The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Davis, Barbara

  No one would talk.

  I let the telegram fall to the bed, then frown as I notice the date: 25 October. I pick it up again, to be sure, then look at Anson’s father through a scrim of tears. “This is four days old.”

  He stares back, mute.

  “You’ve known for days, and you said nothing?”

  “It was sent to me.”

  I’m stunned by his reply. “When were you going to show it to me?”

  “I’m showing it to you now.”

  Once again, there is no apology in his tone, nothing that speaks of regret or empathy. Only an icy flatness I cannot comprehend.

  Thia.

  My chest tightens as her name pops into my head. Anson is her hero, the lone bright spot in this cold and unfeeling house. She’ll need comforting, and I can’t imagine her getting it from her father. I need to go to her, to help her be strong.

  “Does Cynthia know?”

  His eyes harden on me, a warning. “No, she does not. And she won’t until I’m ready for her to know. Is that understood?”

  I nod, because I haven’t any say in the matter, though I’m not convinced it’s right to keep the truth from her, or that she’ll thank her father for his silence when she does find out. But maybe she’ll never have to find out. There’s still a chance Anson will be found safe and well, and she’ll never have to know about the telegram. I grab hold of the thought like a lifeline.

  “There must be someone we can call, someone at the Red Cross who might know something.”

  Owen regards me without emotion, but every muscle in his body seems clenched, as if he’s willing himself to stay together. “I’m a well-connected man, Miss Roussel. I have an extensive network of well-placed contacts within the various branches of government, and I can assure you I have made every call there is to make.”

  “Did you call the hospital in Paris and speak to Dr. Jack? He’s the chief surgeon.”

  “A surgeon?” He seems astonished by the question. “Young lady, my connections go all the way to the White House. Not that they did me any good. No one could tell me anything, except to say that my son failed to report back to the hospital at the expected hour and that his ambulance was found abandoned on some road where it had no business being. No one knows why. He isn’t listed as captured or killed, which is something, I suppose, though I’ve been cautioned not to read too much into that. There was a substantial amount of blood in and around the vehicle, and two witnesses claim to have seen a pair of German soldiers leading a man fitting my son’s description into the woods. They reported hearing gunshots a few minutes later. There’s been no sign of him since.”

  His voice goes thick, his pain finally palpable as he picks up the telegram and slowly begins to fold it.

  “The official line is ‘presumed captured or killed,’ though they think it likely that he died and was quietly buried. Apparently, even Hitler knows it’s bad form to murder a Red Cross worker. Either way, in all likelihood, my son is dead.”

  My head swims as I reach for his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  It’s all I can think to say. I know it isn’t enough, that no words will ever be enough, but I find that I’m strangely numb, as if I’ve somehow slipped my body and am watching it all unfold from a distance. I’m aware of that other me—the one still clutching the wedding dress she’ll never wear, the one whose heart is splitting open, bleeding, breaking. I just can’t feel any of it.

  He jerks his hand free as if I’ve burned him. “Get away from me.”

  I sag limply onto the bed, his hatred suddenly more than I can bear. I thought that in this moment of grief we might find a way to comfort one another, but I was wrong. My comfort is not wanted. Nor am I to receive any. In this, too, I will be alone.

  The nausea rises without warning, the prickly wave of clamminess so sudden that for a moment I fear I might lose consciousness. I barely make it past Owen and into the bathroom before I’m sick. The spasms are more violent this time, threatening to turn me inside out. I drop to my knees on the cold tile floor, retching so hard my vision goes dark, then crouch there, heaving, until finally there is nothing left to bring up.

  My legs are unsteady as I stand at the sink and rinse my mouth. In the mirror, my face is chalk-white and sticky with sweat, and I’m suddenly reminded of the day Anson and I met at the hospital. How he steered me into the lavatory, then stayed with me while I cleaned myself up with his handkerchief. Because of a little smear of blood. But there was no blood today. No blood for a while now. Not this month or the one before. Suddenly, I realize what I’ve been ignoring for weeks.

  I’m going to have a baby.

  TWENTY-NINE

  SOLINE

  The Reading is the foundation of The Work and must always be the Spell Weaver’s first undertaking. Some personal item shall be provided with the understanding that nothing seen will be used for the purposes of manipulation or harm.

  —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

  I don’t know when Owen left. I only know he was gone when I came out of the bathroom, leaving me alone with my grief and this terrible new awareness. There will not be a wedding, but there will be a baby.

  Enceinte. Pregnant.

  The word brings a lump to my throat, like a stone lodged partway down that I can’t seem to swallow. Babies are meant to bring joy, but I feel no joy. In fact, I feel nothing. I have heaved myself empty and wept myself dry. I’m hollow, scraped raw. And yet strangely disconnected. Perhaps there’s a limit to how much pain the heart can hold.

  The room is dark, and I have no sense of time. I’ve slept a little, somehow. But I’m awake now in the yawning quiet, the taste of bile still sharp in my throat. It never occurred to me that a child might result from our single night together. Maman never spoke of such things, but I always assumed it would be more difficult than that. Now I see that I’ve been naive. The headaches and queasiness, the endless fatigue. It began on the ship, nearly a month after leaving Paris. I thought it was mal de mer—seasickness. And then later, I thought it was just the toll the journey had taken on my body: days with little or no food, always on the move, the constant fear of being caught and arrested. I have been an imbécile.

  I shield my eyes as I turn on the lamp and look around me, at the scattered letters, the dress box yawning emptily at the foot of the bed, my discarded wedding dress sprawled beside me, a ghost of the bride I once dreamed I was meant to be. Anson’s shaving kit—the one thing I possessed of him and promised to keep—is gone.

  I think briefly of Maman’s rosary, my parting token to him, and wonder where it is now. In the hands of some SS officer who picked his pockets after shooting him? In a heap somewhere at one of the camps?

  Presumed captured or killed.

  I squeeze my eyes closed, but the images are still there, burned into the backs of my eyelids. Anson’s face—his sweet, beautiful face, bloodied and still. Wide eyes, the color of a calm summer sea, open and unseeing.

  He can’t be gone. He mustn’t be.

  If only I could see his face again, as it was the last time I saw him, I could hold on to him the way Maman held on to my father—in her heart. My hand drifts to the locket, small and warm at the hollow of my throat. If only I had a photograph of him. I could carry him with me always, and one day share it with our child.

  Before I can stop myself, I have slipped from my room and out into the hallway. The house is still, the silence as complete as the darkness. I hold my breath as I move down the hall, bare feet soft on the carpet. I have never been on this side of the gallery—the family side—but I know Thia’s room is the first door on the right and that Anson’s room is across from hers.

  I pause outside Thia’s door, listening. All is quiet. And for this moment, at least, I’m glad she doesn’t know about the telegram, that when the sun comes up and she opens her eyes, she won’t know what I do—that her beloved brother isn’t coming home.

  I turn around to face Anson’s door, my pulse drumming in my ears as
I try not to think about Owen stepping out into the hall, finding me skulking outside his son’s room. Then I remember that the worst has already happened. If Anson is truly gone, nothing he can say or do can hurt me.

  The glass knob is cool against my palm. I glance once more toward the end of the hall. No light, no sound. I let my breath out slowly and push inside. The smell of him is suddenly all around me, limey and clean and male, and for a moment his presence is so palpable, it feels as if I might reach out and find him in the dark.

  I wait for the ache of it to subside, my back pressed against the closed door. Moonlight seeps through the sheer curtains behind the bed, washing the room in cool, angular shadows. There are no blackout curtains—probably because the room hasn’t been used since Anson left for Paris, long before the Americans joined the war.

  I move to the window and draw down the shade, then flick on the small bedside lamp. It’s a simple room, not much larger than my own, decorated in shades of pewter and sand. There’s a double bed covered in pale-gray brocade, a heavy chest of drawers, and a small desk and chair tucked into one corner. It suits him. Simple and neat, unfussy.

  I feel like a prowler as I tiptoe about the room, opening drawers and peering in his closet, peeling back the layers of the life Anson lived before I met him. Being here, touching the things he used every day, is the worst possible torture, and yet I can’t seem to stop myself. I’m hungry for him, desperate to connect with his memories if that is all I’m to have of him now.

  I move on to the desk. The surface is bare except for a small lamp and a scarred leather blotter. I run my hand over the back of the chair, imagining him in it, studying or writing letters, then slide the center drawer open. A framed photograph stares up at me, the glass cracked down the middle. It’s of Anson and Thia, smartly dressed in matching white sweaters, posed with their mother in front of a large sailboat. All three are squinting against the sun, grinning for the camera. Thia is missing a front tooth.

  My heart tears as I try to guess Anson’s age. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. He’s thin, almost gangly, but he already towers over his mother. A tear slides down my cheek. I catch it with the back of my hand before it falls. It isn’t exactly what I’d hoped to find—it was taken years ago—but it’s more than I have of him now. I could cut it to fit the locket. But as I stand there staring at the three smiling faces, I can’t bear the thought of cutting Anson out of a photograph with his mother and sister.

  I ease the drawer open a little farther, preparing to return the photograph, then notice a book shoved toward the back. I tease it forward, then lift it out. The cover is coarse blue cloth decorated with a gold crest of some kind. The lettering on the spine reads: HISTORY OF THE CLASS OF 1941, YALE UNIVERSITY.

  I carry the book to the bed and lay it open on my lap. I turn the pages slowly at first, scanning face after unfamiliar face, until they all begin to look alike. And then suddenly he’s there, staring up at me from the heavy white page. Anson William Purcell. Sophomore.

  I nearly smile as I trace the image with my finger. He looks so handsome in his suit and tie, his unruly blond waves carefully tamed for the occasion. The boyish softness in the earlier photo is gone, replaced with a brash, almost stubborn sense of purpose, a resolve to make his own way in the world, to be his own man.

  A wave of rage shudders through me, a sob surging up from a well I thought emptied. For promises that will never be kept and good that will never be done. For a child who will never know its father.

  My eyes are already raw from weeping. I close them and lie back against the spread, the yearbook hugged to my chest. I’m so tired suddenly. The baby, I think muzzily. The baby is making me tired. Anson’s baby.

  I come awake with a start, a bright light suddenly searing through my closed lids. I’m dimly aware of something thumping to the floor as I sit up, and that I’m not in my room. My eyes won’t focus properly, but Owen’s shape at the foot of the bed is unmistakable.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” he snarls.

  I blink heavily, fumbling for a response. He has switched on the overhead light, and the glare hurts my eyes. “I’m sorry.” My throat is thick from crying, my words a mere rasp. “I only wanted to see his room, to be near his things.”

  He moves to the desk, where I’ve left the drawer open, and picks up the broken frame, examining it. He has shaved since I last saw him, but he’s wearing the same rumpled cardigan as yesterday, the cuffs rolled to his elbows. I push to my feet, watching as he bends down and retrieves Anson’s yearbook from the floor. His hand hovers over the cover a moment, as if he might flip it open. Instead, he rounds on me, his face so close to mine that I can smell his stale hair tonic and unwashed clothes.

  “You have no right to touch my son’s things. Or to sleep in his bed. You’ve no right to be here at all. This is not your home.”

  I take a step back. His fury is terrifying, and his breath is sour from drink. “I was looking for a picture of Anson, and I found his yearbook in the desk. I sat on the bed to look through it and must have fallen asleep.”

  His eyes narrow, as if he’s just thought of something. “What do you want with a picture of my son?”

  “I wanted to see his face,” I say softly, pleadingly. “And to have something to remember him by. His shaving kit was all I had, but you took it. So I thought—”

  “Get out of this room,” he barks, pointing to the door. “Or I’ll drag you out myself.”

  My eyes blur, but I refuse to let the tears fall. “I’m going to have a baby,” I say quietly. “Anson’s baby.”

  His eyes slide to my belly, then back to my face, sparking with accusation. “I suppose I should have seen this coming. Now that you know there won’t be any wedding bells, you’ve decided to play your ace. Did my son know?”

  I shake my head. “I only realized it yesterday, after you showed me the telegram.”

  “Convenient timing, I must say.”

  His callousness astonishes me. “Your son isn’t coming home, and I’m carrying his child. This is what you have to say to me?”

  He glares down his nose. “I don’t question the fact that you’re carrying a child. Only a fool would lie about such a thing when time stands to expose her, and though I suspect you of being many things, a fool isn’t one of them. But there’s no way to say for certain who the father is.” He pauses, raking his eyes over me. “For all I know, you don’t even know.”

  The words wound in a way I never would have thought possible. “You don’t believe that. You can’t.”

  “Can’t I?” His mouth curls unpleasantly. “There are names for women like you. Experts at luring our boys into marriage. It nearly worked too. You managed to get yourself all the way across the big blue ocean and install yourself in my home. You even have my daughter eating out of your hand. But you didn’t plan for the telegram, did you?”

  “It isn’t true! None of that is true!”

  “Spare me your outrage. It will do you no good.” He moves to the desk, briefly studying the cracked picture frame before slipping it back into the drawer. When he turns to look at me again, his face is blank and hard. “You thought you were so clever, showing up on my doorstep with your box full of clothes. You assumed I would simply look the other way while you sauntered down the aisle with my son. But that was never going to happen. Now you think your belly will save you, that a baby gives you some kind of a claim on the Purcells. But you’ve miscalculated, mademoiselle. Your child will never be a Purcell—in name or anything else. There is no place for either of you here.”

  I stare at him as the reality of my situation creeps in. I am an inconvenience, a mistake to be corrected. The sooner the better. “Are you really so hard—so full of hate—that you could live with turning your back on your own grandchild? Could Thia live with it?”

  He stiffens, hands fisted at his sides. “My daughter isn’t to hear a word about you and your belly. Or about her brother. Is that clear? I’ve arranged for her to go away
to school in Connecticut. She leaves the day after tomorrow. And until she does, you will stay well clear of her. By the time she returns, you’ll be gone.”

  The thought strikes me with terror. I know no one here, have no money, no work. But my first concern is for poor Thia. “May I at least say goodbye?”

  “You may not. I won’t have you manipulating her further.”

  I have nothing to say to any of that. He’s made up his mind. About me, about all of it. “What happens now?” I ask simply.

  “Steps will need to be taken. Damage control. You have no money, I suppose?”

  “Not much, and none of it American.”

  “There’s a man I know in Providence, a doctor who works with women like you.”

  “Women like me,” I repeat. “What does that mean?”

  “It means unmarried, pregnant, no family or means of support. I’ll call him today and get started on the arrangements.”

  I feel myself go pale. In Paris, there were women who specialized in such things, in medicines and . . . procedures. Avorteuses. I cross my hands over my belly, an instinctive act of protection. “What kind of . . . arrangements?”

  “A place for you to go. A suitable family to take the baby. Help getting on your feet when you’re done with all of it. What did you think I meant?”

  I shake my head, unable to say the word out loud.

  Owen drops his eyes to the floor, clearly uncomfortable. “I’m not a barbarian, despite what you might think. But I will not have your condition become public knowledge and create a scandal for myself and my daughter. No one knows about your connection with my son, and I intend to keep it that way. And if you’re as clever as I think you are, you’ll keep it that way. If this were the movies, I would just write you a check or set you up in a little business, and that would be the end of it. But this isn’t the movies. In the real world, that kind of assistance could be mistaken for an admission rather than what it really is—a simple act of Christian kindness.”

  “This is your kindness? To treat me like some little schemer? When I’ve asked you for nothing?”