The Memory of Us: A Novel

by Camille Di Maio

We fell asleep just before dawn and woke up in the late morning. The sun had forced its way inside, inviting us to rediscover the world that was awaiting us. Kyle got out of bed first, and he pulled out a soft pink blouse and pleated white skirt for me to wear for the day. I looked at the clothes as if they were brand-new. While he made breakfast, I showered, feeling the water wash away the hurting inside me. He had thrown me a rope in that well, and as I climbed, I saw light in the distance. It was the beginning of feeling normal again.

  On a chilly March morning Kyle walked in with bags in his arms and frost on his cap. “I’ve come back from the market, Julianne,” he called. He set them down on the table and rubbed his hands together.

  “Did you bring the headache pills?”

  “Yes, and some chicken and carrots for dinner.”

  “Sounds grand. I’ll help.”

  “Nope,” he said, as he came and kissed me on the head. “I have another project for you.”

  I eyed him with suspicion. “You’ve got something up your sleeve, Kyle McCarthy.”

  “I do, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  “What kind of surprise is that?”

  “It’s not a surprise. It’s a task I have for you.”

  He came around to sit with me on the couch. “I brought you some writing paper. I want you to write to your mother.”

  “I’m sorry, did I lose my hearing these past few months? Did you say that you want me to write to my mother?”

  “Think about it, Jul.” He held my hand. “There will never be a better time to reconcile with her. Whatever you can say about her, she did bring you into the world, and you can see yourself now that it’s no easy task. You don’t have to tell her anything about the baby. But maybe you can find a few nice words to say. After all, Mothering Sunday is coming up next week.”

  I sat quietly for a moment. “I know you’re right. It’s one of the things that would have made you a great priest, Kyle. You won’t let anything stand in the way of family and forgiveness. But I just don’t have the words.”

  “I thought of that, too, just in case. Look.” He pulled a card and an envelope from the bag. Its lithographic print depicted a floral scene, and the interior had a benign message that could have been sent to nearly anyone. “Someone already wrote the words for you. You can just sign it, Love, Julianne, and I’ll post it for you.”

  “Love, Julianne? This is Beatrice Westcott we’re talking about.”

  “How about Affectionately, Julianne?”

  “How about Warmest regards?”

  “We have a winner! I’ll bring you a pen.”

  Kyle posted it as he’d promised, and I marveled once again at this man that I married. He had been dismissed, ignored by my parents. They had tried to bribe me out of my marriage to him. And still he sought to create a truce to our estrangement.

  For whatever it was worth, his plan worked. I received a birthday card from my parents signed by each of them and containing another ten-pound banknote. Kyle was not mentioned, of course, and my instinct was to consider it nothing more than another attempt to lure me home. As if they were showing how easily I could have all the things they thought I wanted. But I decided to follow Kyle’s lead and assume the best of them.

  As I continued to emerge from the fog and return to routine, I looked at everything with new eyes. I was not the same person that I was before, and I felt like a more grown-up version of myself. It was easier to be gay and lively when the realities of life hadn’t set in yet. In just a year, I had gone from a girl who pined over love, danced at every opportunity, and shopped at all the best stores, to a wife, a mother of a lost child, and a citizen of a country on the precipice of war. Leaflets prepared us for rationing, recruitment for air wardens had begun among civilians, and an engineer came to our building to assess its potential for a basement shelter. One had no choice but to grow up.

  Oddly, I didn’t miss my former self. She felt like a shell that was now being filled with memories and experiences. We already had so much to look back on and treasure, with even more to come. But I discovered that even painful experiences could help fill the shell. I had been a girl last year, and now I was a woman. That didn’t come without some bruises.

  We felt the grief through the beginning of the summer, and we coped together by taking walks in the evening and going out on the weekends. Kyle treated me like I was a porcelain doll capable of breaking at any moment. Sometimes it irritated me, but I knew that he was just concerned for my well-being. It occurred to me what a wonderful and understanding priest he would have been, and I felt more than a little guilty for taking him from that. I voiced that once, and never again, when I saw how vehemently he stated that he was exactly where he wanted to be.

  Gradually, as the weeks went on, it became easier to be at home, and I no longer spent every moment recalling that there was someone missing.

  The whole experience left me thankful that I had chosen nursing and caused me to reflect on how I could empathize with other women in the future. I had made the decision months earlier to follow the midwifery course, and I was especially glad now. It seemed as if it would be painful to deliver babies after the loss of my own, but I knew that there would be women coming in just like me, and they would need my support just as I had received it.

  Besides, I was confident that one day Kyle and I would successfully bring a child into the world and I could share that experience with my patients, too.

  The end of the summer also brought our first anniversary, and it was a welcome celebration. We spent the evening on a dinner boat that cruised up the Thames and back for a couple of hours. There was music, mostly slow, and we swayed while holding one another. I didn’t know how I could possibly love him any more than I did at that moment.

  I thought that the dinner was our anniversary gift, but Kyle told me that he had something else planned, something that I couldn’t have for another week or so. When I pleaded with him to tell me, he looked at me with the laughing eyes that I had missed for the past couple of months. Tapping my nose with his fingertip, he told me that I would have to wait, and that there was nothing that could be done about it.

  I busied myself in these last days before school started by freshening up the paint in the flat, thoroughly scrubbing every surface, and having hot meals prepared when Kyle came home from work. I was eager to slip back into normalcy.

  One evening I decided to surprise Kyle with cinnamon rolls. It was my first batch since the miscarriage and the last that I could make before classes. I wanted to show him my appreciation for all that he had done for me over those troubled months.

  Concentrating on a measurement, I didn’t hear him come in, so I squealed in shock when I felt him put his arms around my waist.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” he said into my ear, nibbling the tip just a bit. Despite the doctor’s orders being lifted weeks before, Kyle was still reluctant to make love to me for fear of hurting me, and that absence made me especially sensitive to his touch.

  “Hello, yourself,” I said, turning around and kissing him quickly on the lips.

  He laughed at me and brushed my cheek with his finger, where I had apparently splattered myself with icing sugar. I put my hand to my cheek, only to leave a dollop of dough where the sugar had been. Mortified, I turned back to face my bowl and gently scolded Kyle for ruining my surprise.

  Turning me back around, gently but firmly, he reached behind me and scooped up some icing onto his finger. Tracing my lips with it, he proceeded to taste the icing slowly, repeating the step again. This time, I kissed him back steadily, eager to connect with him again in every way. I think that I surprised him with my enthusiasm, and he pulled back briefly to ask if I was all right with this. I set my wooden spoon on the counter and put my hands behind me to untie my apron.

  Kyle stopped me and put his own arms around me to untie the strings. He lifted the apron over my head, and then my blouse. He leaned in to kiss my cheek, my jaw, my neck, less careful now with h
is porcelain doll.

  We didn’t even make it to the bedroom.

  I don’t know what time I woke up, but I was in our bed and it was still dark outside. Kyle was asleep next to me, and he stirred when I moved. Reaching over me to turn on the lamp, I smiled with utter contentment and ran my hand down his arm.

  “Good morning,” he murmured, eyes blinking as he adjusted to the light.

  “Good morning.” I stretched and felt that every nerve had been reawakened from a dormant sleep.

  We turned on our sides, facing each other, and he drew little circles on my hand with his finger.

  “Are you ready for your present?” he asked.

  “My present? Didn’t you give that to me last night?”

  “Mmm, you can have that present today, tomorrow, and anytime that you want.”

  “Then can today be my birthday?”

  “You’re skipping holidays. You still have to go through Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day . . .”

  “OK, stop it. Just tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Our anniversary present. I was going to give it to you last night, but you made me forget all about it.”

  I leaned up on my elbow. “Well, I’ll be certain not to let you forget if you don’t tell me what it is!”

  “Ouch! Blackmail! You win. Here you go.”

  He handed me a plain white envelope. I opened it and found tickets to The Dancing Years at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane for the next day.

  “Kyle! You remembered! How did you get tickets? They’re impossible to get now that the show is closing for the war!”

  “I had a little help from Abigail’s father. He knows everyone, apparently, even theater managers.”

  “Yes, he does, doesn’t he? Oh, I don’t care how you got them. I’m just so excited!”

  Kyle had arranged to take the day off, the first in as long as I could remember. We got up for breakfast and went back to bed, but not in order to sleep.

  The tickets were for a matinee. There was a time not long ago when it would have thrilled me to be able to say that I was seeing such a popular show. But such empty thrills were behind me now. In their place was the joy of being married and of being loved.

  I learned quickly that I needed to hold on to that joy with all my might. Not only had my own private world changed, but the world at large was about to look very different.

  On 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany.

  What had seemed inevitable was now definite.

  The announcement was not sudden. For weeks leading up to it, London had started to make noticeable preparations, and the late-morning radio speech by the prime minister only made it official. Just ten minutes later, the air-raid sirens started. The pitch of the sirens rose and fell in step with our anticipation. They were only for practice, but they were nonetheless chilling—a prelude to what was likely going to be a devastating reality. I pulled out the gas mask that I had bought last year. I’d got out of the habit of carrying it but would start doing so again. Kyle received one at his office. We kept them by the front door so that we could bring them with us whenever we went out. The cheap cardboard boxes that they came in reminded me of the frailty of this new existence.

  The evenings brought blackouts. At first, we used blankets to cover the windows and listened to the radio by candlelight. Later, specific blackout material was made available at two shillings a yard. Some people were cautious about even lighting a match. As I saw children leave on trains to stay with faraway relatives, I felt the heartbreak of the mothers who were losing their children. Was it more difficult to have never known my child or to send a beloved one into the large world with its uncertain future? I didn’t think that there was a difference. Surely, any separation was agonizing.

  It was easy to spot the mothers who had sent their children off. They had a listless look in their eyes, and their existence was fixated around the telegrams with updates of the whereabouts of their sons and daughters.

  London was visibly, strikingly different. The pavements were painted white so that cars could avoid them during the blackout. The ground was filled with sandbags, hoisted against buildings, the most important of them fortified first. The air was dotted with barrage balloons to thwart enemy planes. Our area in Lambeth was particularly secured due to its proximity to Waterloo station, and the tunnel behind our flat was routinely checked for explosives. Airplanes carrying bombs and troops flew overhead constantly, and we listened with acute attention to updates on the radio telling us where they were heading. More than once, I wondered if Lucille’s Ben was aboard one, as his training was now being called into use.

  Many people heeded the call of the government to evacuate London. Two-way roads were now running one direction as people fled to the countryside.

  We considered leaving, too, maybe to Liverpool, but the school remained open and nursing had never seemed more vital. I found myself clinging to my studies even more determinedly, both as a distraction and necessity. Kyle’s office was quickly shut down, as no one was hiring landscapers when it was unknown what the landscape might look like from one day to the next. But he had no trouble finding odd jobs, since so many people had left the city. One week he might be delivering milk, and another week he might be stacking sandbags. He never complained of more than a sore back.

  I delighted in the role reversal of taking care of him after my period of convalescence. In the evenings I would rub his neck and shoulders, pressing my thumbs deeply into the tight spots. He groaned when I would find an especially tender spot, and I lightened my touch into no more than a caress.

  I studied by day and worked some nights in the hospital. We were too tired to cook as we once had, eating out of necessity more than enjoyment. This became a reality for everyone in the early part of the new year, as food became rationed. At first, it was meat, butter, and sugar. Even paper was rationed. We coped with blandness and savored Sundays, when we allowed ourselves the use of the majority of our coupons. What wasn’t rationed was still scarce, and what wasn’t scarce lacked variety. Fruit and fish and bread and such were limited to whatever could be imported into the city. The queues to purchase even those things sometimes took over an hour. Most people were impatient with this, but I always made sure to bring a book. I avoided all of those murder mysteries that Lucille so loved. There was enough talk about death around us as it was.

  As a treat, we would sometimes eat at a Corner House since restaurants were considered off ration. The atmosphere there was one of escape, as people from across the social spectrum could gather and imagine that life was, for an evening, what it had once been.

  Mother and I communicated more regularly now, keeping details newsy and impersonal for the time being. She never inquired about Kyle, and I never told her about the baby we almost had. It was a tenuous start, but one for which I was grateful. I just wish she had known that it was Kyle who was encouraging the mending of our relationship.

  The draft continued to call young men to service. I could see that my husband was impatient to trudge off to the continent and serve his adopted country. But I knew he also felt reluctant to leave me, whom he still viewed as delicate, just months after the strenuous summer. I didn’t want him to go, rationalizing that if the country needed him, he would get the summons.

  The sinking of the British vessel HMS Exmouth, and the subsequent death of its crew of 175 men, had a strong effect on him, though. He became more focused than ever on joining the war effort, and I gave in to his desire to enlist. It was only a matter of time, anyway, and who was I to keep my husband from the war when so many others had already gone?

  His draft papers arrived by post just an hour after he left for the recruiting office.

  Kyle passed the physical exam and was assigned to the Seventh Armoured Division. He was set to leave for training soon and was expected to be sent to the front lines in Egypt.

  Egypt. I used to think that Durham was a world away, when I was aching for a love that I could
n’t have. Now I had my love, and I was sending him off to a faraway desert, farther away than I could comprehend. He was enthusiastic about it, albeit restrained for my sake. As was his habit, he drew an analogy to his faith. Like the flight of Joseph and Mary into Egypt to protect their son, he saw this as a providential journey to protect us all from evil.

  We spent our last two weeks pretending as if there was no war, that life was grand, that there were no cares. Spending some of our carefully earned savings, we went to the cinema several times. The cares of the outside would be remote for an hour or two. Pinocchio was released, and Kyle saw it with me two days in a row. We dined at restaurants, affordable ones, and made love in the evenings as if there were no tomorrow. Because there might not be one.

  Kyle was due to meet his unit at 7:00 a.m. on the morning of 23 March. I woke up a few hours earlier after a night of restless dreams filled with obscure scenes that frightened me. Kyle slept peacefully, the man on a mission. I turned around to face him and scooted in so close that our bodies were indistinguishable. I framed his face with my hands as if to burn the image in my head. He smiled without opening his eyes and said, “Good morning, gorgeous,” like he did every day. It never sounded rote, though. How long would it be before I would hear those words again?

  I whispered desperately, “Don’t go,” even as I knew there wasn’t a choice.

  He pressed my palm to his lips and said, “I must.”

  We lay there without talking, a million things racing through my mind while his still seemed peaceful. I wished that I could feel as confident as he did, but I felt instead as if my world was crumbling. Again.

  One question came to mind more strongly than anything else. Something that I had never asked, but had always wondered: What if this was my only chance?

  “Kyle?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why did you fall in love with me?”

  It’s funny that I had never asked. Maybe it was because I was afraid of the answer. To me, Kyle was hardworking, funny, handsome, tender, so many other things. In his shadow, I felt like something pretty to look at, with some respectable characteristics, but not much more. Here he was, bravely heading off to war, and I was cowering in the corner like a mouse. I wished for the first time that he had not become a British citizen so many years ago; otherwise, he could have fled to Ireland, which had remained neutral. He once had in front of him the venerable life of a man of God. As a seminarian, he would have been exempt from military service. Now, married to me, he suffered through odd jobs and had to put his life on the line. Why was I worth it? I couldn’t see it, and if I knew nothing else before he left, I had to know this.