Next to Love (19 page)

THREE DAYS LATER
she goes to a woman doctor in Boston. On the bus ride home, she sits cradling the diaphragm, wrapped in plain brown paper like a dirty book, in her lap. She always knew she got off too easily for that night in the station bathroom and for wishing the baby away.

APRIL
1948

The sun should not be out. The light is too buttery, the buds on the trees too tender. The daffodils, just like the ones a ten-year-old Charlie ran down a line decapitating with a stick, break Babe’s heart. She would prefer rain.

Grace has dressed Amy in a black spring coat, with a black hat that trails a mournful black grosgrain ribbon down her back, and black patent-leather Mary Janes. Only her short socks are white. She stands, an eight-year-old widow, barelegged in the spring wind, pregnant with loss.

Grace is all in black too. The veil of her hat hides her eyes. Once during the ceremony, she reaches for Amy’s hand. Amy pulls it away and jams it in her pocket. A moment later, she takes it out and clasps her mother’s hand. She is such a good girl. Babe wishes she was not such a good girl.

They are all in mourning clothes: Babe and Millie in black coats, Claude and Al and Mac Swallow, home for the first time since he moved to Boston, in dark suits, holding dark hats against dark serge thighs. Al feels uncomfortable being here. He does not hold a grudge, he insists, but after what happened at the bank, he does not think King Gooding wants him at his son’s grave.

“He doesn’t want any of us,” Claude says on the way to the cemetery.

Naomi has come. After all, she works for the family. Frank has stayed away. He always liked Charlie Gooding, but he cannot forgive King’s treatment of him when he comes to the house to pick up Naomi. Like a goddamn field hand, Frank says, but Naomi insists it has nothing to do with Frank’s color, only with King’s misery. If any other white man in town treated you that way, she tells Frank, it would be because you’re a Negro. But these days King Gooding is color-blind. He hates everyone who came home from the war, black or white.

King’s dark suit hangs on him as if on a scarecrow. His neck rises scrawny as a chicken’s from his shirt collar.

“May his soul, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”

The minister steps back from the grave, and the four workmen come forward. They slip two heavy belts under the coffin, then each of them grips an end. The coffin begins to descend. The belts groan under the weight as it inches lower and lower, until only the top half is visible, then only the cover, then it is gone from view. Babe wonders how a thud so quiet can shake the earth.

She sees Grace drop Amy’s hand and take a step forward. Oh, God, no, she’s going to throw herself in after him. But she doesn’t. She stands there, so close that the toes of her black pumps jut out over the open grave, teetering. The sight makes Babe dizzy. She reaches for Claude’s hand.

He is silent in the car on the way home. This is his second funeral in as many weeks. Ten days earlier, he drove to Haverhill to bury Joe Dumbrowsky, who fought his way through France and Germany only to go into the garage in his own backyard, close the door, and turn on the car engine. Babe did not go with Claude to the funeral. You never knew him, Claude said. I know you, she wanted to shout. I could keep you company on the drive. I could stand beside you at the grave. I could comfort you, or try to. But she does not argue with him. Men he trusted with his life, he says. And what about me, she wants to scream, don’t you trust me with your life? But she did not cover him while he ran across a field under fire; or walk through enemy territory by his side, relying on each other’s eyes and ears and reflexes; or crouch together in a foxhole, sharing cold and mud and lice and fear. He does not trust her with his life. He shuts her out of it.

She knew better than to ask him about the funeral when he came home that night. But he surprised her. He told her about a letter Dumbrowsky’s widow showed him. Forgive me, his old buddy had written, but I just can’t do it anymore, to myself, or to you and the kids. You’ll be better off without me.

The poor guy, Claude said.

The poor wife and children, Babe thought, to have to live with that for the rest of their lives. She did not blame the man. Only a tortured soul takes his own life. But they would not be better off without him. With the exception of someone throwing himself on a grenade or stepping in front of a bullet, suicide is never altruistic.

SUMMER
1950

Through the open window of the upstairs bedroom, Babe hears the newspaper hit the front steps with a thwack. Other bedroom windows on the street are beginning to sprout air conditioners, but a teacher’s salary will go only so far. Besides, she likes sleeping in the fresh air. And an air conditioner will not stop Claude’s night sweats, only give him chills afterward.

She glances at the clock on the night table, five forty-five, and waits to see if Claude is up. She feels the mattress shift as he gets out of bed. On the mornings he cannot sleep, he goes down to get the paper as soon as it arrives and brings it back to bed. She was hoping he would sleep in this morning. She wants to sleep in herself. It’s Sunday. They were up too late last night. She tells herself she does not have a headache—she will not use the word
hangover
—but the dull pain behind her ears begs to differ.

Through half-closed eyes, she watches him step into his slippers and put on his robe. When they first moved into the house, he used to pull on a pair of trousers and go down to get the paper shirtless in bare feet, but Mrs. Wright, who lives next door, complained he was bringing down the tone of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wright is neighborhood proud. Everyone on the street is. Even Babe, though she disapproves of the trait.

Babe never thought she would own her own house. In the ramshackle dwellings below Sixth Street, people were lucky if they could make the rent each month. Even if she and Claude could get a mortgage, they would never have been able to come up with half the buying price of a house, not on a schoolteacher’s salary. Only rich people owned their own houses. Claude would probably inherit his parents’ house after they died, as they had inherited it from his grandparents, but that was far in the future. A house was beyond their reach, until the government passed something called the G.I. Bill of Rights. Suddenly even a schoolteacher could afford to buy a house, if the schoolteacher had been in the service. They did not need a down payment, and the interest was only four percent.

Babe figures it out. It will come to about fifty-five dollars a month, not much more than the rent they pay for the small apartment with the shabby furniture. And a house is an investment. Equity, she tells Claude. It will also give him something to worry about—leaky faucets to fix, storm windows to put in and take out, grass to cut. In the newspaper, she reads a line from a politician in support of the G.I. Bill. A man who owns property will never become a revolutionary. The government is worried about restless G.I.s stirring up trouble. She is worried about trouble stirring up Claude. She does not tell him any of that. She merely talks about a sound investment.

Claude is not sure about the idea, but these days he has a hard time making up his mind about most matters. She tries to joke him out of it. Martini or old-fashioned, she asks before dinner; vanilla or chocolate, after. Come on, sweetheart, choose.

His parents, however, know their own minds—mind, because they are in perfect accord about this. They have never in their lives bought anything they have not saved for patiently and paid for in full. A penny saved is a penny earned, they insist. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Rather go to bed without dinner than rise in debt.

“You were raised by a couple of Yankee samplers,” she says on the way home from a Sunday dinner.

Claude takes his hand from the wheel and puts it on her knee. She has charmed a smile out of him. It is no easy feat, but every now and then she carries it off. She will get her house. That’s the way he thinks of it—her house.

She reads everything about the G.I. Bill she can get her hands on. It is not just for buying houses. All over the country, veterans are going to college and starting businesses on it. The government pays tuition and backs half the loans, and the banks administer them, and everything comes up roses. All over the country, but not in South Downs.

King Gooding has never said he will not make loans on the G.I. Bill. He merely murmurs, in his silkiest tones, phrases like discretion of the lender, and responsibility to the bank’s investors, and rates of small-business failure. For your protection as well as ours, he tells Al Baum, when Al applies for a loan to open an appliance store to outfit all those houses that all those vets are buying on the G.I. Bill. The sinister word
bankruptcy
hangs in the air between them.

But a house is its own collateral, and King cannot stop the loans to Babe and Claude and the scores of other veterans who are snapping up the Cape Cods and ranches and moderns in the development called Riverview, which is springing up in what used to be hay and cranberry and cornfields north of town.

On weekends she and Claude drive out to see their house. They cannot believe how quickly it grows. One Sunday, they stand in a chill drizzle looking down at the concrete foundation. This is no slapdash job going up on a slab. By the next Sunday, the frame is up. As spring softens the earth, windows and plumbing and electrical wiring sprout like tender shoots. Claude gets caught up. He climbs through the unfinished rooms and makes lists; he drives out after school to talk to the foreman. At night, he still thrashes and shouts and rages, but in the light of day he takes an interest. Babe is hopeful.

They move in the last week of May. Millie and Grace come to help Babe unpack, though she and Claude have little in the way of furniture and household effects. Millie, who is still living in half of a two-family house, which is more cramped than ever with three children, wanders the rooms, running her fingers lovingly over the smooth Formica counters, shiny bathroom fixtures, and an avocado-green washing machine and dryer that come with the house.

That was more than a year ago. The Formica is still pristine, the bathroom fixtures continue to gleam, and the washing machine and dryer whir regularly. Babe is a good housekeeper. Claude does his part. He cuts the grass, cleans the gutters, and fixes a drip in the shower. She watches him doing all that and could swear he is happy. Sometimes he even hums. But one Saturday, after they have been living there for several months, she comes home from doing the marketing to find the floor of the bathroom covered with shards of glass and bloody footprints. The door to the medicine cabinet is a piece of splintered plywood. The wooden bowl of shaving soap sits on the sink; a razor lies in it. On her way through the bedroom to get a broom and mop, she sees a letter from Dumbrowsky’s widow on his dresser.

She does not ask him what happened. Her imagination is as vivid as his memory. She sees him facing off with himself in the mirror. He lifts the razor to his cheek. His hand trembles so badly he cannot draw it down his skin. She has seen that happen. He drops the razor and stands gripping the sink, staring into his eyes. The bloodshot mirrors of the horrors he has witnessed, and perpetrated, reproach him. His fist comes up and punches the face in the mirror.

She opens her eyes and looks at the clock again. The hands read six-ten. He went down for the paper twenty-five minutes ago.

She kicks off the covers, gets into her robe and slippers, and goes downstairs. He is not in the kitchen, or the living room, or what the architectural plans call the family room and she calls the den. She looks out the sliding glass doors. He is not in the yard. She goes back up to the living room and notices that the front door is still open. She goes to it. Claude is sitting on the top step, reading the paper. There is nothing wrong with that, though Mrs. Wright would probably disagree, but she is surprised. He always brings the paper back to bed.

She goes out on the stoop and stands behind him, her knees touching his shoulders. The headline jumps up at her.

NORTH KOREA DECLARES WAR
COMMUNISTS ATTACK SOUTH

This has nothing to do with you, she wants to say. Instead, she sits beside him on the stoop and leans over to read the article, which is not exactly news. Guerrilla raids have been going on for the past year. Claude has been following them religiously.

Her eyes comb the columns of words. They speak of mortar and artillery bombardment, small-craft landings, and all-out warfare. The words are sickeningly familiar. She puts a hand on his arm.

“Let’s go back to bed.”

She says it without a trace of seduction. War is back, but for him, at this moment, Thanatos and Eros do not go hand in hand.

SHE BEGINS GOING DOWN
to get the paper each morning, though she hates bringing the headlines into their bed.

33 COUNTRIES BACK U.N. ACTION ON KOREA

ARMY SECRETARY SAYS FULL-SCALE LAND WAR

PRESIDENT SIGNS BILL EXTENDING THE DRAFT

They will not draft him. He is too old. He has her. But who knows what is going on in his mind as he sits at the table, drinking his coffee and studying the news.

“What gets me,” he says one morning, “is that no one gives a damn. It’s not like the war. They don’t even call it a war. It’s a police action. Guys are over there fighting and dying, and the rest of us go about business as usual.”

She wants to ask what they are supposed to do but doesn’t. She thinks of his telephone call from the recruiting office in Boston.

She watches for signs, but he gives away nothing, until one night he turns on her and warns her to stop spying on him.

“I’m not spying,” she says, though she knows better than to try to reason with him when he is like this.

“Maybe you need a hobby,” he sneers, “other than me, I mean.”

An hour later, he goes through the house looking for her and finds her in the yard. He comes up behind her, puts his arms around her, and says he’s sorry. But it is too late. She is rigid in his embrace. He feels her anger, drops his arms, heads back into the house. Now they are both angry. It is a cycle—worse than that, a downward spiral.