Woman in Red (14 page)

One day Eleanor’s father took her aside. “I’ve been praying long and hard on this, Ellie, and I think God has an answer for us.” As though her pregnancy were as much his dilemma as hers. “Do you remember Joe Styles?” She nodded, vaguely recalling him from Sunday services, a squareset man with a weather-beaten face who sang the hymns in
a deep baritone that carried above everyone else’s voices. “Well, I spoke to him about you,” her father went on, a grim set to his jaw, as if determined to get through this before he could weaken and change his mind. “I told him about your, uh, circumstances, and he thinks he can help. He’s a good man, Eleanor. You could do a lot worse.”

It had dawned on her then what her father was getting at: He expected her to marry this Joe Styles, a man she only knew to say hello to. Eleanor would have been mortified, if she hadn’t been so numb. Instead, she only sat there in silence, listening to her father go on about Joe’s attributes: He didn’t smoke or drink, and he owned his own fishing boat and a house to boot. She had such a sense of disconnect, she even found herself agreeing to meet with the man. A quick and painless death would have been equally welcome, but that wasn’t an option.

The meeting took place the very next day, in the rectory parlor, with her parents no doubt hovering on the other side of the closed door. If Joe Styles had said one wrong thing, it never would have gone beyond that. If, for instance, he had told her he was willing to overlook the fact that she was pregnant with another man’s child, in essence spoiled goods. Instead, Joe said only that he would be honored to have her as his wife, and that his home would be hers if she wanted it.

“It’s not much. But it’s solid and there’s an extra room, for when the baby comes,” he said of the house his father had built with his own hands. “As for that, you should know I’d treat it no different than if it was my own.”

Seeing Joe perched on her mother’s Hunzinger chair, surrounded by the porcelain figurines Verna collected, the old expression, bull in a china shop, came to mind. Joe wasn’t so
much a big man as one who gave the impression of brute strength, with those great meat hooks of hands and a thick, veined neck that thrust from his shirt collar like that of a straining ox. Even the suit he was wearing was all wrong, shiny in spots, the jacket too tight, as if it had been purchased years before the daily effort of hauling in his catch had added twenty or thirty pounds of extra muscle to his frame.

Even so, Eleanor, recalling her father’s words, had thought,
I could do worse
. Joe was a man of simple means and education, and not much to look at, but he was kindhearted, and what more could she ask? It wasn’t as if she were in a position to be choosy. The fact that she didn’t love him and couldn’t imagine ever feeling for him what she had for Lowell, didn’t greatly concern her. This was a decision based not on want but on need.

“And if I were to agree to this, what would you be getting out of it?” she asked bluntly.

His face reddened at the implication, and he seemed at a momentary loss for words as he stared down at his thickly callused hands, curled loosely on his knees: a man clearly unaccustomed to expressing such intimate thoughts. “I’d want only what’s freely given,” he said at last, shyly bringing his head up to meet her gaze. “If you don’t see fit to share my bed, I’ll respect that.” Looking into his eyes, she saw that he was sincere.

“I can’t make any promises,” she told him. “Why don’t we see how it goes?”

“Does that mean . . . ?” Something flared in his eyes making her wonder if he’d had ideas about her long before her father had approved him.

“Yes, I’ll marry you.” She rose to her feet and extended her hand—as if it were a business deal they were concluding.
Pride prevented her from showing any gratitude. She couldn’t bear having him think that he was doing her any favors. “Would the Sunday after next be convenient?”

Over the years she had come to love Joe, in her own way. He was a good husband, better than she deserved, and a considerate, if uninspired, lover. More than that, he was utterly devoted both to her and to Lucy, who couldn’t have been any dearer to his heart if she’d been his own flesh and blood. And as far as Lucy was concerned, the sun rose and set by her papa. After Joe shipped out, Lucy had moped about for days. Since then, she’d written to him religiously, at least once a week, often tucking into the envelope some remembrance of home—a pressed flower or a bird feather, a pretty picture cut out of a magazine. While Eleanor’s letters were filled with the minutiae of daily life—the chimney she’d had to have patched and the rain that was wreaking havoc with her garden, the new pastor who’d taken over when her father retired—Lucy wrote about how heartbroken she’d been when her best friend moved away and the boy in school she secretly had a crush on. Each letter ended with her telling him she was counting the days until he came home and that she prayed every night for God and President Roosevelt to look over him.

On the morning of William McGinty’s serendipitous visit, Eleanor woke her daughter after he had gone, singing out, “Rise and shine, sleepyhead, breakfast is getting cold.”

Lucy sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. She lifted her head to sniff the air, smelling bacon, which was odd. Usually they only had bacon on Sundays. “Do we have company?” she asked.

Eleanor grew warm, thinking of William and the surprising turn of events brought about by Yoshi’s ill-timed appearance. “Now what makes you think that?” she replied briskly.

“I thought I heard voices.” Lucy yawned, stretching her arms over her head. In her flowered nightgown she looked small and defenseless, her bare feet scratched from running shoeless about the yard. Eleanor saw that her silky auburn hair was clumped in back where a rat’s nest had formed.

She used her fingers to work out the knots, ignoring Lucy’s attempts to squirm out from under her. “A man was asking about puppies,” she said.

Lucy grew still at once. “Is he going to buy one?” she asked hopefully. Already, at nine, she was aware of how thinly stretched their finances were. She turned her face up to Eleanor, small and heart-shaped, with Eleanor’s green eyes and Lowell’s olive complexion.

“We’ll see. I told him to come back when Belle has her litter,” Eleanor replied. “Now come on, get dressed. We have lots to do today.” She shooed her daughter out of bed, then before Lucy had gone two steps she impulsively pulled her close, hugging her tightly. “That’s for being so good. And for keeping our secret.” She drew back to look her daughter gravely in the eye. “You know what would happen if you ever told?”

Lucy nodded, her expression solemn. “Yoshi would have to go away to a bad place, where they keep people locked up.”

“That’s right,” Eleanor said.

“But why? He didn’t do anything wrong.” Lucy had been wrestling with this for some time, ever since Eleanor had explained about the internment camps to which Japanese Americans like Yoshi had been sent, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. To Lucy, it had been like finding out there was no Santa Claus, learning that the president she revered could do something so unjust.

“It’s because of the war,” Eleanor gently explained once more, stroking her daughter’s head. “People are afraid of anyone who looks like the enemy. They think if they lock up all the Japanese we’ll be safe. But they’re wrong. The reason men like your papa are fighting this war is so the world will be free of just that sort of thing.”

Lucy nodded slowly, her eyes welling with tears. “I wish Papa could come home.”

“I know, baby. Me, too,” said Eleanor.

But at the moment she wasn’t thinking about Joe. Her thoughts were with the tall stranger who’d appeared on her doorstep earlier that morning. William McGinty. The compassion he’d shown went deeper than mere chivalry. Maybe he felt a need to prove his worth. Whatever the reason, fate had thrown them together, and after these long months of struggling to hold it together, with money tight and the ever-present worry of her secret getting out, it was a relief knowing she had someone to share the burden.

William McGinty was no stranger to hardship himself. During the Great Depression his parents had lost everything they owned. His father’s prosperous dry goods business went under and the bank foreclosed on their two-story brick house in Omaha. With little more than the clothes on their backs, the family had had no choice but to go to live with his mother’s sister and her husband, in McCredie Springs, Oregon, where the population numbered in the hundreds and moonshine was the main source of income. They were good, hardworking people, his aunt Lillian a nurse in a doctor’s office and his uncle Ripley, Uncle Rip
for short, the owner of a small plumbing supply business, but they weren’t much better off financially. Uncle Rip’s business was barely staying afloat and Aunt Lillian’s salary only covered the rent on their two-bedroom house. William’s mother and father and three sisters had all slept together in one room, while William and his brother shared the sofa-bed in the living room.

The two boys had always been close, but the tight quarters, coupled with the fact that their parents were so preoccupied with finding work that William and Stu were left to their own devices for the most part, made them inseparable. William, at nearly fourteen, had taken it upon himself to instruct his eleven-year-old brother in the art of manly pursuits, such as throwing a curve ball and shooting at tin cans with his BB gun.

It wasn’t long before William graduated to Uncle Rip’s old squirrel rifle. When his uncle took him hunting, William turned out to be as good at hitting small animals as tin cans. The difference was that he took no pleasure in the kill; it was only to put food on the table. And with so many hungry mouths to feed he couldn’t afford to be what his uncle referred to, usually accompanied by a well-aimed wad of spit, as “soft.”

One day when William was showing off to his brother, shooting at Coke bottles lined up along the fence, a shot went astray, catching Stu in the arm, near his shoulder. Stu crumpled to the ground, blood bubbling up from the wound and quickly soaking his shirtsleeve. For a terrible moment William thought he was dead.

In a panic, he sank to his knees before his brother, ripping off his own shirt and pressing it to the wound. “Oh, God, Stu. Please. Say something.”

Stu’s eyelids fluttered open and his mouth twisted in a pained smile. “Nice shot,” he’d managed.

By the time William had half dragged, half carried Stu back to the house, his brother had lost consciousness again. The doctor Aunt Lillian worked for was summoned and, after an examination showed it was only a flesh wound, the bullet was removed. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the doctor pronounced that Stu would survive, none the worse for the wear.

Two days later an infection set in. This was before penicillin was readily available, especially in remote areas such as theirs. All they could do was apply poultices and hope for the best. But Stu only got sicker, developing a raging fever, his arm swelling to the size of an Easter ham. Throughout the ordeal, William, certain that it was all his fault, seldom left his brother’s side, praying for the Lord to take him instead, should it come to that.

But either God hadn’t heard his prayers or He’d had other plans for William. On the fourth morning of Stu’s delirium, William woke from the doze he’d fallen into, as he’d sat slumped in the chair at his brother’s bedside, to find that Stu was dead. His parents and sisters, aunt and uncle, were all gathered round, his mother weeping inconsolably, lost in her grief, while his sisters clutched to her with their faces buried in her skirt.

But William refused to believe it. “
No
!” He’d reared up and grabbed his brother’s lifeless body, shaking Stu as he did on mornings when his brother pretended to still be asleep. “Stu!” he’d cried, half out of his mind. “Come on, this isn’t funny. You’re scaring everybody. Quit it now. I’m serious. If you don’t get up off this bed right now, I’m going to . . . to . . . ”

“That’s enough, son.” A heavy hand had fallen on his shoulder, and William had twisted his head up to find his father gazing down at him, a bleak, unforgiving look on his face that remained with William to this day, burned into his memory. His father hadn’t spoken a word of blame, not then or in the days that followed, yet there was no question in William’s mind as to whose fault it was. Even if his parents could have forgiven him, he knew he could never forgive himself.

He’d vowed then and there never again to pick up a gun, and all these years he’d kept that vow. It hadn’t been a sacrifice until just recently, but with the war on, he had mixed feelings, memories of Stu mingling uneasily with his guilt at not being able to fight for his country.

And it wasn’t just his guilt he had to contend with. Martha had lost her beloved younger brother at Pearl Harbor, and now her patriotic fervor knew no bounds. It wasn’t easy for her, with every other man in uniform, to have her husband enjoying the relative comforts of the home front. She fought against those feelings, he knew, conscious of the fact that he wasn’t to blame, but deep down she was ashamed of him. As a result he found it equally hard to be around her, and these days was quick to seize upon any excuse to get out of the house, like this morning when he’d volunteered to drive Danny to the meeting place for his Scout campout this weekend.