Chapter Seven
But this place, which to Margaret seemed too big to be a town and far too small to be a city, had only one museum and it was devoted to agriculture.
There was a vocational college but it didn’t offer classes in art or art history; it offered classes in auto repair and plumbing.
There was no dance studio. There was no nightclub, unless you counted the Bric-a-Brac Lounge, and that was attached to a liquor store out near the highway; she couldn’t picture herself stepping foot in there, much less dancing.
The house, though, was a castle compared to anything she’d ever known.
It was in a nice neighborhood, on a street called Roswell Lane, which she liked the sound of.
Dark brown trim and white wooden shingles, tapered columns on a front porch deep enough to keep the snow away from the door.
Three bedrooms (two up, one down), an expansive living room, a separate dining room, and more closets than she could keep track of.
Tuck the other half, including the Dolice, she leaned in various places, considering.
It was a truly charming house, a beautiful house, and she couldn’t wait to write to Lydia about it.
But once they’d settled in, she also wondered, what now?
Was this (a promotion, a house, a new town) what Felix meant when he’d said things were going to change for them, or was this where they had to come for things to change?
She found herself wishing—stupidly, ungraciously—that they could pick up this house and move it to Columbus, in the vicinity of Broad and High Street.
The closest thing to a ladies’ social club she could find was an establishment on Sutton Street called the Swan’s Nest—“A Place for Ladies to Dine,” the ad in the paper read.
One afternoon, while Felix was at work, she got cleaned up and put on one of her last Lazarus purchases: a royal blue two-piece suit of knop-woven wool, and a black velvet half-hat.
She wore these to the Swan’s Nest—only to find herself overdressed in what was essentially a restaurant with a game and reading room attached to it.
There, she sat with a deck of cards, hoping to strike up a game of gin or whist with someone—if for no other reason than to make an acquaintance and be able to talk about how she’d recently moved here from Columbus—but the place was nearly empty and she ended up having a Russian tea and an iced triangle cake while she played solitaire on one of the sofa cushions.
At home, for the first time since marrying Felix, changing out of her nice clothes felt like taking off a costume.
The feeling pervaded. In Columbus, she’d been a young bride for two and a half years.
Here, she felt like—and was—a housewife.
A homemaker. A helpmeet. How many names did they have for it?
Rather than the woman with the dachshund and the woman with the fancy handbags and the woman with the little girl, she had for neighbors the woman with the baby (Mrs. Burke), and the woman with the baby (Mrs. Lane), and the woman with two babies (Mrs. Talbot, next door).
Also the pregnant woman with three small children who weren’t even triplets (Mrs. DeForest—what was she thinking?).
Not all of her neighbors had children, but they were all ready to ask her when she was going to start having her own.
Put just that way, as if she were holding in a litter as she went about her day.
“Someday,” she’d say, thinking, Why do you care?
But she still had small talk on her list, and she learned to do it, taking walks with the stroller brigade or chatting at the foot of the driveway with whomever might be passing by.
The first time she ran into one of her neighbors in the grocery store and stopped to shoot the breeze felt like an accomplishment.
When Mrs. Mitchell—Ruth—from two streets over knocked on her door one afternoon to ask about her rhododendrons and then invited herself in for a drink, it might as well have been a badge of honor.
They were all nice (to varying degrees).
Some of them were impressed that she used to live in Columbus.
Some made a point of not being impressed.
Most of them waved if they saw her on the porch or in the driveway.
All of them, to a one, perked up and turned like flowers toward the sun when Felix emerged.
Felix, meanwhile, seemed happy in his new job.
He had a hundred and fifty men and eight different departments answering to him and sometimes spent so much of his day in the vicinity of the cast houses that his suits had to be dried out and aired in the backyard when he got home.
He was tired in the evening but always asked about her day, and he always told her about his—over dinner, anecdotally, and at length.
In May of 1941, they bought a second Packard, this one dark blue and just slightly used. He taught her to drive. She stopped-and-started them on the farm roads outside of town, then smoothly delivered them to a donut shop.
Did she miss Columbus? Every day. Did she miss Doyle?
Open Arms? She missed Lydia. They still wrote, but only a postcard every few months and birthday cards on their shared birthday.
The house is heaven, she’d written. Huge living room!
Felix as handsome as ever. And he was, including when he allowed himself to un-dapper a little on the weekends and sat around in his pajamas, unshaven, reading the sports page.
Dishevelment on him was just another kind of handsome.
He always seemed glad to see her, even if she was just coming back into a room she’d stepped out of minutes ago.
He held her hand when they walked downtown.
He put his arm around her when they sat on the sofa and listened to the news at night, which, lately, was more and more about the war in Europe.
Almost exactly, Felix fit the picture she had in her mind of the perfect husband.
If only their sex life had more than a faint pulse.
They started going longer in between attempts.
He continued to say it wasn’t her, it was him, and that it wouldn’t be forever.
She felt reasonably sure there wasn’t someone else, so how could it not be her?
It wasn’t a matter of broken equipment, on his part.
The flesh was often willing at first, then wasn’t.
The same flesh, she noticed, that had no problem rousing itself when he was asleep and his brain was unplugged from his life.
There were mornings when she woke up and felt so lonely, lying beside him, that she could have screamed.
There were mornings when she opened her eyes and took in the sturdy posts of the four-poster bed, the enormity of the room, the way the sunlight spread across the smooth white plaster walls, and she felt as if she’d pulled off the greatest bait-and-switch imaginable: she’d swapped the world she’d known as an orphan for this one, and God or whoever hadn’t batted an eye.
Look how far she’d come. Look at this raven-haired man sleeping next to her, lying on his side, his broad, pajamaed back one more solid surface in a room dappled with sunlight.
—
He’d been a senior at the University of Akron.
His roommate that year, Gil Meade. Their friendship forged by living down the hall from each other the previous year as rising star athlete for the Zippers and sports reporter for the student paper, The Buchtelite.
Different as night and day, Felix rock solid, a fullback who also swam and wrestled and struggled to keep a good grade point average, Gil lanky, a bookworm and budding gumshoe whose horn-rimmed glasses often sat crooked on his face and who, at twenty-two, smoked a pipe and wore corduroy blazers with patched sleeves.
A straight-A student, Gil helped Felix with his essays.
Felix checked Gil’s sports coverage for accuracy of both fact and phrasing before Gil handed in his copy.
Their running joke was that when Gil wrote about the Zippers, he always found a way to mention Felix.
Even when Felix was stuck on the bench with a sprained thumb for three weeks.
The Zippers were victorious over Baldwin-Wallace, six to zero, Buchtel Field swarming with people before the clock ran out, and Felix had to watch from the sidelines—but the next day, in Gil’s write-up for The Buchtelite, “ ‘The only disappointment for the crowd was in not getting to see Felix Salt, the Zippers’ lightning-fast fullback, in action.’ ” Gil read that aloud as they walked across campus that evening, and they laughed at Felix’s uncanny ability to be lightning-fast while sitting on a bench with a sore thumb.