The Glass Forest

by Cynthia Swanson

  The teacher nodded toward Paul and me. “It was nice to meet you both, Mr. and Mrs. Glass,” she said. “Again, my condolences.”

  As she started to step away, I caught her coat sleeve. “Miss Wells,” I said. “Would you come over this evening for dinner?”

  Shocked at my impulsiveness, I put my hand over my mouth. The invitation had slipped out before I could give it much thought. But it seemed like the courteous thing to do, the neighborly thing. To pay back, even in a small way, this woman who had been so kind to Ruby.

  Miss Wells seemed taken aback. “Thank you for your generous offer,” she said. “But I’m afraid that my driving alone in the night—especially in the neighborhood where Ruby’s family lives—wouldn’t be a good idea, Mrs. Glass.”

  I was initially confused but then grasped Miss Wells’s meaning. “Mr. Glass could pick you up and bring you home,” I proposed. “Would that be all right?” I turned to Paul. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

  His brow was furrowed and his mouth closed into a severe, thin line. Clearly, Paul would have preferred we’d discussed it beforehand.

  After a moment, he said quietly, “I could do that.”

  “It’s settled, then.” I smiled brightly at the teacher. “Mr. Glass will pick you up at seven.”

  26

  * * *

  Silja

  1947–1948

  Silja’s first view of Stonekill, New York, was from the backseat of a real estate agent’s car. They’d driven through other Westchester towns—Ossining, Croton, Peekskill. The hamlet of Stonekill was smaller than but similar to those other places—downtowns with commercial districts and aging Victorians and Tudors, surrounded by newer developments on the outskirts of town.

  When she thought of the suburbs, Silja had always pictured those developments. The ones the real estate section in the Sunday Times showed. Advertisement upon advertisement showcasing sparkling new homes in quaint, well-planned communities.

  She’d told Henry it would be patriotic to buy a new house. “All those construction workers—they’re all vets,” she pointed out. “What better way to support them than by purchasing a brand-new house they’ve built?”

  Hesitantly, almost under her breath, she added, “And you could be one of those workers, Henry.”

  But no. No to a construction job, and no to a new house, too. It was true that Henry wanted out of Brooklyn, out of the Alku, just as much as she did—he’d never taken to the place she’d called home her entire life. He said the Finnish customs and socialist views made him uncomfortable. “Like a fish out of water,” he complained. “It doesn’t feel like home to me, Silja.”

  But unlike Silja, Henry wanted to buy an older house. He told the agent as much on the drive to the suburbs. The man said, “I have just the place to show you, Henry.”

  Stonekill was on the banks of the Hudson, about an hour’s train ride to Manhattan. As she stepped out of the agent’s car on Lawrence Avenue, Silja looked up in dismay. Built in the late 1800s, when the village consisted of nothing more than a few shops and homes, a tiny harbor, and a depot, the Victorian house had ramshackle brown trim work and cream-colored wood siding. Two sleepy-looking, tall windows looked out on either side of the front door.

  Henry took one look at the house’s run-down facade and exclaimed, “I can make something of that.”

  For the first time since he’d come home from Europe, she saw real hope in his eyes. Well. He wouldn’t be building other people’s houses. But if he’s fixing up ours, Silja thought, at least he’s doing something.

  So she nodded and they stepped inside. By the time they’d finished touring the house—Henry marveling at every nook and cranny, every original detail that, according to her husband, “only needed a little paint and patching to be good as new”—Silja understood that this was going to be their home.

  • • •

  They packed their things, said good-bye to the Alku, and settled into life in Stonekill. Silja memorized the train schedule to and from Grand Central Station. She knew how to time her brisk walk through Grand Central to the subway terminal, catching the Times Square shuttle and the exact Broadway line express train to put her at her desk at precisely 8:52 in the morning, Monday through Friday.

  On the train ride home each evening, she sat contemplatively in the smoker car, lighting one Chesterfield after another, reading the Times and glancing at the river, its waves catching the setting sun’s rays. Often she had to share a seat on the crowded train, but the men—nearly all the passengers were men—were solicitous, rising to offer her a window seat if she boarded too late to secure one before they were all filled.

  At the Stonekill depot she watched as her fellow commuters—a sea of men in impeccable gray, black, and brown suits—got in their cars to drive home. Like the Glasses, these men and their wives had moved to Stonekill from the city after the war. With their education and their ambition, they started over. The couples bought two cars—one the husband drove to the depot, one the wife used to get around town. From their brand-new Colonials and split-levels and Cape Cods on the winding roads in the woods, the wives drove to the grocery store and the dry cleaner’s. In summer they went to the village swimming pool in their station wagons full of kids. They had dinner parties and backyard bar-be-cues; they vacationed on Long Island Sound or at the Jersey shore.

  Those transplants, those cutting-edge suburbanites, were supposed to be the Glasses. They were the people Silja had dreamed of being.

  As the train rumbled north, its whistle fading in the distance, Silja stood on the sidewalk. She watched the men leave—Chevrolets following Dodges following Buicks, brake lights winking at her. Then she began her lonely walk up the hill—from Station Street to Lawrence Avenue, then one block south until she reached her house.

  Lawrence Avenue was so different from those quaint new developments on the outskirts of Stonekill, they may as well have been separated by country borders rather than mere miles of winding wooded roads. The Glasses’ neighbors on Lawrence had inhabited Stonekill for generations. Some had never in their lives been to New York City, less than fifty miles away—a fact that astounded Silja.

  Walking home from the depot on warm evenings, she encountered hardscrabble children and laundry-hanging mothers. The children ignored her; the women nodded diffidently as Silja passed. Most were of Irish or Italian descent, their houses smelling of fried fish on Fridays during Lent. The men came home drunk on payday, staggering down the street singing love songs to the women who hollered from the windows for them to shut up already and get inside.

  Silja passed dilapidated house after decrepit house. When she reached home, she sighed before heading up the walkway.

  Henry, in carpenter pants and a work shirt, was gritty and smelled of sweat; he showered in the evenings after his day’s work was done. Every day except the very coldest ones of winter, Henry was in and out of the house and the garage. Repairing. Gardening. Painting. Little Ruby followed him like a puppy dog, with the disheveled neighborhood children also joining Henry’s Pied Piper parade. He patiently answered their questions, only shooing them away when he worked with power tools or other dangerous equipment. He and Ruby spent countless hours at the hardware store in town, becoming so closely acquainted with it that either of them could tell Silja the exact aisle and bin where one could find three-eighth-inch bibb washers, one-thirty-second-size drill bits, or stainless steel structural screws in ten different thicknesses.

  Henry bought a Ford pickup truck and used it to haul all sorts of odds and ends home from the village dump. Discarded furniture—highboys and bookshelves and ladder-backed kitchen chairs that he sanded and refinished. Old newspapers that he used to add insulation to the house’s thin walls. A lawn mower that he refurbished, adding new blades and repainting the handle with shiny red paint.

  He taught Silja to drive, and said she could use the truck on the weekends to run errands if she liked. She loathed the truck but found she enjoyed driving, whic
h provided a freedom she didn’t experience when walking or taking public transportation. Henry adored his truck and drove it everywhere. She was lucky to get it for an hour on Saturday or Sunday.

  The only cerebral work he insisted on was overseeing the household finances. Silja knew she could do a better job of it—for heaven’s sake, she managed dozens of business transactions every day!—but she let it go. She understood that Henry needed to control something important—something they both knew she could easily handle, but he had to prove he could, too. Well, if it made him happy, that was easier on her in the long run.

  She tried to do nice things for him. In the city, she shopped for him—buying elegant, fashionable suits from Brooks Brothers, stylish hats from Lord & Taylor, wing tips from the men’s shoe department at Gimbels. Of course, he never wore any of the things she brought home for him—why would he, when all he needed around the house were dungarees, flannel shirts, and work boots? Nonetheless, she relished the orderly sight of the unused masculine attire lined up in the closet. When no one else was around, Silja would bury her nose in the closet and smell the new-clothes scent. She imagined Henry wearing the clothes she’d bought, tipping his hat at her before sauntering down the street toward the train depot. In her head, she heard the happy tune he’d whistle while she waved from the porch at his retreating figure.

  He all but stopped drinking—once in a while he’d have a beer on a muggy afternoon, but more often he chose the hot tea he’d always so favored. He became stronger from his physical labor. His upper body muscles thickened; his legs had the lean, athletic quality of a long-distance runner’s. His buttocks were firm and his limp was gone. He was more handsome than he’d ever been. Sometimes Silja stood outside the half-opened bathroom door, peering in as he showered, admiring his taut body through the steam.

  It was as close as she got to him. Though they shared a bed, they kept to their own sides. He seldom touched her. They gave each other quick hello and good-bye pecks at the start and end of the day—but that was all.

  She reminded herself how hurt he’d been, the times back in the Alku when she’d pressed the issue. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Instead, she’d continue to be patient. Things still had the chance to get better—someday.

  But at times the stark realization that this might be the hand she’d been dealt, forever, would hit Silja like a speeding train. She’d have to stop and catch her breath, trembling at the thought.

  27

  * * *

  Ruby

  At home after her father’s burial, Ruby feels trapped but also like she shouldn’t leave. Aunt Angie puts the baby down for a nap. Uncle Paul says he’s going for a walk out back. He asks Ruby if she wants to come along, but she says no. She does want to get outside, she does want to walk through her family’s forest. She’d like to wind her way toward the silent, secretive cemetery behind their property—so different from the crowded place where they buried her father. Ruby would like to walk among mossy, half-sunk gravestones and listen for the faint whispers of spirits.

  But not with Uncle Paul.

  Uncle Paul slips through the sliding door to the backyard. After he’s gone, Aunt Angie steps to the front windows and glances out. Ruby follows her gaze and sees three cars parked by the curb. People sit in them, in the drivers’ seats, doing nothing but watching the birdcage.

  Aunt Angie frowns. “Reporters,” she says. “Wish they’d go away.” She turns toward Ruby. “Can I get you anything? Can I fix you some lunch?”

  Ruby shakes her head. Aunt Angie stares at Ruby as if she wants to say something else. Then she says she’s going to clean Ruby’s mother’s bedroom and bathroom.

  Ruby nods. She completely understands why Aunt Angie would want to do that. Those rooms are a mess.

  She goes in her own room and lies on the bed, staring at the posters on the walls. Her mother selected the posters. When she brought them home and asked if Ruby would like them hung in her room, Ruby just shrugged and said okay. Her mother bought her records and a record player, too, one that sits inside its own leather case. Her mother would come home from her day working in the city with 45’s of the latest songs on the hit parade. “Have you heard this one yet?” she’d ask Ruby, holding up Elvis and Chuck Berry records in bright paper covers. Ruby would say no, and her mother would reply, “Well, it’s all the rage. You should take a listen.”

  Sometimes Ruby would put the records on, although she doesn’t really care for popular music. But she knew it pleased her mother to hear the music and see pictures of snazzy movie stars and heartthrob-inducing singers hanging in Ruby’s room. The record player and the posters are the type of thing Ruby’s mother would have wanted in her own room as a girl.

  They’re evidence, her mother would have told herself, that her daughter is just an ordinary teen girl.

  The walls in Ruby’s room are watery blue, almost the exact same color as the parlor was on Lawrence Avenue. Before they moved into the birdcage, when it was finished except for painting and a few small details, Ruby’s mother allowed her to choose the paint color for her room. Ruby chose this color because it reminded her of the parlor, which was her favorite room in the old house.

  The parlor was the first room in that house that Ruby’s father remodeled, not long after they moved in. He started with the parlor because Ruby’s mother liked to unwind there in the evenings, and her father wanted to do something nice for her mother, in hopes that she’d appreciate the house if he made it more to her liking.

  That was long ago, when Ruby’s parents still did nice things for each other.

  Ruby was only four, and back then she did everything with her father. They poured pale blue paint into flat trays. He used a roller; she used a brush. He told her that when he was a kid there was no such thing as a paint roller. It was the handiest invention he’d ever seen. “Good old American ingenuity,” he called it.

  Years later, in her freshman history class—quite by accident while researching famous and not-so-famous twentieth-century Canadians for a term paper—Ruby learned that the paint roller was actually invented by a Canadian named Norman Breakey. She knew better than to share this discovery with her father.

  In the parlor, her father stood on a ladder and worked the top section of the wall. Ruby crouched the way little kids do, with their bottoms sticking out, and painted the lower part of the wall. Her father had covered the floors with drop cloths so they wouldn’t get paint on them, even though he said it was on his list to lay carpeting someday.

  Ruby remembers the gloomy olive-green color the walls were before they started, and how the blue lit up the space. She remembers beaming at her father, who looked even taller on the ladder than he did when he stood on the ground.

  “Your mother will love this,” he said, standing back and admiring their work.

  The next day, while Ruby napped, he painted the trim a sparkling white—so pure it almost blinded Ruby when she saw it, so pretty against the blue of the walls it made her weep.

  After her father put away the paint supplies, they arranged the furniture. First, they laid down a Turkish rug her mother brought home from a Saturday shopping trip—something to brighten the place, she said. It looked like an oversize flying carpet, its edges fringed in creamy white, its pattern a riot of blues and reds and greens. They arranged Grandma’s old sofa, side tables, and lamps facing the fireplace.

  They moved in a plush, low armchair upholstered in turquoise-blue frieze fabric—a chair Ruby’s mother selected at Wanamaker’s Department Store in the city. Some years later, that chair was the only stick of furniture that made the move from Lawrence Avenue to the birdcage.

  The day the chair arrived, brand-new, to Lawrence Avenue, it was brought by two sturdy young men in a truck filled with other deliveries. They asked Ruby’s father what company he’d served in during the war. In those days, when the war was fresh on everyone’s mind, men often asked each other such questions. Where did you serve? What kind
of action did you see? Her father’s response to the furniture deliverers—as it was to everyone who asked him this sort of thing—was monosyllabic, grunting. He just told the men to turn left and bring the chair into the parlor.

  It made Ruby curious. Later, she asked her mother about it. Her mother said the men asked those questions to be friendly.

  “Then why isn’t Daddy friendly about it?”

  Her mother shook her head and didn’t reply.

  Ruby’s father set the new chair in a place of honor by the hearth. Her mother lounged there in the evenings. Her father might light a fire if it was chilly outside. Her mother would read to Ruby while she sat on her lap. After Ruby went to bed, her mother would have a cocktail and read the newspaper. She’d relax and unwind after her long day at the office.

  It was an exquisite room. Who wouldn’t be happy in a room like that? Who wouldn’t appreciate a house like that?

  Ruby’s mother should have been happy. Ruby and her father were happy when they lived on Lawrence Avenue.

  But that was a long time ago.

  28

  * * *

  Silja

  1948–1949

  During their early years in Stonekill, Ruby was the single joyous thread in Henry and Silja’s relationship, binding them together as a family. As she had when she was a baby, Ruby continued to adore Silja. She greeted her mother each evening with deep eyes that begged to be looked into—the way Silja had once stared dreamily into Henry’s eyes.

  Silja made small, gently teasing talk with Ruby at the dinner table, relating tales of her day in the big city and asking about Ruby’s day at home. Afterward, the three of them would sometimes play a game. Ruby developed an affinity for Monopoly, which initially Silja thought the girl would be too young to understand. Silja expected the adults would need to go easy on Ruby, let the child win by making foolish moves of their own. She followed this tack in an attempt to make the game fun for her daughter—and for Henry, who would only play if he had the possibility of winning. He disagreed with Silja’s pushover strategy; he said Ruby needed to learn that life wasn’t a series of handouts. Henry’s primary goal in Monopoly was to buy the most expensive properties, which he said were the only ones that had any value. He became frustrated when, by a toss of the dice, he missed landing on a desired property and had to pay a luxury tax or go to jail instead.