As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  The words of congratulations have been followed by the question “So, when is the big day?” Palmer has already looked at the calendar, and suggested the day after Christmas, a Saturday, because if any extended family have come to town—meaning his—they will still be here on the twenty-sixth. He hasn’t asked if I agree; he’s merely thinking it’s the date that makes the most sense, so how could I not be in favor of it? He’ll be in town; his sisters and their families will be in town. It’s the perfect day for a wedding.

  When people ask me when the big day is, I keep saying we’re still looking at dates. Palmer laughs when this happens and tells the inquirer that it will likely be the last Saturday in December. Then when whoever has asked has walked away, Palmer says something like “People just want to wish us well, Maggie. They aren’t fishing for an invitation to the ceremony.” Then he will bring my hand up to his lips to kiss it.

  Palmer and I told Alex yesterday that we want him to come with us to New York after we marry. He seemed cautiously pleased by the plan, and he asked more than once how far away Manhattan is. He has no frame of reference for distance. We don’t get to Quakertown very often and that’s the farthest he’s ever been from home. He also asked if the rest of the family is coming, too, and he seemed sad when I said Papa, Evie, and Willa are staying here. Willa wasn’t that happy about the idea, either.

  “So, why, again, are we leaving?” Alex said after we’d answered all his queries. I wanted to turn to Palmer and ask the same question.

  With all the fuss over the engagement, I’ve been too busy to talk to Jamie and it seems the Sutcliffs have been happy to have Jamie all to themselves. Dora hasn’t been over since Jamie came home, other than to bring us a plate of pralines as a thank-you for letting him spend the night. She didn’t stay for a visit, though, so I couldn’t ask her anything about how Jamie is doing now that he is home or why he came back or if he is planning on staying. And while I’ve kept my eye on the Sutcliffs’ home and business, I haven’t seen much coming and going. I am guessing that Dora perhaps wanted to make a celebration out of Jamie’s return and he’d asked her not to.

  I’ve been pondering Evie’s advice to me, though, every spare second. And I know I need to talk to Jamie and that it cannot wait. Today, after the morning’s restorative work, and while Willa and Alex are at school, and Evie’s at the hospital, I will walk over to the Sutcliffs’ to return Dora’s plate and ask to speak to him.

  • • •

  Dora answers the bell, happier than I’ve seen her in years.

  “You didn’t have to trouble yourself to bring this old plate over!” she says as I stand at the threshold of their apartment above the accounting office.

  “It was no trouble. The pralines were wonderful. Thank you.”

  “My mother’s recipe! And what’s this I hear about you and Mr. Towlerton?” She beams at me but doesn’t invite me in.

  “Oh. Yes. He proposed.”

  “Lucky you! And I hear you’ll be setting up housekeeping in New York City after the wedding. My, my. Manhattan!”

  “Yes. Um, do you think I could speak to Jamie for a minute?”

  “He’s downstairs in the office.” Dora leans toward me in glee. “He’s back at his old desk, Maggie. Working! He’s home. Home to stay!” Her gray-blue eyes flood with tears.

  “I’m so happy for you. For all of you.”

  “I know! It’s the only thing I’ve wanted since the day he left. It’s all I prayed for. And now? My prayers have been answered.” She hugs the plate to her chest.

  “How wonderful after all these years.”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Has he . . . mentioned why he decided to come home?”

  Dora cocks her head to the side. “You know, I haven’t asked him. I don’t care why he came home. Only that he did. That’s all that matters to me. He wanted to come home. And he did.”

  “Right.” Any hope that Dora Sutcliff might shed some light on the situation vanishes. “So, I’ll just head downstairs, then.”

  I start to turn, but she reaches for my arm. “Here. Come in through the apartment and use the indoor stairs.”

  I follow her inside, through a tiny entryway and to a set of stairs that lead to the office below.

  “Want me to take you down?” she asks.

  “I’ll be fine. Thank you, though.” I take the first couple steps.

  “We should have an engagement party,” Dora calls out from the top of the staircase.

  “Oh. Um. Well, that’s a nice idea,” I answer.

  “Let’s talk later.”

  “Certainly.”

  I get to the bottom of the stairs and open the door that leads to the office space. I find myself in a back room full of file cabinets and shelves of ledgers that reach to the ceiling. The door to this anteroom is ajar and beyond it I hear the clicking of an adding machine.

  “Jamie?” I poke my head through the door’s opening.

  Jamie is seated at his old desk, working the machine, with an open ledger in front of him. The desk where his father sits is empty. Beyond him is the counter that separates his and his father’s offices from the reception area. Beatrice’s chair is empty, too.

  He looks up as I come into his office. He’s had a haircut and is clean-shaven. The clothes he’s wearing are new and tailored.

  “Maggie!” His smile is one of surprise but also of obvious delight.

  “Your mother let me come down the stairs from the apartment. I need to talk to you for a minute if that’s all right.”

  He stands. “Of course. Please. Come in. Have a seat.” He moves newspaper pages off a chair directly across from his desk. He motions for me to sit and then he takes an identical chair next to it.

  I look past him to his father’s office. “So, your father is away at the moment?”

  He glances behind him and then back to me. “Yes. He’s meeting with a client.”

  “And Beatrice?”

  He slightly crinkles one eyebrow. “I’m afraid she’s out sick today.”

  I nod. The conditions are perfect for what I want to ask, but I don’t know how to say it.

  “It’s true, then? You’re getting married?” He is looking at my ring.

  I gaze down at the sapphire on my finger. “Yes.”

  “Congratulations. I’m sure you’ll be very happy.”

  I lift my head to look at him. “You are?”

  He blinks. “Pardon?”

  “You’re sure I’ll be very happy?”

  “You’re not?”

  “I don’t know how any of us can be sure of anything.”

  He studies me for a moment, and I know he’s wondering what in the world I am talking about. I close my eyes for just a moment to dispel the notion that I might not love Palmer like he loves me.

  “Maggie?”

  “I saw the letters.” The words tumble out too soon. But once they are out, they are out. I open my eyes.

  Jamie is looking intently at me. I cannot read his expression.

  “I didn’t mean to look inside your rucksack. It just happened. You were leaving my house to come here and you’d forgotten it in the sitting room. I went to get it for you and because it was open, a few things started to fall out when I picked it up. I merely wanted to put everything back inside. And that’s when I saw them. My letters.”

  He is quiet for a second and his unreadable thoughts are making my heart pound.

  “I’m not angry you saw those letters,” Jamie finally says. “I was going to tell you myself that I still had them. I figured at some point I’d have the chance.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you keep them?”

  “Because they are precious to me.”

  I can’t make sense of those six words strung together like that. How could my
letters be precious to him? How?

  “You never wrote to me after you came home from the war,” I say. “I sent you all those letters after you left and you never wrote back. Not once.”

  “That doesn’t mean your letters aren’t precious to me.”

  My mind is whirling with confused thoughts. I want to reverse time and spin the earth back to before I had decided I meant nothing to him. Before he made me feel like I had meant nothing to him.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You left. You wanted nothing to do with any of us. You left!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I was a broken man when I came home from the war. I hated who I was, who I had become. I hated what I had seen and what I had done. I didn’t want to be here where life had been beautiful. When I was in France, everything I believed to be true was turned on its head. It was like waking up every morning in an upside-down world where everything that had been sacred had become profane. Every time a shell knocked me to the dirt or blew apart the man next to me or I aimed my gun and fired, I felt myself disappearing. Some of the other soldiers found a way to navigate the upside-down world. I never figured out how I was going to stay me. When I was shipped home, I didn’t know how to be the man I was before. That’s why I couldn’t stay here.”

  I’m not aware that tears have gathered in my eyes until he reaches into his vest pocket and offers me a handkerchief.

  I blot my eyes and I smell the closeness of his skin on the fabric. “I still don’t understand why you saved my letters.”

  He leans forward and takes my hand. “Because every time you penned a letter to me, you wrote to the man I had been, the man you thought I still was. Every time I read or reread one of your letters, I was given a glimpse of the person I used to be. You made me believe I was still in there somewhere, past all the regret and the wounds and the self-loathing. There were many times I wanted to give up, times I wanted to point a gun to my head and just be done with it, but I’d see your letters in my rucksack and I’d find the will to live another day. All these years that I’ve been roaming about, doing odd jobs here and there and waiting to see if my world was ever going to turn right side up again, it was your letters that gave me the hope that one day it would. Your letters saved my life, Maggie. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be dead.”

  “But . . . but I stopped writing.” My voice is tight in my throat and feels leaden. I do not feel like anyone’s savior.

  “It didn’t matter. All those years that you did were enough for me. And after your letters stopped coming, I found myself wanting to live so that I could come home and show you that you hadn’t been a fool for writing a man who never wrote back.”

  I was in love with you, my heart whispers. That is why I kept writing. And why I finally stopped.

  He squeezes my hand before letting go. “I’m glad you came over, Maggie. I wanted to find the right time and place to tell you all this. I wish . . .” His voice falls away.

  “You wish what?”

  He smiles and shrugs. “I wish I had come home sooner.”

  “I wish you had, too.”

  For the first time ever, the eight years that separate Jamie and me seem like nothing more than a day. Unspoken words hang between us. He leans forward slightly, and I want to think it’s the posture of a man about to kiss the woman who saved his life.

  And then Roland Sutcliff throws open the front door to the accounting office, jangling a bell to announce his entrance and breaking the spell.

  CHAPTER 59

  Willa

  Lila enters her dressing room wearing a silky black robe trimmed with glittering gold lace. Her ever-present cigarette holder is in one hand, and a cocktail glass is in the other. A man wearing a pin-striped suit, with gelled hair and a pencil mustache, is laughing behind her, spilling his own drink on his polished shoes.

  When she sees me, Lila puts up a hand to the man’s chest. “We’ll have to do this later, Frankie.”

  “What?” the man says as he stumbles against her raised arm.

  “You heard me. Later.” She is looking only at me.

  The man named Frankie unloads a string of curses.

  She turns to him and tells him to shut the hell up or there won’t be a later. He sighs and ambles off, his shoulder hugging the wall as he disappears down the hall. Lila shuts the door and pivots to face me.

  “What are you doing here, love?” she says.

  It’s a Sunday. I don’t sing on Sundays. “I want to work tonight.”

  She crosses the room to stand by me, folding her arms and leaning her backside against her dressing table. The top of the table is covered with lipsticks and pots of rouge and eye color, bottles of perfume and tins of scented talcum. One of the tubes of lipstick falls over. “Does Albert know you’re in my dressing room?”

  “No.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I took a taxi.”

  “A taxi dropped you off here?” she says, her perfectly painted eyebrows raised.

  “A block away. I’m not stupid.”

  She cocks her head, and her perky bob falls away from the left side of her face like fringe on a curtain.

  “What are you doing here, Willa?” She never uses my real name even though I told her what it is. She always calls me Polly, or love, or doll.

  “I told you. I want to work tonight.”

  “That’s not going to happen. Look, Albert likes you, but he doesn’t like surprises. You here right now is a surprise. You say you’re not stupid. I’m telling you, the smartest thing you can do is go back home and come back on Friday like you’re supposed to.”

  I want to sweep my hand across her table. I can feel the muscles in my arm tensing with the desire to send everything clattering to the floor.

  “Like I’m supposed to.” I echo her words, but she said them gently and they come out of my mouth hard and angry. I’m tired of people telling me what they’re going to do no matter how I feel about it.

  “Hey, we all have to live by someone’s rules,” Lila says, as if reading my thoughts. “You work here, you live by Albert’s rules. I don’t know who at home you’re mad at, but you can’t be here right now. Every time you come to the club, Albert takes a risk. You know that, don’t you? He takes extra precautions on the nights you’re here.”

  I don’t know what she means and she can see that I don’t.

  “You’re young,” she says by way of explanation. “You’re still a child.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “You’re fourteen. You live at home with your father. You still go to school. You—”

  “How do you know all that?” I hadn’t told Albert my real name or anything else about me.

  “Albert knows everything about the people he hires. He knows you want to be here and that you can be trusted to keep your mouth shut. But other people can be idiots. Other people can cause trouble. He makes special arrangements on nights you sing. Financial arrangements. You’re good for business, kid. People like you. They’re coming special to hear you. So don’t mess it up, okay? Go home.”

  “I don’t want to go home.” I don’t. I don’t want to hear any more of Maggie’s plans to leave Philadelphia and take Alex. I can’t believe Papa is letting her do it. She has no right to take Alex from him. And he’s just letting her. Maggie knows how much Alex means to Papa. After all the losses he’s suffered, how can she take that boy from him? She’s only thinking of herself. I don’t want to go home. I want to wear the bows and lace and sing like there are only good things in this world.

  Lila inhales from her cigarette and blows the smoke over her shoulder. Then she slides onto the bench where I’m sitting. Her robe feels cool and silky against my skin. “Who’d you get in a fight with?”

  “No one.”

  “Go home.”

  I sit there for a minute, star
ing at my reflection in the mirror inches away from us, wishing there were a way to disappear into the glass like in the story by Lewis Carroll. “Why do people hurt other people?” I murmur.

  Lila laughs. “Because they can, sweetheart.”

  I look at the face in the mirror, at that sad face. “That can’t be the reason.”

  Lila leans in. Her face is next to mine. Our temples touch and our eyes meet in the mirror. “Sometimes they just can’t help it,” she says. “They don’t mean to hurt anyone. It just happens. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not unless you’ve got a magic wand, love.”

  We sit there a minute longer as the smoke from her cigarette twirls about our heads like a halo.

  “I’ll get you a cab,” she says.

  Fifteen minutes later I am standing at the front stoop of my house. It’s only a little after midnight, but the house is dark and still. No one sees or hears me come in brazenly through the front door.

  I cross the foyer to the staircase and stop to look down the little hallway toward Papa’s room. The seam under his door is a ribbon of mellow light. He is still awake. He didn’t hear me come in. Didn’t hear the front door open and close.

  I stand there for a second or two longer, looking at his door and thinking of all the things I would change if I had a magic wand.

  CHAPTER 60

  Evelyn

  I have been preparing for this day for nearly a week. Since the evening I told Maggie that she had to ask Jamie about those letters, I’ve known I would have to be equally honest with Ursula. Maggie told me she had spilled her question to Jamie in a moment of anxiousness, and while she had gotten the most tender of answers, I could not spill anything to Ursula in a likewise kind of temperament. I had to formulate what I was going to say, how I was going to say it, and how I would respond to every possible kind of reaction from Ursula, including no response at all. Maggie hadn’t prepared herself for what Jamie would tell her about those letters. I can see that she’s confused about her feelings for Palmer now that Jamie has come home, and especially so since learning the reason he kept them. She hadn’t contemplated the response she would get or what it might mean for her future with Palmer. I couldn’t be as unprepared when I met with Ursula.