The Glass Forest

by Cynthia Swanson

  Finally, she heard from him. In his typical jolted writing style, Henry’s letter ran:

  This, it’s wonderful news. These things, it’s the start of our life together. What better way to seal ourselves to one another forever than a child?

  She read his letter over and over. She whispered to herself, “A child seals you forever.”

  She ignored the voice in her head reminding her that a child hadn’t sealed her own parents forever. Her father, who had made the trip from Helsinki to New York with his pregnant bride, had deposited Silja’s mother at the Alku with a family they’d met on the boat, promising to send for her when he found work. He disappeared somewhere into the interior of the United States, and they never heard from him again.

  • • •

  At three months along, Silja knew she couldn’t hide it from her mother any longer. Her skirts were getting tighter; her already full breasts were even larger. She had morning sickness a few times but had passed it off as a stomach flu; it was going around Hunter, she told her mother.

  One warm night in early July, as they started the supper dishes, Silja slipped her ring on her finger and said, “Äiti, look here.”

  It took her mother a moment to figure out the meaning of the ring. “You’re engaged?” she asked. “You’re marrying some boy? Is he a Finntown boy?”

  Silja shook her head. “No, Äiti, no one from Finntown.” Gently, she took her mother’s hand and led her into the dining room, sitting beside her at the familiar oak table. “You’d best sit down for this.”

  As she spoke Silja watched her mother’s face carefully. Mikaela would soon turn forty, but looked ten years older. The combination of her small stature, the extra weight she carried, and the brightly patterned blue and green shawl she so favored made her look like a powerful little version of Earth with a head on top. Her graying hair, pulled back in a bun, wasn’t something she gave much thought to. But behind her glasses, her hazel eyes had a light to them, as if illuminated by everything that went on in her sharp mind.

  In 1921—a newlywed, pregnant and fresh off a steamship from Helsinki—Mikaela Takala had not let her husband’s desertion get her down. She’d given birth to her child, found work in a dress factory, and relied on the generosity of the co-op to help raise her daughter. Their stalwart little party of Finnish socialists believed passionately in Marxist philosophies and improved living conditions—sanitation! heat!—not just for New York Finns but for everyone. Mikaela took meeting notes and created leaflets. She designed signs that party members held when they stood next to striking sweatshop workers protesting low wages and poor working conditions. During the Depression, when the Nylund family sold out and moved to Pennsylvania in hopes of making it on a farm, they sold their co-op shares to Mikaela. The Takalas moved into the third-floor, street-view apartment and began taking in boarders of their own. Soon afterward, when her employer’s dress factory shut down, Mikaela found a job in a laundry, washing sheets and towels for Manhattan hotels. Just a month ago, she’d quit the laundry for more lucrative work sewing GI uniforms.

  After she’d said all there was to say, Silja showed Mikaela the photograph Henry had sent. He wore his uniform, holding his M1 semiautomatic and standing in front of a barracks.

  “This is a very handsome boy,” Mikaela observed, fingering the photograph.

  She turned it over. On the back, Henry had written: For Silja—forever my love, H.

  Mikaela looked at her daughter. “Silja, we need a plan.”

  It would be best to take the next year off from school, Mikaela said, to ensure a safe and healthy pregnancy, as well as a period for connection with her newborn. But after that, Silja would return to Hunter.

  Mikaela went into the kitchen and came back with coffee for both of them. “You need to get as much schooling as you can,” she said, picking up the creamer and filling her cup to the brim. “No matter what happens, Silja, you must have an education.”

  She said no more. But Silja knew what her mother was thinking. She believed Silja would end up raising the child on her own, like she did.

  Silja nodded her head, implying agreement; it would be useless to argue with her mother. We’ll see, she thought.

  She could envision exactly how her life would unfold. Henry would come home and get a job—doing what, Silja didn’t know, but something lucrative and fulfilling. They’d move to the suburbs. Silja would have more babies. She’d have no need for the bachelor’s degree she was pursuing.

  Silja hoped the baby was a boy. She wanted a big, strong boy—one who looked just like his father, with Henry’s glowing smile and dreamy eyes.

  She’d be happy either way, she told herself—but she was keen on baby blue.

  • • •

  Henry wrote frequently and called whenever he could. One humid afternoon when she answered the telephone, he told her he was in New York. “I’m at the cruise ship terminal,” he said. “They’ve turned the Queen Mary into a troopship; we’re going to England. Come down right away. I hope I can see you, but they tell us there’s not much time.”

  She hurried to the subway and headed for the terminal in Manhattan. When she got there, she was told that all soldiers had embarked and could no longer return to the pier. “Just wave your handkerchief,” said a man in uniform—one of a group of soldiers forming a line that held Silja and the other well-wishers back.

  Silja waved, shouting Henry’s name. Men leaned over the Queen Mary’s railings waving back to the crowd, but she couldn’t pick out Henry. It was agony—being this close but not being able to see him; knowing that he was on the ship but had no way to contact her. Knowing that he must have hoped—but couldn’t be sure—that she was among the throngs on the pier.

  Finally, the ship’s engines came to life. Her mooring lines were cast off and tugboats guided her into the river. Silja expected her to head south toward the sea, but the Queen Mary sat in the middle of the river, tugboats lined up beside her gently keeping her bow and stern in line.

  “What are they waiting for?” Silja asked a woman beside her.

  The woman shrugged. “Who knows?” she said. “Word from some muckety-muck that they’re cleared to go, I suppose. They’ll get it, but who knows when. I wouldn’t hold my breath for your man coming back ashore anytime soon, miss.”

  “Hurry up and wait” was how Henry described army life in one of his letters. During the long hours she stood on the pier, Silja saw firsthand what he meant.

  “They’ll likely leave overnight,” the guards told them. “No saying exactly when. You may as well go home now, ladies.”

  The sun went down; the hour grew late. Silja’s stomach rumbled with hunger. One by one, girls and mothers and families left the pier. Eventually Silja turned away and walked to the subway, heading for home.

  • • •

  In the dark, early hours of the first day of 1943, Silja’s child was born. When she awoke from the anesthesia to learn the baby was a girl, Silja was stunned. Over the course of her pregnancy, she’d convinced herself she was having a boy. Henry Junior, she called him—sometimes aloud as she affectionately patted her abdomen.

  She had a hard time believing she’d given birth to a female instead. After the nurses and Mikaela left her alone in the new mothers’ ward, she furtively unwrapped the child’s diaper, checking the baby’s genitals to confirm what she’d been told.

  She mourned for little Henry Junior. But the baby girl was beautiful—no hair to speak of, but she had Henry’s stunning dark eyes. And she was healthy, with a good set of lungs and a strong heart.

  There would be other babies, after the war. She and Henry would have their boy—at least one. And many more, she hoped. Boys who would, no doubt, torment their big sister endlessly.

  • • •

  Silja named the baby Ruby Mikaela Glass. Mikaela for her mother, of course. And Ruby because Silja loved the simplicity and American-ness of the name.

  Ruby is a very good name, Henry wrote to her—from
north Africa now; his company was thick into the fighting there. A pretty name and I am sure a pretty girl that her dad can not wait to meet.

  For eight months Silja stayed home with Ruby. She got used to a routine of feeding, diapering, rocking Ruby to sleep before dozing off herself. Ruby was a colicky baby—fussy and quick to change her moods, a restless and inconsistent sleeper. Silja despaired that the child would always be difficult, but Mikaela assured her that Ruby’s behavior was normal for one so small. “Just give her time to grow, pikkuäitini,” Mikaela said.

  Silja scoffed. She didn’t feel like a “little mother.” She felt like a cow. Her enlarged breasts leaked, staining blouse after blouse. But it would be wasteful to buy formula, when Silja had such a plentiful supply that cost nothing beyond her own dignity.

  And then, magically, Ruby did grow out of her difficult stage. Her smile became a sign of genuine happiness, not just of gas. She ate oatmeal and pureed fruit. She sat up on her own. She slept for six hours each night. Silja fell in love with Ruby’s toothless grin, her rosy cheeks, her burbled language. She couldn’t get enough snuggling with her child, darling and cuddly as a teddy bear or a favorite pet.

  Then it was time to reenroll at Hunter. Mikaela changed to working nights at the uniform factory, allowing her to be with Ruby during the day while Silja was at school. “You get back to your studies,” Mikaela told Silja. “The baby and I will manage. The important thing is your education.”

  They fell into a rhythm—Mikaela and Ruby spending their days together, Silja remaining at Hunter for classes and to study in the peaceful, hushed library. Each evening, Silja arrived at the Alku in time to have supper with her mother and Ruby, then put the baby to bed herself after Mikaela left for her shift at the factory.

  Silja missed being with Ruby terribly. At Hunter, it was hard to concentrate on her schoolwork. More than once she considered quitting. What was the worst that would happen? She’d have to contend with Mikaela’s disappointment, but her mother would hardly throw Silja out on her ear.

  If only the damn war were over, then Henry would come home and take care of them. That would solve everything. But it dragged on, with no end in sight. At least he wasn’t seriously hurt—or worse. In his letters from Sicily and later mainland Italy, Henry told her the names of his buddies who were gravely wounded or killed. He was grateful, he said, to have suffered only minor injuries. Nothing to keep me off the front lines, he said. Guess I’m a lucky duck. Right, baby doll?

  Despite spending so little time with her, Ruby gravitated toward Silja. Mikaela reported that Ruby began looking for Silja as soon as the shadows lengthened each afternoon; it was as if the tiny girl could sense her mother’s presence simply by the change in how light played across the living room walls. When Silja opened the apartment door, Ruby’s eyes lit up and she crawled enthusiastically across the floor to greet her mother. She climbed into Silja’s lap for supper, crying out in protest if they tried to put her in her high chair.

  Silja was surprised that Ruby was still so attached to her. But Mikaela nodded approval. “Babies should love their mothers more than anyone else,” she said. “That’s the natural order of things.”

  • • •

  By June of 1944, when Ruby was eighteen months old, Silja was ready for another break from school. She usually worked summers to earn extra dough, but Mikaela agreed she should stay home this year. “We don’t need the money,” she said. “I’m making plenty these days. You rest up, get ready for your senior year, and enjoy being with your daughter.”

  It was a swell plan—but ironically, despite her happiness at finally being home for a stretch, Silja found it hard to concentrate on Ruby. The papers were full of articles about the Allies’ invasion of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall on the northern French coast. Tens of thousands of soldiers were involved in the battles, which took place mostly in a town called Caen and on the surrounding beaches.

  She knew Henry had returned to England and that he’d been waiting for something important to happen—something he didn’t talk about specifically, though he alluded to it in his letters. The last one he’d sent was full of mystery:

  Baby doll, things are looking grim. We wait in agony, we don’t know what to expect. It will be big is all they say. Think of me and my pals and tell everyone at home to say prayers.

  Then the letters abruptly stopped. She heard nothing for weeks.

  She made a million calls, but no one would tell her anything. “The status of specific soldiers is pending,” is what she heard each time she telephoned. “When there’s word about your husband, ma’am, you’ll be informed.”

  So she waited, played with her child, cooked, and cleaned to make it easier on her mother when she got home from the factory after a night hunched over her sewing machine. Silja took lengthy, meandering walks through the scorching Brooklyn summer, the baby buggy heavy and awkward to push, the humidity drenching her skin. While Ruby napped, Silja sat in the Alku’s courtyard, reading novels she checked out of the library. But Agatha Christie and Saul Bellows and W. Somerset Maugham couldn’t take her mind off Henry.

  She wondered whether to contact Henry’s mother. He’d spoken little of his mother when he and Silja had met, and hadn’t once mentioned her in his letters. She knew the mother lived in northern California, where Henry and his brother had been raised.

  “We both left home shortly after our father had a heart attack and passed,” Henry had told her in the spring of 1942, before he left New York. His voice was flat, matter-of-fact. “Paul and I traveled together for a while, working odd jobs. And then I wanted to see more of the country. Paul stayed in the West, and I moved eastward.” He shifted in his seat. “Last year I enlisted. I knew Roosevelt would get me eventually anyway—and besides, I didn’t have anything better to do.” He shrugged. “Paul’s registered for the draft, of course. So far his number hasn’t come up, but I expect it’s only a matter of time. Until then, my little brother is still drifting around.” Henry smiled fondly and shook his head.

  “And neither of you ever went back home?” Silja asked. “You haven’t seen your mother since?”

  Henry shrugged again. “She didn’t need us,” he said quietly. “And it seemed like she didn’t want us around.”

  “Your mother didn’t want you around?” Silja couldn’t fathom it.

  They were riding a Lexington Avenue express train, heading toward Battery Park because Henry wanted to see the tip of Manhattan. Silja watched as they passed through Canal Street station, the train barely slowing down before speeding up again.

  “She had other concerns, that’s all.” Henry squeezed Silja’s knee through the flannel of her skirt, his thumb sliding partway underneath the fabric. “And anyway, if she hadn’t, maybe I’d still be there, working those vineyards in Sonoma instead of riding in a New York City subway car with a looker like you.”

  Henry never spoke of his mother again. Silja supposed he’d written to tell his mother about Silja, about Ruby—but Silja never heard from the mother and had no idea how to contact her. Since they’d married, the army had considered Silja to be Henry’s next of kin; information about his condition or whereabouts would come to her.

  Nonetheless, Silja worried. Suppose some mistake was made? Suppose his mother had received communication that Silja hadn’t?

  At last, toward the middle of August, a letter arrived. It was from Henry, but not in his hand. In beautiful penmanship at the top of the page, a nurse noted that Henry had dictated the letter to her.

  Dear Silja,

  I’m alive and in an army hospital in England. I was hit pretty bad and they did not think I’d make it, but here I am. Doc says they’ll send me home when I’m well enough to travel. Next time I write, I’ll provide details about what happened. But now I’m tired and need to rest.

  Love,

  Henry

  Silja breathed a sigh of relief and immediately dashed off V-mail to Henry. She told him how thankful she was to learn that he was all rig
ht.

  I can’t wait to feel your arms around me. I think of nothing else. I dream of us together again.

  Henry’s response was delivered two weeks later. Holding the thin paper, reading his words, Silja’s hands shook. The truth sank in for her, and for the first time she began to understand what their future might hold.

  13

  * * *

  Angie

  Without meaning to, I slept in the next morning. Going to bed the night before, I’d expected to toss and turn in the unfamiliar room. But I found Silja’s bed unexpectedly comfortable; I slept soundly all night.

  Facing west and with the drapes drawn, the master bedroom stayed dark even after daybreak. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to find the little round-faced clock on Silja’s bedside table showing almost eight. I reached for Paul, eager to touch his skin before I arose, hungry to feel his mouth on mine. But his side of the bed was empty.

  I opened the drapes, releasing dust that made me cough. Now that I was more awake, I noticed that the room had a musty feel to it, as if the carpeting could use a thorough vacuuming and possibly a shampoo. In the large, fancy bathroom, I noted that Silja’s fixtures didn’t gleam the way they did in the tiny bathroom in my cottage on North Bay. Silja’s tiled bathroom floor was gritty with dirt and long strands of hair. I prided myself on being a meticulous housekeeper; I cleaned our bathroom twice a week, scrubbed all our floors at least once a week, and washed every window monthly. I loved the fresh, lemony scent of a clean house.

  Silja’s house could use a good scrub-down, I thought. Maybe I’d have time to give it a going-over while we were there. I hated thinking of myself as a cleaning lady, but I loathed the idea of staying in a dirty house, too.

  Passing the guest room, I peered in and saw that PJ was still snoozing. In the chic, modern kitchen with sunlight streaming in from the east, I found Paul standing in his robe and pajamas in front of the sliding door, hands on hips. He was staring into the woods behind the house. I wrapped my arms around his waist from behind. He turned, pulling me against him. I nuzzled my face against his chest, my forehead resting on his St. Christopher medal while he continued looking outside.