What was to come next, they could not know, and for the time being at least, Caroline tried not to think about it. Perhaps it was just enough for each of them to have this period of calm relief in which to pause and breathe and let the future wait.…
“A lot has happened since we came here two years ago,” Joel said one evening.
Long afterward, Caroline recalled the moment in precise detail. He had been reading the evening paper. Lore was hemming diapers, it being too expensive to rent them from a diaper service. She herself was correcting a French test.
He put the paper away. “Yes, a lot has happened,” he repeated.
Into the casual ordinariness of the time and place, his remark fell, heavy with importance. “A lot of things have changed, and a lot of things have stayed the same. Perhaps it is too complicated for me to explain.”
Both women stopped their work and looked expectantly toward him. But avoiding them, he spoke to the air.
“The fact is, I’m going to leave you. The time has come.” When he paused, it was plain that this speech was going to be hard labor for him. “I am a businessman. My English is good, thanks to you, Caroline, and I am ready to do more with my life than spend it in a small-town bakery. Although,” he added quickly, “I mean no offense to anyone. Anthony Ricci is content with it, so it’s fine for him. But I am not content.” He took a breath and continued. “I am not the person I was when you first knew me. You must have thought, Caroline, that I was some sort of idiot, a good-hearted fool who could expect by putting a ring on your hand that I could somehow make you love me. And I’ll tell you, you were right. I was a fool. I myself look back now and wonder how I could have failed to see how much you disliked me. And you dislike me now. The marriages they call ‘marriages of convenience’ are more truly named ‘fraud.’ No, don’t go, Lore”—for Lore had laid the diapers on the floor and was about to stand up—“I have no secrets from you. You are a part of all this.”
Caroline was trembling. His words were hard to refute, and still she tried. “But I do not dislike you at all, Joel. How could I? The most loving brother could not have cared or done more than you have. Why, when I think of Eve and how you—”
He put up his hand to stop her, and interrupted. “I had a sister, you see, the baby of my family. Her name was Anya. She was three years old when they shot her there in the courtyard. She was holding a rag doll.”
The women were silenced. Awful tragedy had silenced them.
“We have both been through terrible times, Caroline, and your parents still weigh on your heart. I asked too much of you. You cannot force yourself. I understand. Believe me, I do. And so that’s why I’m leaving. I’ll be going fairly soon. It will be better.” His tone grew harsh as his voice rose. There was anger beneath his sorrow. “Yet something at least has come out of this mistake. Eve has a name.”
Lore coughed and turned to Caroline, who was expected to make some response, and was too shocked to make one.
“Joel, we shall miss you!” Lore cried. “It will seem so strange—”
“We’ll be friends. Everyone will know where he stands.” Joel looked toward Caroline. “We’ll be friends, with no further expectations. I’m sorry. I don’t express myself well.”
On the contrary, he expresses himself all too well, she thought. And he says correctly that he is not the person he was two years ago. He has been working hard, he is thinner and older and somehow stronger. The overgrown boy with the flushed cheeks is gone. Now that he has spoken, he sits in a weary thoughtfulness; perhaps he is wondering how he ever arrived here with people who have no relationship to anything he has ever known or can have anticipated.
Deeply moved, Caroline stood up, went to him, and took his hand.
“I will never forget you,” she said. “If we should come to live as far apart as Australia and the North Pole, I will never—”
“You don’t have to do this,” he told her, gently withdrawing his hand. “I’ll be all right. And so will you.”
ON Sunday she pushed the stroller as far as the lakefront. Eve, well wrapped against the arctic weather, sat up and watched the scene with interest: A man shoveled snow, gulls in raucous cry swooped overhead, and Peter in his plaid coat trotted alongside on his short legs.
It is too cold to have been out so long, she thought. But the little rooms at home were so oppressive, filled with a subtle anger, although possibly she was only imagining the anger. Joel seemed to stay away as much as he could; she had an idea that he lingered late at the Riccis’ house. He was unusually silent.
Certainly she had never expected, let alone wanted, their singular arrangement to be permanent. Yet Joel’s choice of this time did seem to be very strange and sudden.
“It’s no mystery to me,” declared Lore. “It tortures him to be near you. He’s a man, after all.” She hesitated. “Do you think you could ever—” And she stopped, blushing.
She meant: Would you ever sleep with him? Lore, however, being Lore, so prim and repressed, would never actually say those words.
As if I didn’t know, thought Caroline. He’s a man, after all. And I am a woman with needs of my own, one of them being that I want to love. I want to want again.
She paused, gazing out over the gray lake, huge as an inland sea, and she thought, as she often did, how small they were, she and her baby girl, with their little needs and heartbreaks, in the face of these rocks and the waves that shape them, and the wind that shapes the waves.
Ah, well, so it is! Shaking the mood, she turned around toward home. On the corner, the Schulmans’ car passed; they waved, and she thought ironically about the astonishment they would feel when they learned that Joel was leaving his “little bride.”
Lore and Joel were listening to the radio. They motioned for quiet when she and Eve came in. A voice almost hysterical was speaking.
“Over three hundred Japanese planes have attacked so far. The loss is incalculable. Our ships, battleships, destroyers, and cruisers, were at anchor in the harbor … The Nevada, California, Arizona, completely destroyed … Thousands dead, thousands wounded … Disaster … The United States crippled in the Pacific …”
The three stood solemnly looking at each other. “This means war,” Joel said. “We’ll be in it by tomorrow.”
So the last hope for Father and Mama was gone. Silently, Caroline took Eve into the bedroom and laid her in the crib for a nap. She went to the window and stared down at the trodden snow in the dreary yard. She felt nothing. Then she remembered having read that wounded people have a few moments without any feeling at all before the agony begins.
THE hours pass in a dream. The Riccis’ son Tom is lost on the Arizona. In the little brown house behind the bakery, the broken parents are left to bear the unbearable. Al Schulman has brought medication for Angela and sends her to bed. Anthony refuses help; he sits in a frozen trance and stares at the wall. People crowd the room to approach him on tiptoe and murmur words that he does not heed. Only when Joel comes does he respond at all. Joel kneels beside him on the floor, taking his hand, saying nothing. Anthony grasps Joel’s hand in both of his and is able to weep.…
Afterward, the Schulmans walked a short distance with Caroline and Joel, the two men ahead of the women.
“Joel has a remarkable way with people,” Emmy remarked. “A natural sympathy. It’s a very healthy trait.”
“Yes,” said Caroline.
“I suppose you can’t be aware that you’ve made a great change in him. He seems so much older. But those poor Riccis now! Whoever thought we’d be in another war? This is supposed to be an enlightened century.”
Meaning well, she talked and talked until they reached the corner and went their separate ways, leaving Caroline with a fresh headache and fresh thoughts.
Her footsteps, matching Joel’s, were loud on the sidewalk. Everybody was indoors listening to the news on the radio. They walked rapidly and in silence until Joel said abruptly, “I’m not going to wait till I’m called. I’m
going to enlist tomorrow. I want, I really want to fight them. Yes,” he said, “ ‘a date that will live in infamy.’ There’ve been more than a few of those days these last years.”
She did not answer. What was there to say?
Lore was in the front room, walking up and down with Eve. “I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with her,” she reported, “but I just don’t seem able to quiet her. She must have had a bad dream.”
A bad dream? What fears could possibly trouble this new little untried life?
“They have them, you know,” said Lore, seeing doubt.
Caroline took Eve and laid her in the crib, but the child protested and struggled so desperately that there was nothing to do but pick her up and walk with her. Lore, who had had a long, hard day, gave up and went to bed. But Joel stayed and watched. After a while he stretched his arms out for Eve.
“Let me have her,” he said, and carried her back to the crib.
For the first time since her child’s birth, Caroline was more than willing to hand her over to someone else. She was feeling overwhelmed. The sorrow that is drowning the world is drowning me, too, she thought: Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, Nazis marching in uniform, Eve’s father among them, Father and Mama.… Everything.
And why? Why, when the world is so beautiful, with it all! The summer has sails on the lake, the winter has Eve’s red cheeks in the frost, and there is music somewhere all the time—
Very quietly, someone is singing now. It is Joel in the bedroom. She gets up to look, and there is Eve with her head on his shoulder. After a while, he moves to the crib and puts her in it. He covers her and strokes her back, faintly humming. The man and the sleeping baby make a picture, captioned Father and Child.
And Caroline, bowing her head, stands there fighting all the accumulated sorrows in her heart, the world’s and her own.
“What is it?” whispers Joel. “Is it poor Tom Ricci?”
“That and more.”
She turns around and sees the pity in his eyes. Then, although she doesn’t know why she does it, she says, “You ought to know it wasn’t a rape. I loved him.”
“Ahhhh.” The sound comes painfully, as if something has choked him. “I’ve wondered about that. There was too much sadness in your anger. Yes, I always wondered.”
“The sadness is not for myself anymore. It’s for Eve.”
“I understand.”
“Yes, I believe you do.”
“But it will never touch her. Lore and I are the only people who know about it, and surely you trust us.”
Light from the street lamp falls upon his face, which is bent toward hers with a look that seems to be probing her mind. They are standing so close that she can breathe the pungent fragrance of his shaving soap. In brutal shock, she thinks: He, too, will die in the war. This strong body, this decent man, will die. And as her child has done, she lays her head on his shoulder.
Gently he asks her, “What has happened to you?”
She does not answer because she cannot bring herself to say, and perhaps is not really certain that she ought to say: I have been starved, and I need love. I am ready now if you still want me.
In the half dark his eyes are filled with tears, though as he strokes her head, he whispers, “Don’t cry, don’t cry.”
After a moment or two, he lifts her, carries her to the bed, and takes her into his arms.
LORE was aghast. Living as they did in these close rooms, it did not take long before she became aware that Joel no longer slept on the sofa. Her bright eyes glistened with avid curiosity. She stammered and filled the void with long, tense pauses, as if she were waiting for Caroline to answer her unspoken questions. Ladies did not ask personal questions, nor did they offer information about their sex lives, even to someone as intimate as Lore. Therefore, very little was said about the unbelievable change that had occurred, or at least very little of substance was said. Besides, even if she had been willing to confide, Caroline would have had only confusion to disclose. The thing had simply happened in an indescribable, chaotic swirl of emotion. And now that it had happened, there must be a quiet acceptance of it. He was, after all, a clean man, clean in body and mind. And he adored her.
SIX
In Ivy, as everywhere, life that had ambled, or even perhaps stood still, now began to race. To his chagrin, for Joel had had visions of hand-to-hand combat and personal vengeance, the army rejected him. He was diabetic. His case was a moderate one; he was given instructions to keep his weight down, watch his diet, stay in touch with a doctor in regard to insulin, and help the war effort at a defense job. This he did promptly, not half an hour after a call went out from a local machine tool plant that had just received another huge government order.
One day, only a few months after Pearl Harbor, the Riccis came with a proposal. The two of them, sitting side by side on the edge of the sofa, seemed very small. They had shrunk and aged ten years. Two furrows made parentheses in Angela’s smooth cheeks. She was tired, and she wasted no words.
“We want you to buy the business and the house at the back of the lot.”
“You can’t be serious,” Joel said.
“Why? Because you can’t afford to? We don’t need the money right away. We’re going to live with our daughter in Denver. Get away from this place. It was home once, a good home. But now it’s nothing. You understand?”
“I do,” Joel said, “but still, it’s out of the question for us.”
“We’d gear the payments to your wages at the factory. In the end, it wouldn’t come to much more than you’re paying for these few rooms here.”
“And who would run the business?”
“Your wife would run it.”
Anthony looked over at Caroline.
“She could run a bakery, Anthony?”
“The two women who’ve been working there will stay. They need the wages, and you’ve taught them a great deal, Joel. They can turn out bread as well as you or I can. Maybe some of the fancy stuff, too, but there won’t be much need for that with sugar being rationed. Caroline can run the business end.”
Joel shook his head. And Anthony, interrupting him before he could speak again, went on. “Don’t shake your head. Think about it. It’s a future. It did well enough for us.”
Joel was impatient. “What are you saying? You want to hand it to us for nothing, out of charity?”
“No, we’ll take a mortgage on the whole thing. You’ll pay out of what you earn. Take your time.”
Joel laughed. “You want to wait seventy-five years?”
“I said we’re in no hurry. Anyhow, it won’t take any seventy-five years.”
Crazy, thought Caroline, catching both Lore’s eye and the tightening of her lips. She almost read Lore’s thoughts: How far you have come from where you began, Dr. Hartzinger’s daughter! Look at this room. Look out at the cold, wet night on this dingy Sycamore Street. And now they want you to run a little bakery in this dingy town of Ivy.
“It would be wonderful for the bambina. Our yard is two times the size of this one. No, three times, with plenty of sun and shade. There’s the vegetable garden, and Tony’s grapes. It’s nice to have supper in the arbor.”
Angela was urging. Yes, it would be wonderful for the bambina, not like this place here. That much was true. Not like this place.
“The house is sound,” Anthony said. “I put in a new furnace two years ago. We’ve got plaster walls, a tight roof, and a good cellar. No leaks, no matter how high the snow gets.”
Joel asked, “Why don’t you sell it to somebody who can pay you for it now?”
“Because we want you to have it. You’re our kind of people.”
“We’ll think about it,” Joel said, clearly wanting to end the subject. “Ridiculous,” he said as the Riccis went downstairs.
But Caroline, lying long awake that night and the next, began to think that maybe it might not be so ridiculous after all.
SO began the years that Caroline was to recall as ??
?our times in the small brown house.” Time is long or it is short, depending upon what one cares to remember, or what, even if one does not care, will not allow itself to be forgotten.
Is it possible to forget Edward R. Murrow’s stern voice broadcasting from London under bombardment? Or the long lines of blood donors during the Battle of the Bulge? The magnificence of Churchill? Or even to forget a popular song about “love and laughter and peace ever after”? Or the unbelievable rumors of the death camps?
From the moment of her last good-bye to Father and Mama, there had lingered in some hidden part of her mind, against her will, the knowledge that she would never see them again. It was this knowledge that startled her, stopping her in the midst of some simple activity, perhaps just walking down the street on an ordinary errand; it struck like a blow to the heart and stopped her breath.
Yet there is a personal life that keeps its own momentum from day to day. Everyone in the house had to pursue his own path. Lore, whose English was by now almost perfect, passed her licensing examination with no trouble and was accepted at the hospital with no trouble, either. She learned to drive. If only, Caroline thought, that ten-year-old Nash holds up long enough to get her to work every day! The roof leaked in a heavy rain, but still you couldn’t expect much from a ten-year-old car that cost thirty-five dollars.
Joel worked hard at labor to which he was not accustomed. But he did his best, and he was helping the war effort.
As for Caroline, having conceived an idea and undertaken to finance it, in large part with Joel’s wage, she was now under heavy obligation to make it work. She began with a few tables in the shop, an embryonic café. Eventually there would be a full-grown addition to the building. Brown would be painted over in buff, with burnt-orange trim and awnings; there would be good music, and on the sunny side in a bow window there would be an orange tree. The whole would be called the “Orangerie.” The Riccis’ little enterprise was to be expanded in a way that would astonish them. Hour after hour, the idea took shape as her enthusiasm grew.