders. Saturdays are the worst days of the week at the store. Mr. Diamond makes her change outfits every hour. And she has to keep moving through the crowds, practically singing what she’s wearing. Tab-buttoned gray wool wrap dress, $19.95. Little-waisted deep-yoke coat, $29.95. Checkmate cardigan jacket, wool and rayon, $15.95. She cannot wait to quit. Al doesn’t make much, sitting in his uncle’s back office, toting up figures, but he says it’s enough to take care of the three of them. No wife of his is going to work. Besides, he isn’t planning to spend the rest of his life in that back office. His uncle sometimes speaks of bringing him along, but Al is impatient. He has his own plans, or at least ideas, though Millie is not sure what they are.

He sits up and begins to massage her shoulders again. She is wearing a sundress, and she likes the feel of his hands on her skin. It has been so long since a man touched her. That’s another reason to marry quickly. Sometimes she feels herself getting carried away, and she cannot afford to. Just because she is no longer a virgin, that is not a license. If anything, it is a reason to be more careful.

As Claude’s car turns in to the driveway, she shrugs her shoulders, and Al takes his hands from them, but not before he runs one finger along the back of her sundress just inside the fabric. She shivers.

Babe climbs out of the car and takes Jack’s hands so he can jump down from the running board. He dashes toward the steps, and Babe and Claude follow.

“There’s a wonderful invention,” Babe says. “It’s called canned vegetables.”

Millie steadies the bowl with one hand while she hugs Jack with the other.

“This man spent three years aboard ship eating canned vegetables and canned fruit and canned meat,” she says. “It’s about time he got the real thing.”

“And now I have it,” Al says. His finger traces the line inside her sundress again.

She thanks Babe for taking care of Jack, and Babe says it’s her pleasure. Millie hears the wistfulness in Babe’s tone and wants to tell her not to be impatient. Claude has been home for only a month. But Babe never brings up the subject, any more than she mentions the baby she lost. Millie does not understand her. She can get hot under the collar about things that have nothing to do with her, public things, political things, but she is cool as a cucumber about the things that count.

After Babe and Claude leave, Millie bathes Jack and puts him to bed. Then Al mixes two gin fizzes, and they carry them out to the steps. She sits one below him, leans her shoulders against his legs, and tilts her head back on his knees. Thin clouds skulk across the sky, and in the intervals between them, a full moon gloats down. She does not know if she is happy. She is not stupid enough to think she is safe. But she no longer feels as if she is in free fall. I can do this. Pete wanted me to.

The sound of Jack’s whimper, faint as a distant siren, floats through the open window. She lifts her head from Al’s knee and listens. Sometimes he falls back to sleep. Sometimes who knows what monsters and bogeymen will not let him.

The whimper builds to a full-fledged cry. She starts to stand, but Al puts his hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll go.”

The stairs creak as he climbs them, and she thinks, yes, this is right. This is not Pete, but it’s right.

AL STEPS INTO THE
darkened room. His foot hits the wastebasket and knocks it over. He switches on the lamp, crosses to the narrow bed, and sits on the side. Jack stares up at him, his dark-blue eyes inky with half-remembered fear.

“Bad dream, buddy?” He scoops up the small body. It is rigid in his arms.

“Want to tell me about it?”

Jack shakes his head no. The silky hair grazes Al’s chin. The small tight muscles begin to ease. He did not even know he liked kids. He knew he would have them. Everybody does. It would kill his parents if he didn’t. But that is not what he means.

They sit that way for a few minutes, until Jack’s breathing becomes regular and his head drops from Al’s shoulder and bobs against his chest. He lays the boy on the bed, stands, and notices the overturned wastebasket. As he stoops to right it, a sheet of paper that has fallen out catches his eye.

He does not mean to read it. He is not the kind of man who reads other people’s mail, except aboard ship when he had the censorship duty. But the lines jump out at him. He recognizes them from a letter one of the men on the ship sent to his girl. As a joke, the kid said when Al not only blacked them out but called him on them. Can’t you take a joke, Lieutenant? He straightens and stands looking down at them now. He censored them, but he cannot stamp them out. The joke is still going around, though now it’s in an anonymous letter. He takes the envelope out of the wastebasket. It’s to Mrs. Peter Swallow, but there is no return address.

First man to sink an enemy battleship—Colin Kelly

First man to set foot on enemy territory—Robert O’Hara

First woman to lose five sons—Mrs. Sullivan

First son of a bitch to get four new tires—Hymie Goldstein

He has not thought of this side of it. He has been too busy fighting the other side.

His mother threatened to sit shivah for him.

“Mom,” he pleaded, “for three years you were worried sick something was going to happen to me. Now I’m home safe and sound, and you want to pretend I’m dead?”

His father said after all the Jews they killed in Europe, it was up to him to bring new ones into the world.

“That’s why I’m getting married, Pop.”

“A Jewish mother you need, for Jewish children.”

“Since when did you get so religious?”

It’s the war, his parents lamented. This time he did not argue with them.

He had spent half the war fighting Krauts and half fighting his shipmates—not all of them, only the ones off the farm, who never saw a Jew before but knew they hated them; and the ones from the city, who worked alongside them and fought them for neighborhood turf and knew they hated them; and the country-club boys, after they discovered the name Baum was not German but Jewish. Better to be a German, even in this war, than a Jew anytime.

But there was another side to it, and that had to do not with what they did to him but with what he did to himself. The first week in training at the base in Florida, he had no trouble eating ham for Uncle Sam, as the saying went. Some of the other Jewish guys couldn’t stomach it. They could handle the bacon, but they froze at the sight of ham. Pork chops, a Sunday special, were the worst. One guy he knew stepped out of the chow line when the man doling out the food put a pat of butter on his pork chop. Al liked the Sunday pork chops. The ham for breakfast was even better.

Not all of it was that easy, though he did not have to wrestle with the dog-tag issue. He had heard of Jewish guys in the army who took them off before they went into battle. If they were taken prisoner, they did not want the Germans to find that telltale
H
on the tag. He stood a better chance of getting blown up or drowning than of ending up in a German POW camp. But even if he had been at risk of a camp, he would not have taken off the tags. He would not give up the identity, the amalgam of himself, he had just begun to forge. For the first time in his life, he was not a Jew first and everything else an afterthought. In training, he was either a good seaman or not. When the call to battle stations sounded, they either could count on him or they couldn’t. On leave, he was just another Yank—not the best thing to be, but not as suspect as a Jew. He was still different, but not as different as before.