Four Seasons of Romance (6 page)

Before she knew what she was doing, she was running—running
back across the bridge and through the woods, back up the hill to her house,
not looking back to see whether Leo was behind her. She ran straight inside and
to her bedroom where she flung herself on the bed and wept.

When Leo came to the front door a few minutes later, out of
breath, she refused to see him. Josiah was away at the courthouse, so there was
no risk of another fight. Elaine was making almond pastries in the kitchen when
Leo banged on the door.

“I need to see her,” Leo said. “Please.”

“I’m sorry,” Elaine said. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

For once, it wasn’t another case of the Woods family keeping
the two apart: Catherine truly didn’t want to speak to him.

As he left the Woods house, dejected, he looked over his
shoulder and saw Catherine watching him from her bedroom window, but when he
saw her, she pulled the curtain closed.

Leo wanted to stay in Woodsville but he had no choice: she
had to understand.

He waited at their meeting spot in the woods for hours, deep
into the night. Realizing she wouldn’t come, he headed back to his shared room
and snatched a few hours sleep. The next day, he was back at his post,
desperately hoping that she would come to speak with him.

When she finally did, her face was pale, and her cheeks were
tearstained. It had been a full day since she’d run away from him at the
bridge.

“I’m sorry,” she began. “I’m sorry I left you. It’s just…
I’ve been having these dreams.”

“I have dreams too,” Leo said.
“Dreams of
our future together.”

She shook her head. “Those aren’t the kinds of dreams I
mean. I’ve been having dreams of your dying in the war.”

He sat on the soft bed of leaves and pine needles and
beckoned to her. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms, and Catherine falling
into them.

“Why did you hide from me?” he murmured, as she shook
silently against his chest.

“It’s not because I don’t love you,” she said, her voice
muffled against his shirt. “I just couldn’t bear to see you again, knowing I
might lose you.”

“I don’t have to report to basic training for ten days,” he
said. “We still have time to spend together.”

She shook her head fiercely. “It’s not enough.” She kissed
him, first softly, then passionately, on his neck, his arms, and his lips.
“It’s not enough,” she whispered. “It’s never enough.” Then, she climbed on top
of him as he slipped his arms around her waist.

*

The next morning, Catherine begged her parents to allow Leo
to stay with them. “Please,” she said, “just for a few days.”

Her father laughed in her face. “What in God’s name makes
you think I’d allow that half-breed inside this house? If I as much as see him
on my property, I’ve got half a mind to shoot him where he stands.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Catherine retorted. “It wasn’t enough to
hit him—now you want to blow him to bits?” She slammed her fist down on the
kitchen table. “Is that how you treat the men fighting for this country you
claim to love? He’s about to get shot at every damn day!”

“Watch your mouth, young lady.”

“I don’t care what you say.” She turned to Elaine and laid a
hand on her arm. “Mother, please, just for a few days. He could help with the
chores. He’s very handy. I just want to see him as much as I can before…”

Elaine’s eyes darted to her husband, then back to her
daughter. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “That would be inappropriate. I can’t
consider it.”

Upset, Catherine barely spoke to her parents for the next
week and took all her meals with Leo or at the drugstore, even spending the
night at Leo’s apartment, in flagrant defiance of her parents’ wishes. In a
final effort to make them change their minds, she threatened to follow Leo
wherever he was stationed.

“I’ll go to France,” she said. “How would you like that?
Your precious daughter in a foreign country, alone?”
They
just shook their heads.

She cried to Leo about her hardhearted parents then
apologized for not eloping with him when she had the chance.

“It’s all right,” Leo said. For once, he encouraged her not
to make waves with her parents. “Just wait for me,” he said, stroking her hair
in an attempt to soothe her. “Wait for me to come back. Because I promise you,
Catherine, I will come back.”

*

On the day before he was scheduled to leave, Leo roamed the
hills and river valleys of Woodsville until his arms were full of flowers. At
home, he pulled a ball of twine from his pocket and set to work.

That night, they met at the Bath-Haverhill Bridge, the site
of their first kiss, the starlight shining off Catherine’s long brown hair like
a silver waterfall. For her part, she marveled at how tall and handsome he
looked standing there, his arms behind his back.
How much like a soldier
,
she thought with a pang.

“What do you have there?” she asked.

Then, Leo presented her with the biggest bouquet of wild
lilies and black-eyed
Susans
she had ever seen.
“Beautiful,” she said, burying her nose in the fragrant petals, then reached
into the small coin purse she carried. “I have something for you too.”
Carefully, she extracted a silver heart-shaped locket and placed it in Leo’s
palm, him eyeing it with wonder. “It’s my
great-grandmother’s
,”
she explained. “She gave it to me before she died. It’s very special to me.”

“You sure you want me to have it?” he asked.

She smiled. “You’re special to me.” She nudged him. “C’mon,
open it.”

Leo popped open the locket so it was two perfect
half-hearts; inside were two photographs, the first a current photograph of
Catherine, the senior portrait her parents had insisted she take. She wore a
demure black dress with a string of pearls around her creamy white neck, her
skin pale and smooth, eyes full of fire, her lips curving into the faintest of
smiles.

Leo kissed her on the cheek. “You’ve never looked lovelier,”
he whispered.

The other picture was a portrait of Catherine from fourth
grade, the year they’d met. By now, she knew that Leo had been in love with her
since that first meeting.

“This way, you can preserve me the way you first knew me,”
she said, “and the way you know me now.”

He closed the locket and held it tightly in his fist. “I’ll
always keep it with me,” he said. “I swear to you. Whatever happens, this
locket will never leave my side.”

She caressed his cheek and cupped his chin in her hand. “I
wish I were the one going with you, not the locket,” she said. He held her
while she cried.

*

Leo left for basic training in early April of 1944, buoyed
on a stream of heartfelt promises after the two lovers swore they would be
together again, that they would write to each other, daily. And they swore
that, when Leo returned from war, they would be married, their promises far
beyond the objections of Catherine’s parents now.

Meanwhile, Catherine would go to school to learn a trade so
she could find employment, and when Leo returned, he would open his own sculpture
studio. He left his beloved Coupe behind, a car that held so many memories for
them.

In the weeks after Leo’s departure, they kept their promise
and wrote each other daily. However tired he was after a day of military
drills, Leo found the energy to pen a few lines to his beloved, sharing his
thoughts, fears, and the dream of coming back to her one day. Catherine kept
him going, day after day, and gave him the strength to face whatever was to
come.

But once Leo was shipped across the ocean, his letters became
less frequent. Sometimes, it was a shortage of materials—he couldn’t get paper
or ink. Other times, he had no access to a post office for days. And often, the
strains and horrors of the war were taking their toll.

Slowly, as Leo’s letters became less frequent, Catherine’s
father began to use the situation for his aims, watching for Leo’s letters in
the mail. They were easy to spot—the angular block print, the foreign stamps,
the battered shape of the envelopes that had been to hell and back.

At first, Josiah was selective about which letters he
destroyed, opening every other letter, reading it, and then throwing it away
before Catherine ever had a chance to see it. He destroyed half of Leo’s
correspondence, then starting to burn every two out of three and eventually,
stopping the flow altogether.

The judge knew the postman and made a deal with him. It
didn’t take much conniving—no one in Woodsville wanted to cross the judge;
Josiah stopped the flow of Catherine’s outgoing letters the same way. Catherine
didn’t know that, when she left the letters in the Woods mailbox or dropped
them off downtown, the postman saw that the letters never made it out of the
post office.

As the letters dried up on both sides of the ocean, the
lovers sank into despair. Each thought the other was writing less and less. Leo
feared Catherine had met someone else and forgotten him. After weeks and weeks
with no news, Catherine feared the worst.

In late May 1944, Josiah Woods stopped their communication
altogether, but Leo continued to send letters, hoping to get a response.
Catherine’s father continued to read each letter before destroying it. Then,
one day, he read in one letter that Leo would be part of a secret mission in
France. The letter arrived on June 6, 1944—the day of the Normandy Invasion.

*

In the annals of history—the annals
not written by a corrupt circuit court judge in Woodsville, New Hampshire—Leo
Taylor was a war hero, on the last wave of soldiers in the Normandy Invasion,
landing on Juno Beach with his platoon. Leo fought bravely in helping secure
Northern France for the Allies and was not among the wounded.

But Judge Josiah Woods told a very different version of
events as Leo’s letter presented the opportunity he’d been waiting for. He
could now cleanse his daughter’s mind and heart and free her from that
poisonous obsession by telling one little lie, claiming that Leo had been
killed in Normandy.

Catherine knew that the names of New England men who died in
the war were collected and posted at the Grafton County Courthouse and that her
father checked the list routinely. Indeed, he typically told her of anyone she
might know—classmates, neighbors, family friends. Waldo Ayers’s name had been
on the list a few months ago, and her father had delivered the grave news. For
his little ruse to succeed, Josiah had Leo’s name added to the board at the
courthouse, in case Catherine would check.

But to cover his tracks and ensure he remained above
suspicion, he took it a step further, using his clout to have a brief
description of Leo included in the
Twin State News-Times
as a part of
the local coverage of the Normandy Invasion. Because a dozen other men from the
county and surrounding area also perished in the invasion, Leo’s death was one
of many.

Josiah found Catherine at the Woodsville Drugstore, where
she was in the middle of making a cherry lime soda. “I’ve had some news,” he
said, then cleared his throat.

Fear clutched at Catherine’s heart as she forgot to breathe
for a minute.

“Leo was killed,” her father told her, “in Normandy. I’ve
just received the list.”

The soda glass she held fell to the floor, shattered into a
thousand pieces and skittered across the cheery black-and-white tile. “It can’t
be,” she said. “There’s been some mistake.”

He shrugged. “It’s on the board,” he said. “I’m sorry. I
know how upsetting this must be for you.”

Without even taking off her apron, Catherine fled to the
courthouse, refusing to believe that her biggest nightmare had come true. But
there it was, on the board—Leopold Ellis Taylor, Jr., her Leo, the man she
loved.

The tears were unlike any tears she had ever cried. Thick
and bitter, they tumbled down her face like a funeral veil.

So, this is why he stopped writing
, she thought.

The deception was complete. Because Leo was a loner with few
friends, no one bothered to check or challenge the claim he was dead. Leo’s
father had left town without leaving an address and his mother was long gone to
Boston with her new husband. Thanks to Josiah, Catherine believed that Leo died
in the Normandy Invasion.

Catherine knew Josiah’s dislike of Leo but never would she
suspect her father of such elaborate treachery. So, when she checked the papers
the next day and wept over Leo’s mention, Josiah congratulated himself on a job
well done. He had finally purged Leo from his daughter’s life forever—or so he
thought.

*

For weeks, Catherine wandered the streets of Woodsville in a
daze, seeing Leo’s name every time she passed by the courthouse list. Every
time she tried to conjure images of his face or hands, the memories were ripped
from her, only the cold, sterile block letters of his name on that cursed board
in their place.

She’d been worried when Leo stopped writing, now she was
crushed to learn of his death.

“I think you’ve grieved enough,” her father said at dinner
one night. “Your life will go on; it’s time to make the most of it.”

Catherine gave him a level look. “You know I’ll never
forgive you,” she said.

For a moment, Josiah thought she had discovered the ruse.
“For what?” he asked.

“The way you treated Leo,” she said. Josiah kept eating.
“You robbed me of being with him,” Catherine continued. “Those were the last
few days we had together. But you wouldn’t let him spend time here or even
share a meal.”

She took a deep breath. “The way you treated Leo when he was
alive was despicable. Now that he’s gone, I’m going too.” She pushed her plate
away from her. “I can’t stay in Woodsville anymore.”