Searching for Pemberley (45 page)

“Aunt Marie's never alone,” Patrick continued. “Mom or Aunt Agatha fix her meals every day, and the neighbors are taking turns checking up on her. She wouldn't let J.J. spend the night because it would be 'indacent,'” he said, mimicking Aunt Marie's brogue that had survived her sixty years in America. “At 8:00, he pretends he's leaving, and she pretends he's not in the next room.” According to the little man with the big heart, they had been dating for forty years, and he proposed to her every year on her birthday.

“Grandpa's looking forward to seeing you again,” Patrick said, smiling. “He just found out where you've been living. He thought you were still in Germany.”

When we pulled into the alley behind the house, I was overwhelmed by a flood of memories, especially of my
grandmother. All summer long, Grandma would be in the garden checking on her tomatoes and other vegetables to make sure they had ripened to perfection. While Grandma was out in the garden, my mother would be in the kitchen, peeling, slicing, or boiling potatoes, which was what she was doing when I came through the door. I had not seen her since August 1946.

Mom looked much older. Added to the daily stress of living with a husband who drank too much and a father-in-law who raised meanness to an art was the strain of caring for my Aunt Marie. But Mom had an inner strength whose source was her unshakeable faith in her church and her belief that everything happened for a reason, according to God's plan. We had been having a good cry when my Grandpa, sitting in his usual place by the coal stove, woke up.

“I thought you be dead,” he said.

In order to keep peace in the house, I needed to come up with a reason why I had been in England, the home of his enemy, for more than a year. But I thought it best to keep it simple. “The U.S. Government gave a lot of money to the British during the war, and there had to be some accountability on how the money had been spent.” That was the truth. It just didn't have anything to do with me.

After a long silence, Grandpa finally said, “That be a good thing. Those teeving bastards need watching.” And he went back to sleep.

At the end of their workday, Dad and Sadie came home, and my sister grabbed me and spun me around. We had grown up sleeping in the same bed, which provided numerous opportunities to share stories as well as our hopes for the future. As for my
dad, he came over and put his arm around my shoulder, and all he said was, “Welcome home, M'acushla.”

“Katie and little Jimmy are coming in from Jersey tomorrow to spend time with Aunt Marie,” my mother said.

And that brought me back to the reason why I had left England. It also reminded me that I was now on the same continent as Rob. When I sent my telegram to Michael, I would send one to Rob as well letting him know that I was on his side of the Atlantic, and I wondered what, if anything, he would do.

After a long evening of catching up with a steady stream of friends and family welcoming me home, I finally went upstairs. Inside the door of my bedroom was a little holy water fountain screwed into the wall above the light switch, and the walls were covered with pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart, which made me realize that I was back under the aegis of Father Lynch. Before I left England, I had gone to confession because I wasn't about to go into the confessional with Father Lynch. Not only would I have to confess that Rob and I had had sex, but I would have to estimate how many times we did it. Sackcloth and ashes would have been too easy a penance for someone who was obviously a loose woman.

The upstairs was heated by grates that opened to the kitchen below. During the night, when the fire in the coal stove had died down, the room was freezing, but for the time being, it was warm enough so that Sadie and I could talk. When I left Minooka in 1944, I was nineteen and Sadie was fifteen. In those four years, Sadie had easily become the prettiest girl in town. Although we shared the same physical characteristics—black hair, blue eyes,
and fair skin—Sadie's hair was blacker, her eyes were bigger and bluer, and at five-foot-six, she was four inches taller than I was. If she had a flaw, it was her habit of saying exactly what was on her mind. In the two years I had been overseas, that hadn't changed.

“What happened with Rob?”

Should I tell my little sister that Rob and I were over, and how would I explain Michael? But then I decided to go for it, and I told the story of Michael's waxing and Rob's waning.

“Oh my God! My sister, St. Margaret Mary Joyce, had a flirtation with another guy while she was dating someone else?” Actually, after our time together on the sofa in the study, referring to it as a flirtation was probably no longer accurate, but I wasn't going to tell Sadie that. “Going overseas really did change you. You used to be a real stick in the mud, so this is definitely a change for the better.”

One of the people I had missed the most while I was in Europe was my cousin, Bobby, who owned an Esso gas station with my brother on the main road between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Before sitting down in the office, I took out a handkerchief and placed it over the split red-vinyl chair. Bobby opened the vending machine and tossed a bag of M&Ms to me. We were alone, because Patrick was out picking up tires.

“How's your love life?” he asked with his quirky smile that had gotten him out of more than one jam. Obviously, Sadie had told Bobby about Rob and Michael.

“Never mind about my love life. How's yours?”

He answered in almost a whisper. “I'm dating a girl from Southside.” That was no big deal because a lot of people from
South Scranton went to St. Joe's, so it was considered to be an extension of Minooka—one with amenities. “Her name is Teresa Mateo.” I let out a whoop. Now, this was a big deal. Because of the high position Bobby's father held in local politics, his mother thought she was better than everyone else. Having her son dating an Eye-tie would damage the family's image.

“Do you know who gave me my first kiss?” I asked in the same voice he had used.

“Tommy Gallo.” Tommy had been killed on D-Day, June 6, 1944, while climbing the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in an attempt to knock out a German pillbox. My final letter from Tommy had been dated June 4th. In it, he had talked about how he couldn't wait for the invasion to start because he was tired of being penned up in holding areas with hundreds of guys in miserable weather. He just wanted it to be over, and for him and thousands of other young Americans, it was.

“I saw you getting into his car outside Dugan's Diner. So I asked him if he was seeing you, and he said 'yes,' and then he said, 'All of this baloney about Irish girls dating only Irish boys, and the same deal with Italians, is a load of crap. When I get back, I'm going to take Maggie dancing at the Hotel Casey and to hell with anyone who doesn't like it.'” I brought the conversation back to Teresa Mateo because I didn't want to think about how devastated I was when I had heard that Tommy was gone. He was the only one who could have gotten me to move back to Minooka.

Teresa's family owned a bar on the city line, which was probably where Bobby had met her. She was a beautiful girl: thick black hair and blacker eyes and a very attractive figure. I asked him when he was going to tell his mother. I wanted to know when to leave town.

“Probably on Saturday,” Bobby said. “Teresa and I have a wedding to go to. I think her mother has figured it out because I've been eating a lot of spaghetti at the bar, but it's going to be a shot out of the blue for Mom. She'll get over it eventually,” he said with a confidence that I doubt he felt. I was happy for him, but I seriously doubted if Mamie Lenahan was going to take this lying down.

BEFORE LEAVING ENGLAND, I received a letter from Rob saying that Ken and he were heading to Miami Beach where they would spend the Christmas holidays. When my mother told me there was a telephone operator on the line, I couldn't think who would be calling me long-distance. To my surprise, it was Rob.

“Maggie, I just got your letter. How's your aunt?”

I told him that we had buried her two days earlier, but I assured him that she had lived a full and happy life.

“God, Maggie, I can't tell you how good it is to hear your voice. I swear, it's like manna from heaven.”

I knew exactly how he felt because just hearing his soft Western drawl was giving me a much-needed boost. But longdistance phone calls were expensive and, in our family, reserved for emergencies. I told Rob his call was costing him a fortune, and he said, “I don't care. You're worth every dime.” In that case, if he wanted to talk, I'd oblige, so I asked him how his Christmas holidays had been. He said he didn't want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about “us.”

“I'm flying out to Omaha for a visit with the Monaghans, but after that, I'd like to come and see you.”

I hadn't been expecting the phone call, and now he wanted to come to Minooka. Feeling very flattered, I told him to come ahead.

Before hanging up, he said, “I couldn't have a better Christmas present than hearing you're back in the States. I love you, and I'll see you soon.”

Waiting at the station for Rob's train to come in, I wasn't sure how I would feel when I saw him. It had been three months since we had been together in London. But when I caught sight of him, I felt a burst of happiness. He looked so good in his new suit, and living in a state with lots of sunshine certainly agreed with him.

Before December 1941, no one would have hugged and kissed in as public a place as Scranton's Lackawanna Station, but since the war, people were used to returning servicemen kissing their loved ones, so I gave Rob a big hug and kiss.

Walking to the car, he told me he had joined the Air Force Reserves. “I haven't actually reported, but I was able to grab a seat on a flight to an airfield near Philadelphia anyway. As soon as I signed the papers, they told me I could get on any flight that had space available. They're moving planes all over the country, and some are being sold to private contractors. I flew in on a twin-engine job that was used for photo recon that's being sold to a real-estate developer.”

I asked Rob if he was hungry, and he said he was starved. “There's no in-flight service on these planes,” he said, laughing. After sliding into a rear booth in a West Scranton diner, Rob informed me that he had gone on an interview with Delta Air
Lines in Atlanta for the position of flight engineer. The personnel manager who interviewed him was a former B-17 pilot and liked to hire Air Corps vets.

“I thought you said you didn't like Atlanta.” He also said that I would most definitely not like Atlanta, so why was he acting as if this was good news for me?

“I wasn't real keen on the idea of staying in Atlanta, but this guy told me not to make up my mind until I had seen the city from Delta's point of view. Since the war, thousands of servicemen who had been stationed in the South went back to look for jobs. It might be hot in Atlanta, but for some guys, it beats shoveling snow in Des Moines.

“Maggie, this is a great company,” he said, placing his hands over mine. “I could support a family on the salary I'd make. They're building houses left and right, and the apartments are air-cooled—the bedrooms, anyway. What better place to kick off your shoes and cool down on a hot summer's night?” I knew he was flirting with me, but I said nothing and just nodded my head. “They have routes from Atlanta to Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans, but that's just the beginning. Why would anyone want to spend four days on a train when you can get on an airplane and be wherever you want in a matter of hours?” Doing a drum roll on the table, he said, “This is big. Really big. The guy even mentioned possible pilot's training for me. Do you know how exciting it would be to fly a plane where your cargo is a group of passengers instead of bombs? I can do this.”