The Sisters

by Nancy Jensen

  No, Grace thought, it wouldn’t. What a hypocrite Hiram would be if he warned her off Ken on those grounds. Hi’s wife, Mary, was at least twenty years younger than he was.

  “Crab’s … odd,” Hiram said. “Not quite right, you know?” He squatted down in the stall and braided a couple of pieces of straw while he talked. “He don’t fit this world. Not since the war. Used to come here when he was still a kid, got drafted right out of high school—marines took him—about the time Mary and me got married. He drove the team for the carriage that picked us up at the church.” Hi dropped the braided straw and picked up two more pieces. “I knew a lot of fellows that got sent to Vietnam. I ain’t never seen a one of them change like Crab did. All them years in that gook prison, I expect.”

  Grace opened her hand and the bucket clanked softly as it dropped into the straw.

  Ken. A prisoner of war.

  Where and how had he been taken? How long had he been held? What had happened to him there? Why were his friends—why was Hi—turning away from him? Trying to get other people to stay away from him?

  Grace clutched her left wrist and thought of Capt. Mark P. Stevens. Had there been anyone to meet him when he came off the plane? She remembered scenes of wives and children running toward the men, scenes played over and over on the news, but if someone had been there to greet her captain—her newly promoted major—the cameraman hadn’t filmed it. What if he had been alone? What if he was so changed that no one wanted to know him, no one wanted to be patient? Who would listen to him, let him talk about those years in prison? Who—when the world acted like the war had never happened?

  Ken was gone and Hi would never tell her how to find him. But even if she did, what would she say? That she understood? Of course she didn’t. That she wanted to try? That she cared? That she’d like to know him? She did. But she wouldn’t. And it was her fault.

  * * *

  Grace knew the car was squarish and tan, but that’s all she could remember. Furious at herself for being so unobservant, she turned to make another pass through the community college parking lot. How could there be so many tan cars? It had another color, didn’t it? Maybe blue or a darker brown on part of the doors? She couldn’t remember. It was old—she knew that—but so were most of the cars in the student lot. Maybe she wasn’t finding it because it wasn’t here at all.

  Ken was probably long gone, out of Newman altogether.

  Hiram had told her Ken had a piece of property way out in the country, an hour or two northeast of Indianapolis. He’d bought it with the payout from a life-insurance policy taken out by his father, who had died while Ken was still a prisoner in North Vietnam. No one seemed to know what had become of his mother. According to Hiram, Ken, ever since he’d gotten back from Vietnam, turned up in Newman every few years, talking big about how he was going to go to school, get a job, settle down. He would stay for a couple of months, maybe as long as five or six, but then he’d vanish again, going back, Hi presumed, to his patch of lonely land.

  Grace parked and headed toward the nearest building. Huge bronze letters on the side announced it as the Miller Science Pavilion. There was a girl out front, sitting on a stone bench, so Grace asked her if she knew Ken Vincent. She said she didn’t and pointed to a flat building on top of a low hill when Grace asked where students registered. “Drop and add’s over,” the girl said, and Grace thanked her and hurried up the stone steps to the building. She asked three different people in the registrar’s office, each one handing her off to someone, she supposed, with higher authority, but all of them told her student information was private and that they couldn’t even confirm that Ken was registered.

  She asked about a restroom and followed their directions down the hall, to the left, and down another hall. She took a long drink from the water fountain, stopping only when she sensed that someone had appeared beside her to wait for a turn. “Sorry,” she said, wiping her lips with her fingertips.

  “Me, too.” It was Ken, standing right in front of her.

  For days she’d thought of what she would say, but now her mind was blank.

  “How’s Ashes?”

  “Fine,” Grace said. “A little edgy, maybe. He needs a good gallop.”

  Ken shoved his hands in his back pockets and looked away. “I guess Hi will see to that okay.” He looked back at her and gave a slight nod. “See you, Grace.” He took a step away, and she grabbed his arm. Both of them stood for a moment, looking at her hand on his arm. She let go suddenly, as if her palm had caught fire.

  “I was looking for you,” she said. “I wanted to bring you something.”

  He fixed her with that frank stare of his, neither hot nor cold, just unreadable, unnerving.

  “Is there someplace else…” She couldn’t do this standing outside a restroom.

  Ken gestured for her to follow, and in a moment they were in a room with café tables and chairs. Awkwardly high wooden booths lined the walls. There were only a few students at the tables, some talking quietly, others with books and papers spread before them. All the booths she could see into were empty. Ken chose one in the corner and Grace slid in across from him, setting her purse on the table between them.

  “So what is it?” Ken said. He’d joined his hands together, almost like a giant fist, and he tapped the fist on the table.

  “I…” Grace watched his hands, lean and strong, dark from the sun.

  “I know Hi didn’t send you. So what are you doing here?”

  She put her hand over his, as if to stop his nervous tapping, but when his hands fell quiet beneath her small cool palm, she didn’t take her hand away. She didn’t want to.

  Ever so slowly, Ken released one thumb and, curling it over her hand, stroked her fingers. And then, without her knowing how it had happened, her hand slipped between his. They were just as she’d imagined, his hands—warm and sandpapery.

  “I’m sorry I left you at the mall,” she said. “I was pretty mad.”

  He turned one hand so it cupped hers, and with his other he caressed her open palm. “I get in a funk sometimes,” he said. “I never know when it’s coming. And when it does, even if I could talk myself into going out, it’s no good for me to be around anybody. That’s what I wanted to tell you when I came to the store.”

  She felt a rush of desire for him and longed to fling herself across the table into his arms. She wanted to curl in his lap and pull his head to her chest and hold him and rock with him and stroke his hair.

  She loved him. Suddenly. Absolutely.

  “I brought you something,” she said. With her free hand, she opened her purse and drew out a metal cuff the color of dull pewter. She held it so he could read what was engraved there: Capt. Mark P. Stevens, USAF, 9-9-66.

  Ken released her hand, took up the bracelet, then stood up to slide onto the bench beside her. He put his arm around her, and laid a line of caressing kisses on her temple, behind her ear, on her cheek, her neck, along her jaw, and finally her lips. She clung to him and he held her ever more tightly and they kissed and kissed.

  “Grace,” he said, retracing the line of his first small kisses. “Sweet little Grace.” He held the bracelet up to read it. “How long did you wear this?”

  “Until I saw him get off the plane,” she said. “Until I knew he was home again.”

  Ken held the bracelet before him, sliding his thumb over Captain Stevens’s name. “You brought this for me?” He turned to her again, and, cupping her chin in his hand, he looked into her eyes, the same direct gaze, but tender now. “You’re sure?” He tugged at the edges of the bracelet to widen it, then pressed it onto his wrist and squeezed it closed. He took her hand and lifted it, kissed the tender underside of her wrist.

  There was a tear on his cheek. “I want you to wear mine,” he said. “Will you? Somebody sent one back. I never knew who.” He pulled her into his arms. “Say you’ll wear it, Grace. Will you?”

  Grace pressed into him. She wanted to feel her heart pounding against his
. She pressed harder, and harder still—and there it was: the beating of his heart, a rhythm matched with hers. “I will,” she said. “I will. I will.”

  EIGHTEEN

  A Mighty Fortress

  August 1987

  Indianapolis, Indiana

  MABEL

  THE VESTIBULE WAS DARK AND cold, with high ceilings that seemed to be made of stone arching overhead, like a grand tomb. Mabel groped for something to lean on, but her hand found only a slender wooden stand, awkwardly placed at the entrance to the sanctuary. In her reaching for the tilted surface, she knocked off an open book, which fell with an echoing slap to the marble floor.

  “Mama, take my arm.” Daisy was beside her now, holding her steady, and, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Mabel saw her son-in-law, Barry, fetching over a small metal chair. Where had it come from?

  “Are you feeling faint?” Barry asked, guiding her into the chair and then kneeling down to take her pulse. “Mabel?”

  “I’m all right,” she said. “The light was so bright outside. I just couldn’t see when I came in.” She waved her hand in the air around the seat. “Where’s my camera? Did I drop it?”

  “It’s here, Mama,” Daisy said, giving a tiny tug on the strap around Mabel’s neck. “Right where it always is. You just sit still a minute and then we’ll take you in. The rest of the guests won’t be here for another half hour.” She could feel Daisy’s firm, slender hand stroking her arm. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I told you,” Mabel said. “It was just the light. And the sudden cold—coming in out of the heat like that.” She could sense Daisy doubting her—Daisy, who knew every turn of her mood—but Barry and the other people gathered in the vestibule—the priest, a couple of ushers, the hired photographer—seemed to accept her story, as they were chatting about other incidents when a sudden change in light or temperature had made someone ill.

  Mabel hadn’t been in a church for more than sixty years, not since she was sixteen. She hadn’t even stood directly outside one since the Juniper fire, when she and Daisy had paused on the walk before the ruins of the Emmanuel Baptist Church. It didn’t matter that this cathedral bore no resemblance to the little stone church she remembered. Even a casual mention of Sunday services tripped a collage of images in her mind—of her father’s funeral and then her mother’s, of Jim Butcher standing next to her in the pew, loudly singing “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” two mornings after he’d first raped her, of the churchwomen who had finally driven her away by staring and whispering behind their hands as she passed, of Bertie in her pink graduation dress searching the sanctuary for her and Wallace. She’d hoped to reach the end of her life without entering another church or another cemetery, never imagining that her granddaughter, Jenny, without a single day’s instruction in religion, would fall for a boy who had seriously considered becoming an Episcopal priest.

  “We’d better call the hotels about open dates,” Daisy had said last Christmas, moments after Jenny had startled them all by announcing in the middle of dinner that she was dropping out of college for the spring term so she could plan her wedding to Stephen, whom she had known only three months. “Or there’s that new restaurant—you know the one I mean. It’s a converted Victorian mansion. I’m sure we could rent that if they catered the reception.”

  “No,” Jenny said. “We want a big wedding. Stephen has lots of family. And the sanctuary at his church is so beautiful.”

  “But all that rigmarole,” Daisy said. “All that ritual and hocus-pocus. A wedding doesn’t have to be in a church to be beautiful.”

  “I don’t think it’s hocus-pocus.”

  Mabel, Daisy, and Barry all stared at Jenny, while their friends Nick and Ted excused themselves from the table, saying they hadn’t yet had a good look at the Christmas tree.

  “I like it,” Jenny stammered. “I can’t tell you why exactly. And it’s not like I believe everything the priest says. I don’t understand a lot of it, but even if I did—” She picked up her fork and scratched at the tablecloth. “I like the way it makes me feel,” she said. “Like there’s something beyond this world we have to answer to.” She nodded toward the ceramic tree that sat in the center of the table. “Why do you even celebrate if you don’t believe anything?”

  Mabel scooped up the bread basket and said she needed to get more rolls from the oven. Jenny followed her into the kitchen. “What’s wrong, Gran? Don’t you like Stephen?”

  “I do. We just don’t really know him, that’s all.” Mabel pulled an oven mitt onto her hand, which Jenny pulled off again, saying, “I’ll do it.”

  While her granddaughter opened the oven, Mabel said, “You’re too young, Jenny. Finish school first. Get to know some other boys.”

  One by one, Jenny plucked the steaming rolls from the tray and dropped them in the basket. “Oh, Gran,” she said. “When it’s right, it’s right. What do you want me to do? Wait until I’m thirty-five, like Mom was? Or be like you and never get married at all? It’s not like we’re planning to have kids right away. Lots of girls my age get married. Lots.” She pulled off the oven mitt and covered the bread basket with a cloth. “You’re not upset about the church thing, too, are you?”

  Mabel shook her head. She turned toward the sink to hide her reddening eyes. “Of course not,” she said.

  “You are.” Jenny stood beside her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice quiet, “but I want to come out after my wedding feeling like I’ve been through something—not like Mom and Dad. They treated it like a big joke.”

  Mabel’s head snapped up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked at her granddaughter. “Take that back.” Jenny had seen the photographs of her parents’ wedding—onstage at the theater following Daisy’s closing night performance in A Doll’s House—and she’d been told the story: how Barry, a theater-loving insurance salesman, talked his way backstage to meet Daisy by claiming to be a florist with a special delivery. From that, Jenny had imagined her parents’ courtship as a blithe romance out of a musical comedy—all bells and stardust. But she didn’t know what had really happened—like how Daisy, who hadn’t been touched by a man offstage in twenty years, fell into hysterical sobs the first time Barry tried to kiss her. He’d lifted his hands to cup her face, and she’d fought him as if he were strangling her. It was hard not to love a man who stayed after that, who sat in a corner until she calmed down, who asked in a gentle way for her to explain what happened, when she could.

  Perhaps they had all protected Jenny too much. She was so naïve, understanding the world in the simplistic way of the young—the very young, who had never faced death or feared any monster that wasn’t imaginary. Jenny saw the theater as only make-believe. She couldn’t understand—as Barry had come to—that there was no place on earth more sacred to Daisy.

  “I didn’t mean it,” Jenny said. “But why won’t any of you tell me why you hate church?”

  “Your parents weren’t raised on it.” Mabel knew Jenny would roll her eyes at that easy answer, so she quickly added, “And me … I just didn’t want to go back after my mother died.” To say any more would have been like throwing her granddaughter into the center of a great maze—and for what? It wasn’t Jenny’s fault that at twenty-one she remained such an innocent—Mabel and Daisy and then Barry had made those choices. Jenny knew Mabel had adopted Daisy during the war, but she knew none of the circumstances—and certainly nothing of the common past her mother and grandmother shared.

  “Those aren’t good reasons,” Jenny said. “I’m not asking you to join. I just want to have my wedding there.”

  “Well, what about Nick and Ted?” Mabel knew the question wasn’t fair, but she was desperate to divert Jenny to another track. “Do you want to make them feel they’re not welcome at your wedding?”

  Jenny sighed and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. “So I’m supposed to give up even asking questions because some people who go to church think gay men are devils? You
know there are plenty of people who don’t go to church who wouldn’t accept Nick and Ted, either. Why do I have to pay for all that?”

  Mabel stroked Jenny’s hair. “Oh, honey.” All her granddaughter was asking was for them to gather as a family for a few hours inside a church—and for that she did not deserve Pandora’s box as her wedding gift. A church was just a place, Mabel told herself, nothing more. She kissed Jenny’s cheek. “You have your wedding wherever you like.”

  The girl brightened instantly. “And you’ll take pictures?”

  “No, Jenny, I’m too old for that. Can’t I just be a guest?”

  “Not all of them. Just at the reception—whatever strikes you. We’ll pay somebody to do the ceremony and all the formal stuff.” Jenny clasped her hands, as if in prayer. “Please? I’ve told all my friends about my famous grandmother.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “Well, nobody else I know has ever had a grandmother on 60 Minutes.” She winked at Mabel. “Not a grandmother who wasn’t a criminal, I mean.” Jenny picked up the bread basket and headed back to the dining room, tossing another grin over her shoulder as she passed through the door.

  Jenny’s soft-focus view of the world and her generation’s obsession with celebrity made the girl recall that interview as cause for rejoicing—entirely forgetting the reason for it. Mabel hadn’t wanted to do it at all, but her editor had urged her on. “It’s not just anybody,” he said. “It’s Ed Bradley. He was wounded covering the war in Cambodia.”

  Mabel’s book, The Never-Ending War, had grown from the series of photographs she had taken of young men bound for Vietnam. How she wished she could have captured just one moment for all the tens of thousands of Indiana boys who had gone, but working as hard and as long as she could work, she’d managed only a slivered fraction—a few over twelve hundred in seven years. Of those, about half had kept their word and returned to her for one more session. Sixty-three, she knew, would never come back—either killed or reported missing in action. But twenty-nine of the men who returned had joined with Mabel in a new project, letting her photograph them once a year so that others could one day look at the progressive images and understand something of the cost the veterans themselves could not otherwise express. These photos had become the book. If it hadn’t been released the same month the Wall was dedicated in Washington, The Never-Ending War would have sold very modestly, with little notice, but somehow word had gotten to nearly every news station in the country, and, eventually, to a producer at 60 Minutes.