“I never knew my grandmother,” Olivia said, “and I know that my mother is sexually active.” She had grown up watching a stream of men come and go. “But you’re different. You’re a lady.”
Natalie suddenly grew cross. “Is there some reason why a lady can’t feel passion? Is there some reason why she can’t love with her body as well as her heart?” With a convulsive little headshake, she erased her frown. “I’m not asking you to be graphic. I won’t give you anything to be graphic about. But the whole point of this exercise is to let my family know that I felt things back then. Before they criticize me now, they should know how it was. Carl was my be-all and end-all. He was my first thought in the morning and my last one at night. Aside from when I was in school, we spent every waking hour together. He tried to shield me from work, always gave me the easier chore, but I was right out there with him. I was so in love I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
“So, what happened?” Olivia asked. “Why didn’t you marry him?”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“Not like that.”
“Did you love Tess’s father?”
Olivia had met Jared in a coffee shop in Atlanta, where she was living at the time. He was there for a scientific symposium, looking adorably brilliant with his mussed hair and his glasses. He had a shy way of speaking that suggested vulnerability. Olivia had found that endearing, too.
“I thought I loved him,” she told Natalie. “Listening to you, I’m not so sure. I know I liked him. He was a nice person. Yes, I guess I was in love.” But Jared had been gone well before Tess was born, and though Olivia had felt his absence throughout the pregnancy, once she had the baby, she hadn’t missed him at all.
So, had she loved him? Or had she simply loved the idea of loving him?
Natalie wore such a grandmotherly look that Olivia couldn’t resist telling her more. “Jared was the kind of guy who could get so lost in his work that he didn’t even know I was around. I wanted him to know. I wanted to be the distraction that he couldn’t pass up. But I wasn’t ever that.” She smiled lopsidedly. “He did give me Tess. She was everything I wanted and more.”
Natalie smiled. “She was all yours. She was a guaranteed love. She wasn’t leaving. Not ever.”
Olivia weighed the words and slowly nodded. “That’s it. That’s what I felt.”
“Then you do know what I felt with Carl. I never doubted that he loved me. I never feared that he would leave me. He was always there, and I was desperate for love.”
“But you had your parents. You had your brother.”
“You had those things, too.”
Feeling like a fraud, Olivia sat back in the wing chair. She shouldn’t have lied about her family, certainly not to the extent she had. “I wasn’t completely honest about that. Having four brothers was a dream. I always thought it would be such fun. But … I only had one.”
“One brother?”
Well, it wasn’t quite as big a fib. “But he was protective. My parents were even worse. My brother was the boy. He could do whatever he wanted. I was the girl. I was coddled and kept close to home. There was a real double standard. I had to leave just to prove that I wasn’t helpless.” Feeling guilty, she stopped blabbering. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which question was that?” Natalie asked.
“About what happened with Carl. If you loved him so much, why didn’t you marry him back then?”
My father wasn’t doing well. When Prohibition ended, the black market went with it, which meant that our wine money dried up. But the Depression didn’t end. Thanks to some of the New Deal programs, farm production in other parts of the country picked up. Our market was local, and it was fine. We survived without federal help. We fed ourselves and clothed ourselves. But we couldn’t get ahead. We couldn’t get a leg up on the rest of the world, which was what my father needed to do. He was a businessman. He knew the importance of growth. That was why he bought up the farms around us. He had visions of building the whole thing up and selling it, recouping what he’d lost in the stock market crash, and returning to New York.
Funny, how quickly a person loses touch. There was no way he was going to do that. We didn’t own nearly enough land, and the growing season here was nothing like it was in the Midwest or the South. Asquonset was never going to be worth enough to get him back to New York, not in the style in which he’d left. Little by little, that sank in. He worked the fields from dawn to dusk, pushing his body almost irrationally but getting nowhere.
He was depressed. He was delusional at times. Jeremiah and Carl covered for him when he wasn’t functional.
He was still growing grapes, though there wasn’t much of a market for the native varieties, and he was wasting precious money on vines from French stock that languished for a year or two and then died. But he wouldn’t give up. When growing corn and potatoes and carrots and such didn’t make us rich, he got it fixed in his mind that grapes were the answer. He kept at it, even when we were losing money that we couldn’t afford to lose.
It was like gambling. After a while, you’ve lost so much that you have to keep going, because the jackpot is certainly around the next corner. You need the money so badly that you can’t afford to stop.
Growing grapes was like that for my father. He was convinced that it was just a matter of hitting on the right varietal. It became an obsession.
Try to picture the situation. My father was physically depleted, a thin man with a bent back. He rarely talked and never smiled. He would sit with his paper and pencil at night and try to make the numbers come out so that there was a profit to show for the work that we’d done. He had high hopes that had nowhere to go.
At the same time, the world around us was going mad. Hitler was moving through Europe, annexing one country after another. First it was Austria. Then Czechoslovakia, then Poland. He made it clear from the start that his goal was world domination, but it was hard to take him seriously. To us, he was an awkward little man with a square black mustache and a penchant for invading the countries bordering his. There was nothing unusual about it. History is full of stories like that.
Then we started hearing the reports of what he was doing in those countries that he ruled. It was horrifying.
He took Poland, and soon after that, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. That gave us greater pause. We sat around the radio at night listening to the reports.
But Hitler was there, and we were here. The Atlantic separated us from him. We were protected. Besides, it wasn’t like we had nothing else to think about. We were barely recovering from the Depression.
Then Paris fell to the Third Reich, and Hitler began bombing England—and suddenly we didn’t feel so far away. My God, it was in our living room every night, Edward R. Murrow with that inimitable voice saying, “This … is London.” We heard air raid sirens just as they were sounding, and explosions when the bombs found their mark. You people grew up on live reporting, but we hadn’t been exposed to it before, at least not this way. It was new to us, and terrifying.
Roosevelt agreed to supply the Allies with weapons and raw materials, but it wasn’t until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that we finally entered the war.
Your generation remembers where you were when you learned that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed. My daughter remembers where she was when she learned that President Kennedy had been killed. My friends and I, we remember where we were when we learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
It was a Sunday. My parents and I had been to church in the morning and come home for dinner. I went to Carl’s afterward. I always did that. His house was so much happier than mine. And he was there, of course. I was seventeen and in love.
Jeremiah and Brida had closely monitored Hitler’s bombing of England. They had friends and family in Ireland, and didn’t want the bombing to spread. They applauded Lend-Lease and other promises of help in the battle against Hitler. This day, they listened raptly
when Roosevelt went on the airwaves to report the bombing.
We were in their living room, Carl and I on the floor by the chairs where his parents sat. Our goal was to be as close as possible to the radio at the same time that we were as close as possible to each other. I remember hearing the president’s voice that day and knowing right away that something was wrong. Carl and I looked at each other the whole time he talked. I think we knew even then that what had happened was going to change our lives.
Olivia’s mind raced ahead, trying to guess exactly what had changed that would have come between Natalie and Carl. “He went into the army?” she asked.
“The navy.”
“Even though he wasn’t an American citizen?”
“Oh, he was an American citizen. He and his parents had been sworn in years before. They took pride in being American.”
“But he was their only son. He was needed to help run the farm. Couldn’t he have gotten out of the draft?”
Natalie gave her a funny look. “Did I say he was drafted? He wasn’t drafted. He enlisted. Don’t look so surprised, Olivia. It makes a bad statement about your generation.”
“It’s just … if he loved you …”
“There were thousands and thousands and thousands of couples like us. But what good is being in love if your families and homes are threatened by a man who is carting people off to concentration camps and killing them in droves, or by a country that killed twenty-five hundred of our servicemen in a single horrible day of bombing?
“Your generation is fortunate. You haven’t lived through a war, certainly not one that threatened your own soil. We had been convinced that Hitler would never make it out of Europe, but there he was, bombing England. We were next. The isolationists in the country were suddenly silent. We had a common enemy now.
“As for Carl,” she went on, “there was never a doubt in his mind. He was hale and hardy. He wanted to fight for his country. It was a matter of pride. And he wasn’t alone. Men enlisted, because it was the honorable thing to do. They didn’t look for excuses to get out of the war and stay home. There was one fellow here in town—you know Sandy Adelson—I’m talking about her father. He was just Carl’s age, the perfect age to enlist, but he was stone deaf. When the army turned him down, he was humiliated. Oh, there were other things he could do to help the war effort, and he did. But to the day he died, he insisted that the worst part of being deaf was not being able to fight in the war.”
“Did your brother enlist?”
“Yes. He did it even before Pearl Harbor was bombed. He saw the war coming.” Her eyes strayed. Beneath a soft sweep of white hair, that gentle brow of hers furrowed, and suddenly Olivia knew.
“He died in the war, didn’t he?” It wasn’t even a question, the answer was so obvious.
Natalie rose from the wing-back chair and went to the window. She would be looking out over rows of vines and down toward the ocean, Olivia knew—though from where she sat, all she could see was treetops. And clouds. It was another misty day at Asquonset. The health of the grapes was in doubt, as were the Fourth of July festivities.
Turning away from the window, Natalie came to stand behind the chair she had left. She put her hands on the wings. Her voice was quiet. “History talks about Pearl Harbor first. When we heard about the bombing there, we were appalled. We were also a little relieved. Brad wasn’t at Pearl. He was at Midway.”
Olivia was trying to remember every little thing she had ever read about the war when Natalie said, “Right about the time when we were sighing those sighs of relief, Japanese bombers were hitting other bases.”
“Midway?”
“Among others. It was several days before we got word. The navy had been so startled by the speed and force of the attacks that things were chaotic. Understandably, the first efforts went toward getting medical help for the wounded. The dead couldn’t be helped.”
Olivia could barely begin to imagine it. She had been too young to know what was going on during the Vietnam War, much less have any friends who fought. Two of her high school classmates had fought in Desert Storm, but neither had been hurt, and for all the times she had imagined a father and brothers in the navy, not a one of them had died.
But she did have a daughter. It wasn’t beyond the pale to imagine that if there was another war, Tess might be drafted under the premise of equal rights for women. As a mother, she would be worried sick.
“Your parents must have been devastated.”
“Devastated,” Natalie said with a stricken look. “Brad had been gone from home for a while by that point. He hadn’t been back to visit more than a few weekends each year, but my father continued to hope. Suddenly hope was gone. Just … gone.” She rapped the top of the chair once, as though to cap the finality of it, and took a steadying breath. “After that, even if Carl hadn’t felt the patriotism, he would have gone. He had Brad’s death to avenge.”
“Patriotism,” Olivia repeated. She conjured up a vision of the movie The Music Man, with Robert Preston and his band dressed in parade regalia, launching into “Seventy-six Trombones,” all of which was a balm from Natalie’s stricken look. That look had touched her. Olivia didn’t want to live through a war. She didn’t want to lose someone she loved. There wasn’t anything remotely romantic about that.
Natalie smiled. “Patriotism is another thing that your generation doesn’t see the same way we do.”
“I do,” Olivia argued.
“You do not. When I say ‘patriotism,’ you think of George C. Scott as General Patton or Mary Lou Retton winning Olympic gold. To you, it’s an event. To us, it’s a state of mind. When we fly the American flag in front of our homes, it’s a matter of pride. When vets march in parades, it’s a matter of pride. When we do things up red-white-and-blue, it’s an expression of that same pride. Even tomorrow. The Fourth of July marks a different time in our history from the one I’m talking about here, but they’re related. The War of Independence gave us freedom, and we rather like it. Your generation takes even that for granted. We didn’t. We were children of the Depression. We don’t take much for granted at all. We may not have had prosperity, but we wanted our freedom. That’s what we fought for during World War Two.”
“You, too?”
“Did I enlist? No. I was here through the war. That didn’t mean I was idle, though. The mobilization on behalf of the war effort was pervasive. You didn’t have to be in uniform to help the cause. I don’t know anyone who didn’t do something.”
“What did you do?” Olivia asked. She pictured Natalie working on the assembly line in an armament plant, turning out bombers. There was a drama to that.
“Oh, lots of things.”
Modesty didn’t work for Olivia. “Such as?”
Natalie sighed. “I was a civil defense volunteer—a spotter. I had a circular chart with pictures and watched the sky for enemy planes. Being on the East Coast, I imagined I would be the first to see the Luftwaffe. Fortunately, of course, no German planes ever appeared.”
“What else did you do?” Olivia asked. This time she pictured Natalie rolling bandages for the Red Cross or nursing the wounded who had returned home. It wasn’t as dramatic as turning out bombers, but it would have been heartrending.
Natalie fished a photograph from the group on the desk. It showed people working the fields. “Asquonset became a great big victory garden. With so much of the produce from traditional suppliers going to feed the troops, small farms like ours filled the void locally.”
“These are all women.”
“That’s all who was left. Jeremiah told us what to do, and we did it. Those are other local women you see. One of them would watch the children while the rest of us worked.”
The children. Olivia did a little quick math as she rose and pulled another picture from those on the desk. It showed Natalie with a baby. “When was this taken?”
“Before this one,” Natalie said, pointing to the women in the field. “That was my son Brad. He was bor
n in ’42, obviously named after my brother. Susanne was born in ’44. Greg was born in ’60.”
“Brad hasn’t called here since I’ve come,” Olivia said.
“No. He wouldn’t.”
Olivia was thinking that Brad the son must have opted out the way Brad the brother had done, when Natalie’s eyes went to the door.
Catching a little breath, the older woman broke into a surprised smile. “How nice,” she said and crossed the room to embrace a blonde-haired woman who wasn’t much older than Olivia. A bit taller than Natalie, she wore slacks and a knit shell, chunky gold earrings, a matching necklace, and a pair of glittering diamond rings.
Ending the hug, Natalie held her back. “You look pale, daughter-in-law, but as beautiful as ever. Is everything all right?”
The woman hesitated a second too long.
Natalie frowned. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” There was a forced smile. “Well, nothing that bad.” She lowered her voice. “Greg and I are having some troubles. I thought I’d camp out here for a bit.”
Natalie released a breath, taking mere seconds to absorb Jill Seebring’s words and move on. “You thought right. Take your usual room, and stay as long as you want. There’s a buffet at the yacht club tonight and a cookout here tomorrow. After that, you can rest, unless you feel like helping out at the office. First, though, come meet my assistant.”
Fourteen
OLIVIA LIKED JILL SEEBRING on sight. She didn’t know whether it was the woman’s easy smile when they were introduced, the bruised look that she couldn’t quite hide, the closeness of their ages, or the simple fact of Jill showing up in the driveway late that afternoon wearing a sundress much like Olivia’s. But she and Jill easily wound up in the same car heading for the yacht club.
“I’m not sure I’m up for this,” Jill said softly. “It’s been a long day. I’m exhausted.”
Olivia was driving. Tess was in the backseat, along with the new maid, who was barely eighteen. Natalie claimed the girl had ten times the enthusiasm of the closest competitor. Whether she could do the job remained to be seen.
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