Leigh (21 page)

L
eigh followed Grandma Chloe as she walked down the lane behind Ivy Manor. Leigh carried a basket, as did Chloe. A local family
had just had a new baby, so Chloe had packed a cold meal and gifts for the family. In the weeks since the double funeral,
Leigh and Kitty had lingered at Ivy Manor, unable to find the strength to return to San Francisco. And though Bette had taken
Dory home so that she wouldn’t miss high school, they both returned to Ivy Manor every weekend. Leigh still felt ripped open
inside, and her grandmother seemed unusually quiet. The phrase “walking wounded” was a perfect description of how Leigh felt.

Every morning when Leigh awoke, she tried to come up with a destination, a goal that would give her a purpose, a reason to
move forward. But every morning she came up with no answer. She knew there had to be one. She couldn’t just stop living because
Dane was gone. Now, as she walked beside Chloe, she wondered if she could use this private time with her grandmother to make
some sense of what her future
could, should be. If anyone had answers, it would be her wise and loving grandmother.

Unable to get up the energy to begin this kind of discussion, Leigh let herself drink in the warmth of the sunny day, the
lavish greens that surrounded them, and the sweet, clean scent of mown grass that permeated the air.

“It’s hard to believe that dreadful George Wallace is speaking in Maryland today,” her grandmother commented in a faraway
voice.

Leigh made a sound of acknowledgment. Chloe didn’t like Wallace, and it was far too beautiful a day for a racist rally. Cocooned
from the world, Leigh was vaguely aware that another presidential race was in full swing, with Hubert Humphrey and George
McGovern fighting over which of them would face off against Nixon, the incumbent. As a third-party candidate, George Wallace
was campaigning on state’s rights and white supremacy all over the South. Peace talks over Viet Nam had also begun in Paris.
But all of that strife and striving was a world away from the soft breezes laden with the fragrance of late lilacs, lacy boughs
of bridal wreath, and periodic bouts of tears. Losing Dane filled Leigh with an emptiness, a weepiness she’d never imagined,
never known before in her life.

Beside her, Chloe began humming “Amazing Grace.” Leigh frowned. “I didn’t like them singing that at Grandpa’s funeral,” she
murmured, the basket weighing heavy on her arm. “He wasn’t a wretch who needed saving.”

Chloe smiled at her, cocking her head toward Leigh. “Your grandfather requested that hymn especially to be sung. He loved
the story of its author, a slave owner who’d seen the light and turned from his sin of selling other humans. Dearest, you
only knew my Roarke as ‘a lion in winter.’” Chloe
used the title of a recent award-winning movie. “You’ve never been told how he struggled after the war.”

“You mean because of his arm?” Leigh stepped over a shallow puddle in a rut in the road.

“That and other things.” Chloe looked away.

“You mean
other things
I’ll never be told,” Leigh said with a snap in her voice, “because I’m too young to understand?”

Chloe ran a hand lightly over Leigh’s cheek. “No, I just can’t talk about it now, dearest. I will someday. Just realize that
no one comes through this life unscathed. Your grandfather had his battles, too.”

Leigh understood not being able to speak about certain subjects, so she nodded, thinking of her own battles.
And I’m only twenty-five.
That wasn’t a pleasant thought. What else might she be expected to endure? She looked up as if to God, gazing at the blue
sky through the chartreuse leaves on the trees. Everything around her was in fresh blossom, and yet she felt frozen in the
dead of winter.

The ache inside her was relentless, an all-consuming vacuum. “Will I ever feel normal again?” The words flowed out from deep
inside Leigh before she’d realized she was ready to speak.

Grandma Chloe kept walking, but glanced at Leigh. “I ask myself the same thing every morning. I grieve over losing Roarke.
I grieve over Bette losing Ted and your losing Dane. All our griefs are multiplied.”

“Sometimes I find it hard to breathe,” Leigh admitted.

Chloe nodded. “When your grandfather was under the oxygen tent, I kept having trouble breathing along with him.”

Leigh wanted to say, “It’s not fair. You had forty years together.” But, of course, she couldn’t. What did it matter? Would
she have loved Dane more if they’d had more years?
That didn’t seem possible. “How could we lose them all at once? I keep thinking of how many fathers, husbands, and sweethearts
are dying over in Viet Nam, and yet we lost all three of them here in peace. What sense does that make?”

Chloe reached over and patted Leigh’s arm. “I don’t know how, but we will heal. No one can avoid mourning, but somehow it
does end at last. It’s best just to accept that the sorrow will work its way through us like a horrible virus that must run
its course.”

“What do we do until then?” Leigh lowered the basket from her arm, swinging it near her knees. What would take away this raw
sorrow?

“We go on living—keep busy and comfort one another. That is what losing my first love and my parents and the Depression taught
me. That’s the only way. And God is here to comfort us.”

Leigh glanced at her grandmother. “I don’t have your faith. I believe in God, but…”

“Just remember, He believes in you.” Chloe gave Leigh a gentle smile. “He loves us just as we are, with all our frailties
and failings. He’s always just waiting for us to turn to Him, to lay down our pride that insists we can
do
this life without His forgiveness. When we let Him, He takes us just as we are, and we must do the same for each other and
even ourselves. Don’t forget that, dearest Leigh. If you never remember anything else I’ve ever said to you, don’t forget
that.”

Leigh absorbed the words deeply and felt a solemnity in that moment that seemed at odds with their mundane errand, a walk
down a country road, listening to robins and cardinals calling their mates. “I won’t forget, Grandma,” she murmured. She didn’t
understand what this really meant, but her grandmother’s earnestness touched her.

Chloe turned and gave her another of her sweet, loving
smiles that warmed Leigh from her head to her toes. “I love you, dearest.”

“I love you, too, Grandma.”
I do. I always will You are the dearest of all to me. “
I wish…”

“What do you wish?”

“I wish I could be closer to my mother.” Leigh sighed. “I wish she and I could talk like this.”

“Why can’t you?”

Leigh stared down at her sandals. “She won’t let me. She always keeps busy telling me what to do, not listening to me, not
seeing me and what’s going on in the world. Why is she like that?”

Chloe walked along, gazing down. Finally, she glanced at Leigh. “Your mother is a strong woman, and she suffered greatly with
your father. She doesn’t want you to make the same mistakes she made.”

“What mistakes? All I know is that my father died after the war. Is there more—more I’ve never been told?”

“There is always more, dear.” Chloe smiled sadly.

“What, then?” Why wouldn’t Grandma tell her the truth?

Chloe shook her head. “I try not to let myself get in between you two. I love both of you, and this is up to both of you to
deal with, not me.”

Leigh heated with frustration. “Tell
that
to my mother. Whenever I try to talk to her, all I get is a lecture. She never listens.”

“Do you listen to her?”

“Yes, but she never
gets
it. This isn’t 1942. It’s 1972. The world’s different, but it’s like she can’t see that at all.”

Chloe nodded with a wry grin. “You always remind me of Theran Black, your mother’s real father and your real grandfather,
the husband I lost in 1917. He was just like you.”
Chloe suddenly gave Leigh a dazzling smile. “He was so dashing—he intended to go to France and bring the Kaiser to his knees
single-handedly.” Chloe shook her head. “That’s you, dear. You’re going to grab the world and teach it how to behave. I love
that about you, but it scares your mother to death. She knows it will put you on the front lines, just as it did in Chicago.”

Leigh pondered her grandmother’s words, and in her mind, she heard Dane again: “
You’re Joan of Arc. The crusader who wants to change the world.”
Tears slipped down her cheeks. She tried to hide them, not wishing to trigger more weeping in her grandmother.
Dane, I didn’t want to save the world. I just wanted us to have a life together. Where do I go from here? When will this awful
emptiness be filled?

Later, when they returned to Ivy Manor, Aunt Kitty met them at the backdoor. From the look on her face, Leigh felt a tingle
of dread. “What’s happened?”

“It just came on the news.”

“Not another assassination?” Chloe asked, dropping the empty baskets in the back hall.

Kitty shook her head. “Well, it would have been if the man had succeeded. George Wallace has been shot during a rally at Laurel,
Maryland. They think he’s paralyzed.”

“Well,” Chloe said, wiping her muddy shoes on the rough mat. “I hated his politics, but that doesn’t mean I wanted someone
to shoot him. When will this end?”

Leigh felt the same shock. In the years from 1963 through 1972, JFK, his brother Robert, Dr. King—all had been cut down by
lesser men. How many politicians had to be killed before this terrible scourge stopped?

“Leigh, you got a phone call while you were out.” Kitty handed her a slip of paper.

“From whom?” Leigh looked down at the phone number and name.

“From someone in the Maryland Democratic Party. She asked you to please call her back. It’s important, she said.”

L
eigh sat in a row of maroon, banquet-style chairs in the back of a meeting in the McGovern for President headquarters in a
Democratic pre-1972-convention meeting. People milled around in the aisles. She’d been asked to take the place of the original
woman delegate, who’d died suddenly in an auto accident. They’d needed a woman to fill Maryland’s quota of women delegates,
and she had been remembered from 1968. Grief made it hard to sit in her chair and not get up and pace. But she was afraid
that if she got up, she’d leave. And it had been hard enough to make herself come.

When she looked toward the front of the room, she realized that the man who was chairing the meeting appeared to be gazing
at her steadily. Avoiding his eyes, she scanned the large room. In the weeks at Ivy Manor after Dane’s death, she’d been asking
the universe for something strong enough to make her want to get up in the morning and change out of her nightgown. And then
the day George Wallace had been wounded, she’d been asked to serve as a Maryland Democratic Party delegate and go to Miami
in August. She’d also been invited to visit both the Humphrey and McGovern campaign centers. Perhaps this was her answer.

This wasn’t anything like the closed and secretive sessions
she’d heard of in previous election years. She glanced at the front once more and found the man still looking in her direction,
although he was speaking to a large, gray-haired matron on his right. Who was he?

Then the chairman stopped his conversation and faced the microphone, asking for volunteers for a subcommittee on the pro-peace
plan.

Leigh lacked the energy to raise her hand. Wasn’t it enough that she was here? She felt like an imposter. She expected someone
to walk up to her at any moment and demand, “Who let you in?”

A young woman sat next to her, a brunette with long, straight hair who wore bell-bottom jeans and a jersey-knit blouse in
a wild yellow-and-green print. She leaned forward to read Leigh’s identifying badge. “You’re from Maryland?”

“Yes,” Leigh replied uneasily.

“I’m Nancy Hollister.” The woman offered Leigh her hand. “I’m a delegate from New York.”

Leigh returned the handshake, glad to have someone cheerful to talk to.

“It’s unbelievable being here, isn’t it?” Nancy asked.

“Yes.” At last someone else who felt a little like Leigh did. This was an exciting opportunity, but still grieving, she just
couldn’t generate any strong emotion. “I had forgotten that in Chicago the way delegates are chosen has been changed, that
they had voted to set up quotas for all the different groups—youth, women, minorities.”

Nancy snorted. “With everything that happened in ’68, who noticed? But when they called me and asked me to put my name in
to be a delegate, I didn’t hesitate. I was a precinct worker in ’68. That was my first election.”

“Mine, too.”

Nancy chuckled. “And here we are four years later, dele
gates to the national convention. Power to the people in action.”

Leigh smiled, but the radical phrase still brought back unhappy memories of the violence she’d been caught up in outside the
Conrad Hilton, the very day she’d met Dane.

“Some men still don’t like women having access to power. They call our influence the ’Nylon Revolution.’” Nancy snorted again.
“Personally, I’m not going to wear pantyhose to any party meeting or function. I think pantyhose—or worse, girdles and garter
belts—should be relegated to the past along with corsets.”

Leigh, who was wearing pantyhose under her lemon-yellow miniskirt, was in the minority. She’d already noticed most everyone,
male and female, was wearing jeans or polyester slacks. Pantsuits for women had revolutionized fashion. She looked down at
her legs. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Hey,” Nancy conceded as if she’d just noticed Leigh’s pantyhose, “if you like skirts, do your own thing. If I had legs like
yours, maybe I’d wear skirts, too.”

This made Leigh almost grin, just as the chairman asked one last time for volunteers for the pro-peace committee.

Then Nancy surprised her. She raised her own hand and at the same time lifted Leigh’s. “Hey, we might as well jump in with
both feet!” she exclaimed.