“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” Sybil said meekly, but she knew that she had embarrassed her and hurt her pride more than anything. And it had been no easy task getting her arms around the corpulent woman.
“You didn’t. But you can’t trust those Germans. Leave it to them to come up with such a barbaric remedy for choking. Quite dreadful, I assure you.” She left the room on her brother’s arm then, and disappeared even faster than usual. As Sybil walked up the stairs that night, she thought about how tragic it was that she could save an old woman from dying who was already dead, but she couldn’t save a twenty-three-year-old boy they all loved from going to war and being killed there. It truly wasn’t fair, and Augusta Campbell might have recovered from choking another way, but Sybil couldn’t take the chance. But she was sure that somewhere, though she would never have admitted it, Gwyneth’s mother was grateful. Blake teased Sybil about it later when she climbed into bed.
“Tried to kill the old lady at dinner tonight, did you?” She laughed in answer, remembering Augusta’s look of indignation once Sybil had saved her. “Don’t forget, my darling, that no good deed goes unpunished, even with ghosts.” He laughed at her again, while Sybil tried not to think of Josiah. She’d been worrying about him all night, and already missed him. She hoped they would see him again soon. In the meantime, at least she’d saved Augusta’s life, whether she appreciated it or not. The children needed a grandmother, after all, and she was the only one they had, even if she was a ghost, and a cantankerous one at that.
Chapter 8
The whole family was subdued after Josiah left in April. The newspaper reports about the war suddenly had deeper meaning. Sybil found herself reading about the First World War online, so she would know more about it. The casualty reports and the nature of the casualties were grim. Mustard gas and poison gases of various kinds were released on the soldiers. The conditions in the trenches were ghastly. Sybil couldn’t bear the thought of Josiah going through that once he went to Europe, and neither could Gwyneth. Sybil had to remind herself again and again that in real time, Josiah had been dead for a hundred years. But in Gwyneth and Bert’s world, it hadn’t happened yet, and Sybil dreaded when it would, and what it would do to them.
The first Battle of the Somme had ravaged the Allied troops the year before in 1916, and the fighting was still continuing. It hadn’t ended yet. And what Sybil read had happened in 1917 was even worse. She tried to keep positive around Gwyneth, but she knew that it was all her friend could think of, and Sybil was grateful they both had Magnus and Charlie to cheer them up, and their daughters to keep them busy. Caroline missed Josiah too, and a few weeks after he left, she met a new boy at school, which Sybil thought might be a good thing. He was a senior and captain of the basketball team, a tall, handsome boy who was crazy about her and she liked him. She knew that Caroline would be shaken by what happened to Josiah. And it was better for her to dive into the real world for now, like a normal high school girl.
Caroline mentioned her new beau one night to Bettina at dinner, who warned her not to get involved with anyone, because he would be going to war soon. And Caro gently reminded her that he would be going to college like Andy, not to war.
Angus told Andy that he had best forget the University of Edinburgh, if he got in. It would be too hard to get to Europe, it was a dangerous time to be there, and he might get torpedoed on the way over. Andy politely didn’t comment, since most of the time Angus forgot that they lived in two different centuries. He kept telling Andy that he’d be going to war soon, and if he wasn’t drafted before he graduated in June, he’d have to enlist then, if he was even able to finish. Andy would nod and play with Rupert, who spent mealtimes either snoring loudly at his master’s feet or waiting for something to fall from the table. Magnus and Charlie fed him scraps whenever they could, and Rupert would bark at them when they didn’t and give them away, while the boys feigned innocence and insisted they hadn’t given him anything.
Andy provided the families with good news for a change. He got into the University of Edinburgh, and so did his two friends, and he was thrilled. They celebrated him at dinner, despite Angus’s warnings that he’d be drafted instead. Both families were delighted for him. But it was bittersweet for Sybil. She hated the thought of her firstborn leaving in the fall, but it was inevitable. She didn’t dare complain to Gwyneth, who was worrying about Josiah night and day.
Magnus and Charlie had been less adventuresome since their escapade with the secret passage, and Charlie reported to his mother that Magnus had gotten really good at videogames. He was almost as adept as Charlie, and had a real knack for it, just as his mother had learned to use Sybil’s computer with impressive skill. It was a dimension that neither of them could have dreamed of. Bert scolded Gwyneth when she hung around Sybil while she was working. She still talked longingly about having a job, which both her mother and husband told her wasn’t appropriate for her.
“I don’t see why not,” Gwyneth answered petulantly. “If Sybil can work, why can’t I?” She sounded more like one of her daughters than herself.
“Ladies do not work,” Augusta had told her in no uncertain terms. “The next thing you know, you’ll want to be wearing one of Caroline’s indecently short skirts. That’s for them,” she said, glancing at the Gregorys. “Not for us.” She liked them, and had accepted “the new family” as she called them, in their midst, but the same rules did not apply. And she had warned Sybil several times that if she ever choked at dinner again, not to leap on her with that German attack method to try to save her. She claimed that Sybil had nearly killed her, and said she was sure it was being used by the enemy in the war.
“She was trying to help you, Mother,” Gwyneth reminded her, but Augusta was not convinced.
During the weeks after Josiah left, Sybil noticed that Bettina was unusually quiet, and hardly ever spoke. Her brother was two years older, and they were very close. Bettina was twenty-one and didn’t have a beau. When Sybil had asked Gwyneth about it one afternoon in her office, while Gwyneth painted on her computer, she sighed and said it was a long story. Bettina was a beautiful girl, and from the moment war had been declared, she had severely withdrawn, and barely spoke to any of them. She had taken to going on long walks alone, and writing letters for hours in the garden. She seemed desperately unhappy.
“She fell in love with a boy two years ago, when we went to Lake Tahoe. He was a nice boy her age. He seemed very bright, and he was very taken with her, but he was entirely unsuitable. She had just come out the year before, and we presented her to a number of young men she refused. After a month at Lake Tahoe, she had her heart set on this boy. Bert was very upset about it, and he talked to the boy’s father and told him that his advances weren’t welcome. He completely understood, and I don’t think they liked the idea either,” Gwyneth said unhappily.
“What made him unsuitable?” Sybil was curious about it.
“It was quite impossible. Tradesman. The family is Italian, and they had a fish restaurant somewhere. The parents barely spoke English,” she said in her soft Scottish burr. It was the first time that Sybil had heard her sound snobbish, but she was very definite about it. There were rules and standards that they lived by, and they expected their daughter to do the same, and the son of an Italian immigrant restaurant owner was unthinkable for one of their daughters, even if the business was successful. “My mother would have had a fit if she’d known,” Gwyneth added. “His parents found the match as undesirable as we did, they had a girl picked out for him in Italy, which he was resisting. He had very modern ideas, and had no interest in working at the restaurant. He wanted to go to university. He was a bit of a revolutionary, and I think they blamed Bettina for his refusing the marriage they’d planned for him. After Bert spoke to the boy’s father, he forbid Bettina to see him again.”
“And did she anyway?” Sybil was intrigued. There was nothing about him that she could remember in the book Bettina had written many years later. She hadn’
t mentioned the incident at all.
“I don’t think so,” Gwyneth said quietly, “but she was very angry at us for about a year. Bettina can hold a grudge for a long time.” It was a side of her Sybil had never seen. She had always seemed very docile and adaptable, and very proper. “She hasn’t been interested in anyone else since. And we don’t want her to be a spinster. It will be even more difficult now with a war on. All the young men will go away. She should be married by now. Bert and I were married when I was eighteen. She’s already a bit late.” It was interesting to hear Gwyneth’s views on the subject. She firmly believed in all the old rules, and so did Bert, no matter how open-minded they were with their new friends. But that was different, they all agreed.
“She seems very unhappy these days,” Sybil commented, and her mother had seen it too.
“I think she’s upset about Josiah. We all are. And they’re very close.”
A few days later, Sybil was up early and saw Bettina downstairs just before she slipped out the door of the house in a light blue dress and a navy blue coat, with a small elegant hat and a heavy veil concealing her face. She looked suddenly very grown up, and Sybil had an eerie sense that something important was happening that her family didn’t know about. She picked up Bettina’s book later that morning and combed it for answers. In the chapter on Josiah leaving to go to war, she saw a few lines and guessed what they meant and what she might be doing. Sybil had no way of warning Bettina’s parents, and it was too late to follow her. Bettina didn’t appear at dinner that night, and a note was hand-delivered to Bert halfway through the meal, which Phillips handed to him at the table. Bert apologized, read it with a grave expression, and handed it to Gwyneth, who looked at him with tears in her eyes as soon as she’d read it too.
“Is everything all right?” Sybil asked her, and touched her hand, fearing it was about Josiah, and Gwyneth dabbed at her eyes as she answered.
“I never thought she’d do something like this. She’s so incredibly foolish. It’s Bettina,” she said, as tears ran down her cheeks. “She must have seen that boy again. The Italian.”
“Is the letter from him?” Sybil asked her, remembering Bettina’s book. It said that her parents had prevented her from marrying the boy she was in love with. They had waited two years and got married when war was declared, before he shipped out.
“It’s from Bettina.” Gwyneth spoke in a whisper. “She married him this afternoon at city hall. He’s shipping out tomorrow, to New York, and then to Europe. She said she’ll be back after he leaves. How could she do this?” Gwyneth choked on a sob. “We tried to reason with her, and now look what she’s done. They’re married.” Augusta was watching them intently, and Bert had just explained it to Blake. Bert looked livid, and Blake felt sorry for him. He was more stoic than his wife, but looked near tears too. Bettina had upset them severely.
Sybil didn’t have the heart to tell her that fate was going to take the upper hand here, just as it would with Josiah. Gwyneth excused herself shortly after, and left the table in tears. She couldn’t bear it any longer, and wanted to lie down. Bert continued to be a gracious host until they left one another at the end of the evening, and Sybil and Blake talked about it that night and worried about them. Having their daughter marry someone unsuitable was a tragedy to them.
Bettina was back the next day, red-eyed and heartbroken after seeing her new husband off at the train in Oakland. She had taken a ferryboat back to the city and still looked windblown at dinner. Her grandmother was furious at her, having heard the whole story by then. Bettina was belligerent, and Bert was unusually silent at dinner, after a stern discussion with his daughter when she got home about how dishonorably she had behaved, sneaking off like a thief and marrying a boy she knew they disapproved of. “And will you work at the fish restaurant with him?”
“He doesn’t work at the restaurant, Father. He’s studying to be a lawyer. He’ll finish his studies after the war.” Bert was still not pleased and cast somber glances at her all through dinner. He had threatened to have the marriage annulled, and she had sworn she’d run away if he did, and live with her in-laws. He believed her, so he agreed to let the marriage stand, under the circumstances. She had spent the night with her husband at a hotel, after their wedding at city hall. She was desperately in love. And her father said he just hoped there would be no issue from it, and that she’d regain her senses when he returned and she saw how different their lives were. Bettina was the most stubborn of his children. Bert was not in a good mood at dinner, until he and Blake talked for a while and he calmed down. The two men agreed that no one could drive you as crazy as your children. Gwyneth still looked upset and shaken, and Bert was cool and disapproving with Bettina for many weeks.
Bettina’s elopement was the main topic of conversation in the family for the entire month, all through May. They reported it to Josiah, and he wrote to his sister and told her she’d been very foolish and upset their parents deeply, and however nice the young man was—and he’d met him in Tahoe too—she would be miserable in the life he’d been born to, which was so different from hers.
Even Magnus and Charlie talked about it when they played in the garden, and Magnus told him his big sister was in trouble for marrying a fish merchant or something like that.
“Sounds smelly to me,” Charlie commented, and Magnus agreed. “Why would she want to marry a man like that?”
“Just stupid, I guess,” Magnus responded, and then they forgot about it. But the families’ dinners together were tense for weeks, as they all worried about Josiah, after he wrote them that he was shipping out. He couldn’t tell them where he was being sent, but obviously to the front somewhere, where he would receive more combat training. Tony Salvatore, Bettina’s husband, left shortly after, and she was still in disgrace with her parents. Bert hadn’t forgiven her yet, although her mother had. Gwyneth couldn’t stay angry at any of her children for long, no matter how grievous the offense. Bettina’s marriage to a man they disapproved of was the worst thing any of them had ever done.
Bettina had gone to visit Tony’s parents at the restaurant, to do the proper thing after their rapid, stealthy marriage, and she was disappointed that they were upset and angry too. As far as they were concerned, he had a fiancée in Italy he had jilted. It had been arranged through their cousins, and the young Italian woman was supposedly a hardworking girl who would have been helpful to them, and it was obvious that Bettina was much too fancy to ever work in the restaurant. They were cold and unfriendly and barely spoke to her, and she had left in tears. They had made it clear to her that they had no intention of supporting her or helping her in their son’s absence if that was why she had come to visit them, which it wasn’t. They told her to stay with her own family and not come asking them for money, and if there was a baby on the way, they said they didn’t want to know about it. They informed her that she and Tony were on their own, and that his family had enough mouths to feed. The smell of fish at the restaurant had been awful, and she felt sick when she got home and didn’t even come to dinner. She told her mother where she’d been and how nasty Tony’s parents had been. It was a harsh lesson to her for doing something so impulsive. Neither side was willing to approve the marriage or support it.
—
In June, Andy went to New York to graduate with his class, and the whole Gregory family went with him. Blake flew back to San Francisco after the ceremony to work, but the rest of the family spent a week in their apartment. The kids saw their friends, while Sybil spent several days working at the Brooklyn Museum.
A week after graduation, they returned to San Francisco. Dinners with the Butterfields were quiet and tense, as the reports of the war continued to get worse in the Butterfields’ time frame. Andy spent time with Lucy to cheer her up, but she was worried about Josiah too. They all were.
In July, Bettina realized that she was three months pregnant, which upset her parents even more. The baby was due in early January, and she hadn’t heard from
Tony since he’d shipped out, so she couldn’t write to tell him. She was so violently sick that she vomited all the time, and stopped coming to dinner. She couldn’t bear the smell of food, and Gwyneth said she was living on toast and weak tea. She was so ill that Gwyneth felt sorry for her, and Bert was even more upset that a child would result from her foolish, headstrong behavior. She didn’t contact Tony’s family to tell them, since they had been so unfriendly toward her the first time, and had made it very clear that they wanted nothing to do with them or a baby. It was a heavy dose of reality for her. She had no idea what she’d do with a child. The whole thing seemed a great deal less romantic to her now, although she had been so in love with Tony after they met in Tahoe, and on the day they got married. No one had warned her she could get this sick if she got pregnant. She didn’t know enough to take precautions on the one night they’d spent together, and he had been so anxious to go to bed with her that he had done nothing about it either. And now she was paying for her foolishness. Lucy was ill that summer too, and Andy spent hours keeping her company. He was going to miss her when he left for university.
In early August, disaster struck, and they received the telegram telling them that Josiah had been killed in France by a mine, when his unit had offered auxiliary support to British troops. Sybil found a black wreath on the door when she got home from taking Charlie to swim club, and her heart nearly stopped when she saw it and guessed what it meant. The house was in deep mourning for weeks afterward, and Blake and Sybil postponed their vacation in the Hamptons, in order to stay in San Francisco and support Bert and Gwyneth in their grief.
“Is this crazy?” Blake asked Sybil when they made the decision not to go east. “He’s been dead for a century, and we met him as a ghost. Should we be canceling our kids’ vacation for him?”
“They’re our friends, Blake,” Sybil said quietly. “I’d feel terrible leaving them.”
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