“I think I could do it,” Lottie said.
“Well, of course you could, Lots,” Eugene said, chucking her under the chin. “You could do just about anything you put your mind to.”
Lottie hesitated. She’d braced herself for an objection, but his easy agreement stymied her for an instant.
But suddenly the words rose up, not out of her thoughts, but out of her heart. “I want to,” she told him. “I got an application at a recruitment office, and I already sent it in. I want to join the Navy WAVES.”
“Join the Navy?” Eugene said, sitting up so that he could look her in the eye. His own eyes sparkled slightly, as if he were already amused by whatever joke she was trying to play now.
Lottie nodded, her jaw set.
As Eugene recognized the seriousness in her eyes, his own smile faded. “Lots,” he said, taking her hand in his. “We’re getting married tomorrow.”
“But what if we didn’t?” Lottie said.
At the surprise in his expression, she gave his hand a quick squeeze. “I mean, what if we didn’t right now?” she said.
Now Eugene took a deep breath, shaking his head. “Lottie—” he began.
“No, listen,” she interrupted. “Our whole country is at war. The whole world is. Robbie’s going off to fight it. But I never do anything.”
“What about me?” Eugene asked, his tone turning sharp. “Do you think I don’t do anything?”
Lottie stopped, confused. “No,” she said. “You work for the war every day, at work.”
As she said it, she felt her certainty about that slipping away. Lottie had always thought of Eugene’s position as a clever way to keep him from the war. Mr. Grantham certainly agreed. He had absolutely forbidden Eugene to have anything to do with active duty, even though he was unquestionably of age and so many of their friends were serving now, themselves.
But this wasn’t about Eugene. She was trying to tell him how she felt, about her own life. “I have skills,” she said. “They need people. I could help. I might not be able to do much, but I could do something.”
“Skills?” Eugene repeated, raising his eyebrows.
“I can repair engines,” Lottie said. “They might need mechanics.”
Eugene played with her fingers on his knee. “Lots,” he said, “I’m not sure how many Stutz Bearcats the Navy’s employing these days…”
“You know I can repair other engines!” Lottie said indignantly. “You’ve seen me.”
Eugene held his hands up in self-defense. “I know, I know,” he said. “You got Bob Spratt’s Cadillac up and running again when it broke down after that picnic on the Rouge River.”
“And Emmeline Fairchild’s convertible,” Lottie reminded him. “When it broke down last year. And I repaired Jim Trinkle’s plane engine, remember that?”
“I remember you found the hole a groundhog chewed in his fuel line,” Eugene said.
Lottie nodded with satisfaction that he seemed to be taking her point.
“But I remember other things, too,” Eugene added gently.
“Like what?” Lottie asked.
“Remember what you wanted to be when you were ten?” he asked.
“A cowgirl,” Lottie answered promptly.
“That’s right,” Eugene said. “And so your dad got you Star, and then you begged him for Bullet.”
“Star was too short to do a real jump,” Lottie said.
“And you got good at jumping,” Eugene said.
“I won a Michigan Equestrian cup that year,” Lottie said proudly.
“I know,” Eugene said. “I was there, remember?”
Lottie smiled. He’d shown up with a bag of apples for Bullet, and it had been a trick to get the grateful horse away from him, over to the competition. “I do,” she said.
Eugene nodded. “And remember what you wanted to be when you were thirteen?” he asked.
“A nurse,” Lottie said. But this time she felt a little uneasy.
“And if I wanted to see you,” Eugene said, “I had to go over to the Grosse Point Hospital, where you were volunteering, and roll bandages with you.”
“I loved volunteering,” Lottie said. When she’d participated in the program, which brought young students into the hospitals as volunteers, it had been the first time in her life that she’d really felt anything she did might really be making a real difference.
“You were wonderful at it,” Eugene said. “I remember every time you went into a room, they always said, ‘Thank God you’re back!’ If it’d been up to the patients, they would have hired you full-time.”
Lottie smiled. Eugene was making a better case for her than she even could for herself. She’d always wanted to be part of something that mattered. And he had known that, she realized, even before she did herself.
“And remember what you wanted to be when you were sixteen?” Eugene asked.
“An Egyptologist,” Lottie said.
“Hieroglyphics,” Eugene said. “And pickaxes. Everywhere.”
Lottie laughed. “And you said you’d buy me a ticket to Cairo, even if my dad forbade it.”
“But I didn’t have to,” Eugene said. “Because by the end of that summer you were going to become a master jeweler.”
At this, Lottie’s heart dropped in her chest. She could see where he was going, and she didn’t like it.
“And the next year you were going to be a reporter,” Eugene said. “So you spent a summer writing society notes at the Free Press, until you got to college and took your first class on astronomy…”
“This isn’t like that!” Lottie said angrily, pulling her hand away from his.
Patiently, Eugene reached for her hand again.
This time, she let him keep it.
“Isn’t it?” he asked. “Are you sure about that?”
Lottie took both his hands in hers, kissed them, and looked pleadingly in his eyes. “What if we just waited a year?” she said. “Just a year. The war has to be over in a year. I can join the WAVES, and once it’s over, I’ll come back, and we can pick up right where we were.”
Eugene didn’t object, so she rushed on. “It’s not that I don’t want to marry you,” she said. “It’s just that I feel like I need to do something, to be part of something that matters. That’s all I want. Like you. You’ve already gotten to do so much.”
Eugene stared back into her eyes. “So have you, Lottie,” he finally said, quietly. “So have you.”
Lottie sighed. “If we could just…” she began again.
But Eugene shook his head, this time with a firmness that let her know she needed to listen.
“Lottie,” he said. “I don’t care what you want to do. When you wrote me letters in hieroglyphics, I got a book to decode them, hoping you might be too shy to tell me you were in love with me in regular old English.” Eugene smiled. “I drove you to every party in Detroit when you were working the society beat for the paper.” He looked down at his lapel, where a pin she’d made him from a flawed emerald glimmered. “I’ve worn this pin of yours for years,” he said.
“If I’d known you’d really wear it I would have used a better stone,” said Lottie.
“I don’t need a better stone,” Eugene said impatiently. “I only want you. And I don’t care what you’re up to next year, or the next, or fifty years from now. I just want to be part of it.”
“Well, then we just—” Lottie began.
Eugene raised his hand. “But this isn’t just another of your whims,” he said.
“No,” Lottie said, hurrying to agree.
“It’s a war,” said Eugene. “It’s something some men won’t come back from. It’s serious. And it’s dangerous.”
“I know,” Lottie insisted.
“I’m not sure you do,” Eugene said. “I’m not sure anyone does, until they’re part of it. Which I pray you never are.” He took a deep breath. “And this wedding isn’t just another whim,” he said. “At least, not for me. I’m serious about you, Lottie. I always have b
een. Our wedding’s tomorrow. Of course you’re going to feel some nerves. Everyone has them. That’s only natural. But it’s time for us to get married.”
Lottie felt tears spring to her eyes. A flood of emotions washed through her. Her feelings for Eugene but also a growing sense of frustration at his words.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Eugene wrapped her in his strong embrace. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Lots,” he whispered in her ear.
When she pulled away, he smiled. “You’ll see,” he told her. “All those things you want to do, you still can. We’ll just do them together.”
But not the WAVES, Lottie thought. You had to be a single woman to join them.
Eugene took a deep breath, stood, and held out his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’re being rude to our guests.”
Tears sprang to Lottie’s eyes. It had seemed like Eugene was really listening to her. But now she felt like he hadn’t heard a thing. “You go back to the party,” she said. “I’m going upstairs.”
“Lottie,” Eugene called, but she just pushed through the door and raced up the stairs, then down the long hall that traversed the mansion’s second floor, to her room.
When she got there, she sank down on her bed, lay there for a minute, then rolled over and turned on her bedside light.
With a gasp, she realized that one of the maids must have brought her freshly pressed wedding dress to the room while she was gone. It was hanging on the door of her closet, the hem floating several feet off the ground, so big that it felt like a stranger had stepped into her room with her.
She looked away. Outside her window, on the otherwise dark front lawn, was the American flag her father flew there proudly, illuminated brightly by lights shining up from the ground.
She didn’t have any idea how long she sat there, staring at the fluttering bands of red, white, and blue, while memories of Eugene and thoughts of the war spun through her head, while her heart tugged, restless, in her chest, almost as if it were being blown about by the same wind that caught the folds of the flag beyond her window.
Five
IT WAS STILL DARK when Lottie woke up. She lay there for a long moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dawn light, which she thought must have awoken her, but it was still pitch-black outside. As she stared through her bedroom window, into the night, her eyes eventually began to pick out the stars in the sky beyond the dark branches of the trees nearest the house. But there was no hint of daylight yet.
Lottie sat up.
Despite the darkness, and despite a fatigue in her bones that let her know she had barely slept, she was wide awake. And she knew what she had to do. It wasn’t even so much that she had thought her way to a decision. It was simply that the path before her was suddenly clear.
And it didn’t lead down the aisle to Eugene.
She wasn’t sure where it led. She just knew she had to follow it—this voice in herself that had started as a whisper but was now impossible to ignore, telling her that she was built for something more than anyone in her life believed—including her.
She stared out into the night.
Then she reached over and turned on the small light on her bedside table. She pushed away the covers, got out of bed, and stood face-to-face with her wedding dress in the dim light.
After a long moment, she reached up and unhooked it from her closet door, and threw the gown and its piles of tulle underskirts on her unmade bed.
She opened her closet, pulled out a simple blue shift, and got dressed. She knelt beside her bed and pushed the skirts of her wedding dress aside to root around under the bed.
The first piece of luggage she pulled out was rich red cordovan, decorated with shining brass. With a little shake of her head, she pushed it back and reached deeper under the bed. This time, she pulled out a somewhat battered blue canvas satchel, one of her father’s that she had rescued from the trash heap when he decided it had gotten too worn for him to travel with it.
She’d never actually traveled with it herself before, other than to parade around the house or the yard with it when she was small. But now she set it on the foot of her bed, flicked the latches, and flipped it open to reveal the faded gray satin lining within.
Quietly but quickly, she began to fill it. She piled in some underthings, a pair of cotton pajamas, and a handful of socks. She stacked a few blouses on top of a pair of shorts and a pair of slacks. She pushed aside the rows of silk and velvet and chiffon party dresses in her closet and pulled out another simple shift, this time olive green. Then she slipped a pair of Mary Janes onto her feet.
As she did, she noticed her jewelry box, which she’d left open the night before, on the vanity at the foot of her bed. It was large, about the size of a bread box, and lined with dozens of velvet cubbies big enough to fit one necklace, or brooch, or pair of earrings. In the faint light that reached all the way from her bedside lamp to the cubbies, her gems gave off a faint glow: glimmers of sapphire, ruby, turquoise, and diamond after diamond, her father’s favorite gift to her on almost every birthday since she had been a little girl.
Without taking anything out, she closed the box.
She twisted the engagement ring on her finger once, twice—and dropped it on top.
Then she went over to the little writing desk beside her bed.
The other furniture in the room was all the best available, from Hudson’s, a department store downtown. The wood shone, the detail was exquisite, and the upholstery was lush.
But her desk was from another time and place. It had been built by her mother’s father, for her mother’s mother, when they were first married. Unlike the luxurious pieces the family could afford now, the joinings weren’t cleverly hidden. The varnish wasn’t perfect. And the signs of all the years that her grandmother had used it were clear: dings and scrapes on the legs, ink spots soaked into the wood. But it had always been Lottie’s favorite piece of furniture in the whole room.
She sat down in the little chair her grandfather had also made. It looked so rickety that it might barely hold the weight of a child, but Lottie knew it was as sturdy as anything else in the room.
She pulled out the single rough drawer in the center of the desk, removed a few sheets of her monogrammed stationery, and picked up the pen she had left lying there.
For a moment, she bowed her head, covering her eyes with her hand. Then she lifted her chin and began to write.
Dear Eugene,
Tears sprang into her eyes as she looked down at the blank page. She shook her head and her glance landed on her wedding dress, with the little bag she’d packed just beyond it. Pen still in hand, she wiped the tears away from her eyes.
Then the thoughts that had filled her mind all night, and were still there roiling when she woke again before dawn, began to fill the page.
I wish that I could be in two places at once today. But there’s only one of me, and there’s something I feel I have to do. I’ve never felt so strongly that I need to be part of something bigger than myself. I want to try to be of some help in this world.
I want you to know that you’ll always be in my heart. I hope one day you can forgive me.
Your Lottie
She laid the pen down, folded the page over without reading it again, and slipped it quickly into an envelope. Then she wrote Eugene’s name on it, sealed it, laid it on her desk, and stood up.
She went over to the bed and picked up the small valise she had just packed.
As she crossed to the door, she looked back at Eugene’s name on the letter. Her mind flashed forward to what it would feel like for him to hold it in his hand, to open and read it. She could see the way his face would fall and how he would quickly try to cover his sadness, so as not to distress anyone else who was there with him.
The guilt nearly stopped her in her tracks. But something else tugged at her even more strongly, pulling her urgently toward the door, and she followed it out, into the hall.
She pau
sed after she pulled the door to her room shut behind her, listening to the sounds of the rest of the house. A bit of very early light was starting to dawn now, pouring faintly into the hall from the large windows at either end. But nobody else seemed to have awoken yet. No boards creaked, no electric lights hummed.
Quickly, she slipped through the hall to the stairs and down to the main entryway. It was also deserted, with the early sun just beginning to pick the buffets and chairs out of the darkness.
She ducked into the vestibule where she and Eugene had sat the night before, then passed through it quickly to the kitchen, heading for the garages that opened off them, so that deliverymen could easily stock the big larder and refrigerators.
But just a few steps before she reached the delivery entrance on the opposite side of the kitchen, a shadow separated itself from the counter with a happy cry, and the overhead fixtures flicked on.
Squinting in the sudden light, Lottie turned around, already forming the excuse she’d give to whatever cook or kitchen maid she’d surprised with her early morning foray. After all, brides were liable to do all kinds of eccentric things on their wedding day. An early morning drive was hardly the strangest thing a bride had ever done.
But when Lottie turned and saw her mother’s face, she was speechless.
Her mother smiled as she swept over to embrace Lottie in a long, warm hug. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, smoothing Lottie’s hair before she released her. “You’re up so early. Did you get any sleep at all?”
Lottie stood frozen. Her mind was racing. She had never lied to her mother. But if she told her the truth, what would her mother do?
Lottie had barely had the strength to write the message to Eugene, even when she wasn’t there to see his face. If her mother tried to stop her, she didn’t know what she would do.
Maybe, she told herself as her mother gave her another squeeze and stepped back, she wouldn’t notice that something was wrong.
But as soon as her mother gave Lottie a quick once-over, Lottie knew that was a foolish hope.
At the sight of Lottie’s simple dress, and the valise in her hand, her mother’s smile vanished.
For Love and Country Page 4
