“We’re asking reasonable questions,” Santangelo insisted.
“Not for me to answer.” He swaggered to the doorway. “But I will tell you this.”
They waited, and Cohen took his time.
“First, the name calling ends now, right now, or I will put you in the hospital, inquisition be damned. Second, if you all don’t finish those trajectories today, I won’t be the one who drops you out of a bomber.”
Cohen slammed the door behind him. The boys were quiet. Charlie ambled back to his desk. “Maybe . . . ,” he said eventually. “Maybe they’d do the run at night, so it would be safer to fly at eleven thousand.”
“Could it be like our version of a kamikaze?” asked the boy at the back. “Would we stoop that low?”
“This is war,” Santangelo answered. “There’s no such thing as low.”
5.
He was late, which in my book was not the way to impress a girl. It was Saturday night, I’d given him my home address, and we were going to grab a bite before seeing a picture. I was ready on time, maybe a bit early to be honest, but the kitchen clock cuckooed six times and there was no knock at the door. I flipped through a magazine, went to the john to check my teeth in the mirror, fortified my lipstick. I perched on the piano bench facing out, my leg jiggling.
“Brenda,” my mother said, smoking a cigarette at the dinner table. “For the love of Pete, will you relax?”
Easy for her to say, sitting pretty as if we were playing hearts and she’d just won the jack of diamonds. Yet I knew she was right. I wanted the interest of boys, it was important to my self-image, so I kept my makeup fresh and my dating calendar full. Jerks were rare, and despite the war—maybe even to spite it—life was a lark. There was plenty of time before I’d need to get serious. Till then any fella would do, so long as he behaved himself and was nice to my girlfriends.
But Charlie Fish? Deny it all I might, that boy gave me ants in my blood. Today I like to think I knew already that he was something special, but that would be rewriting history. I didn’t yet see the strength that was deep inside, waiting for its time. I also didn’t see the strength he would call forth in me, and how it would make my innocent years seem trivial as jigsaw puzzles.
At six thirty I went into the kitchen. Bad idea, because I couldn’t resist the bowl of pistachios my mother left on the table. I started cracking them open, popping one after another in my mouth without thinking. By the time Charlie arrived, I’d gobbled half the bowl, leaving me salt-mouthed and with a lump in my belly.
“Sorry I’m late,” I heard him tell my mother in the front room, while I poured a glass of water from the pitcher in the fridge. “With the snow dumping down like that, there were no cabs.”
I peered from the kitchen. My mother was crushing out her cigarette. “You walked from Ellis Avenue?”
“And Fifty-Ninth, yes, ma’am. They’re housing us in the university’s empty dorms.”
She rose from the table. “Well, let’s get you dried off.”
Just like that, my mother had found out where he lived, information I hadn’t been able to pry loose in ten Mondays of conversation. She raised her eyebrows at me as she bustled by.
“What?” I said to her. “What?”
“Hi, Brenda,” Charlie said. “Sorry I’m late. And soggy.”
His hair was soaked, the shoulders of his coat drooping. Appealing as a wet cat. “I didn’t know it was snowing,” I said, looking away so as not to embarrass him further.
My mother scurried back with two towels. “Charlie, how about we don’t let you catch a chill and ruin your evening?” She handed him one towel and used the other to rough up his hair.
“Thanks so much, Mrs. Dubie.” His voice was muffled by the towel.
“You can leave that coat here to dry while you’re out,” she continued. “I’ll lend you one of Frank’s.”
“Frank?”
My mother froze. “You don’t know about Frank?”
Charlie ducked out from under the towel. “Should I?”
“Of course you know about Frank,” I sang out, while my mother gave me a look made of daggers. “My brother in the service. Who is overseas now.”
“Of course,” Charlie said. He turned to my mother. “Of course.” He smiled, and it was so quick I wondered if he had winked at me. “Brenda has always called him Francis.”
My mother’s expression softened. “She has?”
“Out of respect, I guess,” Charlie said.
That was the first time I suspected he and I might make good coconspirators.
“Well,” my mother conceded, “I suppose that is more respectful.” Then she reverted to her busy self. “His coat won’t fit, but it’ll do till you get Brenda home—at a reasonable hour, by the way.”
“Which reminds me.” Charlie gave me a wink. “We ought to skedaddle if we don’t want to miss the newsreels.”
“You should.” My mother dug in the hall closet for Frank’s winter coat.
There’s no nice way to say it. Charlie looked ridiculous. The coat’s shoulders were so broad, its sleeves did not begin till almost his elbows. Which meant he had to roll them up, never a good look with the lining showing. Also it smelled a bit of mothballs. We had a quiet walk to the diner, snow falling in tiny flakes. My fingers were cold because I hadn’t been able to find my gloves from last winter. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, fingers curled over thumbs. In memory, I see us from a distance, strolling a snowy sidewalk without speaking, friendly as the one and ten bowling pins. At the diner, we slid into opposite sides of a booth and the awkward silence stretched longer.
Finally Charlie cleared his throat. “Would you like to tell me about Frank?”
I fidgeted with the pepper shaker. “My older brother. He enlisted two years ago.”
“You have a brother.” He folded his hands like a judge. “Funny how that never came up.”
“You haven’t exactly volunteered an encyclopedia about your family either.”
Charlie made that surprised face of his. Maybe he wasn’t used to a girl giving him backtalk. “I told you I’m from Boston. I have a younger brother and two sisters I’d gladly tell you about later. What’s Frank doing?”
“Running a motor pool in England. He could get bombed, but he’s not in battle.”
“I never realized before how many people in a war are not actually fighting.”
“But he’s still far from home, and my father is gone too. That’s what makes my mother such a wreck.”
“Your mother is a wreck? She seems fine to me.”
“Well, what would you know?”
Charlie looked surprised again. “That’s true. I barely know her.”
Why was I peevish? I don’t know. Maybe I thought it was like being coy. The chemistry I had with Charlie felt like the first time every winter that I went skating on Lake Michigan. The ice could be a foot thick, trucks out by the fishing shacks, my girlfriends already charging ahead. But for me those initial steps out onto the ice still felt dangerous. I might fall through. I might pass over the one weak spot in the entire frozen bay, and drown before anyone noticed. So, every year, I was peevish with my friends that first day, tentative. Then I was over it, skating as confidently as they did till March came and the thaws put our skates away till next year.