Chapter Eight
Eight
Evelyn
May 1945
We plan a simple ceremony at the Arlington Street Church in May. I choose a knee-length white dress, and Joseph buys a black suit with his employee discount. I clutch a bouquet of violets, and Joseph’s eyes crinkle as I glide toward him, the organ playing “Ave Maria.” His parents in the front pew, beaming, beside Aunt Maelynn, and our friends. My parents declined, blaming the travel, as though Boston was not merely a morning’s drive, but a world away. ( To them , Joseph reasoned, it’s a big city. Maybe it is .) Their excuse stung, but theirs wasn’t the face I ached to see, the teasing grin, the pair of suits at the top of the aisle that met me in my dreams, he should be here . Joseph kisses me when the priest pronounces us husband and wife, and my tears are of joy as well as sadness. Joy that he will always be mine, and sadness that there will always be a sliver of emptiness in every happiness we share.
When he lays me on our bed in our apartment, it is the first time for us both. Although I tried to entice him many times over the years, Joseph would not be taken by my touches or whispers, not even after midnight with my legs wrapped around him on Bernard Beach. Tonight he doesn’t hesitate. He slips the straps from my shoulders, strokes my collarbone with his fingertips and then his lips. My dress falls to my ankles and I work the knot of his tie until it comes undone, his jacket in a heap on the floor . I undo the buttons of his shirt, exposing the sprout of dark hair on his chest. His hands roam until I am naked, unhooking my bra and sliding my stockings and panties over my knees and my feet to the floor. He guides his trousers and underwear to his ankles, his eyes never leaving my body, then he presses himself against me. He kisses me, and all I can think about is his skin against my skin and how soft it all feels, like petals. Then there is a sharpness like pain but it falls into something else, something new, and it somehow makes me want to cry, and laugh, but then it is over, and all his weight is on me, my chin on his shoulder, and his face in my hair, and all we are is breath. He kisses my cheeks and asks me if I am alright, and I giggle, a spontaneous sound, because for the first time in a long time, I am.
Months later, his father calls us, his voice shaking, “Come home, son...she’s gone.”
Walking through Stonybrook unearths a hurt I thought I buried. Joseph had returned once a month since he left, his mother disintegrating with each visit, but I couldn’t bear it. The streets were full of ghosts.
Joseph’s father is a shell when we see him, dressed in his nicest suit but empty and thin, like the mannequins at Joseph’s store. We see my parents briefly at the funeral when they came to pay their respects. After Tommy died, I expected my mother to turn to me, for our grief to be the language we finally shared, but instead our pain wielded itself like a dagger, each day spent in silence dug a deeper wound. My father buried himself in work, my mother slept all day and smoked alone on the porch all night. When she saw me packing, she hid in her bedroom. She never asked where I was going or how she could reach me. My anger surfaces as we approach them in the dispersing crowd outside the church, daring her to speak first, to break our impasse.
My father steps forward, his bushy mustache muffling his congratulations on our wedding, clearly uncomfortable.
“Joseph’s parents made it, even though she was sick,” I say, an accusation, not an update.
My mother nods. “I heard. We’re sorry for your loss, Joseph.” Neither offer a place to stay for the night, rightly assuming we are staying with Mr. Myers, a preference I’m sure they clock. The family I coveted, now mine.
Leaving Joseph’s father again feels like pushing off from a deserted island, knowing he is stranded ashore. On the train back to Boston, Joseph presses his head against the window, fogged with the cold. I say, “I don’t want to go back again...it’s too much.”
Joseph doesn’t argue; the guilt he carries from enlisting with Tommy and coming home alone an anchor he drags everywhere, no matter how I try to assuage him. Now this. A last year Joseph will never share with his mother, a goodbye he never said. His father left alone with no family or inn to keep. To be with me. A sacrifice, raw to the touch.
I think of the letters he wrote while overseas. A stack signed Love ; envelopes bursting with longing, with hope of the future. I think of the jar on my porch brimming with violets, flowers meant for the girl I used to be. The note tucked inside, Leaving won’t stop me from loving you. No question, no demand. A statement, asking nothing from me. It was almost worse that way, my silence a cruel response when all I wanted was to slip into a new life where grief couldn’t find me. His devotion a gift when I had nothing, a steadiness I wish I knew how to offer him now, he who has given up everything for me.
Back in our apartment, we lay foot to head, resting on our elbows, and I run my fingers over the scar, exploring the jagged lines with the tips of my fingers for the first time.
“What happened?” I had never asked him. Our unspoken agreement, we never talk about the war.
“A bomb went off during a raid, we were in Rome...the day before Tommy was shot.” His eyes clench in pain and he gets quiet. We learned of the details of Tommy’s death later, the supplies his squad carried, the trap they walked into, the bullet in his stomach, the doctors who said he’d recover, the infection like snake venom that took him later.
“How did it feel?”
“I don’t remember anything. I woke up in bandages.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” Maybe he is trying to protect me. Or maybe he really has no memory of the moment, not pain, not the smell of burnt flesh, not even the sound of the explosion, only a white expanse in his mind like an uncharted map he refuses to explore.
“I killed her, you know,” he says, voice quavering.
“Don’t say that.”
“My enlisting killed her, she worried so much it built up inside, and it killed her.” I start to cry, his pain intimately mine. “And I left her again, when I knew she was dying, I left her...and now I left my dad...”
“Come here.” I turn to face him and press him close, his wet cheeks against my chest. I hold him as he falls into sobs, all he says is a repeated apology, one not meant for me, that I feel I am overhearing, whispered into the ether. “I’m sorry... I’m so sorry.”
I left Stonybrook to chase a bigger life, but when Joseph followed me, it shrank around us. Our whole world exists between these walls, and within this bed, a thin mattress in our tiny apartment on Tremont Street, a lodging house full of immigrants and crying babies. I wake to the sweet sound of trumpets and saxophones and guitars. Jazz music wafts through the open window like the scent of a freshly baked cake, and I drift in and out of sleep, unsure which part is a dream. At night we cling to each other, afraid if we don’t one of us will get taken away by morning with the moon. Joseph has become my only solace, and I, his. This seems to comfort him, but it frightens me to love him this much. It’s one more thing to lose. I don’t know how to describe it, except in moments, notes on a page, that build to create something beautiful and uniquely ours. His arm wrapped around my abdomen in sleep. Threadbare sheets woven between our legs. The rough scratch of his chin against my bare shoulders as he kisses me awake. The movement of my body against his in the morning, his against mine, making love out of our joy and our anger and our hurt. We ease into the space where nothing else exists, collapsing into breath and holding on to each other, so as not to disappear. We lie together and I gaze at Joseph’s clothes hanging in the closet, comforted by his things interspersed with mine, his jackets next to my dresses, his ties by my blouses. Sometimes if he works late at the store, I run my fingers over the fabric of his shirts, smell the soap and musk on his collars, as if to remind myself he lives there. That he will come home to me.
Joseph surprises me with tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for our first anniversary. He confesses he’s been stashing coins into the heels of his boots in our closet for months, saving so he could splurge on the thirty-cent admission. I leap into his arms and he spins me around the apartment and for the first time in a long time we laugh like we aren’t shattered inside.
The night of the performance, Joseph wears his suit once more and I wear a shimmery gown I borrowed from Marjorie at work, and we take the train to Symphony station. It’s impossible not to feel like we are entering something sacred as we step into the hall. Even Joseph, who has never played a note in his life, is hushed by the sanctity of it. He squeezes my hand, echoing my excitement as we navigate the crowd to find our seats. Gilded balconies adorned with wine-colored velvet provide a bird’s-eye view of the orchestra, marble statues displayed in decorative alcoves. There are plush red-carpet aisles and burgundy exit doors, but otherwise the entire room is a sharp white. We are awed by the massive organ pipes, towering golden trunks that reach the ceiling, looming so high as to extend to heaven itself. Glimmering carvings outline the stage, an elaborate shield with the name Beethoven inscribed at the center.
I point it out to Joseph, and wave over one of the ushers. “Excuse me, I’m curious, why is Beethoven the only name carved into the border?”
The silver-haired gentleman peers over his glasses to meet my eyes. “That’s a great story, miss. You see, the original designers of the venue wanted to pay homage to the very best musicians, ones that would never fall out of favor. But the only name everyone could agree on was Beethoven, so the rest of the plaques they made to honor other artists were left blank.”
He grins at me, our shared appreciation of the symphony like a code between us, a club I could belong to. “Thank you.” I beam. “It’s our first time here.”
“You’re in luck, tonight they’re performing Mozart’s Concerto number ten. The dual arrangement is a sight to behold.” He straightens up and helps another woman to her seat.
Classical music was the backdrop of my youth; my mother floated through our foyer greeting my father’s work associates as I perched on the stairs, eyes closed, straining for the faint notes beneath the hum of chatter and clinking china. But this is the first time I hear the music as it is intended, and I am overcome. It’s like splashing in a puddle for years before discovering the sea. Tears stream down my face as the piano concerto soars around us, and something inside of me cracks open, light streaming through the slightest tectonic shift of my sadness.
After the show, I hold Joseph’s arm as we stroll through the city, night falling around us. I am taken back to years ago, walking to the trolley at dusk with Maelynn, after my first piano lesson at the Boston Conservatory. Arm linked in mine, she said, Evelyn, you know you could be a concert pianist, right? You’re so talented, and it would be a wonderful way to travel the country, to see California, the world even, to begin to check things off your list .
The idea glitters inside me once more. To be a part of the Boston Symphony is to exist inside music itself, to stand in the center of the universe, a Milky Way melody, a chorus of planets swaying and spinning around my cadenza sun.
As Joseph and I undress for bed I can’t shake the thrill of it, like something amusing remembered in an inappropriate moment, twitching beneath the surface. As he falls asleep I whisper, “I’m going to play with them someday.” And I lie awake, the concert ringing in my ears, dreaming of the power of the music up close, the steady hum inside of me mirrored and soaring through the pulsing air; an explosion of color and light, pure emotion etched in song.
Last week we received word that death had come for his father. Mrs. Myers was fifty-five when she died, and he lasted only eleven months without her, passing at fifty-six. He had no symptoms, and no health problems to speak of. Death by heartbreak.
Guilt rushes into the crevices of my cluttered mind that aren’t already occupied by loss. My parents are both alive, but we never speak. All this heaviness and yet I am only twenty-one, and Joseph twenty-three. Is it possible that five years ago we shared our first kiss, our eyes on the clouds floating by?
My thoughts drift as I study him in the glow of the city lights seeping through our window. I allow myself to picture Joseph before the war, before his limp. Joseph at eighteen, shoulders broad, tanned skin, his thick hair ruffled by the wind, one hand on my thigh as we lay in the sand on Bernard Beach.
He has been quiet since he heard the news and it scares me to think how this loss will affect him. The first two brought him closer to me, he hid his sorrow deep in the curves of my body, but this feels different. The loss of his father, a man who lived for nothing more than to run the Oyster Shell Inn, to love his wife and his son, leaves Joseph adrift, a sailor without a compass or the light of the moon. I undress shyly tonight, wondering if he would like to be alone with his thoughts, in the way I needed to be alone in my grief.
When I slide under the covers, he pulls me toward him in one motion so I am against him, my toes touching his shins when we are face-to-face. He wraps his arms around my back, lifts me onto him. Then he does not move, does not kiss me. He holds me, gripping me tightly, and I cling to his cliff edge, terrified to let go, feeling all the sorrow, all the hurt pressed between our bodies, and away, into the night air.
Joseph lies awake, sheets kicked away in the suffocating and stale city heat. He has been irritable all evening, his leg bothering him. I sense him stewing and roll onto my side. “What’s wrong?”
His eyes are on the ceiling, visible in the yellow glow of the streetlights. “I hate this apartment.”
“Please don’t start...”
“I want a house. I want to go home.”
I shake my head, preparing my usual argument. After Joseph inherited the Oyster Shell he became haunted by its emptiness. “Our life is here. Our jobs, our friends, Aunt Maelynn... everything.”
A flimsy defense, at best. Coworkers I began to think of as friends quit to start families, moved out of the city to Newton or Quincy. Younger girls replaced them at their typewriters, bubbly and incessant. Maelynn returns from a new city with a new boyfriend seemingly each time we call, barely contained by her teaching job at Mrs. Mayweather’s. Maelynn, a star-shaped peg that won’t fall in place, a fact tolerated by the school because she’s an acclaimed writer, a trophy they flaunt. Her tether to Boston growing thin, an alluring breeze all it would take to carry her away.
When she’s in town she invites us over, and sometimes I go, desperate for that feeling I had when I lived with her, knees tucked beneath me on her couch as she entertained painters and poets, inhaling their smoke and their stories. The promise I held in their eyes at seventeen. Maelynn at my side, smelling like peppermint and something I couldn’t name; her dresser covered with amber bottles of ancient oils, vouching for me, her priceless jewel, a pianist who was going places, talented enough for private lessons at the conservatory.
But we haven’t been to see her in months. Blaming our time apart on Brookline being too far, especially after a long day of work. Blaming it on the green line, always delayed, unpredictable. I don’t tell her how it feels to be around her friends now, the awareness of them turning away while they stand before me, a twentysomething stenographer, riffraff who had wandered in from the South End, ears cocked for a more interesting conversation.
“Our life is in Stonybrook,” Joseph says, nearly pleading.
“Not anymore.”
“But it could be.”
I roll away, facing the wall. “Don’t do this, okay? It’s late.”
He touches my hip. “I know you’re scared.”
“I like our life the way it is,” I say, not even convincing myself.
The future I had imagined for myself, of music, of exploring and adventure, has settled into the steady drone of typing, elbows pressing on the trolley, steep rent payments and crowded markets. Out of time and money and energy to desire more than my feet up at the end of each day. Maelynn made it all sound so glamorous, easy, to see the world at my age, the men who would sweep her off to London and Greece. She’d leave them behind, returning with cashmere scarves and hand-painted bowls and tales of her escapades. She never explained how she had money to travel or how she made a living during that time, and I didn’t ask in the way I wouldn’t ask a magician to lift his sleeves. She was young and beautiful, and the world was hers. It could be that simple, couldn’t it?
For Maelynn, maybe. But where have I gone, really? The only city I was banished to, and stayed, building a half-life with Joseph that has caged us both. Stonybrook is pink sunrises and indigo twilights, wildflowers and waves lapping against the sandbar. Boston is brick and brownstone, muddled masses in the streets, a feeling of impermanence that leaves me uneasy. And yet, at any minute I could take the train to the end of the line, hop off and start anew.
Going back to Stonybrook means going back to Stonybrook forever. It means opening the Oyster Shell Inn, raising the fifth generation of Myers on the same shore, the life expected for Joseph, the life he gave up when he followed me here. The life erased by Pearl Harbor, by the thick stench of the departing steam train, and wives and daughters and mothers huddled around radios, and Tommy’s stomach infection spread and he wasn’t coming home and I forgot how to breathe on my own, and there was no Oyster Shell Inn, just a big empty house, and Mrs. Myers was dying and Mr. Myers became a skeleton and was it all a dream? I was lost and falling and ran to the only other place that ever felt safe, but then like a mirage Joseph was there, and he scooped me up and laid me in what became our bed, and together we soaked in the sadness until like fawns we found our feet, but those feet lost their path home, we pushed Stonybrook from our minds until it ceased to exist. How can there be an Oyster Shell Inn without any of them? How will we ever fill its sun-soaked rooms when all I want to do is draw the shades?
He jolts up, gesturing around in the dark. “You like this? We can barely afford this shit apartment and there’s a massive house waiting for us back home.”
Joseph never curses.
“Let’s sell it. If we aren’t going home, why keep it?” he asks, his voice raw.
“We can’t sell it.”
“What do you want from me, Evelyn?”
“I don’t know.” I pull my knees to my chest.
“I get what it means, moving back, and you don’t want a baby, but...” He pauses. “If we started a family, we could run the inn together...and if we were back in a place you loved, I know it would make you so happy.”
My face tightens. “You think I don’t want a baby?”
“You never want to talk about it.”
“Because I’m terrified.” I bite the inside of my cheek, play with a fiber fraying on the sheets, anything to keep my tears at bay. To keep us in this limbo, this alternate life, this place where memories can’t find me.
“Oh, sweetheart, come here.” He reaches his arms to me and I scoot over, closing the gap between us, the thick heat compressed like an accordion.
I wipe my dripping nose with the back of my wrist. “But what if we have one, and something happens? I can’t lose anyone else... I can’t.”
“We can’t hide out here forever.” He brushes a stray curl out of my eyes. “But if you’re just afraid... I am, too, and we can be scared together.” He pauses. “What do you want?”
I take a deep breath, shift to meet his gaze, and say the words that have rattled around my head for months, ones I have been afraid to admit even to myself. “I want a baby.”
“You do?”
Every time I pass a mother pushing a stroller, I feel a surge of envy I batten down like shutters in a storm, picture a baby that looks like Joseph, running along the shore that still sings me to sleep, the place we both belong. “I want to go home.” I wrap my arms around his neck and he lifts me onto him, burying his face in my hair.
“I know this will make us so happy. Thank you, Evelyn, I love you so much.” But as he kisses me, all I can feel is the rush of fear in my chest, like a riptide overtaking me.