26. 1960
In the end, Catherine couldn’t do it.
She tried to give William McBride what remained of her heart, she really did. She accepted the ring he offered her, a tight band of gold that she had to wear on her pinkie finger thanks to the swelling that seemed to be taking over her body. She planned a discreet wedding with her mother, the two of them poring over magazines to find the best silhouette for hiding a rounded and rapidly growing belly.
She also got to know her betrothed in the time-honored way of overprotected girls everywhere: she sat and chatted politely with him in her parents’ living room. The pair of them were always seated in opposite wingback chairs, her mother and father out of sight in the kitchen. She and William couldn’t see them making cocoa and anxiously stirring their spoons back and forth, but they could hear them just fine.
In fact, she suspected that if her parents had owned one of those old Victorian courting chairs where the couple sat next to each other but was restricted by a wooden barrier that kept decorum at front and center, she and William would have been tied to it.
The whole thing was hilarious, when you thought about it. What did they expect would happen if the two of them were left alone together? That she’d get more pregnant?
“Your father found me a great post in Moriarty,” William said as he sat with his own cup of cocoa. A dab of it sat on his lower lip, a blob of sugary-sweet chocolate like a mole that was slowly creeping down his chin. Catherine was trying not to stare, but she couldn’t help herself.
Couldn’t he feel it? Couldn’t he feel anything?
He grinned, and the blob continued on its downward path. “It’s not the most glamorous location, and your mother is afraid the heat of New Mexico might be unbearable as you reach your time, but we’ll be able to start fresh, just the two of us. Or three, I guess I should say.”
He said this as though he was genuinely happy about the whole thing—a shotgun wedding where he’d fired no bullets, the prospect of raising a child that wasn’t his own.
“Moriarty,” she echoed. She even managed a smile. “‘The spider at the center of the web.’”
With a name like that, how bad could the town possibly be? Granted, she’d looked up the population and found it to be a painfully small seven hundred residents, and she was pretty sure the only thing people did for fun around there was paint scenic backdrops of the surrounding desert, but she’d be busy anyway.
Raising this child. Loving this child.
William McBride blinked. “Spider?” he asked. “What spider?”
“The Sherlock stories?” Catherine prompted. “Moriarty? Professor of mathematics? Master of crime?”
“Oh. You’re talking about books.”
Catherine tried not to let her sudden wash of depression show. She might have even managed it, if William hadn’t suddenly brightened and pulled out a flat rectangular gift and handed it to her.
“Speaking of, I got you this. I know how much you love to read.”
Something almost like a flicker of hope touched her as she slipped the ribbon off and eagerly tore in, but it was a short-lived sentiment. As soon as she saw the blue dust jacket, she knew she was done for.
“America’s Housekeeping Book,” she said flatly.
If he noticed the sudden plummet of her spirits, he didn’t let it show. Instead, he scooted his chair forward, the legs scraping across her mother’s carefully waxed hardwood floor. “Since I’ll have a higher position at this new post, we’ll have to do a lot of entertaining. I’m sure the other officers’ wives will be able to pitch in, but this should give you a good solid start.”
She let the book sit heavily in her lap, its weight pressing down on her spirits much more than the baby that was starting to show flutterings of life low in her belly.
“Of course, we’ll have to live in base housing for a little while, just until we get settled in, but it’s never too early to start learning.” He flashed his many teeth. “There’s a whole chapter in there about getting rid of spots in the laundry. It even has an alphabetical table for stain removal. Can you imagine? All there in one little book.”
That was when she ended it. She wished she could have said that she did it with kindness and dignity, that she let William McBride down with the respect he deserved, but it would have been a lie. She stood up so fast that the book fell to the floor with a thud, the pages falling open to something that looked an awful lot like a diagram of a formal place setting.
William jumped with her, ready to come to her aid, but she flung up a hand to stop him.
“No, don’t,” she cried. “I can’t. We can’t. I’m sorry.”
Her parents came running into the room then, drawn by the sounds of the book falling and the sudden wailing of tears that Catherine could no longer keep back. To their credit, their first instinct was to rush to her aid, but they stopped when they saw her tugging the ring from her finger.
“Catherine, don’t be hasty,” her mother pleaded.
“Catherine, you need to go to your room and calm down right this instant,” her father ordered.
“I don’t understand,” William said, his glance moving over the inhabitants of the room. The chocolate on his lip finally gave up and fell to the floor, where it landed on the fluttering pages of the housekeeping book. “What’s going on?”
Catherine could hear her parents getting ready to intercede, so she forestalled them by holding the ring out in one shaking hand.
“What’s going on is that I’m giving you your ring and your promise back,” she said. Her voice shook, too, but she had no other choice. She could no more marry William McBride and shackle herself to the same dreary life her mother led than she could marry Jasper Holmes and shackle him to a lifetime of self-blame and regret.
Because that was what it would be for Jasper. She knew it just as much as she knew that the Catherine in A Farewell to Arms had to die in order for Hemingway’s stupid book to have any value. She hated the ending to that book, hated it with a passion she usually reserved for small-minded men living in even smaller-minded worlds, but there it was. If the Catherine in that book had lived—and her child lived with her—then what was the moral? That life could be simple and easy and still worth living? That a man’s story didn’t have to end when he gave up everything for the sake of an unwanted child?
Catherine had read enough books to know that a happily ever after like that wasn’t really possible. Not for people like her, and definitely not for people like Jasper.
“I’m sorry, William,” she said, and meant it. “I wish I could be the wife you deserve, but I’m not. And no matter how hard I might try or pretend otherwise, I never will be.”
“Catherine Winifred Martin—” her father began, but Catherine only shook her head and pressed the ring firmly into William’s hand.
“You’re a good person,” she said as she squeezed her fingers against his. “And I have no doubt that you’ll make some other officer’s daughter a wonderful husband. But I don’t want to be married to anyone right now. Possibly ever.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you got yourself in trouble with—” her father began again, but this time, it was her mother who stepped up to intervene.
“Perhaps it’s best if you walk Lieutenant McBride out, dear,” her mother suggested to her husband. She did it in her deceptively sweet way—the way that used to get Catherine’s back up, but that now only made her feel sad. Her mom had so much more to offer the world than a clean house and a nicely browned pot roast. In another lifetime, she could have been leading a military installation of her own. “We’ll sort through all the details later.”
The phrase sounded vaguely threatening, but the moment Catherine caught sight of her mother’s expression, she knew it would be okay. Her mom might be angry and would probably try to send Catherine away to a convent for the rest of her life, but she’d never force her down the aisle and into the arms of a man she didn’t love.
“Let’s talk about this, please,” William said. His plea was directed more to her father than to Catherine, which nettled her, but his second plea was even wider off its mark. “Mrs. Martin, you can’t let her do this. People are already talking. You know what they’ll say if this engagement falls through.”
“I don’t let my daughter do anything,” her mom replied, still teetering on that soft, unassuming razor’s edge. “And if you think she can be controlled by anything as trivial as small-town gossip, then you have no idea who she is—or what she’s capable of.”
Her father, sensing defeat, quickly ushered William out of the living room. “Come along, Lieutenant McBride.”
“But my future, sir. The posting—”
As they disappeared out of view, Catherine thought she heard her father’s reassuring voice promising William that Moriarty was still very much in his future, should he wish for it.
Even though she knew her father was dangling the New Mexico posting as a bribe for William’s silence and capitulation, she was genuinely happy for him. Once there, he’d probably fall deep in admiration for another officer’s daughter—this time, with one who could see the value in his too-bright smile and even brighter military ambitions. For all she knew, he might even end up loving her.
A wave of relief moved over her at the thought. She sank back in her seat, ignoring the fallen copy of the housewifery book, and settled her hands on the gentle swell of her stomach. Since her father showed no signs of returning, she might have relaxed even further, but her mother’s voice stopped her short.
“Please tell me you aren’t going to marry that woodsman of yours,” she said.
“Mom, you make it sound like he’s the hunter in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ or something. He’s not a woodsman. He’s a logger. Lots of men around here are loggers.”
“I know. That’s what I’m afraid of.” Her mother scooped up the book and tucked it away out of Catherine’s line of sight. “It’s a hard life, honey, even for those who were born to it. Haven’t you seen the way it ages them?”
Catherine nodded. She’d seen it, all right—of course she had. Wasn’t she the one who’d guessed Jasper’s age to be a decade more than it actually was? Nowhere in that strong, gruff man was there anything that smacked of a nineteen-year-old dreamer. At least, not until she lay in the circle of his arms, cherished and protected in ways she’d never known were possible. Only then, when he spoke of the books he’d read and the things he yearned for, of the life that had been cruel to him since the day he’d been born, had she understood the truth.
He was a romantic. Possibly the most romantic person she’d ever known. His feet were planted on solid ground, but his heart roamed free.
And if she had anything to say about it, that was where it would stay.
“I’m not going to marry Jasper,” Catherine said, her hands still on her stomach. “I can’t. It would destroy him.”
“Thank goodness for that,” her mom said, but with a sideways look that said she wasn’t fully convinced. “You’d have been worn down as much as him within the space of two years.”
Catherine didn’t point out that her decision had nothing to do with her and everything to do with Jasper and the life he was forced to lead. It had been wrong of her, but she’d gone down to city hall to pump information out of Samantha, the chatty blond who worked behind the counter. The girl had plenty to say on the subject of Jasper Holmes, who she’d upheld with starry eyes as a hero who sent half his paycheck home every week without complaint or regret.
“I just want to take that poor man home and feed him a good meal, you know?” Samantha had said with a shake of her pretty curls. “They don’t make very many of them like that anymore.”
It had been on the tip of Catherine’s tongue to retort that they didn’t make any like him, but she kept her thoughts to herself. She had to or risk breaking out in tears. The sad truth was, no future existed that could fit all the pieces of the puzzle: Jasper, his mother, his siblings, Catherine, the baby…and all the babies she felt sure would follow. Eventually, he’d be forced to choose between them, and she had no doubt that he’d choose her.
And that, she knew, would kill him. Not at first, and not in any quantifiable way, but by the thousand proverbial cuts. Catherine might have enjoyed that kind of spectacle in the pages of a horror novel, but there was no way she’d stand by and watch a man like Jasper suffer.
So it was with a sob lodged deep in her throat that she spoke now.
“I’m not going to marry Jasper,” Catherine repeated, hoping the more she said the words, the more she’d grow accustomed to them. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Why do I sense a but coming…?”
Catherine managed a weak smile. “Because he won’t let me go easily. Not once he knows I’ve given William the slip. He’ll move heaven and earth and probably a little bit of hell to find a way to keep me.”
Her mother straightened her posture in a way that Catherine knew, feared, and admired most of all.
“I’d like to see him try and force you to do anything against your will,” her mother said tartly. “I don’t care if he did throw that check away instead of cashing it. We might be backed in a corner right now, but there’s still some fight left in us.”
Catherine dashed her arm out and grabbed her mother’s hand. Her mom looked surprised at the sudden demonstration of affection, but she didn’t pull away.
“Thank you, Mom, but that won’t be necessary. I already have an idea. I know of a way to get me and the baby somewhere we can be reasonably happy, but you aren’t going to like it.”
“I don’t like any of it, dear. That’s not the point.”
Catherine knew it wasn’t. But if her mom had any idea what she was about to propose, she wouldn’t be acting so cavalier.
“Then here goes.” Catherine took a deep, fortifying breath that didn’t fortify her at all. “We need to make Jasper believe I died in childbirth.”
Her mother’s hand jerked in hers. “Catherine, you don’t mean that!”
But she did—with all her heart, she did. The idea was cruel and catastrophic and final. It was also the only way she could think of to save him.
“I know him, and I know what kind of books he reads, so you have to believe me when I say this. If I don’t marry William McBride, death is the only other ending Jasper will heed.”
She drew a determined breath and prepared to lay out her plans. Hemingway said it best, but he didn’t say it first and he certainly wouldn’t say it last.
Life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.