by Ann Hood
“No.”
“Did you ask her?”
“I will,” he says. “I promise.”
IN HIS STUDY the next morning, Nigel takes off the artificial leg. It irritates the stump that is left from his real leg. He gets blisters, sores, an ache that nothing can take away. But with it off, and a few glasses of sherry, and some salve on it, he can almost forget the pain.
He watches Martha bound down the stairs, hair flying. Always off in the same direction. He rubs the thing that is missing. It is tender there, but he rubs gently.
There are fields at the farm. Endless fields of hay stacked in neat bundles and clover everywhere. The grass smells sweet. Martha presses her face right into it, feels the wet dirt and the soft grass, pushes her face into it and breathes deeply.
FROM THE BENCH where Martha waits she always sees the same woman walking through the park. At first, Martha thought she was old with her white, wild hair and her blotchy face. But now she realizes that the woman is probably no more than fifty. Her eyes are the blue of the autumn sky in Vermont—deep and clear.
“Winston Churchill is the father of my child,” the woman tells anyone who will listen. “He’s the father of my daughter, Poppy. I only want what’s mine.”
Martha brings the woman an apple.
“I’m waiting for him to come out,” the woman says, polishing the apple on her thin cotton skirt. “Then I’ll say, remember me? Remember the weekend we spent in the cottage by the sea? Well, we have a daughter. I’ll say, I only want what’s mine.”
Later, Martha sees the apple, shiny but uneaten, lying under a tree.
DIANA HAS PREPARED a light supper. Cold slices of leftover lamb. A salad. But she tells Nigel she won’t be joining them. Some nights it is more than she can manage to make her way downstairs to the dining room.
“Do you think Winston Churchill would have an illegitimate child?” Martha asks Nigel. She is cutting her meat into tiny pieces.
“I don’t know,” Nigel says, baffled and embarrassed.
“He’s half-American, you know,” she says.
“Of course I know that,” Nigel says. “He’s our prime minister.”
She leans wickedly close to him. Her eyes are green with flecks of gold, like a precious stone of some kind. “Did you know his mother invented the Manhattan?” she asks him.
Nigel frowns. “The Manhattan?” he repeats.
“Oh,” she says, grabbing his hands. “It’s the most wonderful cocktail. I’ll make us some! That’s what I’ll do!”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Just wait,” she says, closing her eyes, still holding on to his hands. “You’ll love a Manhattan.” She opens her eyes. “We won’t tell Diana.”
“No,” Nigel says.
“It will be our secret,” Martha says. She winks at him. Such a fun-loving girl, a happy-go-lucky girl. He sees why his son married her. He still doesn’t understand why Robin didn’t tell them, why he didn’t bring her home himself. But he sees Robin loving her. That much is clear.
NIGEL SUPPOSES HE SPENDS too much time drunk. It isn’t the drunkenness of his youth, when he and his friends would spend hours at the pubs, drinking and boisterous, singing, loud. This is a somnambulant drunkenness. It makes everything fuzzy and soft. It makes everything pleasant. It slows his thinking and reactions; he knows that. But it’s worth it for the gentle humming it brings deep in his brain.
He watches the girl leave and wonders in his drunkenness if tonight she will bring home the Manhattans, like she promised. It is morning. It is May. He is drunk. The girl walks with her bouncy American steps down the gray London streets.
MARTHA SITS ON THE BENCH and eats some bread and cheese. She waits.
“Winston Churchill is the father of my daughter,” the woman says loudly. “I only want what is mine.”
WEEKS PASS. Nigel waits. But the girl does not bring him secret cocktails.
She is in Vermont. It is fall. The air carries a chill that gets into your bones. Martha sleeps under four blankets, sinking into the feather bed. Her mother reads her Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses. She closes her eyes and her mother’s voice lulls her to sleep.
Since they got word about Robin, Diana has not let Nigel touch her. But tonight he feels her hand slide down his pajama bottoms. She takes him, soft and small, into her hand and works and works but he cannot grow hard. There is an ache where his leg used to be, a deep ache. He thinks he might cry from what he has lost and the pain it brings him now, even after all this time. Diana pumps and pumps his poor soft thing. When she gives up, he makes his way on his one good leg to the front room and sits in his pajamas and drinks another glass of sherry.
From behind the closed door of the girl’s room he hears that song.
Missed the Saturday dance . . . Heard they crowded the floor . . .
THEN, WHEN HE has finally given up hope that Martha will come to him, she slips into his study. Nigel does not want her to see him like this. He has on only his boxer shorts and his shirt. His artificial leg leans against one wall like a sentry. The stump where his leg used to be is bright red and covered with fresh sores.
But he cannot get up and hide it from her. She is here and is holding a pitcher of amber liquid with ice and cherries in it. In her other hand, she has two cocktail glasses.
“Try to get some bourbon in this town,” she says, laughing. She tries not to look at his stump.
She pours them each a drink, then hands him one. When they clink glasses, she says, “To Winston Churchill!”
“To Winston Churchill,” Nigel says. The drink is delicious, sweet but sharp. “Very good,” he says.
“What happened to you?” she asks, glancing at it.
“War,” he says. “The last one.”
She is a good drinker, this girl. A party girl, Nigel thinks after she refills their glasses.
“Where did you meet him?” Nigel asks her.
“At a dance,” she says. “He was in uniform. So handsome,” she says, her eyes and her voice both fading. But then she turns bright again. “Like his father.”
Nigel has that foggy pleasure in his brain. The girl is muted somehow. The sound of her voice distant.
She moves toward him, reaches out a tentative hand.
He sits perfectly still.
She runs her fingers across the stump lightly. “So smooth,” she says, surprised. “Like a baby.”
Her fingers linger there.
Nigel thinks of his son. Robin knew this girl intimately, privately. She holds some key to him that Nigel would never have had if she had not appeared in April on their doorstep. He knows that his wife wants her gone, but how can they let her leave and take the last bits of Robin from them?
“Where do you go every morning?” Nigel asks her. The bourbon has numbed his tongue. It burns in his gut.
“I’m waiting to talk to Winston Churchill,” she says.
Her mother holds her on her lap while she kneads the bread. She tells her how you know the dough is ready. She has Martha press her little finger into the wet dough. See how it springs back? her mother says. Martha watches as the small dent her finger left disappears, and the dough is once again smooth and whole.
“If we could only get enough flour,” Martha tells them at dinner one night, “I would bake the most delicious bread. It’s all in the kneading, you know.”
It is almost June and still the air is damp and chilly. Nigel longs for the sunshine. He longs to throw open the windows and smell the warmth of it. Instead, the cold air smells, still, of war.
Nigel wants to please the girl. “Really?” he says, although he doesn’t care about any of it—bread or apples. “It’s in the kneading, is it?”
Diana is frowning. She concentrates on dissecting the fish on the platter. She slices it and reveals its spine. She lifts the bone from it whole.
“Lovely,” Nigel says. It is lovely too, he thinks. The shape of it. The sturdiness. Long ago he loved the s
ciences, biology most of all. He refills his wineglass, splashing some on the tablecloth. It is white, thank heavens. White wine with fish.
Diana holds a serving of the fish toward Martha, who lifts her plate to receive it.
“You weren’t married to him,” Diana says, her gray eyes leveled at the girl. “Did you think I wouldn’t check? Did you think I would simply believe you?”
Martha looks up, surprised, her fork held in midair.
“Robin,” Diana says, and Nigel is certain he has not heard his wife say their son’s name since they got word last winter, It sounds strangled in her throat. “You were not his wife.”
Martha puts a bite of fish into her mouth and chews slowly. “No,” she admits. “Not the way you mean.”
Diana laughs. “The way I mean? There is only one sort of wife. The other . . .” She lets her voice trail off.
The girl continues to eat her dinner. The overcooked green beans, the dry fish.
Nigel watches her, this girl who is not his daughter-in-law after all but instead was what? His son’s lover? Whore? He presses his fingertips into his temples, trying to clear the fog in his head.
“You have to leave,” Diana is saying. “You have to get out of our house. Go back to America. Or not. I don’t care where you go. But you must leave here.”
Martha continues to eat. She says between bites, “I met him at a dance. So handsome. So British.” This makes her laugh. “He came by my flat the next morning and asked if I’d like to take a ride with him. He said he would be going off to fight soon. He was trying to get a lot of living in. Just in case, he said. I don’t think I was away from him again, until he left. I came here because I didn’t know where else to go. Who else had loved him? Who else had known him, really?”
Nigel’s heart goes out to the girl. He says, “Surely you would have been his wife. . . .” When he sees the hurt look on her face, he corrects himself. “His legal wife, if he’d come back. We’d be sitting here, the four of us, with fresh-baked bread and lots of butter.”
Martha smiles at him, gratefully, he thinks.
“We don’t know any such thing,” Diana says. “He never once mentioned you to us. Why would he? Young men who go off to war need to have pleasures that make them feel alive. They need to have relations with a woman. It makes them feel invincible. If he had come home, he would be here without you. Without your bread. We would never know you even existed.”
“You’re wrong,” Martha says, her face set with determination.
ALL SHE HAS is one green valise, a small square thing. He watches from his window as she walks away from him, down the street, the suitcase bumping against her. There is a light rain falling. The air carries a chill unusual in early June.
Nigel imagines opening a window and calling for her to come back. We’ll drink Manhattans, he’ll say. He can almost hear her footsteps on the stairs and see her bright face in this dim room. The bourbon on her breath, the cool touch of her fingers. Shakily, Nigel pours himself a sherry and lifts it to his lips. It is ten o’clock in the morning. His day stretches before him, endless, cold, lonely.
WHEN DIANA GOES into Robin’s room, where the girl had the nerve to stay all those months, she finds the record still on the phonograph. Carefully, she lifts it like it is a precious thing and smashes it against the sharp edge of the nightstand. It cracks easily. She lifts it again and again, each time bringing it down with as much force as she can muster, until it is nothing. Nothing but shards. A useless broken thing.
MARTHA SITS ON THE BENCH, shivering slightly in her trench coat. Her valise is at her feet. She has no idea what she will do next. There is nowhere for her to go. She thinks of Robin, his face with the chiseled good looks of a movie star. His voice, so clipped and British; she used to mimic it to entertain him. She thinks of how he touched her there, and there; his lips on hers, so hungry and fierce; all the ways he entered her, his hands on her waist, his body over hers, under hers, behind hers. She cannot imagine that body cold, without life. She cannot imagine those lips silenced, empty.
Martha watches as the big black car comes to a stop across the street.
She hears footsteps running and a voice: “Winston Churchill, you are the father of my baby!”
Martha gets to her feet, leaves the valise behind, and walks quietly toward the car. Its doors fly open and men in dark suits and dark hats and faces cast dark with worry, emerge.
Winston Churchill gets out last. Martha is right in front of him.
“Mr. Churchill,” she says.
He looks up. His face is soft with a round nose and big jowls. His eyes narrow, seeking some recognition of her.
“Mr. Churchill,” she says again.
Behind her the woman screams, “I only want what is mine!”
Martha looks into Winston Churchill’s face and tries to say what is in her heart. How she loved a man who went to war and will not come home. How she seeks comfort any way she can. How she needs refuge from the things in the world that are killing young men like hers.
Without thinking about what she is doing, she goes to Winston Churchill and hugs him. Startled, he takes her into his arms. He murmurs something that she cannot understand. All she can do is smell the wet wool of his coat, his strong aftershave, and oddly the crisp smell of apples and bread baking. One of the other men comes between them, but not before Mr. Churchill has patted her back and offered some words of kindness.
Then she pushes away from him and is left standing as he disappears with all the men in black suits and hats into the building.
Martha does not move. She lifts her face to the rain. It is gray here. The bombers are on their way. Martha opens her arms, the arms that have held great men, and finally weeps.
La Vigilia
CONNIE STANDS ON THE FRONT STEPS OF HER CHILDHOOD home, refusing to move forward. Her husband, Vincent, stands close behind her, breathing heavily in the cold air. He sounds like a dragon, or something about to explode. Like a geyser, Connie thinks. Like Old Faithful. Even thinking about Old Faithful fuels her anger. On the list of things she and Vincent were supposed to do but never have, visiting Old Faithful is number two, right after a honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Instead, they drove as far as Seekonk—only thirty minutes from the hall where her family still sat drinking wine and eating egg biscuits and wandi. Vincent had stopped at the first motel he saw. So eager to take her virginity finally, he did not even wait for her to remove her pale-green going-away suit and put on her Champagne-colored negligee. Right then, she should have known. She should have picked up her American Tourister matching luggage and gone to Niagara Falls herself. Now, six years later, it was too late. Connie would never see Old Faithful. Or Niagara Falls. Or do any of the things on her ever-growing list of disappointments.
“I’m fucking freezing, Connie,” Vincent says between snorts, which finally propels her forward.
“Davy,” Connie says, nudging her five-year-old son, “ring the bell.”
But Davy can’t reach it. He stands on booted tiptoes and stretches his mittened hand upward.
Connie sighs, worried that Davy will be a short man like his father, worried that this trip home for Christmas will be just one more misguided decision.
“Jesus,” Vincent says, and leans against Connie to ring the doorbell himself.
He doesn’t move away from her when he is done. Instead, he presses against her back, making sure she feels that even in the below-freezing temperature, even beneath his long wool coat and gray flannel trousers and white boxer shorts, he has a hard-on. As if he has accomplished something special.
“Jesus,” Connie says.
Davy turns his beautiful face up toward Connie and smiles his perfect baby-teeth smile.
“Happy birthday, Jesus!” he says, and Connie’s heart swells with love and pride. Davy is smart. He is beautiful. Despite being conceived on that very night in that terrible motel in Seekonk, Davy is the very thing Connie has always wanted for herself: Davy is special.
The door finally opens, and with it comes a strong smell of fish. Tonight, Christmas Eve, is the festa dei sette pesci, the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a reminder to Connie of everything she tried to flee when she married Vincent and moved to Connecticut six years ago. The festa dei sette pesci screams immigrant, guinea, wop. The smell of fish and the dread at this step backward in her life make Connie’s stomach do a little flip.
Her sister Gloria stands at the open door wearing a sweater that makes her breasts look as pointy as ice-cream cones and a skirt that hugs her ass. Peeking out from behind that ass is Gloria’s daughter, Cammie, her hair in Shirley Temple ringlets and her dress a frilly white confection.
Cammie looks like she belongs on top of a cake, Connie thinks, even as she plasters a fake grin on her face and says, “Look at Cammie! So beautiful!” The girl, Connie decides, will have a hook nose like her father.
“Don’t just stand there like guests,” Gloria says, standing back to let them in.
Even then, as Davy goes inside, Vincent doesn’t move right away. He has his hands on Connie’s waist and he gives her the tiniest shove with his erection before releasing her. Like a teenager, he loves that thing. I’ve got a chubby, he whispers in her ear in bed at night. A woody. A Johnson. Little Vinny, he calls it. Little V.
Still grinning, Connie steps into the kitchen. The smells of fish and perfume and coffee percolating on the stove make her dizzy. All the faces looming toward her with their bright lipsticked lips flapping, their breath of cigarette smoke and anisette cookies, suffocate her.
The next thing Connie knows, she is going down hard onto the green-and-yellow linoleum squares, and someone—maybe her mother?—is shouting She’s fainting! Oh my God! And then she is down, flat, her head throbbing and spinning at the same time, the sharp ammonia smell of smelling salts burning her nose.
She opens her eyes and tries to make sense of what she sees: Her sister Gloria with those ridiculous tits, her skinny arched brows frowning. Her sister Angie with what Connie hopes is a red wig and not her own hair, sprayed into a strange stiff flip, her eyes lined in heavy black liner and a fake black beauty mark beside her very red lips. Her sister Anna, so pregnant she can hardly kneel without toppling over. Little Cammie, wide-eyed, banana curls bobbing. Her own Davy, his face scrunched up the way he does when he tries not to cry. The smelling salts have been jammed up her nose by her mother, who is kneeling beside her frowning, her faded flowered apron splattered with grease. On the other side, Vincent kneels beside her. Was he smiling? Was that asshole smiling?