Strings Attached (26 page)

Thirty-two

 

New York City
November 1950

There were still a few reporters out front, so we went through Iggy’s apartment. We passed through the kitchen, where the turkey was cooking, past the dining room, where the mother was setting the table. It was a glimpse of a normal world, where families sat around a table and said a blessing, and there was plenty of grace to go around.

On a table I saw the paper, and I quickly turned away from the screaming headline.

75 K
NOWN
D
EAD IN
L.I. W
RECK IN
R
ICHMOND
H
ILL
T
OLL
M
OUNTING IN
C
RASH OF
E
ASTBOUND
T
RAIN

“Hi, Mrs. Kessler,” Hank called.

“Hello, Hank. Tell your parents Happy Thanksgiving!”

“Will do!”

A few minutes later we were in a gray Ford and heading toward the Midtown Tunnel. I looked into every car, pressing back against the seat. If I saw anybody who seemed suspicious I would nudge Hank, and he’d take off fast from the light. But mostly I saw families in their good coats, or couples not talking, or someone fiddling with the radio.

I didn’t breathe easily until we left the city. Hank took a road that curved along the East River, and you could see the skyline of Manhattan bristling on the other side. Then we drove past dunes and marsh grass and seagulls. We passed Coney Island and Idlewild. I hadn’t quite realized how close Manhattan was to sand and sea.

I tried to think about what to do when we got there, but instead I kept thinking about the day I’d left Providence. I thought I was going like a smart person, with my bills rolled up in my underwear. I’d thought I had enough money to stake me, enough looks and talent to get ahead. I’d thought that was all I needed to meet the world. How I’d hated Da for the speeches he made, walking into my room and shaking his finger. He had said things about “the characters you’ll meet” and “when you think you have all the answers, you’re just dumb.” I’d never thought I’d get to a place where Da would be right.

We saw the sign for Babylon and Hank followed the curving road to a small, pretty town. He ran into a gas station to ask directions. I felt the first vibrations of nerves, and my stomach dropped away.

He slid back into the driver’s seat. “It’s just a few blocks away.”

I cranked down the window and gulped in some air. “The air feels different here.”

“We’re near the ocean,” Hank said.

“Delia liked the ocean,” I said. “We went once. She said”—and suddenly the memory was fresh and alive, Delia sitting on the beach, her dress tucked around her legs as the wind whipped tendrils of hair around her face — “that it must be the luckiest place to live.”

The house was small, more of a cottage, really, with a white picket fence and a red door. The shutters were painted
a blue that was close to violet, cornflower blue, Delia’s favorite color. I knew just looking at the house that Delia lived there. She was alive.

My mouth was dry and I swallowed hard. “Could you just drive by? Drive by, please?” I added urgently, sliding down in the seat. Hank drove to the corner, pulled over, and parked.

“Kit, it’s not too late. We can just drive back to New York.”

“I can’t.”

“Well. We’ll have to go forward, then.” That made sense. Except I couldn’t seem to get myself out of the car.

I twisted in the seat and looked again at the house. It looked spare and small in the gray light, a little narrower than most of the houses on the street, with its high peaked roof. There was a dried yellowish plot of grass in front and no porch or stoop, just irregular slabs of slate for a pathway to the door. They were placed too far apart, so that you’d have to have a wide stride to make it to the door without stepping in mud.

A woman turned the corner, walking briskly, dressed in pants and sneakers and a navy coat, a wool cap pulled down to her eyebrows. She looked like a sailor.

When I got out of the car, she stopped in her tracks. Slowly, she pulled off her cap.

We stared at each other. I guess the changes were bigger for her. I was twelve when she left, with knees like door knockers. She had short bangs now, and her hair was the length of mine. She was dressed in a baggy gray sweater and khaki pants. The hems of her pants were wet — she must have been walking on the beach. Despite looking like she had thrown on some men’s clothes in the morning and
despite the fact that she had to be over forty, she looked almost shockingly beautiful and wild. “Kit,” she said.

“It’s me.”

“All grown up.” She put a hand out, and then flinched as I took a step back. “You’re lovely.”

“I came to see you.”

“Well, you’d better come in, then.”

She opened the door to the house. To the right I could see a living room with a small hearth and a couch facing it. There was one long table against the wall with books and newspapers and magazines arranged in stacks on it.

I saw all this in a flash, all of it unfamiliar and strange, because I’d never seen Delia pick up a book in her life. Besides the Bible.

“I like to read now,” Delia said. “Comes with the job. I work at the library.” There were two deep, dented lines on either side of her mouth. Laugh lines, they were called. Did she still have cause to laugh?

Hank stepped forward, holding out his hand. “Hank Greeley. I’m a friend of Kit’s.”

“Greeley.” Delia frowned, as if the name tickled a memory. She shrugged out of her coat. “Come in, I was just about to light a fire. Take off your things.”

It was a blessing, to have the fire, for Delia busied herself with kindling and newspaper and matches, so I was able to look around and get my bearings. A bookcase covered one wall, its shelves stuffed with novels and biographies. There was a small pastel of a beach scene framed and hung on one wall. On the mantel was a row of small vases, each of them with a bit of beach grass or dried roses in it. On the windowsill, beach stones were arranged in order of size, white and smooth. Between each one was a shiny new
penny, heads up. The reference to Jamie made me bite my lip and turn away.

How different it was from our apartment in Providence, chockablock with shoes thrown about and papers, sweaters left on chairs, blankets thrown over the worn spot on the couch, forgotten glasses of milk and cups of tea. I remembered Delia’s room, the plain lines of the wooden table she’d dragged out to the backyard and painted white, the white chenille bedspread, one brass candlestick. Delia had always liked things plain and spare. Back then we’d seen it as evidence of her need to show us up with her own superiority, neat in the face of our messiness.

I guess I thought I’d cry, but I felt strangely numb. Maybe I was just all cried out. By the time Delia turned away from the fire — taking longer than she needed to, I was sure — I’d gone through relief and curiosity and pleasure and had settled right back into anger, my most comfortable place.

“We thought you were dead,” I said.

Delia looked startled. “You did?”

“Of course we did! You disappeared without a trace! You didn’t send one word to us.”

Delia put a hand on the mantel like some fancy grande dame. She must have thought better of the pose, because she dropped it. “Your father told me I was no longer welcome —”

“He had every right to!”

“Yes,” Delia said, “he did.” She took a breath. “Why don’t I make us tea?”

“I don’t want your tea. I want answers.”

“Well, how about tea
and
answers?”

Hank looked from me to Delia. I hadn’t taken off my coat yet. I had the feeling I should just run out the door.

“Hank,” Delia said, “there are books to read — you look like a reader, somehow — and you can sit by the fire for a bit, is that all right?”

“That will be fine, Miss Warwick.”

“How do you keep track of all your names, Delia?” I chewed on nasty like it was chocolate, sweet in my mouth.

“Have a seat, Hank. I think my niece will have an easier time berating me in private.”

How could she stay so cool? Delia walked out of the room and down the hall, looking back to see if I would follow.

“If you need me, I’m here,” Hank said.

I hesitated just a moment, and when I went into the kitchen, Delia was setting the tea things on a breakfast table, a small round one by a window that looked out on another patch of dried, dreary grass. There was a package of butter on the counter, along with apples and brown sugar and a sack of flour.

“I’m making a pie this morning,” Delia said. “I’ve been invited to Thanksgiving dinner at a neighbor’s.”

“That sounds cozy.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears, a gesture I remembered. She crossed to fill the kettle.

“You’ve got a right to hate me,” she said over the crash of water hitting metal. “I know that. But you came for answers, too. Wouldn’t it be easier if we were civil?”

She put the kettle on the stove and lit the burner with a match. She couldn’t light it the first time; her fingers were trembling. She struck another one and this time it worked. It was the tremble in her fingers more than her words that allowed me to sit down.

“Did you know he was coming last night?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Billy! Did you know he was coming to see you?” Was it only yesterday?

“What?”

“He was on the train, the Babylon train.” Delia’s face went white. “Billy was on…”

“He was killed.”

“Oh. Oh.” Delia said the word over and over in short exhalations of breath. “I went to church early this morning— we’ve lost several in the town. The funerals start on Saturday…. Billy.”

“Why was he coming to see you?” I asked.

The blast of the whistle from the kettle made us both jump. Delia hurried to the stove and took it off the burner. She carefully poured the water into the pot and warmed it, moving it around in her hands. Then she measured out tea and poured the rest of the water in. She did it slowly, as though she had to concentrate.

“He must have been… eighteen?”

“Nineteen. He enlisted in the army.”

“That poor, broken little boy.” Delia wiped her hands on a dish towel and brought the teapot to the table.

It was the word
broken
that did it. I started to cry again. The tears just leaked out, like air from a tire. I couldn’t seem to stop them. “He asked me to marry him a few days ago.”

She looked startled. “You and Billy…”

“You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know.” She reached out instinctively to grab my hand, but I pulled away.

“I was with him just yesterday morning. Before he left he was upset. He said he just wanted the truth. That he had to stop the lies. Why would he come here?”

Delia looked down at her hands. “I’m not sure. I expect it has to do with his father.”

“I know you were his mistress, so don’t bother lying.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

I felt dizzy and sick, and though I’d been planning to refuse Delia’s tea, I took it. She had already added the cream and a half teaspoon of sugar. She knew just how I liked it. Funny how family is. You know how somebody takes their tea, but you have no idea about their heart.

“I’ve done my confession,” Delia said. “I’ve been forgiven. I’ve lived my penance.”

“Oh, good. I’m so happy to hear you’re square with God. Have a ball in heaven.”

She looked down and creased a napkin with her fingernail. “You’re old enough now to hear about it. You’re seventeen. I was about your age when I first met him.”

“At Buttonwoods Cove, in Warwick.”

It was like I hadn’t said anything. “Have you been in love yet? In love like you thought you would stop breathing when you saw him? Did you feel you were only truly in the world when you were with him?”

I didn’t answer, and I didn’t think Delia meant me to. “That’s how it was. Of course, we parted back then. Nate blamed Jimmy for it, but it was me. I knew I couldn’t marry him. I couldn’t fit into his world. Irish and Italians… we look down on each other, don’t we, for no reason at all, and I knew I’d be in the middle of that. So there was that, but there was also — I don’t know, fear. I didn’t know what he’d be. Bootlegging in Rhode Island… well, lots of people did it. Police looked the other way, the speakeasies were roaring, there was money to be made. But it started getting rougher, and I saw that Nate didn’t turn away from it like
Jimmy did. So I told Nate to go away, and he did. I still think it was the right decision. You can’t save people, you know.”

“So how did you meet again?”

“The day of the hurricane. Do you remember, I was caught downtown? I ran into Benny — he was Nate by then. He saved my life that night. I don’t mean it in a silly romantic way. I was trying to cross Westminster Street, fool that I was, and my feet went out from under me, and I would have drowned if he hadn’t hauled me out. We laughed about it later, how I was swept off my feet. He took me to a friend’s office to dry out and wait out the worst of it, and that’s how it started up again. At the time I thought thank God it did, because I was dying without him. I didn’t go a day without thinking of him for ten long years. He got me that job with Rosemont and Loge. He helped our family and he made me happy. He made me happy, Kit. He made a world for us as though we were married, and for a while it was easy to believe it.”

I looked away, out at the yellow grass. “What about Billy?”

“I’m getting to that. I just have to explain how it was. When the war came and Nate got that apartment, I went, God help me.”

“You never had a job in Washington.”

“It was like we were living the life we were born to live, married. It was lovely, most of it.”

“So that was it? Moonlight and roses, tra-la? Lying to your brother, to us, violating the sacrament of matrimony, mortal sin, all of that?”

“I said it was lovely. I didn’t say it was easy. I didn’t say it was right. That summer we were together, it made us reckless. So that fall I started to see him in Providence.