Legacy of Silence (17 page)

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.

L
ORE
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.

I
n 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.

S
O
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.

Joel was dubious. “You want to put a piece of Europe in Ivy? They won’t accept it. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“All the more reason why they will accept it.”

“Ivy is much too small to support anything like it.”

“Ivy is growing right before your eyes, can’t you see? Actually, we should be in a better neighborhood, though. On Main Street near the town hall.”

Joel remained skeptical, even a little amused, but since the place was already paying its way and even profiting, there was no reason for him to protest too much.

“I don’t know where you get your energy,” he said.

She did not know, either. It had been hard work from the start. She had not even realized how much there was to learn and do, how much lifting and scrubbing that, in spite of all the help she had, would be left to her. Yet it seemed as if she was never tired.

Who was it who first said,
If you build it, they will come?
And they were coming. On winter nights after the movies they came for warm muffins and fresh-roasted coffee. In the summer, they took their iced drinks in the shade, looking out upon Angela’s vegetable garden. And as the modest undertaking grew, so grew Caroline’s ambition. Someday they would have a chain of places like this. The orange awnings would bloom throughout the growing town and on the highways. She kept these thoughts to herself, because they were grandiose and might make her sound like a fool. Yet, as the Chinese proverb goes, every journey begins with one step.

Each of them worked hard in his own way. Lore was well regarded at the hospital. Joel learned fast and was promoted; his extra wages went into the
Orangerie, where the profits mounted and the quarters, fifty-cent pieces, and dollar bills were turned into war bonds.

The war was the stimulus behind Caroline’s labor, the war and Eve as well; yet truly these were one and the same. For the sooner the war was won, the greater the chance that Father and Mama might survive to see her.

Sometimes it seemed as if Eve had been born just yesterday, and as if Pearl Harbor, which for her would be only history in a book, had happened yesterday. Yet in half a year she would be in kindergarten. Already she spoke French, and to Lore, German. She was tender and often mischievous. Joel spoiled her and denied that he did.

Almost shyly one night, he began to say, “I wonder whether we’ll ever—” and then changed to, “Would you like to have another child?”

They were reading in bed, he with the newspaper and she with a book. A kind of mental chill—that being the closest she was able to come to a definition of the feeling—ran through her. She did not want another child, a
disruption
. Eve was all to her. Perhaps if other things were different, that would be different, too.
Other things
. Passionate need, for instance, something very much bigger than her sporadic moments. Then would one not
need to have
the man’s child, the lasting symbol of the union? And she wondered how many women could answer honestly that they had such a passionate need.

It was sad that she did not have it, and yet, in the scale of things, this did not rank first. What ranked first was the fact that each of them, Joel and she, had once hung on a cliff by their fingernails and were now on solid ground.