Chapter Eight #3
She’d seen the news reels, but as hard as it was to imagine Felix taking and giving orders, it was even harder to imagine him watching hundreds of men die.
She couldn’t even imagine him eating dehydrated food.
Then one morning while she was standing at the kitchen window with her coffee, watching the Talbot girls next door have a snowball fight in their front yard, she realized with a start that not only could she not imagine Felix on a cargo ship; she couldn’t imagine him, period.
She’d lost a sense of him. She’d been eighteen when they’d met, had been married for five years when he left, and had been living without him for two and a half.
She knew what he looked like, of course; there were photos of him on the mantel and in her wallet, but what was it like to be in the same room with him?
His voice was gone from her ear. If she’d been a widow, it would have been tragic to lose these things, and tragic to lose him, of course.
But to lose a solid grasp of him while he was still alive felt…
shameful. She couldn’t remember the sensation of his hands on her skin—in part because she’d barely known that sensation when he left.
All of his clothes were still here. She opened the closet and looked at his suits, his ties and shoes.
She pulled out the drawers on his side of the dresser and ran her fingers over his dress shirts, still folded and banded from the dry cleaners.
In the bathroom, she uncapped his bottle of Old Spice and breathed it in.
She dabbed a little onto her wrist. It smelled just like him but brought none of him back.
It was an artifice, like the icicles melting along the eaves, which, at that moment, looked like rain on a clear, sunny day.
—
The woman in front of Margaret at Food Town was arguing with the cashier about her ration stamps. “I’ve been shopping here for years,” the woman said.
The manager came huffing over and said, “Step back!” with unwarranted alarm. He put on his glasses, assessed the situation, and reminded the woman that all stamps had to be removed from the booklet at the time of purchase. Government rules.
“They take them like this at Paulson’s,” the woman said.
“They’re not supposed to, Mrs. Leckie.”
“I guess Paulson’s values its customers more.”
Then go there, Margaret thought. Had she said it out loud? She hoped not.
They were all a bit tired, perhaps. A bit on edge. It was early May 1945. Margaret stepped forward and asked Mrs. Leckie if she had another family member’s ration book at home she might use.
Mrs. Leckie swung her head around. “No one said anything to you, Mommy Warbucks.”
Then she left without buying anything. The cashier moved her things to the side while the manager said, “Christ in Heaven,” lit a cigarette, and walked back to his office.
“Sorry about that.” The cashier rang Margaret up and gave her her change in colored wooden tokens.
By noon, Margaret was almost home, walking down Roswell Lane with a grocery bag under one arm, when she spotted what looked like a token on the sidewalk up ahead.
She heard the clop of feet and looked up to see a boy running toward her.
He was around seven or eight and was hell-bound for that token, she was sure of it.
But when he reached it—and her—he stopped.
His chest was rising and falling inside the folds of his jacket, and his face was pulled back with excitement.
Smiling down at him, Margaret said, “You ran all the way over here for that token, didn’t you? Well, apparently I’m rich, so you should take it.”
The boy didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. Then he spotted the token, bent over, and scooped it up. “Somebody died,” he said. He pointed down the street in the direction of her house.
She felt needles along the back of her neck.
She could see her front porch from where they were standing, and there was no sign of anyone waiting to deliver a telegram.
Still, after years of worrying, the thought that something had happened to Felix sucked the air out of her.
The boy turned and ran back the way he’d come. She followed him.
There was an ambulance. But it was three houses down from hers, its back door standing open. The O’Conners, who’d been at the Abrams’ New Year’s Eve party. Married for fifty-two years, and at midnight they’d kissed so passionately that Margaret had looked away.
As she and the boy came up the sidewalk, a pair of medics emerged from the house, on either end of a stretcher bearing what appeared to be a person. Covered head to toe in a white sheet. They made their way down the porch steps.
“See what I mean, lady?” the boy whispered. “See what I mean?”
Mr. O’Conner appeared in the doorway, looking confused. The stretcher was loaded, the doors closed. The ambulance backed out onto the street and rolled quietly past Margaret. No siren. She looked around for the boy, but he was gone.
—
Later, Ruth called to invite her to a bandaging class the Red Cross was holding at the library that evening.
Ruth had more energy than anyone Margaret had ever known.
She had two boys, had her sister and her sister’s two kids doubled up with her, and volunteered four days a week.
She ran a weekly bingo game at the Veterans’ Community Center and never failed to show up for dancing at least two nights a week. Now bandaging class. Was there no end?
But as Margaret listened to Ruth strike a match and breathe through a cigarette on the other end of the line, she decided a little first aid was appropriate on a day when she’d watched an ambulance cart a body away.
She said she would go. Then she told Ruth about poor Mrs. O’Conner.
And poor Mr. O’Conner. “I thought something had happened to Felix. This little boy ran up to me on the sidewalk and told me someone had died.”
“They wouldn’t send the news by child.”
“Of course not. But this was before I saw the ambulance. I couldn’t move. Do you ever think about what you’d do if something were to happen—”
“Oh, honey, don’t.”
“I know, I know. But I worry. I don’t know how I’d feel.”
“I’m not following. Feel about what?”
“Felix.”
“But there was no news about Felix. Felix is fine, as far as you know, right?”
“The last letter was over a month ago. I’m being stupid. A woman in Food Town called me Mommy Warbucks this morning.”
“Jeez, you’ve had a tough day. Just keep telling yourself Felix is safe and sound. That’s what I keep telling Agnes about George, and that’s what she keeps telling me about Vic. We can’t all be wrong.”
“I guess,” Margaret said.
Ruth suggested they make a tray of sandwiches and bring them to Mr. O’Conner.
Then she remembered the other reason she’d called (there was always another reason): a four-star general’s wife was coming through town tomorrow to give a breakfast talk at the Swan’s Nest—“How Women at Home Can Win the War.” Did Margaret want to go?
—
The Red Cross instructor at the library that evening inspected the gauze Margaret had wrapped around Agnes’s ankle and said it was cutting off all the circulation.
“I can’t feel my toes!” Agnes declared, wiggling them and winking at Margaret.
After class, in the parking lot of the library, Ruth, who’d driven them there, said she had an eighth of a tank of gas to burn in her Chrysler and suggested they cruise around town, like the old days.
She meant her and Agnes’s old days, of course, since they’d grown up there. Margaret was happy to tag along.
The first stop was Ruth’s house. She had them wait in the car and came back out a minute later holding three beer bottles and a church key. Three more bottles were sticking out of her purse. The best part of doubling up with her sister, she told them, was having a live-in babysitter.
They drank and smoked in the front seat while Margaret sat in the back, in the middle, sipping a beer.
They pointed out spots where they’d kissed boys, and more than kissed them.
They sang along with the Andrews Sisters on “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Ruth showed them the spot where a certain debate team captain had proposed to her right out of high school and said she’d declined him because of the way he laughed, which was like a mule.
Agnes pointed to the mouth of Clarkton Road, just past the grain elevator, and said down there was where she and George had done it for the first time, right after they’d both turned eighteen.
“For me, it was Toby Ulner,” Ruth said. “In the loft over his father’s garage, and the whole time we were afraid we were going to get caught. Didn’t stop us, though.”
They already knew these things about each other.
Margaret wondered if they were trying to draw her out a little, get her to talk about her own childhood and adolescence, topics she always skirted because she never felt up to the invention it would require.
“What about you, Margaret?” Ruth asked. “Who was your first? Don’t be ashamed to say it was Felix. ”
The dark cloud of Mr. Higgs passed through Margaret’s mind. “It was Felix,” she said.
“Have you seen his Navy photo?” Ruth asked Agnes.
“Several times. He’s very handsome. So’s Vic.” Agnes was being diplomatic; she only had eyes for George.
Ruth produced a flask and uncapped it with one hand. “To the wives,” she said, and drank, and handed the flask to Agnes. “To us,” Agnes said, and drank, and tried to hand the flask to Margaret, but Margaret waved it off.
“You could use a tug,” Ruth said into the rearview mirror. To Agnes: “Our Margaret has had a rotten day.”
“To Margaret,” Agnes said and drank again.
Margaret toasted herself with a sip from her beer. She said, “Isn’t it all unbearably lonely?”
They waited to see if she had more to add to that. Agnes said, “The war?”
The war. Marriage. Life. Margaret nodded.
“Told you,” Ruth said to Agnes.
Agnes turned around and leaned over the seat, philosophical. “War is hell. We’ve all had to get used to being alone. It doesn’t mean it’s forever. They’ll come back.”
That was just it. Margaret felt lonely because of Felix’s absence, but she also felt lonely at the thought of his return.
—
Breakfast at the Swan’s Nest. The general’s wife.
She would have skipped it if Ruth didn’t call at seven forty-five the next morning to remind her.
Margaret brushed something of a shape into her hair, put on some makeup, and stood in front of the closet snapping through hangers, wondering how gussied one should get for a general’s wife.
She settled on her mint-green dress, white sling-back shoes, white gloves.
Her stomach was rumbling as she pulled the Packard into a space along the curb on Sutton Street.
On the sidewalk, she nearly bumped into a man who wasn’t looking where he was going.
He apologized, tipped his hat, and hurried over to a station wagon parked a little farther down, but after getting in behind the wheel he left the car door open and just sat there pushing buttons on his dashboard.
She walked on, and before long a woman came out of a flower shop, followed by a man in an apron, and the two of them ran across the street and climbed into a sedan, but they too appeared to have nowhere to go; the man was pushing buttons on the dashboard as the woman turned an ear toward it. The radio, Margaret realized.
All along Sutton Street, people were sitting in their cars but not going anywhere.
A man dashed up the steps of the Gazette building, beckoned by a second man, and the two of them disappeared inside.
The clock standing in the middle of the roundabout at Sutton and Main struck nine and sounded to her like a song.
Something was happening. What did Felix call it?
General quarters. The alarm sounds & everyone scrambles to their post, whether it’s a drill or the real thing.
She looked around, a needle of panic standing in her throat. The record store hadn’t opened yet. Neither had the camera store, or the shoe store. The closest place that looked like it might be open was the hardware store. She crossed the street and pushed through the door.