“Let me guess,” Suzanne said, closing her eyes. “That brave, tall, auburn-haired, dark-eyed, mystery woman was my mother.”
“That’s right,” he nodded, his eyes soft and dreamy. “That, indeed, was your mother.”
Suzanne was silenced. She drew her knees up to her chest, thinking. Mom had always been, well, Mom. When Suzanne was very little, Ava had been pretty much the average Mom, making sure she wore sweaters if she was cold, putting a piece of fruit in her lunch box every day. But then, Mom became the drunk Suzanne avoided or helped Daddy take care of for years—until it was hard to remember the lunch-making, sweater-bearing, fruit-giving Mom she’d once been. Then, just as suddenly, Mom was the clear-headed, AA-going, constantly cooking woman who tried—but not too hard—to get to know her daughter. The daughter who’d had grown up considerably since she’d taken a dive into the bottle. And now, it was Mom, who she was counting on, depending on, for the first time in her life to take care of her, the way she’d taken care of Molly all of Molly’s life. The way she’d taken care of Ava, before she’d gotten sober.
But this was a whole new Mom altogether. Hearing someone talk about Mom like she was . . . A woman? A hot babe, no less? No, she was quite sure no one had ever spoken about Mom like that in front of her before.
“So,” he went on, “during these furloughs, courtships moved pretty fast. It gave new meaning to the word whirlwind. It wasn’t at all unusual for a couple to get married in a matter of a month or a couple of weeks.”
Suzanne turned her face away. “If you’re about to tell me that you danced naked with the woman who gave me life,” she said sternly, “well, good for you and all, but if you make me listen to it, I’ll scratch your eyes right out.”
“In those days,” Buddy told her, “you had two categories. Girls you ‘danced naked’ with and girls you gave rings to. Ava . . . Ava was definitely in the second category.” He stopped for a moment, considering this. “Actually, she was the kind of girl who told you when to give her a ring and exactly what kind she’d like. And I liked that. You always knew where you stood with her. No guessing games.”
“I can see where that would be attractive.” Suzanne nodded sympathetically. “You had no way of knowing that same determination to get what she wanted was going to extend to the kind of toilet paper she preferred.”
“So,” Buddy went on as if Suzanne hadn’t spoken at all, “we had about two more weeks of leave before we shipped back. I saw Ava three times the first week, five times the second—each date was better than the last. And she made me laugh. Lordy, did she make me laugh! But, then, she wasn’t just . . . She had plans. She had thoughts. Just about everything. When she talked, it was fascinating. And her silences were more interesting than most people’s conversations.” He shook his head, full of admiration that had never truly waned. “And I knew, I knew with all my soul by the end of the first night that I wanted to marry her. I even went to my mom and asked her if I could have my nanna’s ring, the antique, emerald-cut diamond that had been in our family for generations, because I’d met the girl that was going to be my wife.”
Suzanne exhaled slowly and stubbed out her cigarette, trying hard to picture it all. “It’s just,” she said at last, “she’s said such terrible things about you for so long. To find out that all this time, you loved her, it’s just really weird.”
“So, on the day I was supposed to ask her, I take her to this really romantic restaurant—it even had cloth napkins.” He sat up straight, making a hoity-toity face. “The Army wasn’t paying us PFCs much, so this was a big deal. I had the waiter light the candles, bring the wine . . . I even sniffed the cork just like my dad taught me to, and let it breathe. When the waiter came, I didn’t look at the prices, and I ordered for both of us.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s so chauvinistic, Buddy.”
“Hey,” he raised an eyebrow, “it was considered the height of romance in those days. Anyway, the evening went well. So well, in fact . . . Well, I suppose there’s no getting around telling you this: we’re not quite sure whose daughter you are—mine, or Jimmy’s.”
For a second, silence thundered through Suzanne.
“What?” She cleared the brick out of her throat long enough to ask. “What?”
Then Buddy looked up at her, impishly grinning. “Jesus, I can’t believe you fell for that one. That one’s older than the hills.”
“Buddy!” she gasped, standing up; she was horrified, she was furious, she was humiliated.
And then they were both laughing, doubled over, tears streaming out of both of their eyes.
“Well, do a little arithmetic, kiddo,” he wheezed, wiping a tear from his eye. “Geez, if you’d been conceived in our first TDY, then you’d be, what, forty one, forty two?” He took off his glasses and wiped them clean, his hands still trembling with the force of the laughter. “Your bullshit detector must be on the fritz is all I can say.”
She took aim with her pen and tossed it at him, being careful to miss widely. “You’re just lucky I’m not a better shot,” she told him menacingly. “Okay, back to the story. You were in the fancy restaurant.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, picking up the hemp ropes and bringing himself back to the story. “Your mom is a sharp one, and she saw me coming, I think, because before I could pop the question, she put her hand on my wrist and told me she had something important to discuss with me.”
“Ouch!” She winced. “That’s never good.”
“Rarely,” he agreed. “So, she went on to say she liked me very much. She liked me very, very much, in fact, and she thought she could probably even fall in love with me. But,” he stopped for just a millisecond—even now, he had to close his eyes to say it, “that she couldn’t seriously commit to a guy who was going off to war. She knew a few girls who were waiting for their men to come home . . . And then their men . . . Well, their men didn’t. She said she’d pray for me and all that, and to please look her up when I got home, if I wasn’t engaged or married to someone else.” He stopped talking then, stopped macraméing, stopped moving, his eyes locked on the ground.
“Wow, that must have been awful,” Suzanne ventured. “Were you sad?”
“Sad?” he repeated. “Sad would have been a day at the beach. I was crushed.” He clenched his hand, demonstrating just how crushing it had been. “More than that even—devastated. I was so sure she was the one . . . Never in my life had anything knocked me on my ass like that, unless maybe it was getting drafted. Yeah, it was about on par with that. It took me four days before I could take a deep breath, like I had a broken rib or pneumonia. After I got out of the restaurant and went home, I was almost glad to be going back; it was good to be crawling through the mud and trying to kill something right about then.”
Suzanne thoughtfully lit another cigarette. It had been a full five minutes since her last, she noticed with satisfaction. “So, how did Daddy get involved in all this?”
“Now, let me just . . . Oh, yes.” He had to think a minute before he put his finger on it. “On our third date, I’d given her a book of poetry that my grandmother had handed down to my mom, and my mom, to me. Emily Dickinson. She liked the story of how none of Emily’s poems were published till after she died; she said it made her feel like there’s always hope.” Suzanne laughed—and her laugh sounded like Ava’s too, to Buddy’s ears. “Anyhoo, Jimmy wanted to get it back for me, it being a family heirloom and all. Or, at least, that’s the excuse he used to write to her—I certainly couldn’t do it. It was one thing to give out my family’s Dickinson to a woman who was ‘the one,’ but just some girl who dumped me after two weeks—well, let’s just say it wasn’t something I was going to hear the end of any time soon. And every time I heard about it, I was going to think of Ava, and I wanted to get her out of my mind as soon as I could.”
“So, Daddy wrote to her to get the book back?”
“In a word, yes, but he really wanted to rip her a new one. Your dad could use language p
retty creatively when he wanted to.”
“You mean he had special talent for making people feel like shit.” Suzanne leaned forward a little, smiling. “You should have seen him on prom night when I came home at four in the morning with my dress on backwards.”
“Well, rather than crumble under his harsh words—like everyone else did—your mom immediately wrote him back.” Buddy sighed. “She told him that she was terribly sorry if she’d led me on or hurt my feelings, and told him why, and no matter how you slice it . . . At least, she was being honest.” He shrugged again. “You had to respect that, anyway.”
“The thing about not being able to handle getting that telegram?” Suzanne shook her head, wildly disappointed in her mother. Somehow, she temporarily forgot that if her mother hadn’t made that particular choice, she wouldn’t be here. “She could have thought of that before she started dating you.”
Buddy puffed out his chest a bit, and patted his hair. “I like to think,” he said smugly, “that she found herself completely unable to resist my animal magnetism.”
He looked so cute he made Suzanne momentarily forget her cigarette worries. “You know, I’ve seen pictures of you as a younger man, my friend.” She winked at him, approvingly. “You were the total package—a real looker.”
“I was, wasn’t I? If I do say so myself.” He reached down for his abandoned macramé. “Anyway, he wrote back, apologizing for being so harsh; she wrote back, forgiving him. Pretty soon letters were making the nine thousand mile journey pretty regularly.”
“Uh-oh.” Suzanne wrinkled her nose. She knew how the story turned out. “But, what about all that stuff about not wanting to date a soldier?”
“They weren’t dating.” He held up a finger, carefully differentiating the semantic. “They were writing. I guess, somehow, that didn’t bother her quite so much. With each letter, things get just a bit friendlier. And with each letter, Jimmy comes running to me. Sort of, checking in, to see if it’s all right. To see, I suppose, if at any time, I’ll get mad and demand he stop writing to her, and, up to a point, I’m sure, he would have done that.” He lit the pipe and puffed gently until the ember glowed. “And then, after a point, I’m thinking, nineteen or twenty letters later, they had a whole other connection with each other, totally separate from me. Next thing you know, it’s fifty-seven letters later, we’re both back home, both of us in one piece. Exactly two months to the day after that, they were standing in front of a preacher on his parents’ front lawn. Jimmy took me aside the day before he proposed and asked me if I minded.” He choked out a short, bitter laugh. “Did I mind? Did I mind?”
From the strident sound of his voice, forty-plus years later, Suzanne guessed that, in fact, he had minded. Quite an awful lot, if you got right down to it.
“I minded like I’d mind a hot coal burning inside my chest. But what was I supposed to say?” He shrugged again, sadly. “I saw the way she was looking at him.”
“So,” Suzanne asked softly, “what did you say?”
Buddy stared off into the cool afternoon air for a long time before answering. “First and only time in my life,” he said at last, “that I ever lied to that man.”
“Oh, Buddy . . .”
He waved off her empathy; he’d lived too long in Jimmy’s shadow to be jealous now. “Your dad, he was the character. I was the straight man, the one standing next to him to set up the joke, or the one there to tell of the adventures he’d had. You couldn’t really be jealous of it, you just . . .” He tried to describe the magnetism of the man’s personality. “He was just Jimmy. Everyone, everyone loved Jimmy. Trust me, she wasn’t the first gal to walk right by me on her way to Jimmy.”
“So, is that why you did it, because you felt guilty because you’d been in love with his wife?”
Buddy shrugged, suddenly shifting in his seat, looking away. Suzanne frowned and edged closer, trying to see his face.
“Oh, I get it, because even at the time, you still resented him, and felt guilty about that?” Yet another idea struck her. “Plus the guilt you probably still had, of him getting shot for you? Or, maybe, I don’t know, maybe you still weren’t over his wife, even then?”
Buddy turned his face away even further, and then the light bulb finally exploded in Suzanne’s head.
“Because you’re still not over his . . . Oh, my God.” Suzanne’s breath came out in one big whoosh. “Oh, my God . . .”
“Now, listen, you,” Buddy said hastily, tamping out the pipe. “I didn’t say that. Did you hear those words come out of my mouth? No, sir,” he shook his head firmly. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t not say it,” Suzanne retorted, “and very loudly.”
Buddy sighed, irritably. “You know,” he said, “I liked you a whole lot better when I could distract you with a candy bar and a quarter.” He dug around in his pocket and came up with a coin. Holding it up before her, he cooed, “See, honey? Look how shiny!”
She stuck out her tongue at him, then snagged the quarter. “It’s just,” she said, flipping the coin between her fingers, “there must have been so many other women since then.”
He nodded, conceding. “I didn’t let my bed grow too cold or cobwebby over the years. Comparing them to Ava, though, there was just no comparison. None that gave it to me straight and still got my blood up like she did. Pardon me, but it’s true.”
“It must have been hell working with them, seeing them together all day, every day, day after day.” She suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, my God, it must have been so awful when she blamed you for losing O’Shenanigan’s; you must have felt . . .” She gestured wildly, trying to pick the word out of the air.
“Like a perverted asshole?” Buddy finished for her. “Yeah, I did. But, it beat the alternative.”
“And working with them?”
“That was actually okay, at first.” He sounded surprised himself. “Working with them, at least I got to see her. I thought that would make me immune after a while. But then she was always trying to fix me up—she felt sorry for me. That was when I found out that there are things worse than fearing death.”
Suzanne looked at him, questioningly.
“There’s pity,” he told her. “Pity from the woman you love. It’s definitely worse than fearing death. When she hated me, at least she was passionate about the hate, instead of looking at me like some big dumb lump of . . .” He gestured with his hand, trying to grab a word out of the word, but failed.
Suzanne walked over, her heart aching for him, and put her arms around his shoulders, giving him a kiss on the top of his head.
“Now, how come I can’t find a man who’s gonna love me like that?”
“He probably got run over by the Harley of that teenaged bum you married.”
SIXTEEN
From every sitcom that had dominated the airwaves in her youth—Sex in the City, Friends, Will & Grace—Molly had pretty much convinced herself that she belonged in Manhattan. Everyone said it was cultural and intellectual center of the known universe, and every visit there had seemed more like coming home. Even Poughkeepsie wasn’t close enough, although with the package they were offering her, it would have to do. At least for the next four years, unless she managed to get an equally good deal from Columbia or New York University, which didn’t seem terribly likely at the moment.
But when autumn rolled around, she always reconsidered this plan.
When the air turned suddenly crisp, and the leaves turned from green to gold or russet, she could sit for hours, coffee in hand, sketchbook in the other, and just absorb the atmosphere. She could literally feel the Pilgrims who’d first docked at Portsmouth harbor, seeking a new life of religious freedom or a more prosperous place to begin again.
Or, for a great many others, she supposed, it had been “America or jail.” She could feel the hope, the worry, the fear, the determination, the history in every storefront. Legend even had it that the small theatre, the Player’s Ring, on Marcy Str
eet had been a nineteenth century brothel.
It was at times like this when Molly thought, maybe she truly was a New England girl, maybe she’d come back here after she finished her studies. Right now, she was planning on becoming a broadcast journalist but was fully aware that four years was a long time for plans to change. She didn’t mind not knowing what the future held; she planned to take each new experience as it came her way.
“I feel the same way you do, Moll,” Suzanne said, even though Molly hadn’t spoken aloud, as they sat in Prescott Park with cups of coffee from Breaking New Ground. She took in a deep lungful of the autumn air. Sometimes she and Molly could take one look at the other and tell just what the other was thinking. “I always thought I’d be off in some big city somewhere, but when you come right down to it—this just always felt like home. Like I belonged here.”
“Is this lipstick too bright in the sunlight?” Ava snuck another peek in her compact. She still wasn’t used to “the look” Molly and Brandon had created for her yesterday after their AA meeting. She had always put her best face forward, but it had been years since she had been this worried about her appearance. The makeup, the accessories, the brand-new golden highlights in her auburn hair, the semicasual blazer and jeans with two-inch pumps . . . It was all quite startling to take in at the age of sixty-something years (she’d stopped counting at fifty-two and refused to do the math now).
On the walk downtown, Brandon had pushed Ava to stop at the shoe store and go for three-inch heels, but Ava had absolutely balked.
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