Chapter Four
Four
Evelyn
June 1942
The train lurches out of South Station, headed back to Stonybrook after my second year away, my last year at Mrs. Mayweather’s School for Girls. I lean my forehead against the cool glass window, settling in. The man across from me reads a crinkled newspaper, a picture of the war savings bond girls plastered across the front page. I watch as the grays and browns of Boston are replaced by streaks of green and blue, countryside and sky.
My body aches with restless energy; the closer I get, the harder it is to be anywhere but home. The cabin is stuffy with cigarette smoke and I yearn for the sea breeze, the chorus of cicadas in the marsh at night, my bare soles sinking into wet sand. But there is something new, a layer of grief beneath my excitement. Leaving Maelynn, my piano lessons, an outline of a new life I had begun to color in. The instructor at the Boston Conservatory, Sergey, a Russian who notoriously rationed his compliments, once said I had real promise . The possibility of a spot there next year, the call he offered to make. The late nights Maelynn’s living room glittered with writers and artisans and musicians, as I perched on her couch drinking in their stories, dizzy with their nectar. The lists she encouraged me to indulge in, dreams I felt too silly to show anyone but her and Joseph. Dip my toes in the Pacific Ocean . Visit the World’s Fair. Ride an elephant. The Boston list we made together that she stuck to the bathroom mirror. The thrill as we checked things off, sail on The Charles , visit Egyptian mummies at the Museum of Fine Arts , eat salty peanuts at Fenway Park . The streets of Boston humming with smartly dressed people with somewhere to be. The freedom to board the trolley in Brookline and travel anywhere I chose, to meander for hours, pulsing with possibility.
But staying would mean casting off the life I left behind. Saying goodbye to Joseph at the end of last summer was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. We kissed, the world spinning and muted around us, until I was sure I’d miss my train. I’ve loved him as long as I can remember. Probably because he was nothing like me, nothing like Tommy—all noise and bravado and jokes. Joseph was a stone rubbed smooth by the crashing of our waves, a calming pebble you pocket and carry.
I knew about the dates he went on and the girls he had kissed. I never let on about my feelings; I was scraped knees and tangled hair, he didn’t think of me that way. He had always given me his attention, the brotherly kind, and a friendship formed because we were two moons orbiting the same planet, but until last summer, he had never really looked at me. Never like that—like I was a dream from which he didn’t want to wake, his eyes following me with a gaze like physical touch; I could feel it even when I turned away. When he first kissed me, my heart jumped, a staccato drum.
The year passed with the constant crossing of letters and quick stolen visits at holidays. Always a goodbye on the heels of a hello, and the constant ache within me, for the next letter, the next visit, the next kiss. Wherever I was, I was halved. In Stonybrook, I missed the buzz of Boston; in Boston, I missed Joseph’s arms, the feeling of belonging, of home.
The train shudders into Union station and my heart surges. I grab my suitcase and heave it over the seat, rushing past passengers easing out into the aisle. I pat my hair, adjusting a pin, cursing where it flattened in the back since I boarded. I lean out of the car and spot Joseph, a head above the merging crowds, and Tommy beside him, both dressed in short-sleeved button-downs tucked into their trousers. This time I run to Joseph first, drop my suitcase and jump into his arms; he lifts me off my feet, our kisses like gasps for air, filling me and making me whole.
“Alright, you two.” Tommy laughs, shielding his eyes, a cigarette bouncing between his lips. I unwind from Joseph’s embrace and give Tommy a tight squeeze. “How was your second year? Are you even more ladylike than when you left us last?”
“Oh yes, of course. I’ve got grace and poise coming out of my ears,” I say, with my widest smile and an exaggerated curtsy.
“Well, you look beautiful.” Joseph grabs me by my waist, kisses me again before reaching for my abandoned suitcase. “Welcome home.”
Home. The word feels strange, fluid.
Back at the Oyster Shell, Joseph pulls his dad’s Ford into the driveway, and together we walk to the front stoop. I can’t help but gush about our reunion, one I had imagined again and again, buoying me through every patch of loneliness this past year. “It’s such a relief to know we’ve said our last goodbye. We can finally all be together again. For good,” I say, beaming at Joseph, then Tommy, expecting a nod, a smile. Their faces are gray, Tommy stares ahead. Joseph drops his gaze to his feet.
“What?” I stop short. “What? Tommy, are you going to Mrs. Mayweather’s now?” I laugh. Their expressions don’t crack and I stop short, a boulder caught in their stream. “What’s going on?”
“You want to tell her?” Tommy juts his chin toward Joseph. His face alarms me with its flatness, like a mask of my brother, a grave doppelganger.
“Tell me what?” My grip tightens. Joseph’s muscle pulses under my fingers, and I shift my attention to him, a compromised fortress. “ Joseph , tell me what?”
He looks down at me, his eyes rueful when they meet mine. “We enlisted.”
I drop their arms as though they are live wires, my mind fills with fog, cloaking the bliss that had guided me home. “You can’t...”
Tommy fumbles in his pocket for a distraction, anything to avoid my face. “We did. We had to.”
“You didn’t have to do anything. They’re not even drafting nineteen-year-olds!” My legs weaken.
Joseph reaches for my hand, holding it in his against his chest. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“You don’t know that.” My eyes well up, and I blink furiously.
Tommy lights a Lucky Strike. “Ev, we wanted to make something of ourselves. You more than anyone have to understand. We didn’t want to wait until they forced us.” He exhales a thin cloud of smoke. “Come on, you get it. You’ve been sent away these last two years.”
I shake my head. “No. Not the same. There isn’t much chance of me dying at school.”
Tommy lifts his eyebrows, his mouth a lopsided smile. “Not even of boredom?”
“That’s not funny.”
He waves me off. “We’re not going to die.”
Die. The word sends my legs wobbly. I want to argue, to yell the questions careening through my mind, but nothing comes out. I stand there, my limbs dangling uselessly by my sides.
“Well, I’ll leave you two alone. I’m sure you have lots to talk about.” Tommy squeezes my elbow and cuts through the overgrown verdant field, leaving us on the slanted front steps of the Oyster Shell.
We stand, not speaking or touching. The sky is a cloudless blue, the warm breeze and sunshine unsettling. I yearn for the cover of night, for the somber patter of rain, to curl into myself in a gray room alone. The seashell wind chime jingles. Joseph fumbles with a loose button on his shirt.
“How could you?” My eyes begin to fill. I focus on my shoes, heeled Mary Janes, and scuff their bottoms on the wooden slats of the porch.
Joseph rubs his knuckles against each other, with force that looks like it may hurt. “I don’t know what to say... You know how Tommy is, he wouldn’t drop it. I told him we should wait and see, but he kept talking about going in as men, and he said he’d sign up with or without me. I couldn’t let him go alone...and you wouldn’t have wanted me to.”
I sink onto the front steps, tearing at my hair. “How do I say goodbye to you again? To both of you? What if something happens?”
Joseph sits beside me, his fingers loosely clasped between his knees. His leg is inches from mine, but he doesn’t lean it against me, and I can feel the space between us like I would feel his touch. “I don’t know. I’m taking this very seriously. I know what it could mean. But you have to understand...he’s like a brother to me too. I can’t stand the thought of leaving you, but I would never forgive myself if something happened to him while I was safely at home.”
Hot tears begin to fall and I take a deep breath as he kisses my cheek, his strong arms encasing me gently. “Please don’t cry.”
I search his eyes for the first time and am met with the fuzzy outline of my reflection in their russet depths. “When do you leave?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“But I came home to be with you,” I plead.
“What do you mean?” Joseph asks. “School’s over...you came home because it’s over.”
“There was this spot, maybe, I don’t know if I would’ve gotten in, at the Boston Conservatory, but I said no because it would be four more years—”
“What are you talking about?” He pulls away, brows knit in confusion.
“I could’ve stayed. Why am I here if you won’t be?”
“Because this is where we live...” Joseph says. “And I’ll be back before you know it, and we’ll start our life together again, right where we left off.”
I cry without apology now, my voice thick with emotion, with everything I’ve lost and everything still left to lose. “How do we say goodbye again?”
He rubs his thumbs over my cheeks, brushes away the smeared rivulets as my chin trembles in his palm. “We don’t. You don’t ever get to say goodbye to me. Not for good.”
He holds me close, and I lean into his shoulder until I am calm, his shirt wet and streaked from my tears.
The morning Joseph and Tommy depart is foggy and drizzling, Long Island hidden in the haze across the sound, Bernard Beach muted by the spitting rain. Tommy dresses in his Class A’s. Dad salutes a farewell at the stoop, Mom kisses him on the cheek, her face glowing with pride. The handkerchief in her grip an ornament, bone-dry. Their hometown hero, off to be a real one.
We pick Joseph up from the Oyster Shell and find his mother weeping into his shoulders on the porch. He bends low to embrace her, and she grips the fabric of his uniform so tight it wrinkles when he stands tall. His father, a match for his height but hefty like a grizzly, wraps him in a hug. “Don’t just be brave, you hear me? Come home. And bring Tommy with you.” His eyes bloodshot like he rubbed them dry, or hadn’t slept, or both.
Joseph’s parents are older than mine, skin lined and hair streaked gray. They struggled for years to have a child, so when Joseph came into their world, they clung to him. His mother was always squeezing him, his father lifting him on his broad shoulders when we were kids, launching him with a splash into the water. They were affectionate with him, and each other, even as he grew. Watching them say goodbye exposes the ache in me I tried to bury these last two weeks together. A blur of joyful moments etched with worry, days like a shortness of breath, a last supper.
At the station, it is only the three of us. Tommy and Joseph stand opposite me in their olive drab side caps, jackets and ties. Surrounded by a dismal tableau of girlfriends, wives and mothers in their best hats and dresses, damp and clutching on to final hugs, kisses and words of reassurance that are flimsy and fleeting. Another day in June, like so many summer days we have spent. Except nothing about it is like those days—sunny and blue skied and free. I feel the shift like a hairline fracture to a bone, a dull pain that deepens with time.
Tommy leans against a column, blowing smoke rings as he watches the other men board. “We’ll be back before you even miss us. Between my charm and Joe’s good looks, those Germans may surrender.” He gives me his biggest grin, wiggling his eyebrows.
I try to return his confidence, but my jaw feels tight. “Be safe, both of you.” My voice is steady. Tears had found me the night before but left that morning, exhausted. “Tommy, please don’t do anything stupid.”
He laughs his last smoky exhale and extinguishes the ember with his toe. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I force a smile. It strains my cheeks. “I’ll see you when you get back. Love you, big brother.”
“Love you, too, Ev.” He folds me in a tight hug, his wool jacket rough beneath my chin. I feel my tears return and swallow hard. It is right before our birthdays. How could I celebrate without them?
“Joe, I’ll grab us some seats. See you in there.” He snatches their bags and Joseph watches him board, nodding, before turning to me.
“Please take care of him, take care of each other...” I am stammering now that Tommy is on the train, now that they are really leaving.
“I will. Evelyn...” He lifts my chin so I can’t turn away. Those lips that spent so much time parting mine, the softness of his tongue pressing and warm. The jawline that I ran my fingertips over on lazy afternoons, trying to capture it all, to memorize everything. Those deep brown eyes staring so intently at me now that I can see my hazy outline reflected in them, disarming me like a mirror within a mirror, an endless glimpse into the deepest part of me. “I’ll do everything I can so we come home to you.”
“Promise me.” My voice wavers, giving me away.
Joseph winces, his eyes closing as if in pain. “I can’t promise that... I will do everything I can—”
“Promise me, Joseph. If you promise me, you can’t break it...maybe it’ll keep you safe...let me try to keep you safe.” I begin to cry then. I am not making sense, but I can’t stop blubbering about promises, my legs trembling, and he holds me close and I feel myself steady in his solid arms.
“I promise,” he whispers, his lips brushing my ear. He pulls back so our noses nearly touch. “I love you, Evelyn.”
Any lingering strength I have vanishes with those words, said for the first time, and the train whistles through the smoky, soggy air as the remaining passengers on the platform rush around us to get on board. I am struck silent, my heart shouting but trapped, unable to find a path to my tongue. I want to tell him. I want to say, I love you, too, but it is the extra beat of hesitation before leaping off the cliff that stops me cold. I can’t say goodbye and I love you in the same breath. If I don’t say it back, he has to come home to hear it. He has to. I tear myself away from the cove of his arms, conscious of the wet tracks of tears down my cheeks, the wool irritating where it rubbed my exposed skin, pink splotches rising around my collarbone.
I love you, Joseph. But I can’t say it.
Instead, “Come home, okay? Both of you.” His eyes search mine, begging a question I won’t answer, those mirror eyes...but the train whistles again and I kiss him, stroking the hair below his cap, and press him toward the steps, with what feels like a whimper. “Come home to me.”
And then he is gone. I stand there, empty. I reach into my pocket for a handkerchief and find violets, like velvet on my fingertips. I stand thumbing the petals in my pocket until I can’t see the blurred outline of the train, and then after.
What stands out about the days since Joseph and Tommy left? Sore wrists. Sore wrists and an ache in my chest. I count the days that drag like seaweed through the tide, my body a placeholder for the three of us, for the life we’ll have here again, once the war is over. I pass my time playing piano, writing letters and sewing parachutes. There is a whole room of us at The Arnold Factory, a brick building in town that was once a schoolhouse, women awaiting lovers and brothers and sons behind whirring sewing machines, sharing worries and updates from the front lines. Some girls I went to school with before Mrs. Mayweather’s look much older than eighteen; foreheads creased by dread, we acknowledge each other but not our collective bated breath, the odds against us that all our soldiers will return. Every loss a devastation, my sympathy mixed with guilt, private gratitude that their telegram wasn’t sent to my door, selfishly praying to be spared their pain. Sewing parachutes feels like I am doing something tangible. I am saying, Here, hold on to this, let me help you fly . In my dreams, the parachutes I sew billow out like clouds, like jellyfish, but when they hit the ground, they are always empty.
Joseph signs his letters, Love. I sign mine, Yours . I am his. I do love him. I always have. Enough not to tell him in a letter, not to send that hope across the ocean. I reserve those feelings, confess them on pages I never send, scrawled longing I can’t bring myself to mail. I write to Tommy, too, tease him with updates from Stonybrook, things like, All the prettiest girls in town work in the hospitals . He jokes back, I might get injured on purpose, if that’s the case.
I keep Joseph’s letters in a nightstand by my bed, along with flower petals that have long since dried. Sometimes I hold them and, although they are fragile, pass them back and forth between my cupped hands. I like the way they feel against my skin, like to imagine Joseph holding them when they were soft, his palm the last thing they touched before he slipped them into my pocket. I like to read the first letter Joseph wrote. It reached me weeks after they left, weeks I spent mostly by myself. I sit on the dock where we first kissed, listening to the crash of the ocean, and read it again and again. How much louder the waves sound when I am alone.
Dear Evelyn,
I can’t stop thinking of how we said goodbye. I don’t know what to make of it...the words you didn’t say, how you pushed me away. I know you’re strong; maybe you were afraid to tell me how you feel. Afraid it would somehow make you weak. But please know I want my love to keep you strong too. You don’t have to be strong on your own.
I meant what I said, and always will. I love you, and I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute to tell you. I wanted to tell you countless times...on the dock, in the ocean, together on the sand. But I never did because I didn’t want it to seem like I was saying goodbye. But when it was time to leave, I couldn’t walk away without letting you know. I didn’t get caught up in the moment, if that’s what you think.
You don’t have to tell me how you feel. Maybe this isn’t the time, or the way. But I have faith that when I return everything will be as it was. I trust we will keep growing in our love, and that it will outlast every test we put it through. Even this time apart. Even war.
In my letters I won’t write about my time here, please don’t ask me. There is no need for you to worry about things you can’t change. I don’t want to waste these pages recounting violence, instead I will fill them with love. Please fill yours with the same and send them back to me. That’s all I need to bring me home.
Love,
Joseph
I do as he asks. I fill my pages with love but without using the word.
I tell him about the piano, the escape it provides. My fingers dance their swift choreography, creating something apart from me, but a part of me, because the notes hum deep in my core even when I step away. I tell him of the parachutes, the bolts of endless silk. My thoughts wander at every stitch, back to when we were kids, snapshots projected in my mind. Tommy scooping a translucent moon jellyfish, devoid of stingers, and placing it jiggling in my palm. Joseph perched on the jetty with my foot in his lap, brow furrowed as he extracted a jagged shell embedded in my toe. The three of us leaping off Captain’s Rock, plunging into the icy depths. Tommy and Joseph climbing higher to jump off its craggy top while I whooped and hollered from the surf below.
I tell him how I sew the initials T.S. and J.M. at the corner of each parachute before it is packed away. Small stitches that go unnoticed by anyone but me. But I do it every time because they are the reason I sew, and I hope it brings the men who use them luck.
I don’t tell him about the petals, or the way I think about them touching his skin. I don’t tell him of my daydreams of Boston, the rumble of the trolley underfoot, the maze of brownstones that made me feel so big and so small. The winding cobblestone streets that let me be lost and found, imagining an alternate future all my own. Of deadlines and chances missed, another life swept away in the war, an answer I’ll never know, the girl I left behind.
That is what I will remember from this time apart. The longing, the music, the petals, the parachute silk, the letters sent away as if caught by the wind, hoping for a safe landing.