Next to Love (18 page)

The world has not changed as much as he has. His parents have not changed at all. But they are right when they blame Millie on the war. Before the war, he never would have gone after her. He would not have had the crust. The war did not make a man of him—he likes to think he was already that—but it did make an American.

He takes the sheet of paper and goes back outside. She is still sitting on the steps.

“Thanks,” she says.

He sits on the stair above her.

“I wasn’t being lazy. I want him to get used to his new daddy.”

When he does not answer, she twists around to see his face and notices the paper in his hand. Even in the dim light from the overcast moon, he can see the blood rise in her cheeks.

“I threw it out.”

“There are more where it came from.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s an ugly Jew-hating world out there.”

“I don’t care.”

Tell her the truth. She’s going to have to care, for herself, for Jack, for the children still to come. But he can’t. He wants to protect her, but not from him.

“It isn’t as if you’re religious,” she goes on. “You don’t even seem Jewish. You don’t talk like your uncle.”

“I was born here. He wasn’t.”

“See what I mean. You don’t even look Jewish. Not with those eyes.” The first time she saw him, she noticed the five-o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. When he took her out to dinner a week later, she noticed the eyes. “Jews don’t have African violet eyes.”

The phrases should have warned him. You don’t sound Jewish. You don’t look Jewish. Some of my best friends are Jews. But he is too besotted to hear them.

AUGUST
14, 1945

She has not been able to stop worrying the problem since Al found the letter in the wastebasket, the one about all the Irish war heroes and the Jew who got four new tires. I can do this, she thought that night. It’s right. But maybe it isn’t and she can’t. The issue is not the timing. Grace says it’s been only a year, but it feels much longer than that. The days and weeks of widowhood drag more slowly than those of marriage. The problem is the letter, or what it warned of. Maybe that’s why she didn’t tear it up before she threw it away. She wanted Al to find it. She wanted him to make up her mind for her.

The uneasiness stalks her as she struts the floors of Diamond’s in the dresses and suits and coats she cannot afford to wear outside the store. Now, on her day off, as she sits on the steps, mending Jack’s shorts and sewing missing buttons on his overalls and her blouses, while he plays in the sandbox Al has built for him, the problem throbs like a headache. She would be a fool not to marry him. She would be a fool to.

Her aunt and uncle are opposed to the idea. Mixed marriages never work, they tell her. Think of Jack, they warn. She does not explain to them that she is thinking of Jack. At least partly.

Al’s family is against it too. Their opposition surprised her. She thought they would be happy he was marrying a Christian girl. She isn’t saying Christians are better or anything like that, but his children will be Christian or at least part Christian, and as he says, in this world being a Christian is easier than being a Jew. He laughed when he heard her reasoning and explained that his parents did not see it that way.

Her fingers are sweaty. She puts down the needle and thread and wipes her hand on her shorts. As she picks it up again, a siren slices through the thick August air. Then people are bursting out of doors, radios are blaring out of windows, and a car comes cruising down the street honking its horn. Mr. Miller, the man who rents her the garage apartment, bangs out of his house, the screen door slamming behind him.

“It’s over, Mrs. Swallow,” he calls across the small yard. “The war is over!” he shouts, then looks as if he would like to clamp his hand over his mouth. He has remembered she is a war widow. He has remembered that for her it will never be over.

He goes back into the house, but the crowd in the street is growing thicker. Men and women and children are screaming and laughing and dancing and embracing. Everyone is embracing.

She goes down the steps, sits on the side of the sandbox, and takes Jack on her lap. He tries to squirm away. He does not want to be held on her lap while other boys are running up and down the street and grown-ups are shouting, dancing, and carrying on as he has never seen them do.

Mr. Miller comes out again with his grandson riding on his shoulders. Jack stops fighting her and looks up at them. Envy is smeared on his face like the dirt from his play.

“Jackie want to ride,” he says, as Mr. Miller goes by at a clip and joins the crowd in the street.

“Jackie want to ride,” he calls after them.

She tries to pull him onto her lap again, but he splays his hands on her shoulders and pushes away from her.

“Jackie want to ride,” he shouts.

“Okay, okay. Jackie ride on Mommy’s shoulders.”

She picks him up and tries to lift him over her head, but he is too heavy. His hands box her ears; his knees dig into her shoulders.

She carries him to the stairs and puts him on the fourth one up. He stamps his bare feet.

“Jackie ride,” he shrieks.

“Jackie’s going to ride,” she says, and her voice is harsher than she intended.

She sits on the second step with her back to him, reaches around, puts one leg over her shoulder, and starts to position the other. He slips backward and grabs her hair.

“Ouch!”

He begins to cry.

“It’s okay, Jackie. Mommy didn’t mean to yell.”

She tries to pull him onto her lap again. He pummels her chest.

He is crying, and she is cajoling, and the entire neighborhood is in such an uproar of celebration that she does not hear the car pull up behind her and the door slam. Al is standing over them.

“The whole town is celebrating, and I find you two sitting here as if it’s the end of the world.”

She looks up at him. With the sun behind him, he is only a silhouette. She cannot see his face, but she can make out the suit he wears to the back office at Diamond’s. He must have been working late and left as soon as he heard.

Jack has stopped crying, but his face is twisted in a mean scowl that says he is poised to begin again.

“I was trying to get him on my shoulders. Mr. Miller came out of the house carrying his grandson on his shoulders, and Jack wanted to ride that way too.”

He bends to Jack’s level. “Hey, buddy, that’s nothing to cry about.” He slips out of his jacket, folds it inside out, and puts it on the step. Then he reaches out his long arms, scoops Jack up over his head, and positions him on his shoulders. Jack’s chubby legs hang around his neck like a scarf; his hands grip Al’s ears like handles.

“Giddyup,” he screams, and the three of them start down the driveway toward the celebration.

She looks up at Al towering above her and sees Jack floating above him like a willful dirt-streaked cherub with his head in the clouds.

“You’re the tallest boy in the parade,” she calls up to him.

TEN

Babe

SEPTEMBER
1946

M
ILLIE BENDS OVER AND PUTS THE BABY IN BABE’S ARMS. SHE
is always doing that to her, as if fertility is contagious. Babe looks down at the child cradled in the crook of her elbow, and Betsy squints up, a miniature red-faced Winston Churchill.

Al leans over Babe’s chair and chucks his daughter under the chin. “Is she something or is she something?”

“She’s something,” Babe agrees.

He reaches down to take the baby from Babe. He cannot keep his hands off her. He is the same way with Millie. Babe wonders how it feels to be married to a demonstrative man.

She glances around the yard, placing Claude in the group. He is sitting in a canvas chair, a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other. The pose is supposed to be relaxed, but she can sense the tension halfway across the yard. His knee bounces like the valve on an engine trying to let off steam so it won’t explode.

Millie takes the baby from her husband and tells him Grace wants him to start the grill. He does not argue. Grace is the widow among them. Al and Claude must take care of her.

Claude puts down his beer, grinds out his cigarette, and starts to get up to help, but before he can, Millie gives him the baby. Babe wishes they would stop passing her around like a bowl of fruit. It can’t be good for her. She glances at the back steps, where Amy and Jack are huddled. All the fuss over the baby can’t be good for them either.

She looks back at Claude. His face glows hot red. A film of sweat swelters on his upper lip where his wartime mustache used to be. He holds the baby in one arm. The other, with the missing fingers, hangs limp beside him, as if he does not want to touch her with his wounded hand. He looks up. Babe cannot read his eyes behind the dark glasses, but she recognizes the nervous tic at the side of his mouth. His knee is going faster. She gets up and takes the baby from him, and as she does, she remembers his grief in the hospital room in the camp town. He’ll be fine when the baby he’s holding is his own.

He starts to get up again, but before he can, Amy comes over, stands behind his chair, and puts her hands over his eyes.

“Guess who,” she says.

“Mickey Mouse?”

“Nope.”

“Donald Duck?”

“Nope.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt!” He reaches his arm behind him, brings her forward, and pulls her onto his lap. She rests her head against his shoulder. His knee slows.

He’ll be just fine when he has a baby of his own.

BABE KNOWS HE
is lying to her. People do not make decisions like this because of the atomic bomb, or the iron curtain, or the threat of another war. They do not run their lives according to what politicians and diplomats do thousands of miles away. Whatever his reason, it dwells closer to home.

They lie side by side in the double bed with the windows open to the September night and a faint breeze walking over the thin sheet that covers them. A slippery slice of moon swings outside the window. He has waited until they are in bed to spring it. He needs the cover of darkness.

At first she cannot imagine what he’s driving at. She knows he worries about the bomb, and another war, and the end of civilization, they both do, but not in bed. At the small table in the living room, he looks up from the morning paper while they sit having coffee, says can you beat this, and reads her a paragraph, and they agree that it’s unconscionable, but for all their indignation, they know it has nothing to do with them. His demons lurk in the past, not the future.

But now he is saying atomic bomb, and iron curtain, and—there it is, the needle in the haystack, the nugget of gold among the dross—not fair to bring a baby into this world.

She turns her head on the pillow to look at him. His profile carves a pale mask from the dark sky beyond the window. His eyes are fixed on the pattern of leaves cast on the ceiling by the streetlight below. He cannot look at her as he says those words.

She could argue with him. She could tell him that if an unsettled world were reason not to have a baby, people would have stopped reproducing during the Thirty Years’ War and the Plague and every other moment in the human past. He knows that; he’s a history teacher. She could say, tell me the real reason. But she knows he will not tell her. Sometimes she looks up from the book she’s reading or the dishes she’s washing and catches him, sitting, his own book forgotten in his lap or papers ungraded on the table in front of him, his face hard and closed, his eyes staring. At what? She knows from experience not to ask.

Grace would tell her she must make him see the error of his ways. Millie would say tell him it’s an accident; he’ll never know. But she will not argue with a bleeding man, and she will not trick him. She will give him time.

HE IS A LIAR
. It is the one condition they did not warn him about. They gave him physical therapy for his hand. They passed out pamphlets about readjusting to civilian life. But they never told him he would have to become a liar to survive. He would have to deny everything he has seen and learned and done. No, he never watched a baby-faced kid from Ohio cut the balls off a dead German because he just lost his buddy. No, he never saw swarms of rats feasting on human corpses. No, he never sat with Herb’s head, oh, God, please, not that again. And no, no, no, I did not feel my hands crushing Millie’s baby, hear the limbs cracking like chicken bones when you’re trying to get at the moist meat, see the skull splitting and the brains oozing out onto my lap, as Herb’s did. He starts to sweat at the memory of the tiny body in his arms and the damage he could do to it. No, I never saw or thought any of that. I simply think no sane person would bring a child into a world divided by an iron curtain, shadowed by an atomic bomb, stalked by another war.