Dear Kitty,
Written in haste, but with great urgency. Please forgive and disregard last letter. Was awful tired. Okay now. Fine as wine, as J. would say. See you all and soon; I truly feel this can’t go on much longer.
Much love to you, dear.
Michael
Well, now! That was better! Kitty sat on the edge of the tub and turned on the faucets for a bath, then realized it wasn’t time to take a bath now. It was dinnertime, not bath time. Oh, she was tired! She couldn’t even think straight. She used the toilet, washed her hands and face, and pushed her hair back from her forehead. Then she leaned in to the mirror to inspect herself. It seemed so long ago that she’d done this with such pleasure, such excitement, and to be frank, such great admiration. Now she looked at herself in a different way. She had dark smudges under her eyes; she had lost more weight. And oh, look at her hair, so dull and dirty. Aw, so what? Accentuate the positive. That weight loss came from a job that was giving her enough money to make a real difference. Her father had begun calling her Mrs. Rockefeller, and her mother had again taken her aside to thank her for the significant contribution she was making to the family.
Kitty read Michael’s note one more time, then threw it away, as she had his last letter—she didn’t want Louise to see either of them. Can’t go on much longer. If only that were true. Kitty looked at her watch, as if that had anything to do with it, as if the war were a movie and would be over in twenty minutes. She had read an article that cautioned against thinking the war was all but won. In the Nazis’ favor were Hitler’s messianic control of the population, the natural will to survive, an army that remained strong and was yet unbroken, and the riches that had come from plundering Europe. Much of the money was gone by now, and the German army was in retreat, but still…The article had talked as well about the boys’ attitudes. They were sick to death of fighting and dreamed often about how life would be when they returned home. But the catch-phrase was I’ll do the job I want to do when I finish the job I have to do.
There was an urgent knock on the door, and she opened it to find Tommy. “Hi, squirt!” She stepped into the hall and let him go in. “How are you?”
“Fine, thank you,” he said quickly and slammed the door. He had lost more weight, too; she could see his shoulder blades through his shirt, and his collar gaped huge around his neck.
Tish was in the bedroom, sound asleep. She was lying crosswise on the bed, her mouth open slightly. One shoe was still on. She was beat, too. Kitty stood smiling, watching her sleep. Soon Louise would come home and sit in the living room with her feet up while she waited for dinner, exhausted. But at least she wasn’t losing weight. She couldn’t see her feet anymore.
Louise and Michael’s baby. Everyone was counting the days. An early May delivery date had been predicted. A new baby and spring. Heaven. Even Frieda Schumacher, the bent-backed, bewhiskered old maid two doors down who scowled at everyone, had rung the doorbell last Sunday and thrust at Margaret a present wrapped in newspaper. “This is for your daughter’s baby,” she’d muttered and then stomped off the porch. “Thank you!” Margaret had called after her. She’d waved, her potato peeler in her hand. “Thank you…miss!”
“’Twas such a shock, I forgot her name!” Margaret said later. Inside the box had been a beautifully knitted blanket, snow white, and soft as snow, too, and matching bonnet and booties. Louise had added them to her hope chest, and every now and then she took them out and lay them on the bed, as if the baby were in them. Her sisters often stood beside her at such times, each with her own vision. Kitty saw Michael’s dimples, reborn; she saw chubby arms and legs waving excitedly. Tish said she thought the baby would have red hair, like Michael’s mother, and an exceptionally calm demeanor. Louise said she had no idea how the baby would look, but imagine, a whole new person added to the world! She and Michael had decided on names: Mary Margaret for a girl. And for a boy? Michael Francis. The Second. This was what Tish called the doll they kept in the crib, Michael Francis O’Conner, always the whole name. For as far as she was concerned, a girl was not an option. “I simply won’t have it,” she’d told her sisters, her blue eyes wide and really, Kitty thought, kind of greedy.
“OKAY,” KITTY SAID, SIGHING. “Here it is.” She read out loud to her sisters from Julian’s letter:
“April fourth, 1944
“Somewhere in the Pacific
“I’m sitting here in the tent with a cup of joe. I’ve been waiting for a quiet time to write this letter, and now that time is here. I just had a luxurious bath in a stream with two nets stretched across either end to keep out the alligators. Then I took a walk to enjoy the view: shattered coconut trees, overturned jeeps, and whatnot. Oh hell, I guess I’ll skip the preview and go right to the feature.
“Kitty, it seems like I’ll never be your kind of guy. You’ve changed, and I have, too. I’m not the man you said good-bye to at the train station. Or maybe we always were different and we had to be apart in order to see that. I do think of you. I think a lot about you and your sisters, too. The Heaney sisters, wowser, best of the Midwest. But everything back home seems like it’s a movie or something, an out-of-focus movie at that. Maybe it would be best if you and I stopped writing. Seems like you might have more in common with that other guy; you kind of tipped your mitt when you mixed up letters that time. And to be frank, it seems like I have more in common with Tish. I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings for me to say so. Maybe you already know. But I can tell it’s a strain for you to write to me, and it’s hard for me to write to you, too. I just don’t know what to say.
“Kitty, you know I’ll always love you. But not that way. I think you wanted me to slip you some ice for the fourth digit before I left, but I just didn’t see us a married couple, and now I see I was right. I hope we’ll still be friends.
“Julian
“P.S. Thanks for that picture you sent. Nice lid. You always did look swell in hats.”
Kitty blinked back tears. She was surprised at how much this hurt. Oh, she’d known for some time that things were never going to work out the way she’d planned between Julian and her. But to have it so forthrightly presented to her! To have him be the one to initiate the breakup! “Oh, well,” she said lightly. And then, to Tish, “He’s all yours.”
Tish shook her head. “Oh, no, I never meant to—”
“I don’t mind, honest I don’t. It just feels kind of funny.” And now she began to cry in earnest.
Margaret came into the kitchen, her face full of concern, her hand to her throat. “Who died?”
All the sisters burst out laughing, and then Kitty said, “Just a relationship. Julian and me. But you know, he’s grown very fond of Tish.”
“What do you mean, he’s grown fond of Tish? He can’t go through my daughters like Kleenex!”
“It’s okay, Ma,” Kitty said. “Things were never quite right between us.”
“Yes.” Margaret sat heavily at the kitchen table. “’Tis true.”
“Cripes!” Kitty said. “Was anyone ever going to tell me?”
“I suppose Julian just did,” Margaret said. “Ah, me.” She rubbed her forehead.
Kitty stood up. “I’m going for a walk. Nobody come. I’m fine.”
She threw on a coat and walked quickly down the stairs, down the block. In a short while she began to breathe more easily. So many men had told so many loved ones that they weren’t the same man anymore. Well, she wasn’t the same woman, either. Oh, it wasn’t just because of the change in her affections. Rather it was because of the way her ideas about herself had begun to change. She had believed for so long that she knew exactly who she was and exactly what she wanted. She had seen her future as Julian’s wife, a woman who would stay home and bear children and derive most of her satisfaction from whatever goals her husband accomplished. She had doodled “Mrs. Julian Stanton” thousands of times, eager for the day when she could sign her name that way legitimately. But now she was working in a place that gave
her more independence, and she’d grown used to it. She felt stronger not only in her body but in her spirit. How to reconcile this new person emerging with the one she’d always been? How could a woman who swooned over a green-and-rose-plaid taffeta evening gown admire equally a well-made ratchet wrench? How could someone who relied on men to open doors for her have become a person who only yesterday crawled under the kitchen sink to make an adjustment so the faucet wouldn’t wobble?
She had written to Hank about some of this, and in a letter back he had said he thought times like this could galvanize people into a certain kind of unity but could also make for unexpected changes in the individual, for strange contradictions. He said he himself had begun to feel the need to be alone most of the time. And yet he also felt a kind of love and compassion for humanity far greater than what he’d ever felt before. He found it hard to blame the war on any one person. He thought that, despite witnessing—and taking part in—such unimaginable violence, most soldiers would come home from the war wanting never to hurt anything again.
He told her about boys who came back from battle vacant-eyed, their hands shaking, who in a few hours’ time were ready to smile and joke again and then eager to rejoin those at the front. He said that extinguishing life in another seemed to make you unspeakably grateful for your own, indeed for life in general. For a few hours after a battle, Hank said, everything the men looked at seemed caressed by their eyes. They were such young boys. They were such old men.
Oh, but Julian, who never told her things like this yet surely felt them. And now good-bye to Julian and his sweet kisses and his money and his wonderful good looks. Good-bye to the innocent time that had spawned their relationship. But good-bye also to the unease that had been there almost from the beginning, and the worry about how to explain Hank. She would write back to Julian when she got home. She would tell him that she understood, and that she would always love him, too. Because she would. Julian Stanton. “So long, sweetheart,” she said softly, and a man passing by her stopped and said, “Sorry?”
“Only a little,” she said and smiled.
She walked slowly, then, thinking that soon the first flowers would come pushing through the remaining patches of snow: the elegantly drooping snowdrops, the Easter-colored crocus. Not long afterward, tight little buds of lilac would burst open, and their scent would be everywhere. The air would soften and the days last longer, then longer still. There would be newspaper kites with bright rag tails flying high against blue skies, and twisted streams of water running in the gutters, where her brothers would sail their little boats. Soon the sound of shovels being scraped against the sidewalk would be replaced by the gritty sound of wagons being pulled down the block, kids with food-smeared faces being pulled along by some bossy older sibling. Crows would screech out their proprietary caws, cardinals would whistle, robins would hop heavily on the lawns in search of worms. Spring was coming, just as it always did, no matter how hard the winter that preceded it.
Now Kitty began walking quickly back toward home, for she wanted to share these thoughts with Hank in a letter. Indeed, she suspected she’d recalled such images just to tell him. And there was something else she wanted to tell Hank. She would say that spring would be the same as ever, but it would be altogether different this year, too, and it was because of him, did he understand?
He would understand.
If a sheet of paper were put before them, Kitty thought, she would draw something on it; Hank would study it and add to it. Then she would do the same. They would create something together that belonged to each of them equally, that was them equally. This was what she wanted to tell him. Also she wanted to tell him that Hattie had met a new man. That Margaret and Frank had gone out dancing for the first time in ages. She wanted to tell him that she would take him to Henrici’s restaurant as soon as he got off the train in Chicago, the minute he stepped off the train, and then they’d go dancing at the Aragon Ballroom. They would take her brothers to Riverview Park to shoot the chutes and ride the roller coaster and ogle the fat lady and the tattooed man. Hank would love the boys and the boys would love him.
She wanted to tell him about the time they’d had a race outside in elementary school, and she had lost because she had tried to avoid stepping on the ants, because she liked ants, their industry and cooperation, did he like ants? Did he like Jo Stafford? Johnny Mercer? Did he like tobogganing in the winter, boating in the summer? Did he like her, still? Did he love her? Because guess what.
There was always so much that she wanted to tell him, so much that she did tell him. And each time she finished a letter, she would think, That’s it, sister. You’re out of gas now. You’ll never be able to think of something different to tell him tomorrow. But she always did have something different to tell him. Except for the one thing she told him every time, in one way or another: Oh, Hank. Be careful.
“READ IT AGAIN,” LOUISE SAID. The sisters were in bed, Tish at the foot and all but snoring, but Louise and Kitty awake—Kitty because her sister kept tapping her shoulder and whispering, “Hey? Kitty? Are you asleep? Hey? Are you awake?”
Louise was often restless like this at night now. Margaret said it always happened that way, it was Nature’s plan. When it got close to the time for the baby’s birth, the mother didn’t sleep well anymore. “It’s to get you ready,” Margaret had told Louise. “You’ll be leaping up and down all night for many weeks.”
“I’ll help with him,” Tish had said, and Kitty had volunteered herself as well. But inside she was thinking, Oh, no, I need my sleep!
She needn’t have worried: Louise had said she’d sleep in the living room with the baby at first; no sense in all of the family’s rest being disturbed. “Good idea,” Kitty had said quickly, and when Tish and Margaret had glared at her, she’d said, “What? It is a good idea!” But now Louise was wide awake and asking to hear again a certain paragraph she’d particularly liked from one of Hank’s letters.
“I’d read it to myself if you’d let me,” Louise said, and Kitty said nothing. Surely Louise knew why Kitty wouldn’t hand over this letter—or any of Hank’s—to her. There were too many personal things. Lovely, thrilling, personal things. Things that made Kitty soft at the center, that made her heart speed up. Things so wonderfully explicit they made her blush reading them. And to feel your arms around my neck, your body moving beneath my own. Oh! she couldn’t even think of it!
“I’ll read it one more time,” Kitty said, “but then you have to leave me alone.”
“I will,” Louise said. “I’ll go downstairs if I can’t sleep after this.”
Kitty tried to make a lot of noise, getting the letter from her dresser drawer. She wanted Tish to have to wake up, too. But it was no use. If that girl had been at Pearl Harbor, she would have snored right through it.
Kitty got the letter, settled in under the covers, and read:
“The other day, some old colonel told me, ‘Soldiers measure their lives in months, if they’re worth a damn as soldiers.’ In my experience, it’s more like days. One day. You might think that could suggest a terrible hopelessness, a disregard for life. Not so. Instead, you live for the day you’re alive. You are more fully appreciative of every single thing: the taste of a cigarette, the moon coming over the horizon, the smell of wood smoke coming from some farmhouse, some guy sharing chocolate from home. Despite everything, our hearts yearn to be lifted, and they will find a way.”
“Thank you,” Louise said, and Kitty told her she was welcome. Then Louise lay down and punched her pillow into shape. She sighed, and Kitty saw two tears roll down her cheeks. “Don’t you wish they could come home at night, though? Okay, go and fight all day if you have to, but just come home at night. Have a good hot meal and a bath and sleep in a bed. With us.”
“Louise,” Tish said sleepily.
“Yes?”
“Pipe down. And turn out that light!”
“Oh, certainly, Tish; yes, I will! Oh my goodness gracious, I’m so sorry for
having awakened you.” Louise looked over at Kitty and raised her eyebrows. Kitty nodded. “Now!” Louise said, and the sisters each grabbed one of Tish’s legs and pulled her out of bed and onto the floor. An old trick, one that each of them had suffered many times.
“Judas Priest!” Tish yelled. “I told you guys I want to sleep! Now shut your heads and let me sleep!”
Here came footsteps down the hall. The girls leaped into bed, turned off the light, and lay quiet as stones.
“Not another word,” Margaret said. “If you can’t sleep, say the rosary. To yourself! One more sound from any of you and you’ll all be down in the basement doing laundry. I have a full box of Duz and a mountain of ironing. ’Tis sheets and men’s shirts, too!”
Now came a silence so thick you could almost slice it like bread.
ON MOTHER’S DAY NIGHT, KITTY AWAKENED to the sound of Louise moaning. She shot up in bed and looked for her sister but didn’t see her. “Louise?”
“What?” Louise said. And then “Ooooooh. Ow!” She was lying on the floor beside the bed, clutching her stomach.
Kitty pulled hard at the covers and hung her head over the side of the bed.
Tish made a half-growling sound and yanked the covers back over herself.
“Oh, jeez!” Kitty said. “Louise, what are you doing? Are you having the baby?”
Now Tish leaped up. “Where?”
“Yes,” Louise said. “It’s coming!”
“Well…Well…” Kitty said, then hollered, “Ma!”
“No!” Louise said. “Don’t call her! I don’t want to have it yet.”
“What do you mean?” Kitty got out of bed to kneel beside her sister. Again she hollered for her mother, then told Tish, “Go get her. Hurry!”