All She Ever Wanted

by Lynn Austin

  Leonard grimaced as he tried to squeeze one last drop of glue from the bottle. It was no use. The glue was finished and his eighth-grade history project wasn’t. It was due tomorrow, and the stores were all closed on Sunday.

  “Drat!” he said, tossing down the empty bottle. It was as close as he dared come to saying a bad word. If his mother heard him swear, she would wash out his mouth with soap and make him go to confession.

  “There must be more glue around here someplace,” he mumbled as he rummaged through their apartment. His mother had gone to pick up Eleanor from a friend’s house and would be back soon, but Leonard didn’t want to wait. He wanted to finish his project. Maybe his mother kept some glue downstairs in her hat shop.

  Leonard thundered down the stairs with the grace of a newborn calf. His awkward legs seemed to be growing faster than he could adjust to them. He opened one drawer after another in her work desk, trying not to mess up the contents too much, but he didn’t find any glue. He yanked open the last drawer, lifting out a wad of fabric scraps—then he froze. On the bottom of the drawer was a folded, yellowing newspaper with a photograph of a man he recognized—his father. Leonard sank onto a chair and unfolded the newspaper to read it.

  The story stunned him. He’d known that his father had died seven years ago, but not that he had committed suicide. And not that he’d been a wealthy investment banker who’d lost everything in the stock market crash. Leonard read the article all the way through. There were things in it that didn’t make any sense at all, but the man in the picture was definitely his father. Leonard recognized him, even though his father had never really lived in the apartment with them—not the way other fathers lived with their families. He seemed to visit for only a few hours during the week, and once in a while he’d stay overnight on a weekend.

  Leonard forgot all about the glue as he read the article through a second time. Then he read all of the other articles on the front page. He never heard his mother and sister arrive home, and was oblivious to any sounds from upstairs until his mother called down to him.

  “Leonard? Are you down there? You need to come up and clear your schoolwork off the table so we can eat supper.” He didn’t reply. He couldn’t make sense of what he’d just read, let alone mesh it with what he’d thought had been true these past seven years.

  “Leonard?” she called again. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Reading!” he yelled angrily. “Reading a bunch of lies about my—” A sob choked off his words. He couldn’t finish. He felt the shame of what his father had done as if it were his own action. He heard his mother’s soft steps descending the stairs, and when he looked up at her, he felt inexplicably angry with her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked when she saw him. He held up the newspaper, unable to speak. His mother crossed to the desk and yanked it from his hand. “You had no right! What did you think you were doing, snooping through my things?”

  “Is it true? Did my father really put a gun to his head and kill himself?”

  Fiona exhaled. She closed her eyes and nodded.

  “What about all the other things the newspaper said? Why is every-thing all wrong? It says that his wife’s name is Evelyn. And that my name is Russell and Eleanor’s name is… I don’t remember, but it was wrong. And it said that we lived in Westchester, but we didn’t. Is this really my father or isn’t it?”

  Fiona took a step backward and leaned against the cutting table, her eyes still closed, her head lowered. Leonard saw that she was crying and then realized that he was, too.

  “Arthur Bartlett was really your father,” she said after a long moment. “He committed suicide seven years ago. That’s why we moved up here to Deer Falls. I wanted to give you and Eleanor a fresh start in a place where nobody knew us.”

  “And those other things… those wrong names… did the newspaper make a mistake?” He wished his mother would laugh and say yes, of course they’d gotten it all wrong. Learning that his father had killed himself had been horrifying enough.

  But somehow Leonard knew that she wasn’t going to say that. His father had never lived with them; he’d never acted like a real father in any sense. “Please don’t lie to me,” he begged when she didn’t reply.

  Fiona looked up at him, meeting his gaze. “I wasn’t his wife,” she said through her tears. “I was his mistress. I should have known better than to let him do that to me, but I didn’t. I was eighteen years old, dirt poor, living in a stinking tenement, and working in a sweatshop. I wanted all of the fine things he offered me. Your father promised to marry me, and I was fool enough to believe him. I loved him. God help me, I still do.”

  “Mommy?” Eleanor called down the stairs. “Are we ever going to eat?”

  “I never wanted you children to know about this,” Fiona said, wiping her tears with her apron. “Please don’t tell your sister.” She handed the newspaper back to Leonard and left him sitting alone in the now darkened store, devastated.

  After that terrible day, Leonard became aware of other things he’d never noticed before. It was as if his mother had finished reading a book of fairy tales to him and had closed the cover, dissolving the fantasy and plunging him into the real world where there were no happy endings. He noticed how differently the coal miners lived compared to the mine bosses.

  He saw the shantytowns along the railroad tracks housing destitute men, women, and children, while the summer cottages that belonged to wealthy Philadelphians and New Yorkers stood vacant most of the year. He became aware of how differently his teachers treated students from impoverished families. It shouldn’t be that way! It wasn’t fair!

  The knowledge that a man like Arthur Bartlett was able to take advantage of a girl like Fiona Quinn, simply because he was wealthy and she was a poor immigrant, fueled in Leonard a deep hatred toward the rich and powerful, and a new empathy for the workingman and his struggles. His mother’s story exemplified the way all rich men abused and misused the poor—and there was nothing the poor could do about it. They had no way to break free.

  Reading the daily newspapers inflamed Leonard’s sense of injury and his passion for justice. He started buying as many as three papers a day, spreading them out on the dining room table at night, growing angrier and angrier as he sat hunched over them, reading. In the early months of 1937, when the new United Auto Workers’Union staged a sit-down strike, closing a General Motors plant in Michigan, Leonard cheered.

  When the strike escalated into a riot, he wanted to hitchhike to Michigan and join in the struggle. He followed the news religiously for the next month as the strike spread to GM plants in other states and production stopped. In the end, management caved in to the workingmen’s demands. Labor unions gained new power to represent the weak against the strong, and Leonard felt as though he had personally triumphed over men like his father. Three months later, ten people died at a Republic Steel rally in Chicago, and as the union movement gained momentum and strength, Leonard knew he had found his life’s purpose. He could fight against injustice; he could help right society’s wrongs.

  He became interested in socialism, then in Communism and its promise to eliminate the class system and give power to society’s poorest members. When he was a senior in high school he started reading Karl Marx. That was the year that Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began. And it was also the year he found his half-brother, Russell Bartlett.

  It happened by accident. Leonard had been pouring through a stack of newspapers, reading everything he could about Joseph Stalin’s Red Army marching into eastern Poland, when he stumbled upon the New York society pages. The name Bartlett at the top of a wedding announcement leapt out at him. He paused to read it more carefully and discovered that his father’s wife, Evelyn, had remarried. That news didn’t interest him much, but the announcement also mentioned her son, Russell Bartlett, who was a Broadway actor and director.

  Leonard began carefully reading the entertainment pages after that, keepin
g track of any advertisement, review, or feature story that mentioned Russell Bartlett. He had collected a good-sized stack of articles when Eleanor stumbled upon them, hidden under his bed, while cleaning.

  “What are all these, Leonard?” she asked, waving the dusty pile.

  “Nothing. They’re nothing. Give them here.”

  She laughed, as if amused by his anxiety. “Too late—I already read them. I never knew you were interested in the theater.”

  “Give them back, Eleanor. I’m not in the mood for your stupid games. Those are none of your business.”

  “Well, I think they are my business,” she said, turning snippy. “I saw our name on all of them. That’s why you cut them out, isn’t it? This Bartlett guy is a relative of ours, isn’t he?”

  A trickle of fear ran down Leonard’s neck. She was uncomfortably close to the truth—a truth their mother wanted kept hidden. Leonard didn’t blame his mother for not telling Eleanor. He had been devastated by what he’d learned, and the knowledge had altered his feelings toward his mother irreparably.

  “He’s an uncle of ours on Father’s side,” Leonard lied. “I thought I might look him up if I ever went down to New York. Now, give them back to me.”

  “Here!” She tossed them in the air, and they fluttered to the floor like falling leaves. “It gripes my middle kidney the way some people don’t even say please!”

  Two days after graduating from high school, Leonard was sitting at the table reading the newspaper when his mother came upstairs from the store with an envelope in her hand.

  “Here. Mr. Messina bought you this graduation card,” she said, handing it to him. “He’s downstairs if you want to come down and thank him.”

  Leonard mumbled a vague reply. He didn’t even want to open the envelope, much less talk to that pompous man. The landlord had been a shadowy presence in his mother’s life ever since they’d moved to Deer Falls, and Leonard had never trusted him. No one really knew what all his socalled businesses were or how he’d earned all his money. The fact that he was rich was reason enough for Leonard to hate him.

  He left the unopened envelope lying on the table until he finished the article he’d been reading. When he finally ripped it open, and a fifty dollar bill fluttered out, he was furious. It seemed like a slap in the face for Messina to swagger into the store, doling out charity to his poor tenant’s son. Leonard stuffed the money and the card back into the envelope and went downstairs, not to thank him but to give it back.

  His mother sat at her worktable with a half-finished hat in front of her. Messina stood close to her—too close—wearing one of his expensive suits. His dark hair was slicked back and shiny with pomade. For some reason, Leonard halted halfway down the stairs, watching them. He saw their landlord cup his mother’s face in his fleshy hand and bend to kiss her. It wasn’t a chaste kiss on the cheek, but a long, possessive one, his greedy lips pressed against hers.

  Leonard would have cried out, but he couldn’t draw a breath. He couldn’t even move. He watched helplessly as Messina gave his mother a parting caress and left the store.

  When his strength finally returned, Leonard didn’t know whether to go back upstairs or to confront his mother. He felt rage billowing inside him, needing release, so he descended the stairs and threw the envelope on the table in front of her.

  “Here. I don’t want this,” he said bitterly. “You can give it back to him the next time you see him.”

  “What’s wrong with you? What did Mr. Messina ever do to you that you would treat him so rudely?”

  “He’s the same as all the other wealthy pigs! They make themselves rich on the backs of the poor. What I want to know is why you’re so nice to him?”

  “These are hard times. If Mr. Messina didn’t take my hats to Philadelphia to sell, we’d never be able to make ends meet.”

  “Yeah? And how much profit does he keep from all your hard work? He’s using you, Mom. Don’t try to tell me he’s just being nice. Tell him to get lost.”

  “Sure, and then how would we live? You read the papers, you know there’s an economic depression in this country.”

  “We’re doing all right. You’re making a living from the store.”

  “You think I can make a living and support two children selling hats in Deer Falls? Think about it, Leonard.”

  But he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to add up all the things that she was telling him and the things he had seen. Helpless frustration welled up inside him, boiling over. “I saw him kiss you, Mom!” She looked startled for a moment, then embarrassed, then resigned.

  “Aye,” she said quietly. “And I kissed him in return.”

  “He’s a married man! A fat, filthy pig! How could you have feelings for him?”

  “I don’t!” she said sharply. “I hate him as much as you do—maybe more.”

  “Oh, no…” Leonard groaned. He shook his head as if he could shake off the truth as he realized what his mother was saying. “Don’t tell me… you’re not…”

  “I do it for you and Eleanor. It’s the only way we can get by. I have no other choice.”

  “NO!” he shouted, covering his ears. “It isn’t true!” She stood and pulled his hands away, gripping his wrists, forcing him to listen. She was angrier than Leonard had ever seen her, her beautiful face pale with fury.

  “If you want to take up a cause, Leonard, why don’t you fight for all the women who have no husbands to take care of them, women who have no way to support themselves or their children. Women who can only get low-paying jobs in sweatshops or as maids and waitresses, jobs that don’t pay enough to support a family. Go ahead, get angry, Leonard—but get angry at a world that gives women like me no other choice but to let men like your father and Lorenzo Messina take advantage of us.”

  She released him and sank onto her chair again. Leonard shook with anger, his wrists red and aching from her grip. He felt as helpless as his mother did, and it enraged him.

  “I’ll go to work! I’ll take care of you!” he said. Fiona reached for his clenched fist and cradled it in her hands, rubbing it to soothe him.

  “My sweet Leonard. I know you would gladly take care of your sister and me. But you’re only eighteen—and there are so many men out of work.”

  Leonard knew then what he had to do. The idea had been simmering in the back of his mind for days, but now he was certain.

  “I’m going to enlist in the army,” he said quietly. “I’ll send you my pay every month.”

  “You can’t enlist!” she said in horror. “Europe is at war. What if America gets involved in it, too?”

  “I believe we will get involved. I think it’s inevitable. But like you said, this is the only way I know to get by. I have no other choice.”

  She leaped to her feet and threw her arms around him, clinging to him as if she could hold him back.

  “No… No, please don’t do this. I couldn’t bear to lose you, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother.” He pried her arms away. “I can’t stay around here, knowing that you’re… I have to get away. Besides, it’ll mean one less mouth for you to feed.” He turned and raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, eager to start packing before he changed his mind.

  Eleanor took the news very hard and did her best to talk him out of it.

  Leonard had always felt close to his sister, protective of her, in spite of her indifference to the labor movement and all of his other causes. In many ways she was very sophisticated—dressing well, wearing makeup, and fixing her hair in the latest styles. She considered herself middle class or even a notch higher, unaware that they were, in fact, poor and forced to survive in a society that abused the poor. He felt sorry for her. Eleanor didn’t know the truth about their father or Lorenzo Messina, either—and Leonard would die before he told her. Let her live in her fairy-tale world. The only regret he had in leaving was that he wouldn’t be around to protect her from men like them.

  “Listen, Eleanor,” he s
aid as he prepared to say good-bye. “And I want you to really hear me and not just shrug it off, okay?”

  She nodded tearfully, gazing up at him from where she sat cross-legged on his bed.

  “Every summer all the snobby rich boys come to town to stay at their families’cottages. You’re a pretty girl, and they’re going to fall for you— and I won’t be here to look after you. Don’t trust them, Eleanor. Don’t listen to their lies. They’ll promise you all kinds of things to get what they want and have their way with you, but none of it is true. You’re just a summer fling to them. They’ll go back to Philadelphia or New York or wherever and marry snobby rich wives and never give you a second thought.”

  “They’re not all that way—”

  “Yes!” he cut in. “Yes, they are! I don’t care if you don’t believe anything else I ever tell you, but believe this. Don’t trust rich men! Stay away from them!”

  She leaped up to hug him, and he felt her tears on his neck. “I’ll miss you so much! Do you have to go?”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Yeah, I have to go.”

  Chapter

  33

  DEER FALLS, PENNSYLVANIA— 1941

  Nothing is the same, Eleanor thought. She sat high in her lifeguard’s chair, scanning the nearly deserted beach. Ever since Pearl Harbor last December, everything had changed. She adjusted the angle of the umbrella that shielded her from the warm summer sun and glanced at her watch. Only one more hour to go.

  The last six months of high school had gone by in a blur, with everyone focused on the war that America was now fighting. Every last boy in her graduating class had enlisted, as had most of the men in town between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. And while Deer Falls was usually bursting with summer people this time of year, the beaches and cottages were nearly deserted. The town was always boring enough during the wintertime, but at least Eleanor had always had summer to look forward to—when there would be dances and parties and interesting new people to meet.