Chapter 20 Adelaide #2
He was pale and thin—so much thinner than I remembered.
His eyes were sunken and ringed with shadows.
My heart gave a sick little clutch, just like it had that time I’d found a bald baby bird with a broken neck under the oak tree.
“Oh, Charlie.” I stepped toward him, and the next thing I knew, he’d dropped his crutches and grabbed me.
He kissed me full on the mouth, so hard it hurt my teeth, smashing my nose against his, making it impossible to breathe.
I pulled back, but he clung to me, burying his face against my neck and sobbing into my hair.
All I could think was—God help me!—how much better Joe had felt; how much taller, sturdier, stronger, and manlier he’d been, how the press of his body against mine had unleashed a dizzying surge of desire, while Charlie’s frail, childlike frame filled me with pity.
I flushed with shame at my thoughts. A ripple of revulsion rolled through me—not at Charlie’s touch, but at his naked devotion, at his beggarly need.
“Charlie,” I murmured. “My parents. Your mother . . .”
That seemed to bring him to his senses. My father cleared his throat. Charlie’s mother stooped and picked up his crutches, and his father steadied him as I drew back.
“When did you get here?” I asked, smoothing my skirt and trying to hide my embarrassment under a show of normalcy.
“At noon,” Charlie said.
“The whole town turned out,” his father added. “The high school band played, and the mayor gave a speech.”
“How wonderful.”
His mother grew teary-eyed. “Yes. It was.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re exhausted,” I said. “I didn’t travel nearly as far as you, and I’m about to drop.”
“Yes, we’d better get you both home,” my father said.
“You two young people can catch up tomorrow,” my mother said.
“Yes, indeed,” Charlie’s father echoed.
I rode home with my parents. Mother talked the whole time, telling me how Charlie had taken shrapnel from a grenade, how brave he’d been, how they’d feared he would die, how his mother had been beside herself.
“It’s just so wonderful to have you both back home! Didn’t I tell you Charlie was anxious to see you? As poorly as he felt, nothing would do but that he come to the bus station to see you the moment you got here.”
Words built inside me like steam in a kettle, until they fairly burst out of my mouth. “Mother—I tried to tell you on the phone. I met someone. A pilot. And . . . he’s asked me to marry him. And I said yes.”
“What?” My parents spoke simultaneously. Mother twisted around the front car seat and stared at me, her jaw slack. “No!”
“Yes. I’m engaged.”
She looked at my hand, obviously noting the lack of a ring. “You are no such thing.” She whipped back around to face my father. “Tell her, Robert. This man hasn’t asked for her hand or even met us. She is not engaged.”
My father glanced at my mother, then looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Adelaide, your mother’s right. He hasn’t done any of the things one does to make it official.”
“There’s a war on, for heaven’s sake! He’s on his way to the Pacific. The rules can’t be followed to the letter during a war. He’s writing you, Daddy. He told me he was going to write you and ask for my hand.”
“We haven’t received any such letter,” Mother said. Before I could tell her that there hadn’t been time, she demanded, “Where did you meet this man?”
“At the USO.”
“How long have you known him?” Father asked.
I hated to say, because I knew how it would sound. “A while.”
“How long a while?” Mother pressed.
“Long enough to know I love him.”
“How long is that in calendar terms?” my father queried.
I drew in a steadying breath. “About two weeks.”
“Two weeks! Did you hear that, Robert? Two weeks.” My mother leaned back in her seat, as if it were all settled. “You can’t possibly be telling us that you know this man well enough to want to marry him in that length of time.”
“But I am telling you that. I love him.”
“Love.” She said the word as if I were either too big of an idiot to know anything about it, or as if the very concept itself were ludicrous. “I refuse to listen to this nonsense. And I forbid you to say anything about this to anyone while you’re here.”
“Mother!”
“You listen to me, young lady. You are not going to break the heart of a man who’s known you his whole life and who loves you to pieces and who just returned from the war with a missing limb. Why, he nearly died, defending our freedom!”
I wanted to say that a few toes didn’t qualify as a limb, but I didn’t. “Mother, I don’t want to hurt Charlie. But I don’t want to get his hopes up, either.”
“You don’t have to do either, Adelaide. Just be nice to him. Just act like you used to when you were dating. I venture to say that after you’re around him again, you’ll realize you still have feelings for him.”
“Mother, we broke up before he left.”
“Nonsense. You’ve been writing to him.”
“I’ve been writing to several soldiers. I send them all the same letter.”
“Adelaide LeDoux.” My mother’s voice was shocked and disapproving. “I raised you better than that.”
“Better than what? I haven’t done anything wrong.” A hot flare of anger shot through me. “There was nothing of a romantic nature in those letters. I’ve told you and told you. I don’t love Charlie.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter right now. He loves you, and this is not the time to break his heart. You need to do everything you can to make him happy.”
What about my heart? I wanted to say. Don’t I have a right to be happy, too? But I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut. Arguing with my mother was futile.
When we arrived at the house, I went up to my childhood bedroom and crawled into the bed where I’d slept since I’d outgrown my crib, feeling just as helpless and under her thumb as I had back then.
· · ·
By the time I got up for breakfast, Charlie had already called, and our mothers had made plans for our day.
“I’ll pack a picnic lunch,” my mother said. “You can drive his father’s car, and you two can have a lovely day down by the river. Just be back by four. The town is throwing a potluck celebration at the Baptist church at five thirty, and you want to have time to dress for it.”
Which is how we ended up driving to the country, out to the Atchafalaya River.
As we left town, Charlie put his hand on my neck, playing with my hair.
I told him it interfered with my ability to concentrate on my driving, and he’d chuckled, as if it pleased him.
He kept his hands to himself, though—and when we got out of the car, his crutches and the fact I was carrying the picnic basket and blanket kept him from trying to hold my hand.
I tried to deflect every romantic thing he uttered.
“I can’t tell you how much I missed you,” he said.
“I’m sure you missed everyone and everything about home.”
“Oh, yeah. But you most of all.”
“Tell me all about life in the army.”
He did. I spread a blanket on the riverbank, and he talked and talked, telling me about maneuvers and battles and the personalities of his fellow soldiers.
The tight guardedness in my chest eased.
This was Charlie, my lifelong friend. He’d been through hell and back, and my heart ached as he talked about the cruel, ugly, unremitting horror of the war.
“How did you get injured?” I knew the general story, but I hadn’t heard the specifics.
He lay back on the blanket and draped his arm over his eyes.
“We were in a trench, under heavy fire. I was sick with dysentery. All of a sudden, a grenade landed at my feet. Like most of the others, I scrambled to get away. But there was one soldier . . .” Charlie’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
“His name was Albert, and he was from upstate New York. He came from money, big money, and he’d enlisted against his family’s wishes.
He kept to himself all the time. He wouldn’t drink cheap hooch or cut up or joke around with the rest of us.
I figured him for a snob—you know the kind, the type who thought he was too good for us.
But Albert . . . well, damned if he didn’t throw himself on that grenade. ”
Charlie’s face was still covered by his arm, but I saw a tear trickle down his cheek. My chest felt both floppy and tight at the same time.
“Truth is, he saved our lives. Mine, and three other guys who got hurt. My leg—well, it was covered with parts of Albert, as well as dirt and metal.”
My hand flew to my mouth. “Oh, Charlie!”
He sat up and turned away, not wanting me to see him cry.
For some reason this touched me more than the tears themselves.
I watched him wipe his face with his fists, the same way he’d done when he fell off his bike in his front yard when he was seven, and my eyes grew wet, as well.
I scooted toward him and put my hand on his arm.
“I relive it in my mind over and over,” he said.
“I hear the thud of the grenade landing. I can hear John Ansom scream, ‘Live grenade!’ I remember feeling kind of frozen for a second, not sure what to do.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of his free arm and gazed at the river.
“The whole time I was in the hospital, I wondered why Albert had done it. Why didn’t he just run, too? ”
His throat worked and he drew a ragged breath. “There’s something else, I wonder, too. Something I can’t stop thinking about.” He closed his eyes for a long moment. “Why didn’t I throw myself on it?”
“You can’t think like that, Charlie.”
“Why not? I was closer to it than Albert. He had to kind of shove me out of the way—out of harm’s way.” His throat moved again. “He had courage, and I didn’t.”
“You had plenty of courage, just being over there.”
“That’s not how it feels. And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve struggled with it. Still do. And I hate everyone treating me like a hero, when the truth is, I’m a damned coward.”