Summer Beach Reads

by Thayer, Nancy

Teddy nodded. He looked properly chastened, but Teddy was always a good actor.

  Kellogg said, “Teddy wrecked the Jeep?”

  “Ask Teddy,” Helen said to her brother-in-law, and swept from the room.

  Worth wasn’t in his bedroom, but she heard the shower water running, so she waited, pacing the floor, feeling like a small boiling human volcano on the verge of erupting. When Worth came back into the room, he was naked except for a towel wrapped around his waist. His hair was wet, his chest hair was damp and curling, and he looked intensely physical and male. She felt the charge of sexual attraction she often felt for her husband, and this infuriated and oddly embarrassed her.

  “We need to talk,” she said, keeping her voice low.

  “Let me put some clothes on first.” Worth dropped the towel and moved around the room, uninhibited by his nakedness.

  Helen sank onto the bed and thought of how many times over the years this very scene had played out—her waiting on the bed while Worth ranged around the room naked. Often they’d be changing for a party, but sometimes she would be waiting for him to make love to her. She would be naked herself, although she tried not to walk naked in front of him. She was too self-conscious, aware of cellulite and sags.

  Worth pulled on a clean, ironed pair of boxer shorts, a fresh rugby shirt, and his chinos. He zipped them up, and again the act seemed sexual.

  “All right,” he said. He didn’t come over to the bed but lifted his briefcase out of the chair, set it on the floor, and sat down by the window. “What’s going on?”

  “How long have you been having an affair?” Helen asked.

  Her husband stared at her. She did not look away. She was still riding the energy of her anger.

  “It’s nothing,” he said at last. And his face changed, sinking in on itself slightly, so that in only a second or two he suddenly looked older.

  “It’s something to me,” Helen assured him.

  “I don’t know what to say.” He looked crushed, as if Helen had betrayed him.

  “Tell me her name,” Helen said.

  “Oh, Helen, come on. Look, it’s just a—a fling. A stupid mistake on my part. An old man’s folly.”

  “Tell me her name,” Helen repeated, with iron in her voice.

  “You don’t know her,” Worth insisted. “You’ve never met her. She works at the bank. She’s a teller. She’s—she’s just nice, and fun, and pretty.”

  Each word out of Worth’s mouth had suddenly become an arrow, an ax, chopping against the wall of icy anger surrounding Helen, and the word pretty sliced right through everything, so that her protective layer shattered and she was vulnerable and wounded. She did not want to cry in front of Worth, but tears pressed insistently.

  She felt Worth’s gaze on her face, her old, lined, sagging face, and she wanted to fling her hands up to cover it, she wanted to run from the room, lumbering along in her overweight unpretty body. Why had she started this? Why had she forced this scene upon them? Why hadn’t she kept quiet, let Worth’s affair run its course, and allowed the united front of their marriage to exist—or at least appear to exist?

  Worth sighed. He pressed his fingers on either side of his nose, a sign of his emotional state. He said, “Cindy. Her name is Cindy.”

  Such a sweet name, Helen thought. A terrible thought possessed her, and her terror froze her tears. “Do you want to marry her?”

  “God, no!” Worth looked appalled. “Helen—”

  A sharp rap came at the door, and Grace stuck her head in. “Hey, you guys, dinner’s ready. We’re all starving. Come on.”

  “We’ll be right there,” Worth told his sister.

  Grace looked at him, then at Helen, and quirked an inquisitive eyebrow.

  “For God’s sake, Grace, give us some privacy,” Worth told his sister. “We’ll be right down.”

  With a sniff, Grace pulled the door shut.

  “Look,” Worth said, keeping his voice low, “I’ll end it. It’s nothing, Helen, and I’ll stop seeing her. Okay?” When she didn’t answer right away, he said urgently, “You know we can’t settle everything right here and now. We can’t really talk with everything going on in this house. Let’s just go down to dinner, okay? We’ve got enough to deal with right now with Teddy and the Jeep.”

  Helen stood up. She felt as if she’d aged a hundred years, she felt as if she had just been struck with the plague. Cindy.

  “How old is she?” she asked.

  “Oh, Helen, stop this!” Worth rose, too, and paced the room angrily. With his back turned to Helen, he admitted, “She’s thirty-nine.” When Helen didn’t respond, he turned to look at her, and then he came toward her, as if he wanted to take her in his arms. “Helen, I love you. You know that.”

  She cringed and backed away, averting her head, making it clear she didn’t want him to touch her.

  Worth held out his hands beseechingly. “Helen. Please. Let’s talk about this later, okay?”

  Helen said, “Okay. You go on down, Worth. I don’t feel hungry. You can tell them I’m not feeling well.” She looked at her husband. “That’s the simple truth, after all.”

  Twenty

  Helen is changing, Nona thought.

  Nona had sensed a deep, active silence in Helen this summer, a kind of waiting. Helen was an attractive woman, and she had an artistic spirit that was not one of the gifts of the Wheelwright genetic legacy. Worth was handsome enough, and he could be charming, but, as in most marriages, with the passing of years Worth directed the energy of his charm to the outer world and expected his wife to make do with whatever was left over. And Worth was becoming dictatorial. Both Grace and Worth had always been bossy; perhaps that was their mother’s example, Nona thought, for she was never much of a follower.

  Kellogg had the temperament of a cow—not a bull, a cow, a contented animal plodding in a field full of fresh green grass, and the lashes of his wife’s commands touched but never stung his thick hide. Nona was very fond of Kellogg. And she guessed that, whatever transpired between her daughter and her husband in front of others, a real tenderness and even a kind of passion existed between them in private. With Helen and Worth, she was not so sure.

  Here was Kellogg now, bending down, taking her hand. “Nona? Dinner’s ready. May I help you into the dining room?”

  More and more it seemed to cost Nona physical effort simply to get from where she existed, cradled among her thoughts, out to the interaction considered normal by others. She took a deep breath. “Kellogg. Thank you. But I wonder if Glorious could bring me something on a tray.”

  She wanted to tell him the truth, that she was simply too tired to make the journey from this chair into the dining room, too weary to sit at the table smiling at her family and hoping she wasn’t dropping food on her bodice. But if she admitted that, Kellogg would tell Grace, who would rush in, alarmed, and try to energize Nona, for her own good. So Nona explained.

  “There’s a television show I want to watch.”

  Kellogg turned to look at the TV set, and to Nona’s immense relief an old Murder She Wrote was just beginning. “Of course, Nona.”

  Kellogg went off.

  Pretty soon Glorious arrived with a tray, to set up a folding table next to Nona. “We’re having fish tonight,” she informed Nona.

  Nona said, “How nice.”

  “And I brought you this, also.” Next to the plate piled with healthy fish and vegetables was a small glass of Scotch.

  Nona smiled. “Thank you, Glorious.”

  Glorious left the room. Nona roused herself enough to sip some of the Scotch, which flowed into her system like liquid sun, warming her old bones, relaxing her. She lay back against her chair. From the rest of the house came the laughter and calls of her children and grandchildren. On the TV set in front of her, Angela Lansbury entered a beauty salon to chat with Ruth Roman. Ruth Roman. No one knew who she was these days. Was the actress even alive? The past rolled around Nona like a beautiful sea.

  1945–19
46

  November 1945

  Dear Anne,

  Here I am, seated behind a desk in an office at our temporary military headquarters in Bremerhaven, Germany. You have no idea what a luxury it is to be able to type this letter without wondering whether the ceilings going to come crashing down on my head. I even have the use of electric lights.

  So things are better. Still, everyone wants to go home as soon as possible, and who can blame them? The vast majority of our troops have already been redeployed to the Pacific or sent home for discharge.

  But we need a good solid U.S. presence here in Europe, and the Army of Occupation has been charged with many significant tasks. We have to protect potential sabotage targets and be prepared for any possible rogue-German military resistance. We have to guard all the stores in military government custody, which include artwork, literally tons of records, and tank cars loaded with mercury. Our men have to lay out billeting areas, establish lines of communication, and set up checkpoints at bridges, ports, railroads, and other facilities.

  In addition, there’s the gargantuan task of redeploying troops. I’m sure you know about the Adjusted Service Rating: eighty-five points and you can go home! As you can imagine, all this takes a heck of a lot of paperwork and causes no end of grumbling. I have seventy-five points, but right now I’m glad to be here, doing what I can.

  Morale is low for those who remain behind, waiting and waiting for months on end. The army has done its bumbling best to deal with morale problems by establishing training education, and recreation programs throughout the theater. Of course, that means even more paperwork and more guard stations to check passes!

  I want to go home just as much as the next man does, and I know I could talk to some people and pull some strings, but I have been lucky and feel a responsibility to continue on just a little longer to do whatever I can to help.

  While we’re waiting to get out of here, we’ve got DPs—displaced persons—and prisoners of war being shipped in from Russia and Poland. If you could see the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and prisoners of war, with all they have left in the world on the back of a cart pulled by a starving horse, wearing rags, sleeping on the ground, grateful for the slightest bit of bread, you would understand how useful our Army of Occupation is. From my point of view, this work is more important than fighting battles. Not everyone feels that way, however, and I can understand the men who are struggling to return home to their loved ones and their lives.

  I am comfortably billeted here in Bremerhaven, living with a German family in their nice house. My life is probably not so different from yours. I rise every day, put on my uniform, and go to the office, where I try to organize the arrival and dispersal of the multitude of foodstuffs and other necessities to be sent out throughout Europe. Bremerhaven, by the way, is in the northwest of Germany where the Weser River meets in the North Sea. You can find it on the map.

  I miss you, and I assure you that I am safe and eating well, and I’ll be home soon.

  Love, Herb

  Anne had spent Christmas with her in-laws, but no amount of holiday goodwill could make her forget her mother-in-law’s bizarre and intentional cruelty back in August in allowing all those plants to die, or her smug satisfaction at Anne’s distress. She felt trapped by her in-laws, and she missed Herb terribly. She needed to be with him, not with his parents, and so on January 2, 1946, Anne marched into Gwendolyn Forsythe’s office at the Stangerone Freight Company.

  Anne leaned on Gwen’s desk and announced without preamble, “I want to go to Germany now.”

  “I know that.” Gwen didn’t even look up from the pile of papers she was sorting. “And you know we’ve been trying to find you decent quarters for passage.”

  “I don’t care about decent quarters. I want to go as soon as possible.”

  Now Gwen looked at Anne. She stuck her pencil over her ear and sighed. “I understand your frustration, Anne, but I don’t think you have any idea just what kind of a mess it is over there.”

  “You can’t talk me out of this, Gwen, I’ve made up my mind. I’m a married woman who has spent far too little time with her husband and far too much time with his parents. Besides, Herbert is doing important work—”

  “You’re doing important work here,” Gwen reminded her.

  “I know, and I can continue to do it and be just as much help, maybe even more, over in Bremerhaven.”

  Gwen swung her desk chair around and looked out her window, down at the wharves, where a multitude of dockworkers scrambled to load overseas provisions. She took the pencil from her ear and used it to scratch a spot on her scalp. “You are so young.” She smiled at Anne. “You have the energy for something like this, and it’s true we can use you over there. You’ve learned our system and we can trust you. All right. We’ve got a freighter making the trip to Bremerhaven in two days, carrying supplies. If you wish, you’ve got passage on it. You won’t have a stateroom; you’ll be lucky to have a bunk.”

  “I want it!” Anne said.

  The crossing was rough, with wintry gales howling on the open decks and slamming what felt like tons of rock-hard waves into the lower decks of the freighter. Anne spent two days lying in her bunk, miserably seasick, but the last three days were calmer. At last she saw land lying like a long dark shadow in the distance, but it took another day of traveling through the North Sea before they drew close to the wide mouth of the Weser River. As they neared land, she saw sinister gray submarines and ominous militant destroyers riding the ocean swells like watchdogs at the entrance to the long harbor, straining at the leash, foaming at the mouth in their eagerness to attack. She knew the war was over, but she still felt a surge of fear. With a visceral bite, she gained a more realistic understanding of what Herb had been through.

  The freighter rumbled as it slowed to make passage up the Weser River toward Bremerhaven, and then they arrived at the port. In many ways, the landscape seemed familiar, with piers extending out into the water and every sort of vessel docked there: tankers, tenders, aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruisers, herring trawlers, and motorboats of every size and kind. Customhouses and warehouses lined the waterfront, the same red brick as those in Boston harbor, but unlike Boston’s buildings, most of these were bombed-out shells. Brick walls rose alone from piles of rubble; stone warehouses gaped roofless to the sky. It looked as if a gigantic angry child had hurled his building blocks down on the city. Then she saw the word STANGARONE in large gold letters above the entrance to one of the larger and mostly intact buildings.

  The freighter shuddered to a stop, and dinghies and tenders motored out toward it, looking like a series of paddling ducks compared to the mammoth ship, to take the passengers aboard before the freighter went into the difficult task of docking and making ready to unload.

  In a way, Anne couldn’t believe she was really here. Everything had happened so quickly. She had debated whether or not to write Herb to tell him she was coming, but a letter wouldn’t have reached him in time. She knew from experience that nothing ever went as planned when it came to shipping overseas, and she didn’t want to get his hopes up by sending a telegram and then being told she wouldn’t arrive for another week or another month. Then, as she thought about it, and let her imagination soar free, she realized how wonderful it would be, how amazing, if she arrived secretly, walked into his office one afternoon, and surprised him. He would be dumbfounded. It would be a story to tell their children.

  She joined the single file waiting to climb down the ladder to the boat below. First stop, Stangarone’s warehouse. She’d introduce herself, ask how to get to Herb’s place on Goethestrasse, and tell them she could be at work tomorrow. She took a small suitcase with her. She’d arrange for someone at Stangarone’s to transport her trunk.

  During the long entrance up the harbor, she had noticed a lessening of the noise of the throbbing turbines that drove the ship, but now as she was helped to step up onto the dock, new sounds accosted her ears. Different langua
ges shot past her like signal flares, vivid, loud, confusing. Men in uniform strode past, shouting orders, men in rags wheeled dollies laden with boxes along the wooden dock to the brick street, fishermen in wool caps and rain slickers hefted giant wicker baskets filled to the brim with slippery fish onto the pier. At the next pier a vessel was undergoing repair work, and the banging of metal on metal rang through the air.

  She’d thought she was pretty cosmopolitan, pretty savvy, for Boston and its docks were not exactly a pastoral scene, but as she squeezed her way through the crowds, it was the different languages, not the people or the buildings, that made her understand that she was far from home. Someone shouted at her, at least she thought they were shouting at her, but when she turned she saw only backs and shoulders and head scarves and uniforms. She pressed on until she’d reached a brick building to lean against as she caught her breath and decided what to do next. She tightened her grip on her purse.

  It wasn’t going to be as easy as hailing a cab. Vehicles rumbled down the side streets, but they were bikes or trucks or wagons pulled by horses. An old woman in a man’s overcoat and a head scarf labored past Anne, pushing a baby carriage full of bags of potatoes. A motor scooter backfired like a gunshot. An emaciated child shuffled past, bent double over a wheelbarrow laden with fish and shellfish. The January wind whipped off the water, filling the air with a frigid mist that almost froze on her face. Clouds were gathering overhead, and she could tell the sun, hidden by the city’s broken walls, was setting on the darkening harbor waters. She had set her watch ahead one hour each day on the trip over, but her body wasn’t quite ready for evening; the thought of being here in the dark frightened her and impelled her away from her wall. She spotted the heavy gilt Stangarone sign again and fought her way through the shoving crowd toward it.

  Gwen had been right, she was naïve and impetuous to come here like this, but she had done it and there was no turning back. And she was so close, so close to seeing Herb again! To holding him in her arms! The thought of the look on his face when he saw her gave her the energy and courage to surge onward, and at last she was at the solid brick edifice of the shipping company.