What Love Sees (15 page)

The next morning in the library, Jean and her parents were listening to the Sunday radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic. Toscanini was directing. An announcer interrupted. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Many lives and ships were lost. At present they didn’t know how many. The family was stunned and outraged. “It doesn’t seem real,” Mother said.

“It does to me.” The sick-hearted feeling Jean had had in Germany with Miss Weaver returned. She heard again the pulsing thud of boots, felt again the constriction in her throat at the hated word, “
Heil
.” All that was only a build-up to this. And where would it go from here? The war was engulfing the world.

Life changed. Uncle Ed and Uncle Dudley switched the Ingraham Company from making clocks and watches to timers for explosives. Jean’s cousins went to work there. Father’s factory, Horton Manufacturing Company, formerly making sports equipment—golf clubs and fishing rods—now made antenna shafts for communication systems on tanks. Bill and Mort and Lucy all went to work there. Neither brother could join up. Classification 4F. Poor vision. Jean folded bandages at the Red Cross downtown. She knitted the bulky gray Red Cross sweaters for refugee children and delivered them downtown. She was part of the war effort.

Even though there was a war, there was still good in the world. She felt almost guilty for thinking so, for feeling the exhilaration of freedom. And if that fellow from California ever sent her a letter again, she wrote to Dody, she’d tell him about Chiang. She wrote to Sally Anne about Chiang. She wrote to Elsa. She wrote to Jimmy. And she posted her own letters.

Independence had its price, she learned. While her own activities increased, her dates with Jimmy decreased. Strange. He didn’t invite her quite so often to New Jersey, but when he did, she stepped off the train at Grand Central more firmly with Chiang leading her down the steps. Once when she arrived, Jimmy wasn’t on the platform as he always was. Jean waited a few moments, listening for his familiar voice. Shoulders brushed by her own. She felt she was an obstruction in the middle of the platform. She turned in the direction they always went. “Forward.” In the station she heard him call out to her. He introduced her to two women he had been talking to, a mother and daughter. Their bubbly friendliness gave Jean an uneasy feeling of insincerity. Jimmy didn’t say anything more about them as they walked out of the station.

Days passed and Christmas was approaching. She wrote to invite Jimmy to Hickory Hill. He didn’t answer. Vincent brought in their nine-foot tree. The two years before, she and Jimmy had decorated it together. She and Lucy did it this year. The maids hung greens under the chandelier in the stairwell. Jean still didn’t hear from Jimmy. She resigned herself to a “family only” Christmas. The whole Ingraham family, nearly twenty of them, came to noon dinner. They started with clam chowder and proceeded to baked scalloped oysters, turkey, ham, and the traditional New England Indian pudding made with corn meal and molasses. It seemed tasteless this year.

A few days later, Japan bombed Manila. Jean wondered what Jimmy felt about it. He’d been born there. She wrote to ask him to a New Year’s celebration at Hickory Hill. He didn’t respond.

On New Year’s Eve Mother and Father had an Ares and Ain’ts party. Years earlier Yale alumni from the Bristol area developed a private bridge group centered around Father, Mr. Yale himself, lifelong treasurer of his class of 1910. The club was called The Ares and The Ain’ts because, as he explained it, “Some of us are married and some of us ain’t.” Usually Ares and Ain’ts evenings began with a black tie dinner of four or five courses with printed menus. Then they’d adjourn to the living room for bridge and eventually end up in the grill room in the basement, a large room for entertaining fitted up like a British pub with furniture upholstered in deep red velvet. Though the Ares and Ain’ts were conversationally polite at dinner in the dining room, and dead serious about bridge in the living room, they usually raised a storm in the grill room late at night.

Just now, well before the midnight hour, they still occupied the living room. Laughter and music and singing spiraled up the stairway. Champagne corks popped. Glasses tinkled. Jean sat up in bed above the party in a flannel nightgown reading Daphne DuMaurier’s
Rebecca
, the wide Braille book spread out on her lap. Mother came upstairs. “Do you want a chicken salad sandwich and some ice cold champagne?”

It tasted good and it was kind of Mother to remember her when so much was going on downstairs, but the interruption made it hard to go back to her book. Her hands were cold, and she tucked them under the covers, giving up reading for a while. She wondered if all of that—the parties, the life with a husband and family, entertaining friends—would ever be for her. Would she always be an Ain’t? Was God only going to give her a piece of life? Would she always be an observer of someone else’s living? An observer. The irony made her smirk. Why was it so wrong for her to imagine and long for the domestic life of an ordinary woman, a life others took for granted?

She pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly and ate a bite of her sandwich. Her eyes blinked. If it is to be, it wasn’t going to be with Jimmy. That was obvious. She hadn’t heard from him for two months. Maybe he was spending New Year’s with that girl at the train station. That mother was more than friendly. Overly familiar, she’d call it. Definitely out to nab him for her daughter. If she could tell the designs that woman had on Jimmy just by her voice, then surely Jimmy must be able to tell, too. But men are stupid sometimes.

Maybe he had felt, all along, the silent disapproval of Mother and Father even though they were properly polite. But proper didn’t always mean genuine. Maybe he realized that Hickory Hill wasn’t for him. Maybe—and this was harder to face—he foresaw that she would become a burden to him. Years might make his extra solicitations grow wearisome. If that could happen, he might eventually resent her. Then she wouldn’t want him either. Her eyes narrowed as if she were trying to see into the future. She pursed her lips.

Where was there a person who could share her life without adopting her limitations? A person who would see her as whole? A normal life had been so close with Jimmy, but when it came right down to it, other routes must have looked easier to him. There was no denying it. Life with her would be different. She was different. Oh, yes, she’d had many advantages. She’d been to the capitals of Europe. She’d heard the world’s finest musicians, read the world’s greatest literature. She never lacked for anything. But she had never eaten a meal cooked with her own hands. Where was normalcy at Hickory Hill?

If Jimmy wasn’t going to give her a natural domestic life, she’d have to do it for herself. They had told her that much at The Seeing Eye, loud and clear on the first night. She’d have to cut her own meat or she’d go hungry. Now here was the bigger picture. She’d have to buy it and cook it, too, or she’d go hungry in a far deeper way.

The words she spoke in her mind jangled again, “If Jimmy wasn’t going to give her a natural life….” There it was—the deeper flaw that would make her permanently dependent, “give her a natural life,” as if Jimmy or any man was going to take the place of Father, providing her with life. Her blindness wasn’t making her feel dependent. Father was, unintentionally—she granted him that—and unconsciously, simply by his enormous need to be provider and to have her continue accepting in meekness. It was in that arena she’d have to struggle free. The test wasn’t on the streets behind Chiang’s harness. It was in her mind. She remembered Miss Weaver’s adamant voice, “Of course you can, Jean.” Look at Miss Weaver. She never married. Marriage was no guarantee of a normal life. And look at the wide world Miss Weaver claimed as hers. Jean’s heartbeat quickened at the possibilities. She reached for the rest of the sandwich and realized she’d eaten it all without noticing.

The first three days of 1942, it snowed continually. Jean opened her bedroom window, leaned out and stuck out her tongue to feel the snowflakes, when she heard Mother call her from downstairs to read her mail. There were two letters. Only one was addressed to her. The other was addressed to Mrs. Treadway, postmarked Summit, New Jersey. She heard Mother open it, but she didn’t say anything. “Just read it,” Jean said.

Mother cleared her throat. “This one’s written to me but it’s really for you. It’s from Jimmy.” Mother’s voice sounded odd. “He’s asking me to explain to you that it wouldn’t work, and that it would be better for both of you if you didn’t see each other any more.”

It started as a sharp wince, then surged up through her chest. Her throat shrank into a taut line. “He wrote that to you?” Her voice shook. “Why couldn’t he tell me himself?” Why did he wait so long, letting me go through the holidays not knowing what happened? All the good times, the laughter and the dancing, Jimmy’s funny singing, all this couldn’t make up for such a cruel, bungling way to end it.

Jean held on to herself while Mother put into her hand two small items. They were cold. She fingered them for a moment. Her ring from Bristol High and a tie pin she’d given him the Christmas before. Slowly she closed her fist around them. In her other hand Mother put the letter. She crumpled it into a ball.

Mother began to tear open the second letter.

“Later.” Jean raced out of the room and ran up the stairs, stumbling at the top one even though she hadn’t needed to count them for years. She rushed to her room and pulled the door shut. She flung herself down and hugged her pillow, burying her face in it. She knew she’d been preparing herself for this. On New Year’s Eve she’d confronted it, but that had been intellectual then. Now it was really and truly here. She wrapped the pillow around her ears so that Mother wouldn’t hear her wail.

After a while she noticed her neck and shoulders, even the muscles in her face, were tense. Where was Vic Gulbransen with his soothing hands now? Jimmy never touched her like Vic had. She imagined again Vic’s penetrating fingers loosening her tightness. Then she had felt like a woman. Jimmy only touched her so safely. He didn’t treat her with the deep regard she felt Vic had. He didn’t even treat her as a human being. Writing a letter to her mother—that denied she was even real, much less a woman. What insight did that show? Only cowardice. Talk about a sighted man! Her face felt tight.

An Ingraham clock ticked. Every other tick seemed to have a higher pitch. She put her hands over her ears. The clock took no notice of the magnitude of this hour. It ticked as it always had. As it always would. Even now, on this winter afternoon, time would already, minutely, begin to diminish the sharpness of the moment, like the snow she remembered rounding the angles of Hickory Hill’s roofline. She half recognized this in the part of her mind that was still thinking objectively. Minute by minute her body relaxed. She discovered her fist tight around the crumpled letter and she loosened her grasp. She smoothed it flat and then methodically tore it in two, then in fourths, eighths, and even once more until it was too small and thick to tear again. She stretched across the bed, found the rim of the wastebasket, and let the pieces fall.

What a stereotyped reaction, she thought, throwing myself on the bed as if I were enacting some melodramatic opera role. She found a handkerchief and blew her nose, then lay back down again.

Maybe she was at fault for allowing herself to think she and Jimmy could have a good life together. Maybe she loved him simply because there was no other. Jimmy was always there, gallant and fun but what more? Her imagination had made him into the perfect mate, but how was she to know whether in the years stretching ahead he was the right one?

She lay there a long time without moving. She may have fallen asleep. She wasn’t sure. When she drew her face away, she was startled for a moment to feel two wet spots on the embroidered pillow slip. Then she remembered.

The next day Mother reminded her of the other letter. Jean asked to hear it. It was from California. Apparently, Forrest had been having a difficult time, too. His father had died. He told how several years earlier when he came home one day, his mother ran out the front door crying, “Come quick. Daddy’s dying.” At his father’s bedside, in a desperate desire to help, Forrest had poured out his love for his father—how he appreciated him, respected him and needed him then more than ever. His father fell asleep and woke up the next morning nearly recovered.

The letter said he came home from work again recently and his mother ran out to him with the same words the second time. “I talked to him like I did before, but he was too far on his way and didn’t hear me.” The letter ended with the sentence, “Love alone is Life.”

Jean carried the letter to her room. It hardly seemed like it was from the same person. The other one seemed so childish, sheepish, jerky. It was written by a boy. This one showed so fearlessly and innocently a well of feeling, freely displayed. Here was a man. Maybe an unsophisticated man, but a man willing to share. Maybe his whole family loved so openly. What could she say to this person she didn’t even know? Strangely, she felt his loss draw her from her own.

A few weeks later she wrote to Dody who was back home in California. Forrest’s artless sharing had aroused her curiosity. The morning after she received Dody’s reply, Jean made an announcement at breakfast. She’d rehearsed it well the night before. “Chiang and I are going to California to visit Dody and her friends.”

She heard Father put down his paper. Jean took a swallow of juice and faced straight ahead. This time, she didn’t fear his reaction, but was only amused by her imagination of his face.

“Jean, you’ve got to be here on Valentine’s Day for Mort’s wedding,” Father said.

“Oh, I will be. I’ll leave after that.” The feeling that she was finally taking charge of her own life gave her voice new authority.

Mother put down her fork. Her voice was firm and measured. “I think that’s lovely, Jean. It will do you good.”

Chapter Thirteen

In San Diego, Dody’s family lived close to the sea. Her family’s Spanish-style house with a tile roof wrapped in a U-shape around a central patio with a fountain, palm trees, and honeysuckle vines so sweet the air was heavy with their scent. Jean felt the tree trunks, rough and different from any tree she’d known, not like a tree at all but pitted like deeply carved cork. So this was California—fragrant blossoms, tropical trees, an ocean breeze, and being outside to enjoy it all even in February.