Next to Love (5 page)

The baby looks up from the zwieback she has been chewing, her sunflower black eyes startled at the noise.

“Damn it to hell!”

The crumb-crusted mouth opens. The howl comes rolling out.

“I didn’t mean you, sweetie.” But she goes on standing where she is, torn between picking up the baby and picking up the silverware, unable to do either.

“What happened?” Charlie appears in the doorway, his khaki trousers ironed to a razor-sharp crease, his khaki shirt immaculate, his jaw smooth. He has shaved.

“Nothing. I pulled the drawer out too far. It’s okay. Everything’s under control.”

He has already lifted the high-chair tray and is picking up the baby. She clings to him, leaving zwieback handprints on his freshly shaved face and pristine shirt. He bounces her gently.

“Hey, Amy pie,” he croons, and the wails descend by fits and starts to hiccups, then whimpers.

“Women are putty in your hands.” Her voice is beginning to sound the way saccharine tastes.

“I’ve got Gable quaking in his boots. You want to take her, and I’ll pick up that stuff?”

“No, I dropped it. I’ll pick it up. You take care of her.”

He turns and starts toward the living room, holding the baby against his chest like a dancing partner, snaking his way through the hall.

There’s seven million people in New York
,

Fifty million Frenchmen in Paree
,

Not to mention such as English, Irish, Italians, and Dutch
,

But you’re the only one for me!

She gets down on her hands and knees and begins picking up the silverware. At least she didn’t drop plates or glasses. Nothing is broken. Except her life.

Stop it!

She goes on working, reaching up to put the handfuls of silverware on the counter. Finally, she straightens and stands, holding the last batch in her hands. She looks at the pile on the counter. How long will it take to wash and dry each piece? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Damn it!

When did she start cursing so much? I’ll tell you when. When the damn government mobilized the damn National Guard.

“You won’t have to worry in the Guard,” King Gooding said. Her father-in-law is Charles Gooding, Sr., but everyone calls him King. “We learned our lesson last time. Even that man in the White House isn’t crazy enough to get us into another European war. You heard his campaign speeches. He swore he wouldn’t send American boys to fight in a foreign war.”

She waited for Charlie to say something. During the campaign, he had heard from one of the reporters covering it, who had heard from someone on the inside, that the catch was, according to Roosevelt, once we were in the war, it would not be a foreign war. Charlie remained silent.

You’d think a man smart enough to run a bank would not succumb to wishful thinking. You’d think Charlie, who hung on every dispatch and broadcast from Europe, would have seen what was coming. But most of the young men in town, the boys Charlie grew up with, were joining the National Guard. If all your friends jumped off a cliff, her mother used to argue, would you follow? The friend her mother had in mind was Babe, a.k.a. the bad influence, the girl from below Sixth Street she never asked to stay to dinner when she invited the other girls, but that was another story. Charlie had followed his friends off the cliff. He said he would not feel right malingering. King agreed. Once you lose the respect of your neighbors, there is no getting it back. You can run away to a big city like Boston, but you cannot mend fences at home. Then the draft went into effect, and Charlie said wasn’t it smart of him to have joined the National Guard. When the government mobilized the National Guard, he did not say anything at all. Neither did his father. She, however, had barely been able to keep from screaming at them that had Charlie not joined the National Guard he would not have been drafted. He had Amy and her.

She stands looking down at the counter and thinks to hell with washing the silverware. They can all get sick and die.

She has to stop this. She is a grown woman, a wife, a mother, the first of her friends to be either, the mature one. She has to pull herself together. None of what is happening is his fault. Then whose fault is it? She wasn’t the one who went off a cliff because her friends were jumping. Stop it, the voice shrieks as she carries the silverware into the dining room.

When she finishes setting the table, she steps back to survey her handiwork. The crystal and silver and china gleam on the white damask cloth. All her wedding presents, not on display but being used, because they are married and have a home and a child and a shared life. At least for another twelve hours.

She crosses the front hall and stands in the archway to the living room. Charlie is lying on the Turkish rug with the baby on his chest. She’s gripping him with her fat legs, and he’s talking nonsense to her. Grace stands watching them and wonders, how can I be angry at this man?

Amy looks up and sees her standing there. Her round face opens into a baby-toothed grin. Mommy, Daddy, baby. Bliss.

Charlie tips his head back to follow the baby’s gaze. His upside-down smile that looks like a frown turns into an upside-down frown that looks like a smile.

“Sweetheart, don’t, please …”

Until then she did not know she was crying.

“Gracie, please …”

That makes it worse. She never let anyone call her Gracie until him. Now she loves it. If anything happens to him, no one will ever call her Gracie again. The silent tears explode in a sob.

He starts to get up.

She lifts her hand with her palm toward him and begins backing away. “No. Don’t.” Her shoes clatter up the stairs. She reaches the bathroom and closes the door behind her, careful not to slam it. She does not want him to think she is angry.

The image in the mirror shocks her. The silky red hair hangs lank around her face. The blotches on her pale translucent skin make her look as if she is breaking out in hives. Her sharp features have become haglike. He came downstairs fresh as a bandbox, an image she can hold on to. She’s sending him off with a picture of an ugly unkempt harridan.

She slips on a headband to hold back her hair and turns on the water. By the time she emerges from the bathroom, scrubbed, combed, and lipsticked, he is coming out of the baby’s room.

“She went out like the proverbial light,” he says.

He puts his arm around her shoulders, and she puts hers around his waist, and they start down the stairs in lockstep. Only they aren’t, because he is leaving and she is being left. He already has one foot out the door.

FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE
, Babe will be able to run the evening through her mind like one of the movies she and Millie and Grace used to see again and again when they were kids, until the usher found them lingering between shows and threw them out. And even when she is an old woman, her muscles will tense at the memory, like Claude’s biceps as she takes his arm to navigate the icy steps to the house.

Grace opens the door to them, her face as fragile as her good bone china, ready to crack at the drop of a word. Charlie stands behind her with a martini pitcher in one hand and a half empty glass in the other.

Millie and Pete arrive a moment later. Millie is all starry blue eyes and flushed pink cheeks, as if this really is a party. Pete helps her out of her coat, shrugs out of his own, slaps Charlie on the back, gives Claude an affectionate punch in the arm, kisses Grace and Babe, feels in his pockets for his cigarettes, pats himself down for a match. He is a rangy, rawboned perpetual-motion machine.

They move into the living room. Charlie pours drinks. Pete tells him not to be so stingy, though the glass is full to the brim. Claude knocks back half of his in one swallow. They pretend to settle in, but Babe can feel the tension vibrating like a tuning fork.

Charlie circles the room, supposedly keeping an eye on empty glasses and full ashtrays but really taking it all in, holding himself outside. Grace’s eyes cling to him like a shadow.

Pete springs out of his chair, does a lap around the room, flops back into it, lights another cigarette, stubs it out, grabs a paper cocktail napkin, starts one of his sketches, crumples it.

Babe’s voice is brittle in her own ears. Beside her on the sofa, Claude sits, shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip. She can feel the anticipation beating in him like a pulse. The men do not want to go, but if everyone else is going … Oh, hell, let’s just get it over with.

Only Millie is calm, the eye at the center of this hurricane of dread and desperation. She perches on the side of Pete’s chair, her arm draped around his shoulders when he’s in it, her Christmas-red fingertips splayed over his heart as if she is shielding it. Her blatant blond blue-eyed prettiness has deepened to a Madonna’s grave beauty. Babe cannot understand her serenity in the face of their panic. Then it comes to her.

When Millie was six, her father took her on his lap and explained that her mother was never coming home from the hospital. Eight months later, her aunt came upstairs, sat on the side of the bed, and told her that her father was not coming back either. A car skidding on ice, a tree, driven by grief. Years later she will hear a slightly different version of the story with the word
drink
substituted for
grief
. They are not mutually exclusive.

Millie went to live with the aunt and her husband. Childless, wanting a child, they were good to her. She likes to say she could not love them more if they were her real parents. Millie always knew how to get what she wanted. Her parents’ deaths taught her to want what she could get.

Babe, wanting, wanting, but never sure what, envies her that. But now Babe sees another legacy of the loss. Millie sits smiling into the terrifying future that is barreling down on the rest of them, because she thinks she has immunity. She has paid her dues. God, or fate, or simply the law of averages cannot smite her again.

Babe wants to shake her. She wants to tell her that, around the world, cities are going up in flames, and men and women and children are dying, and God does not have time to worry about Millie Swallow. She wants to shout that fate has no logic and, in war, the law of averages does not obtain.

SOMEHOW THEY MAKE IT
through dinner and more drinks without a mishap, though the men clutch their highball glasses so tightly they will surely break and the thin-stemmed crystal trembles in the women’s hands. Just as they are getting ready to leave, Charlie’s father and mother show up. All the parents will be at the bus depot tomorrow morning, but that dawn goodbye is not enough for King Gooding. He wants a piece of the last night too.

Dorothy Gooding, a small woman whose pinched but once-lovely face always seems to be apologizing for something, steps into the hall hesitantly, as if she knows they are intruding on the young people, but King strides into the house like a man who has paid for it. Just stopped by for a minute, he says, and a minute is all it takes to ratchet up the pressure. Sir, sir, sir, the men, suddenly boys, say. They cannot wait for him to go. Charlie is the most impatient. But King is in no hurry to leave. The minute swells to half an hour. Even as the rest of them are putting on their coats, he lingers. Only Charlie’s comment about getting up before dawn persuades his father to leave.

Grace and Charlie stand in their front doorway, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist, waving, as they watch the others make their way down the path, their galoshes crunching on the freshly scattered salt, the frost of their good nights hanging in the air like speech balloons above the heads of cartoon characters. Good night, good night, thank you, thank you, see you in the morning, morning, morning. The words echo in the darkness. Mourning, mourning, mourning.

Charlie locks the door, Grace moves around the living room, turning off lights, and they go upstairs. She is sitting on the side of the bed with her back to him, but she feels the mattress shift as he lowers himself onto it.

“Better set the alarm.”

She has managed not to look at the time all night. Now she takes the clock off the night table, moves the alarm hand to five o’clock, and begins winding. She will not need an alarm in the morning. She cannot believe he will either. But if he wants to keep up the pretense, she will match his game.

He reaches out and turns off the lamp on his side of the bed. They lie side by side in the darkness, stiff and bleak as twin sarcophagi, queen and king, wife and husband.
Husband
. She has always loved the sound of the word. At least, she has since she married him. The rustling intimacy of the first syllable, the proud boast of the second. In the early months of marriage, she used it every chance she got. My husband does not like starch in his shirts. My husband takes his coffee black. I’ll ask my husband. Now she has a new sentence. My husband has gone to war.

She feels the mattress shift again as he turns on his side. She wills herself to face him, but she cannot move. He reaches out and slides his hand inside her nightgown. Surely now her body will respond. It remains unyielding as stone. He must know something is wrong, but he will not admit it. Her husband can be stubborn. His hand goes on moving, slowly, maddeningly she would say at any other time, but it is not maddening, at least not in that sense.

“Take off your nightgown,” he murmurs.

He has never had to tell her to do that, not even on their wedding night. She worried then that her eagerness was unladylike, but he did not seem to mind. She wriggles out of her nightgown, a good wife following directions, but she still cannot bring herself to turn to him.

He rolls on top of her, and she puts her arms around him dutifully and goes through the motions, but only the motions. Her body is dead, and her mind will not give up the fight, and the worst part of it is, she knows that in a few hours he will be gone, and for weeks and months she will not forgive herself for her stubbornness.