The Road Taken (11 page)

They went back to New York, and a few weeks later Grandma succeeded in selling the house in Bristol and leased a rent-controlled half-floor-through apartment in a beautiful old stone town house on Washington Square, not too far from the family, with a view of the park. Harriette did not come with her. To everyone’s astonishment, Harriette enlisted in the WAVES, to see the world, to have her second chance on her own terms. Perhaps she knew how hopeless it was with her married man, but she also knew it would be another kind of hopelessness in New York, in mourning, with her mother controlling her. She was stationed in Washington, D.C., a busy and chaotic city filled with Service people. The war had changed her life too. Grandma bought a dog.

Chapter Thirteen

It was 1945, and the war was over. The two fascist dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, were dead; Mussolini shot by Italian partisans, and Hitler dead by his own hand in his burning bunker. The Allies had won in Europe. And three months later, the new atomic bomb, rumored at first to be the size of a golf ball, melted into fire and ash two Japanese cities full of innocent civilians. It was, in fact, just chance that made the Americans choose the first city, Hiroshima; the planes had been headed for a military target, but the weather had not allowed it and they had decided not to turn back.

The mushroom-shaped cloud signaled the end of the war in the Pacific and the beginning of doubt and fear about the morality of science. Like it or not, this was the dawning of a threatening new age. The bomb could end all wars or end all civilization. It was the first time that human beings had had so much power, and so much responsibility. The bomb brought peace, and infinite guilt.

At the movies, on the Fox Movietone news, Peggy and her family saw pictures of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The discovery of the death camps, which people had not known about or had not wanted to believe existed, astonished and horrified everyone. Unbearable photos were in the newspapers too: the crematoriums with their ovens, the piles of bones, clothing, shoes, shorn hair, teeth, and skeletal bodies, the mass graves, the barely living prisoners in their striped uniforms, their terrified and defeated eyes enormous in their starved faces, peering out from the tiers of wooden bunks where they lay in rows like animals in some wretched pen. Peggy had never seen adult men with expressions like that, and it shook the center of her confidence in an unforgettable way, because grown-ups, especially men, had always seemed so in control.

Hitler had killed more people than was imaginable, six million of them Jews, systematically wiping out entire families, entire villages—and also exterminating Gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals, the sick, the different. Josef Mengele, the Nazi “angel of death,” had performed unspeakable medical experiments on prisoners. For amusement the Nazis had made lampshades out of human skin, bearing the numbered tattoos from the prisoners’ arms. As each new atrocity became known people became more appalled. But it didn’t make them like the Jews any better. There was still anti-Semitism in America, just as there was prejudice against the blacks.

Peggy was seventeen, and the war was over, so she went on with her life. She bought her first pair of stockings, three pair actually. Before the war she had been too young to wear them, and then during the war there had been none, and women had put dark makeup on their legs and penciled in a seam. She went shopping with Grandma, who did not try to keep her in silly preteenage clothes the way her mother still did, and bought a form-fitting angora sweater and a pair of high heels. She got a new cold wave permanent. Her sister Joan, who was jealous, called her “Brillo head,” but Peggy thought she looked great. Her braces were off, revealing white, perfect teeth, and her skin had cleared up completely. Her bra was a very respectable 36C. Every girl wanted to be as big on top as possible. And one day, as she had been expecting, the phone rang with a long-distance person-to-person call.

“Peggy?” the caller said. “This is Ed Glover.”

His voice was sort of gravelly, not as she had imagined it, and incongruous with his innocent face, but after a few words she decided his soft, gravelly voice was sexy and made him even more interesting.

“I’m back home,” he said. “Safe and sound. I really want to meet you.”

“I want to meet you too.”

“I was thinking of coming to New York. I’ve never been there. Someone said I can stay at the YMCA and it’s not too expensive.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Could I come next week?”

Next week! “I have school, but . . .”

“I’ll go sight-seeing. What college are you going to? You didn’t say.”

College? Of course, she was supposed to be twenty-one, she should be a senior in college now, or even have graduated. “Hunter,” she lied.

“Do you know anything about NYU? I’m thinking of going there on the GI bill, take a degree in accounting. If I like New York.”

“Oh, I hope you do,” Peggy said. “It’s really odd to hear your voice after all this time; it makes you a real person.”

“Yours too. You have a very warm voice. I knew you would. Your letters meant a lot to me, you know, all through the war.”

“And yours to me.”

Maybe I’ll never have to tell him, she thought. Maybe I can get away with it. By the time he has to meet my parents he’ll like me already, and then if I tell him he’ll forgive me. After all, it was my mind he liked, not my age.

But she knew he would be humiliated to discover he had poured his heart out to a little kid, and she had the feeling none of this could end well at all.

Uncle Hugh was back from the Army now, ensconced again in his first-floor hideaway, working at his beloved antique store. He had let his hair grow immediately. Ginger was seven and in the second grade, and loved school, and they all agreed that she was turning out to be very bright. But she still sleepwalked occasionally, and once appeared in Hugh’s room in the middle of the night, waking herself and him up and asking, “Who are you?”

“I’ve asked myself that many times,” he told her. They both thought that was funny.

Rose and Ben were concerned because she had never opened a door before in her sleep. They were afraid she would fall down the stairs, even though she seemed able to execute complex movements with ease. So after the Hugh incident they locked her in her room at night, to keep her safe, and left her a potty to use because she couldn’t get to the bathroom. Ginger hated it, this humiliation and loss of freedom, and cried and howled so loudly that finally after two weeks that were unbearable for everyone they relented and left her bedroom door open with a ribbon tied across it, so she would wake up.

“I used to let you scream for hours when you were a baby,” Rose told Peggy. She sounded sad. “They told us to.”

“I don’t remember,” Peggy said.

Peggy wondered whether Ginger was only pretending to sleepwalk. Ginger, of the three sisters, was the one who most needed adventure. She was curious and opinionated and willful, sober and fierce. When you looked at Ginger’s little face you could see just what she was going to look like as a grown-up. Maybe it was only her big nose.

“Beaky,” Joan sometimes called her. Ginger and Peggy were Beaky and Brillo head. Why was Joan so mean, so taunting, so angry? Their mother said fourteen was a difficult age. Peggy thought that was so. At fourteen she had found everything wrong with her mother. But she had been nice to Joan then, hadn’t she? Well, maybe not. She didn’t remember that, either.

Ed Glover called again, making plans. “Who is that?” her mother asked.

“The boy I wrote to during the war. He’s coming to New York.”

“Then you should have him here for dinner.”

“All right,” Peggy said. “If he isn’t too busy.”

“He’s not too busy to see you,” Rose said.

Peggy shrugged.

She met Ed Glover under the clock at Grand Central Station. He had just gotten off the train, and had civilian bags and civilian clothes and a crew cut. He was as handsome as she had expected, but so much more mature than his high school yearbook photo had shown him to be that at first she almost didn’t recognize him. “Peggy?” he said, doubtfully.

“Ed?”

Then they flew into each other’s arms and hugged. “You’re even prettier than I imagined,” he said.

“And you’re so much more . . . grown-up.”

“Well, so are you.” The first hurdle had been crossed.

They went to the YMCA in a cab, and she waited downstairs and read a tattered magazine she had found in the lobby while he put his bags in his room and took a quick shower. Then they went to Times Square, and walked while he gaped, and then they had coffee and he talked about the future, about peacetime, and all the things that would be available now: money and freedom and schooling and cars and loans for houses and, above all, just not worrying that in one instant you might die. It was a beautiful fall day, the sky clear, the air pleasant and breezy, yet crisp; the kind of day that occurs from time to time in the fall and spring in New York, and is so magical it makes you want to do things you never did before.

“I could move to New York,” he said. “I like it.”

“You haven’t seen it yet.”

“Does that mean I won’t like it?”

“No, it just means you have to know a lot about something before you decide you want it.”

“Oh, I agree.”

They smiled at each other. The strangeness had easily worn off and Peggy felt comfortable with him. “Should we get theater tickets?” he asked. “Should we go to dinner? Do you want to go dancing?”

She had to be home at ten o’clock. “Aren’t you tired?”

“No. I’m too excited to be tired.”

“Well, let’s have dinner and talk,” Peggy said.

She showed him around Greenwich Village and then they went to a restaurant in Little Italy, which he found picturesque and fun. Over plates of spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti—of which she had only a few sips because she had hardly ever even tried a drink—they told each other about their families. He was an only child and had a stepfather who was a successful farmer. His stepfather didn’t care that Ed didn’t want to work on the farm, even as an accountant, because he had two much older sons of his own from his first marriage and they were working there already.

“What does your mother think?” Peggy asked.

“I can do what I want,” Ed said, smiling. “I’m her spoiled only son.”

“Are you spoiled?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at her hands. She hadn’t bitten her nails since she heard he was coming, and yesterday she’d had a manicure. It occurred to her suddenly that an engagement ring would look very nice on that finger. Why not? The war was over and people were eager to get on with their lives. But in their letters she and Ed had never talked about ongoing significant relationships with others, and she thought she should make sure he was free before she gave in to her fantasy. “Do you have a girlfriend back home?” she asked.

“A girlfriend?” He looked surprised.

“That’s not so unusual.”

“No. Before the war I didn’t want to get involved and then go away, and during the war I found someone.”

Her heart sank. There was an unexpected lump in her throat and she wanted to cry. She couldn’t speak. It had not occurred to her until this very day to protect herself from the possibility of someone new. He had only come here for a vacation, and to satisfy his curiosity about his longtime pen pal, and to look at schools, and then he would go away. Whom had he met, an Italian? Would he be at NYU studying accounting while his war bride was studying English?

“What?” he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Peggy whispered.

“You look so upset. Maybe I’m pushing you.”

“Me?”

He took a little box out of his pocket, opened it, and took out a gold ring with a tiny diamond. “I couldn’t wait,” he said. “I was going to give it to you after a few days, but I know we’re right for each other, Peggy.”

“Oh,” she gasped. “Oh. . . .”

“Don’t tell me you have someone else?”

“No.”

“Then just try it and see if it fits.”

She put the ring on her third finger left hand, her heart pounding, more with apprehension than excitement. She might as well take it right off before she got attached to it, she thought; he would want it back when he discovered who she really was.

“The war made people do strange things,” she said, unable to look at him. “I mean . . .”

“What
do
you mean?”

“I really got to love you when we wrote to each other. It’s not that . . .”

“But it’s what? You don’t want to get married? This is too sudden? All right, I can see that. I’m an impetuous person. But you and I understand each other so much more than people who only went out on a few dates and necked and then got engaged because the war was coming. Those people are getting married and they’ll have to get to know each other now. We know each other already.”

“You might think . . . I’m too young,” she said.

He looked perplexed. “You’re twenty-one, the same as I am. Is it your parents? You’re afraid they’ll disapprove? You don’t need their permission anymore.”

“I do want to marry you, Ed. But . . .”

“But what? Tell me. Did I do something?”

“No, I did.” She tried to breathe deeply to calm herself, but she felt as if she were choking. She took a big gulp of her glass of wine, but that only made her choke more. She had never felt more unsophisticated and childish. “I’m seventeen,” Peggy said.

There was a pause while he considered this. “Then you were . . .”

“Younger when we started writing.”

“You were
fourteen?”

She nodded.

He considered this further. Then he smiled. “Well, heck, it works in the Ozarks,” he said. “No reason why it shouldn’t work here.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

“Oh, Ed!” She bounced out of her seat and ran over to him and sat on his lap, and they kissed and hugged, laughing. She thought she could kiss him forever. His lips aroused her the way no one else’s had. She inhaled him. His hair smelled of shampoo and his skin smelled of Old Spice aftershave, and under that was his own personal odor, rather musky.

People in the restaurant were looking at them, smiling and laughing, but with approval because it was romantic. Peggy waved her left hand in the air so they could all see her ring, see that she was engaged to him, that theirs was a love story that had come true.

Of course, she would still have to deal with her parents.

On the walk home to make her ten o’clock curfew Peggy told him how much she disliked high school. “I can’t wait to grow up,” she said. “I want to be an adult, a married woman, and have a real life. I want to take care of you, and have kids.”

“We’ll wait to get married until you graduate,” Ed said. “Meanwhile I’ll start next term at NYU so we can see each other. Then we’ll get an apartment here while I finish getting my degree. You could work while I’m at college, it will be good for you. I don’t want you to think you missed anything, because afterward you’ll never have to work again.”