“I’m going to bed,” he tells Peggy now, setting his bottle in the empties bin for return to the store.
Peggy gets up and reaches out for him.
“Come here, kid,” she says.
He comes over with a shrug and she throws her arms around his waist, which is as high as she can reach. He hears the clock ticking above the door, crickets out on the grass. The gunk she squirts on her curlers smells like maple syrup.
“I love you, you know that, right?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says. “I know, Peg.”
“I just want you to be happy, that’s all.”
“I am happy,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Never lie to your sister. It’s bad policy.”
“Okay, boss.” He kisses her once on each cheek, then trudges down the stairs, lightened by the beer, darkened by his sister’s disappointment in him. Maybe she’s right: He can’t help feeling bleak as he looks around at the concrete floor, the low ceiling. When he came back from the war, he often thought of suicide. He could taste the poisonous tang of the gun oil, feel the cool metal of his service revolver slipped between his lips. Now he’s thirty-one years old and living in a basement. A different kind of suicide. Not one piece of furniture down here hasn’t been hard used and discarded—just like him. Stripping off his clothes, he lies in his bed, stiff, uneasy, and alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rosalind scouts the closet for a dress, curls her lashes, reapplies her lipstick. Watching herself primp for Weaver makes her feel ashamed. But it’s been four years since they’ve seen each other, and she wants him to find her irresistible. She wants him to explain and apologize until he bleeds. And then she plans to detonate his heart as he did hers.
By the time the buzzer sounds, it’s twenty past eight. Arrogant people are always late. She lifts the intercom receiver. Frank, the doorman, his voice high and uncomfortable, says, “It’s . . . Mr. Weaver. You . . . uh . . . Miss Porter, you want I should let him up?” Frank’s been guarding this building as long as she’s lived here. He used to see Weaver come home with her nearly every night. Frank and Weaver had roaring discussions about the Cubs and the White Sox—Weaver’s newfound American passion. “You marry him soon, you hear?” Frank said. “A girl like you should be married.” And then the bombs were dropped on Japan.
She knew she was supposed to hate the Japanese. She’d heard their soldiers were cruel. And that the country was ruthless and power hungry. Still, the Manhattan Project’s darling vaporized nursing mothers, little girls cradling dolls, old women pouring tea, men too ancient to fight. It sucked their houses into winds of flame, shattered their hospitals and schools. It dropped an entire town into the sun and the Americans laughed while it burned. And then they chose another town and did the same. More than one hundred thousand dreams burned in a conflagration too hot to yield smoke. Fifty thousand died later of injuries. That’s when, consumed with guilt, she shut Weaver out.
“This will pass,” he told her when she flinched at his touch.
“Will it?”
“I’m here. And I plan to wait until you feel better.” His words touched her. And in time, she did feel herself healing, easing closer to him, rediscovering their passion. Then, one evening after work, on the sidewalk outside Eckhart Hall, Weaver told her that he was breaking it off. It was over. There was someone else. No lead-up. No explanation. Frank had to help her up to her apartment that night after she’d sleepwalked to a bar and come home too drunk to walk straight.
“The man’s a rat,” Frank told her. “You’re better off without him. But drinking won’t make it better, Miss Porter.” She doesn’t remember much about that night. But she does remember Frank taking her up in the elevator, settling her on the sofa, filling a glass with water, and instructing her, “Drink the whole thing down or you’ll have a screeching headache in the morning.”
Now the doorman asks again in a whisper, “You sure you want to see him, miss?”
“Let him up, Frank.”
“Okay . . .” She can almost hear him shrugging.
Peering into the mirror by the door, she worries how Weaver will view her. But when she opens the door, she’s the one who’s moved. The man standing in front of her has aged radically. Nine years older than she is, he’s thinner and his hair is turning silver about the ears. It gives him a wolflike quality. In the past, he exuded calm. Now there’s a surprising nervous energy. Yet, in his presence, God help her, she feels twice as alive.
“Hi, Duchess.”
“Weaver.”
“You look beautiful. I mean, extraordinarily beautiful. You’ve no idea how happy I am to see you.” He’s never been this effusive before. He always acted so reticent . . . so British.
“I bought the corniest one I could find,” he says, presenting her with a box of chocolates spiked all around with gold paper lace, the words “I Love You” impressed on top in red foil.
“Well, well,” she says dryly. Where did he find these four months after Valentine’s Day?
“I made sure there were maple creams.” Weaver is particularly wild about maple, something he’d never encountered until he reached America. She introduced him to maple syrup, maple sugar candy, maple creams . . . “Oh, and in here”—he holds up a brown bag—“cherries. I know you buy them every June.”
“I don’t want gifts,” she says.
Setting the cherries on the hall table, he comes to her. “Don’t push me away. You’ve no idea how I’ve missed you.” He reaches out to embrace her, but she ducks.
“Let me get you a drink,” she says. “Scotch and soda neat?”
“You remember.”
“There are a lot of things I remember.” She doesn’t say this in a friendly way.
Relieved to have a task, she wills herself not to look at him. Lifting the bottle of Scotch out of the bar cabinet, she realizes how precious it is: bottled prewar, dust coating its shoulders. Ancient history. While he was gone, Scotch reminded her too much of what she’d lost. She hasn’t tasted it since their last night together.
“I always liked this place,” he says. “In the morning especially when we’d wake to the sun coming up over the lake . . .”
His words make her throat ache, remind her of all those years they were so intimate they may as well have been married. They broke every rule she was raised by, and it never felt wrong. Sharing the sunrise, spending every day together in the lab, sitting across from each other at dinner, eating takeout. Sometimes they stopped just to hold hands. They made love on the bed, the floor, the sofa, in the bathtub, against the wall in the kitchen. After he left, she wondered again and again whether it was deeper than desire. It had been for her. But how could he have left so heedlessly? She pours a glass of Scotch for herself and forgoes the soda. God knows she needs it to face him. She takes two deep swigs before she comes to join him on the sofa.