Next to Love (2 page)

She has another secret about those telegrams from the war department, one she will never tell anyone, not Millie, certainly not Grace. Even if she still went to confession, she would not own up to it. Once, in the past year and a half, she read the name in the second line and felt a flash of relief, not that the boy was dead, never that, but that what he knew about her had died with him. She knows the penance for most sins. So many Hail Marys for lying or missing confession or sins of the flesh, which always sounds better to her than he-did-this-and-I-did-that, Father. But what is the penance for a black heart?

She looks down at the ticker tape again.

MRS

The fist in her chest clenches.

WALTER WOHL

The fist opens. Mrs. Wohl is the widowed mother of a large clan that lives north of town. If you take the main road east toward Boston, then turn off onto School Road and keep going past the pond where the town swims in summer and skates in winter, you reach the Wohl farm, though almost no one does. The Wohls keep pretty much to themselves.

She goes on reading.

THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS

HIS DEEPEST REGRETS THAT YOUR SON

PRIVATE EARL WOHL

She cannot remember which one Earl is. Was.

The ticker tape comes to the end of the message. She picks up the scissors, ready to go to work, but the machine keeps clattering and spewing out tape.

She glances at the new check. It’s from the war department again. This one reads
MR AND MRS
. She forces herself to look away and begins cutting the words of the first cable.

DEEP REGRET STOP SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY STOP

She does not want to fall behind. It’s bad enough she came in late.

She is still pasting the strips of ticker tape from the first wire onto the Western Union form when the machine begins spewing out a third message. By noon she has cut and pasted sixteen messages from the war department, enough to break the hearts of the entire town, more than B.J. will be able to deliver on his bicycle in one afternoon. This is nothing like the fantasies of hiding or holding up telegrams. This is real. All over town, people are waiting for bad news, only they have no inkling. She knows the worst, but she cannot stop to take it in. She has to get the telegrams out.

She thinks of going next door and asking Mr. Swallow if she can borrow his delivery boy. Then she realizes. She cannot ask Mr. Swallow.

Through the plate-glass window, she sees Mr. Creighton pulling up to the curb. He’d be going into the drugstore for his usual ham-and-cheese sandwich. He would be happy—well, not happy, though who knows what an undertaker thinks about death, but willing—to deliver the telegrams. And, with his car, he could do it much faster than B.J. could. She pictures him driving up to a house in his big black Cadillac. She imagines him walking up the path with the pale-yellow envelope in his hand. This is not news an undertaker should deliver.

She tells B.J. to watch the office for a minute and walks quickly down the street to the hardware store. She is careful not to run. She does not want to alarm people. She keeps her head down so no one can see she’s crying.

Mr. Shaker is sitting on a high stool behind the counter, leafing through a catalog. There are no customers in the aisles. She starts to explain that she has sixteen telegrams from the war department and wants him to deliver some of them, but before she can finish, he is coming out from behind the counter. He says he will close the store and deliver all of them.

IT IS THE WORST DAY
of Sam Shaker’s life, until his wife dies eight years later. By three o’clock, he has delivered ten of the sixteen telegrams that came that morning and the three more that arrived afterward. By then, everyone knows what he’s up to. He can feel eyes watching him from behind half-drawn blinds, tracking the progress of his truck driving slowly up one street and down another, praying he will keep going.

One of the telegrams takes him to the Wohl farm outside of town. On his way back, he passes the pond that serves as a swimming hole. The heat has brought out half the women and children in town.

He pulls off the road and sits watching them for a moment. Millie Swallow is sitting on a blanket with her little boy held in the embrace of her crossed legs. She’s wearing a straw hat with a wide brim, but even at this distance he can see that her shoulders are pink and freckled. Grace Gooding is standing waist deep in the pond, her hands supporting her little girl beneath her stomach, while the child churns her arms and kicks her legs and sends up a spray that splinters in the sun like diamonds. At the water’s edge, a group of matrons sit in low canvas chairs. Mrs. Huggins is knitting, probably another sweater for Claude. Mrs. Swallow is pouring lemonade from a Thermos. Mrs. Gooding is watching her granddaughter splashing in her daughter-in-law’s arms. The scene is as peaceful and perfect as a
Saturday Evening Post
cover.
What We’re Fighting For
.

He takes the telegrams from the glove compartment and rifles through them until he finds the ones he’s looking for. A sudden wave of nausea makes him lean back in the driver’s seat and close his eyes. Which hearts break harder, wives’ or mothers’? The question has no answer. Misery cannot be weighed on a scale. He slips the envelopes into his pocket, gets out of the truck, and starts toward the pond.

AWFUL AS THE DAY IS
, Sam Shaker never regrets volunteering for the job, though it costs him business, not just during the hours the store is closed that afternoon but for years to come. People still like him. They admit he carries a good line of products. But certain men and women in town cannot walk in to the store and see him behind the counter without remembering the day the bell rang and they went to the door and opened it to find him standing there with a telegram in his hand. For a while they feel guilty going to A&A Hardware two blocks away. Eventually they get used to it.

ONE

DECEMBER
1941

B
ABE DOES NOT TAKE LONG TO LEARN THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET
of war. It is about death. Everyone knows that. But it is also about sex. The two march off to battle in lockstep.

Her discovery is not original. Eros and Thanatos, she will read later, when she is devouring anything she can get her hands on that might tell her what is wrong—no, that might tell her how to make it right. But Freud did not have her firsthand experience.

Sex is all over the war. Sex inspired by love. Sex born of longing. Sex driven by loneliness. Sex out of desperation. Sex fueled by rage. Violence unlocked does not go docile back into its cage. She has firsthand experience of that too. Or did the war have nothing to do with it? Did she just run across a bad apple?

Sometimes she thinks the whole barrel is tainted. Once, before the men shipped out, she watched Charlie Gooding cradle his baby daughter in his arms, and even as something in her melted at the sight, she remembered another Charlie, ten or eleven, one of the bigger boys she was afraid of, running along a line of daffodils with a stick in his hand, decapitating them with a single long murderous stroke. Because they were there. Even Claude, the gentlest of men, at six or seven threw a stone at a harmless robin. It was the only time in his life, he will tell her later, he was grateful for his pathetic throwing arm.

But at the start of the war, she knows nothing of the twinning of sex and death. All she knows is that the Japanese are evil and the Germans are almost as bad—this is before they learn of the concentration camps—and the men, the boys really, the ones who decapitated daffodils and threw stones at robins, are going off to kill. All she knows is the fear for those men, those boys.

They are all in this together, people say, only they aren’t, because some will come through and some will not, and she is not thinking only of the men.

They are all in this together, so you try to worry about all of them, the boys you grew up with, the ones your friends married, but what you really worry about at three in the morning, and three in the afternoon, and all the moments between, is Claude.

They are all in this together, only she is still an outsider. She knows the logic. It is one thing for girls like Grace and Millie to befriend her. They are not snobs. It is something else for one of the boys to marry her. Until it isn’t. That is another irony of the war. It takes Claude away from her. It also gives him to her. Sometimes she wonders if he would have married her without the war.

There is one more contradiction, and it lights up those blacked-out war years like a firestorm. They live in fear, but they live. Misery and heartbreak and loss are just around the corner, so you might as well suck as much out of life as you can before you turn the corner.

No one admits that. Hypocrisy is the official policy. She does not understand how other people, people who are smarter and richer and more powerful than she is, do not see through it. At first she thinks she is missing some truth other people know. Then she realizes other people are the ones who are missing the truth, and it makes her angry. In movies, the stars on the screen crow for joy when they get their draft notices, while the lone character actor who is classified 4-F mopes in shame, muttering about how he wishes he could get his hands on those rotten Jap sons of guns. Once, she gets so angry that she mutters a furious
phooey
. The woman in the row in front turns around and gives her a filthy look. Then she stares hard at Claude, who fortunately is in uniform. Fortunately?

Newspapers run stories about Jews who managed to wriggle out of the Nazi grasp, but a sign in front of the hotel Grace and Charlie Gooding went to on their honeymoon said
NO DOGS OR JEWS
. Babe knows, because Grace showed her a picture of Charlie and her standing in front of the sprawling white building with its big pillars.

“Didn’t the sign make you uncomfortable?” she asked Grace.

“What sign?” Grace answered.

Babe does not blame her, not really. Grace was newly married, and the world was all soft edges and misty horizons. Only Charlie was in sharp focus, Charlie and the girl in the mirror, dressed in a trousseau of sundresses and tennis dresses and evening dresses, who was suddenly a wife.

Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight champion, now a naval commander, urges servicemen to pin what he calls the “Bright Shield of Continence” on their uniforms, but Claude writes from training camp about sitting through films, again and again, showing festering body parts and pretty girls whose faces turn into skulls, and through lectures indoctrinating with doggerel.
If you can’t say no, take a pro. Put it on before you put it in
. At her worst moments, Babe wonders if Claude would report on the films and lectures if he was writing to Grace or Millie or one of the other girls. At her best, she knows that Claude is writing to her because she is not like Grace or Millie or the other girls.

Nonetheless, people seem to be buying what Gene Tunney is selling, because suddenly everyone is getting married, as if a marriage license is money in the bank against straying. During the last month of 1941, Babe puts on the awful home-sewn pink dress, which makes her feel like a wad of cotton candy, thirteen times. She is not superstitious, but she cannot help wishing she were invited to one more or one fewer wedding.

For a time, it looked as if there would be no weddings at all. With American sea and air power crippled in a single Sunday, and the country at war on two fronts, surely the army and the navy would cancel Christmas leaves. But when the smoke of all those burning ships and planes cleared, someone high up in command decided this was exactly the time to send the boys home for the holidays. God knew when, or if, they would have the chance again. The government might as well have issued a mass marriage license.