Summer House (39 page)

Ilke was panting now, and her entire body trembled. She crawled up onto the bed and held out her arms.

Anne gave her the tiny, squirming, wailing baby. She said, “You have a son.”

Twenty-four

N
ona needed to
do this with great care, and she could not take time for planning, for shaping her words. She had to do this now.

Rising on her shaky old legs, she slowly made her way from the terrace and into the house. “Glorious?” She hated the quaver in her voice.

Glorious appeared. “Did you call me?”

“I’d like to go upstairs, dear. Could you help me?”

Glorious was at her side at once. With the other woman to lean on, Nona made it across the living room and the hall and began climbing the stairs. It helped, having Glorious there. Glorious loaned her strength, and that kept fear of falling from slowing her down. When they reached the second floor, they could hear, from behind Worth’s bedroom door, the sound of argument.

Glorious didn’t mention it; she was good about that. But when she finally had Nona settled in her chaise by the window, she asked, “Would you like a little Scotch?”

“I’d love it,” Nona answered.

She lay back against the chaise, resting. She felt ancient and very tired, and she was dreading what she was about to do. But the time had come.

“Here you are.” Glorious came into her bedroom, set the highball glass on the table near Nona, and nodded. “Anything else?”

“Yes, Glorious. I’d like you to open the bottom drawer of my dresser. Yes, that one. See the old quilted photo album? Put it on the table next to me, please.”

Glorious did as she was requested.

Nona took a fortifying sip of Scotch. “Now. Will you please ask Worth and Helen to come see me?”

“Surely.”

Glorious left the room, returning with Worth and Helen behind her. Their faces were still flushed from their battle.

But Nona smiled. “Good. Worth. And Helen. I want to talk to you both. I have something I need to tell you.”

“All right, Nona.” Worth pulled up a chair for Helen and one for himself, almost touching Nona’s knees, so she would not be troubled to project her voice, which was shaky this morning. “We’re all ears.”

Nona cleared her throat. “Now that the time has come, I find it harder than I expected.” Emotion hit her hard. She lifted her hands and covered her face. “Oh, dear, oh, dear.”

Worth reached out to put a reassuring hand on Nona’s knee. “Mother. It can’t be that bad, whatever it is.”

“Perhaps not. We’ll see.” Nona dropped her hands and struggled to straighten in her chair. “Very well. Worth, on the table there, the burgundy quilted photo album. Could you open it, please?”

Worth obeyed. The album was old, the pages made of black construction paper, with black-and-white photos attached by glue and yellowing tape.

“Hey. Is this Dad’s World War Two album?” He studied the first photo, of several soldiers standing on a cobblestone street. “Why didn’t he ever show this to us?” He found his father, slim and young and handsome. He put his finger on his father and looked up at Nona. “Here’s Dad.”

“Turn the page,” Nona said.

Worth turned the page. This was a black-and-white interior shot. Herb Wheelwright was seated at desk piled with papers, a chrome ashtray, and two black telephones. Herb wore a khaki shirt and tie and a dress blouse with the battalion insignia and stripes on his arm and on his lapel the bar of a first lieutenant.

Behind him stood two other army officers, one leaning casually on a wooden file cabinet, the other looking jaunty, hands in pockets, grinning. Behind Herb stood a thin, bald, older man in a suit, his face taut and serious. Between the standing men were two young women. One wore a flowered dress and her dark hair was arranged in marcelled waves. The other, a blond woman, wore a simple white shirt and a dark skirt. Her shoulder-length hair was almost white, her eyes luminous, her figure voluptuous.

“Wow, the blonde is a beauty!” Worth exclaimed.

“Yes,” Nona agreed. “She is. Look at her carefully, Worth. That woman is your mother.”

Worth wrinkled his forehead and shot Nona a look of gentle, benevolent concern.

“Mother.” He closed the album. “Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about the past. Perhaps it’s upsetting you—”

“Worth, I haven’t had a stroke and I haven’t developed a full-force case of senility overnight. I’m telling you the truth. You need to
hear
me. Your father and I discussed this when it happened, and many times since, and now is the time for you to know.”

Worth looked apprehensive. “What would you like for me to know?”

Adrenaline flooded Nona’s body. She was not as anxious as she was invigorated. Perhaps everyone felt this way when they remembered a dramatic, life-changing event.

“You know your father was an officer in World War Two. You know he remained in Germany, in the Army of Occupation, for two years. You know that I joined him. You were born in Bremerhaven in 1945. But not in August. In January.”

Nona watched Worth shoot a quick look of disbelief at Helen. She was glad that Helen was here to share this—this
bombshell.
The
pertinence of the word made her bark out a kind of choked laugh, which made Worth look even more worried.

She continued. “These are the facts, Worth. Perhaps we should have told you before now. Or perhaps I should never have told you. You must understand how much thought I’ve given this.”

Worth said, gently, “Mother. You and Father were married in 1943.”

“We were. And we were separated for almost two years by the war. Your father saw terrible things—men fighting, men dying—and for months he was on the battlefield, living in the harshest conditions, eating dreadful food, sleeping on the cold ground, not knowing whether he would live or die. I’m not trying to excuse what he did. I’m trying to explain. When the war was over, he was sent to Bremer-haven to head up the organization and dispersal of supplies arriving in that port city and sent throughout a devastated country. He was billeted in Ilke Hartman’s home. That woman, with the white-blond hair, that is Ilke Hartman. That is your mother.”

Irritation rasped in Worth’s voice. “You really should stop saying that.”

“You really should listen to me.” Nona’s voice was sharper than she meant it to be, but it silenced Worth. “I sailed to Bremerhaven in January, to work at the European end of the Stangarone shipping offices. When I arrived, I found your father living with Ilke, and she was pregnant, she was pregnant by your father. He told me they had been lovers. He told me her child was his. She gave birth in January. I was there. Worth, I was there at your birth. I saw you born.”

“But Nona.” Helen’s tone was urgent. “If this Ilke Hartman was Worth’s mother, why was Worth raised here in the United States?”

The accumulated buffer of years dissipated from around Nona like a sea mist, allowing so many emotions to return vividly to her, so many sights and sounds and wounds and terrors. “Because Ilke was killed by a UXB.” Seeing their confusion, she added, “An unexploded bomb. They were everywhere in Europe.”

Now the memories were beginning to coalesce, to weigh upon her shoulders and her lungs. “Ilke knew a butcher in another part of town, a man who had been a friend of her parents. Her parents, her
entire family, had died in the war. Ilke’s milk was not abundant, and she decided to go see the butcher, to could convince him to sell her a piece of meat. It was a Monday morning. The baby—you, Worth—was only two weeks old. He was sleeping, and she did not want to carry him with her, because the streets were difficult to walk on, with the rubble in the way, and people were often unruly, shoving in their haste to get to something, anything. The streets were always dangerous. And she knew the butcher well. It seemed a reasonable thing to do.” Something thick clogged her trachea. She tried to cough it away.

Helen leaned forward. “Would you like some water, Nona?”

Nona touched her throat, her crepey, turkey-wattle throat. “I’ve got something here, dear.” Nona sipped her Scotch.

“Go on,” Worth urged, his voice quiet now.

Nona gazed at the sixty-year-old man, handsome, silver-haired, healthy, sitting before her. “I was taking care of you, Worth. We had not yet decided what we would do, your father and I. He loved me, he had not stopped loving me, but the war … the loneliness, the hardships … I could understand. I could forgive. It was the war, you see; it was another world. And you were a beautiful baby, vulnerable, innocent, precious. Herb told me he would remain my husband. We would return to the United States eventually. But he intended to claim you as his son and to support Ilke and you. I commended his decision. I knew it was the right thing to do. For two weeks, we three adults managed to live together in—well, you could call it a kind of peace. We understood without saying it that you were the focus of all our lives.”

Worth waited in silence.

Nona clasped her hands together, directing her gaze at him. “When you hear an infant cry, Worth, you want to comfort it, feed it, ease its distress. Inside that house, it was such a strange, hot, intense world—did I tell you that the baby was premature? You. You were premature, Worth, you were seven and a half months old when you were born. You were bald and had no eyelashes or eyebrows, no fingernails. We could not weigh you, but I’m sure you weighed no more than five pounds. You were
tiny
, Worth. Absolutely beautiful, but so defenseless. Ilke did not have enough milk for you. Herb managed,
through his army contacts, to procure formula, and bottles, and the three of us took turns feeding you, because you were always hungry.” Nona leaned forward, her voice suddenly strong, powerful with the force of her emotions. “Try to envision it, Worth. Outside the little brick house spread devastation and ruin and chaos. Buildings were still collapsing, beams and roof slates and window glass giving way as houses and shops and churches and hospitals settled. Unexploded bombs were everywhere. You could not trust the ground to lie still beneath your feet. Trees lay across sidewalks, their roots dry and crooked, reaching out like the arms of the dead. And the dead were everywhere. You never knew when you might see a hand extending from a pile of debris. You never knew when you might see rats gnawing at something in a mound of broken timbers. Women roamed the street weeping, tearing their hair, their skin. Men staggered through the streets. Some of them howled.”

“Nona,” Worth cautioned, “you’re upsetting yourself.”

“No. I’m upsetting
you
, and I mean to. I want you to try to see, really see, what it was like, for me and for your father and for your mother. We lived in a world utterly changed by war. We lived in a world of ruin and shambles. And here you were, a new life, helpless but alive and kicking, giving us all something to hope for. You were like a flower, sprouting from a field of wreckage.”

For a moment, the three of them sat quietly, reverently. Nona’s old heart was racketing around in her chest like a squirrel trapped in a cage. She forced herself to take deep breaths. She took another sip of Scotch.

Gathering her strength, she continued. “It was a friend of your father’s who told us about the bomb. The bomb that killed your mother. Your father wept. I wept, too. I had not come to know Ilke well. I was there only two weeks, after all. But from the beginning she had understood how I felt about the baby, about you. She was so generous with you. She let me help take care of you, she let me rock you and carry you, and after the first week, when it became evident that you needed more nourishment than she could supply, she allowed me to give you the bottle.” Tears she could not prevent fell down Nona’s face. “We should have hated each other. I suppose, any other
time, we would have. At least
resented.
She was so beautiful, Worth. Look at the picture. She was much more beautiful than I. And her laugh—it was like silk. Her speaking voice I didn’t find so attractive, all those gutturals and coughing sounds. But her laugh … and when she sang lullabies to you, her voice was as sweet as honey. She was very young. She was twenty-one when she died.”

Helen reached over and lifted the album from Worth’s hands. She studied the photo of Ilke Hartman. “She was beautiful, it’s true. But not more beautiful than you, Nona.”

“You’re being kind. But believe me, I know the truth. Look at her eyes. Look at the shape of her eyes, and the light eyebrows, and how they wing upward at the outside. Like Worth’s. Look at the picture, and then look at your face in a mirror, Worth.”

Worth shook his head. “I don’t know if I can take this all in.”

“Give yourself time,” Nona advised.

Helen asked, “So you adopted the baby?”

Nona said, “I
claimed
the baby. I stayed in Bremerhaven, with your father and Worth, for two years. In August we wrote home that I had had a premature baby. And Worth
was
a frail, sickly infant. In fact, he was small and under average height for the first five years of his life. He was slow to crawl, slow to walk, he didn’t even speak until he was three.” She shook her head, remembering. “Imagine our surprise when you suddenly shot up, a strong, healthy, active boy.”

“Did the Wheelwrights never suspect?” Helen asked.

Nona laughed. “Not once. They were only too eager to believe that I had given birth to a weakling. And then, as Worth became a person, they fell in love with him, just as everyone did.”

Nona sank back into her chaise. Her heart had eased, the pounding receding to its calm and regular beat. She had done it. She had finally told Worth the story of his birth. She studied his face, searching for a sign of his reaction.

Worth had taken back the album and put on his glasses and scrutinized the photo. He raised his head, slipped off his glasses, and folded them. His face was calm when he said, “I know what you’re doing, Mother.”

“Oh?” She raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “And what is that?”

“You’re trying to persuade me to accept Suzette’s baby as my own blood.”