Next to Love (3 page)

The weddings are hurried affairs, conceived in a fever of hope, dread, and desperation; planned at the eleventh hour; carried off in a quick ceremony at the bride’s house or a church; followed by a slapdash though not necessarily unsatisfactory reception. Sugar rationing and champagne and whiskey shortages are still in the future. A few of the brides manage white dresses; most settle for suits. But all of them carry some kind of bouquet, and every one of them insists on throwing it. Millie Swallow—Millie Vaughn until four blissfully dizzying hours earlier—must have eyes in the back of her head to lob hers directly at Babe. There is nothing Babe can do but lift her arms to catch it. She always did have good hand–eye coordination. One of the first things Claude said to her was that she threw like a boy. He winced when he said it, because, as a boy, he was taunted for throwing like a girl. That was why he missed hitting the robin.

Some people cannot understand what Babe sees in Claude Huggins, except that he hails from above Sixth Street, the dividing line of respectability, or at least income, and she comes from below. Others cannot fathom what Claude Huggins sees in her. A few, like Grace Painter Gooding’s mother, think they deserve each other, or would were it not for the Sixth Street divide. Claude’s family does not live in the section of undulating green lawns on the west side of town, but Hugginses have been in South Downs since it was founded. The cemetery is full of them.

Babe knows Grace’s mother’s opinion even before she overhears her at Millie’s wedding. Babe is in the small pantry behind the kitchen, putting away the plates she has dried—she knows how to make herself useful; more to the point, she knows how to hide her resentment at making herself useful—when Grace’s mother comes into the kitchen for a glass of water. From where Babe is standing, she can neither see nor be seen, but she would recognize Mrs. Painter’s voice anywhere. She spent a good part of her girlhood being hectored by it. Wipe your feet, girls. Watch those crumbs, girls. I’d ask you to stay to supper too, Bernadette, but you live way down below Sixth Street. We couldn’t let you walk all that way in the dark, and I can’t ask Mr. Painter to get out the car to drive you home.

“I can’t imagine what Claude Huggins sees in her,” Mrs. Painter says now. “Unless it’s … well, you know what I mean.”

If the other woman doesn’t know what she means, Babe does.

“Now, where do you suppose I’d find a glass?” Mrs. Painter goes on, and Babe hears cabinets opening and closing.

“I think she’s striking,” the other woman answers. Babe doesn’t recognize the voice, but she’s prepared to like the woman. No one has ever called her striking. “With that honey-brown hair and those dark eyebrows.”

“That honey-brown hair, as you call it, is limp as a rag. I know she’s poor, but there is such a thing as a home permanent. And that long upper lip. She always looks as if she’s sneering. Not that she has anything to sneer about. Those Canucks are as bad as the Irish. Worse, if you ask me.”

Sometimes Babe dreams of moving to the big city, Boston or even New York, where everyone she knows does not know everything about her.

“Her legs are long and slim,” the other woman insists.

“Who would notice in that awful dress? A girl with shoulders like a fullback should not wear pink tulle.”

Babe hunches her shoulders and looks down at the dress. It really is awful, but her mother is so proud of it. For the first time in all her years of sewing, a dress has come out looking exactly as it does in the picture on the pattern package.

“And that ridiculous name. Bernadette is bad enough. Babe is just vulgar.”

That’s unfair. She never asked to be called Babe. Somewhere along the way, the boys pinned it on her, perhaps because of her throwing arm, perhaps out of wishful thinking. If she comes from below Sixth Street, she must be fast. She is not fast. She is curious. And alive, for heaven’s sake. She does not understand other girls, the ones who don’t balk at the rules. She suspects they are made differently. That’s another reason she is grateful to Claude. If she had not fallen in love with him, there is no telling the trouble she might have got up to.

“Of course, he’s no catch either. Not an ounce of ambition. And there’s something wrong with a boy who doesn’t like sports,” Mrs. Painter goes on. “Besides, she must be as tall as he is in her stocking feet. Imagine spending your entire life never being able to wear high heels. Not that he’ll marry her. It would break his parents’ hearts if he did, but he doesn’t have the backbone.”

Poor Claude, Babe thinks. He’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

She recognizes what others see as Claude’s shortcomings. He is exactly her height, though she does not see why that means she cannot wear high heels. His sharp-featured face would be handsome were it not for his nose. The kindly call it snub, the unkindly whisper the word
snout
. He has the pale, quick-to-ruddy complexion so winning in English schoolboys, but he is not a schoolboy, he is a grown man, and he tends to appear inebriated or embarrassed when he is neither. His wiry compact body makes him look like an athlete, but, as Mrs. Painter pointed out, he is not good at sports. His best feature is a pair of heavily fringed black-velvet eyes that have, when he takes off his horn-rimmed glasses, the wondrous gleam of myopia. But he rarely takes off his glasses. And as Mrs. Painter also pointed out, he has no desire to set the world on fire, at least in any way that would singe her. He is perfectly happy teaching history in the town’s one high school. Maybe someday he will rise to the principal’s office, though no one is putting any bets on it, especially since he got mixed up with Babe Dion. The principal’s wife does not have to have gone to college, though it would be nice if she had, but she ought not to have worked behind the ribbon counter at Diamond’s.

However, none of Claude’s flaws, if they are flaws, matter to Babe. Being with him unhinges her. No one has ever had that effect on her, not even Jimmy Doyle, whose death she is sorry for, no matter what her initial reaction when she saw the telegram. Claude’s arm around her shoulders in the movies makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. His tongue in her mouth makes her back arch and her pelvis strain against him. Around him, she feels like an exposed nerve. After she has been with him, she is sore with sensation.

Claude has one more trait she cannot resist. He is kind. Some girls do not like kindness in a man. They say they do, but then they fall for men who chase other women, or drink too much, or make fun of them. Isn’t that just like a woman. Woman driver. It’s lucky she’s pretty, because she sure ain’t smart. Claude never makes fun of her.

She has known Claude, like everyone else in her life, forever, but she did not find out about the kindness until an afternoon six years earlier in the South Downs Public Library. She was fifteen, and he was eighteen, and if that difference was not enough, he was home from his first year of college, which as far as she was concerned might as well have been the moon. The town that afternoon sweltered under a brassy July sky, but inside the big stone library, compliments of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the air was cool and hushed. The only sound was the whisper of the fan on the librarian’s desk.

Claude was sitting at a table near the window, reading a book of poetry. She knew because, when she went by, she saw the uneven lines on the right-hand margin of the page. He did not notice her—why would he notice her—until she went up to the desk to check out her books, and she did not find out he noticed her then until later.

The librarian frowned down at the three volumes Babe slid across the desk to be checked out.
The Good Earth
and two mysteries. If Louella Hammond had her way, her books would never leave the building. It was bad enough she had to let them go to nice homes, where she could only hope they would rest on polished tables and have their pages turned by scrubbed hands with clean fingernails, but it broke her heart to send them to the shabby houses below Sixth Street, where they were likely to get their pages dog-eared, and smudged with heaven only knew what, and—she had seen it with her own eyes—insulted in the margins with dirty words. Bernadette Dion had a passel of younger brothers and sisters who were likely to do all that and more.

“These are one-week books,” she said.

Babe did not argue. She knew better than to argue with the librarian.

“You cannot possibly read all three of them in a single week.”

“One is for my mother,” she lied.

“I’ll let you check out one,” the librarian said, and made a mental note to put the other two on hold before Bernadette Dion returned.

Babe took
The Good Earth
and started out of the library. She was halfway down the block when Claude Huggins caught up with her. He held two books out to her. She stood looking down at them. They were the two mysteries she had wanted.

“I took them out for you.”

“In your name?”

He shrugged.

“What if I don’t return them?”

He grinned. “You’ll return them.”

“Thanks.” Her voice was wary. She was not accustomed to being trusted. Once, when Grace brought Babe home after school, Mrs. Painter picked up a quarter she had left lying on the counter and put it in the pocket of her apron. Larceny was not one of Babe’s vices. When other kids pinched candy and gum and barrettes from the five-and-dime, she was not even tempted. But watching Mrs. Painter slip that quarter into her pocket made Babe want to swipe it.

He shrugged again. “I just hate bullies.”

Three years later, they began going together. By then he was teaching at the high school, and she was selling ribbons at Diamond’s. His mother, sensing a rebellious nature as well as an inferior bloodline, was brokenhearted; his father merely disapproved. The town was full of nice girls from good families. Why did their son have to get mixed up with one whose father worked in the hat factory and who had to work herself?

Then the war came, the weddings began piling up like crashed cars on an icy highway, and Babe caught Millie Swallow’s bouquet. She was careful not to look at Claude. When she finally did, he was looking at his spit-polished government-issue shoes.

They have been over it again and again. She never brings it up, but he cannot let it go, a terrier with a bone.

“It’s crazy,” he says.

They have been to the movies, a double feature, which was at least one movie and probably two too long for them. They do not want to be here, drinking coffee and eating pie in the last booth at Swallow’s either, but there are rules about this sort of thing. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if she broke the rules, if she said, let’s skip the movie and the drugstore and go straight to that spot on the road out beyond the pond.

“What’s going to happen if they don’t come home?” he asks. “What’re the girls going to do?”

He is turned sideways to the table, and as he speaks, his leg goes back and forth, steady as a metronome. He could hypnotize her with that leg.

“And what about the babies? There are bound to be babies.”

“Thanks for the biology lesson.”

“It’s not fair to the girls, or the children,” he goes on.

She takes her eyes from his mesmerizing leg and faces him across the table. Their cups sit between them, hers with a slick of black at the bottom, his with a pale-brown foam. Claude likes his cream.

“The girls know what they’re getting into,” she says.

He shakes his head. “It’s irresponsible.”

She is in love with a high-minded man. Or is that merely an excuse? Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same. He is a careful driver. He will not crash their vehicle into that marital pileup on the icy road to war.

And yet. And yet. They cannot leave things as they are.

She makes up her mind the following night, on the front seat of his secondhand Ford, parked way out of town, beyond the pond, on a road no one is likely to risk in the snow. Sometimes Claude can be fearless. That makes two of them, because even as she decides to hell with being a nice girl, to hell with hypocrisy, she knows she is joining a long line of reckless women who have flirted with heartbreak and disgrace since the idea of disgrace was hatched. She knows heartbreak has always been around.

Her decision is not based on altruism, a motive most of the girls, at least those who get caught, will later claim. He was shipping out the next day, they will plead. It is pure selfishness. She wants Claude any way she can have him. She wants this experience with him, not with some other boy down the road after he’s gone back to camp, after … But, no, she will not think of that.

He has taken off her blouse and then her bra, and she has opened his shirt, and this time when he reaches under her skirt, she does not push away his hand but hikes the fabric up for him. He slides his fingers beneath her girdle and under her panties. She holds her breath for what comes next. A few weeks before Grace’s wedding, Mrs. Painter gave Grace a book. Grace and Babe and Millie spent nights poring over it, trying to keep their giggles from seeping under the closed bedroom door, but unfortunately it was not very specific.

His fingers creep inside her. She gasps. The stealth entry becomes more confident. The book said nothing about this. Jimmy Doyle never tried this. But then, Jimmy was not as smart as Claude. She buries her face in his shoulder to keep from crying out, though no one is around to hear her.

With his free hand, he reaches for his wallet. He took it out of the buttoned pocket of his army jacket and put it on the dashboard before he even slipped off his glasses. Now he picks it up and begins fumbling with it. His breathing saws the darkness.

“Damn,” he says.

“What?”

He takes his hand away, sits up, and begins going through the wallet with both hands.

“What?” she asks again.

He reaches up and switches on the dim overhead light. It casts a sickly yellow pall over the front seat. She sits up and crosses her hands over her breasts.

“It’s gone,” he says.

“What do you mean, it’s gone?”

“I mean it was in my wallet, and now it’s gone.”