By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  But he was part of the force occupying Japan when he wrote his letter home, and it was weeks before the letter arrived in San Francisco; even on dry land it made slow progress across the country to arrive in Boston just when Grandmother was busy organizing her household for its annual remove to Cape Cod. This was an irritatingly inconvenient time, as well as being news that was weeks overdue.

  Honestly, Spencer, she wrote to him, sitting down to that task immediately.

  What were you thinking of? Have you never heard of telegrams? Certainly, the birth of the first direct-male-line Howland grandchild, even if it is a female, is important enough to merit a telegram, never mind the cost.

  I’ll pass on your news to the family, and I am sure everyone will be pleased for you and your bride. But whyever did you select the name Meg? There has never been a Margaret in the family, and your aunt Esther would have been so honored, and even you must remember that she is childless. Not after the young princess, I hope. There are entirely too many of those kinds of Margarets and Elizabeths around already.

  We expect Brundy any one of these weeks, once he regains the strength his ordeal took from him. We are all looking forward to having him home with us again, so that life can get back to normal. Anne may not have written to tell you that she is in England now, nursing the wounded outside of Bristol, and Phyllis has had yet another child, although not the girl they both want. Ethan is living at home while he attends his Harvard classes. They rush them through in two and a half years these days. I don’t like to think of the long-term cost of that policy, the kinds of doctors and lawyers who will have the running of the country in two decades. Or three. I find that thought frightening.

  With love,

  Mother

  • • •

  (It was Amy who first raised the question. “But Mumma always said she didn’t see him for four years after the wedding, so what about Meg?” she asked. There could be no doubt whose child Meg was, with her feminine equivalent of Pops’ lanky height and firm jaw, and she had his same long-fingered hands as well. “Mumma never told me about any leave”—Meg did the math—“that December. She only told me about being removed to San Diego, as an officer’s wife, and pregnant.” I could explain this, with the clarity of mind characteristic of twelve-year-olds: “For Mumma, truth isn’t an exact science”; but Jo, as usual, had a view contrary to mine, and nicer, too. “Mumma sees things differently from other people.”

  “We have to ask them,” Meg decided, and, “You do it,” the rest of us agreed. When Meg did, one dinnertime, Pops answered inattentively, “Of course I had leave. Of course I was sometimes in port. What did you think?” and Mumma snapped, “Don’t you girls have anything better to think about than my love life?”)

  When Juliet was told about her new niece, she asked Grandmother, “Are you going to write to Spencer’s wife? And introduce yourself, and welcome her to the family?”

  “I don’t know where the woman is living,” Grandmother answered. “She hasn’t written to introduce herself to me,” she pointed out. “Which I must say doesn’t speak well of her upbringing. I don’t see her fitting into the family, not like Lally,” she said, and Lally thanked her. “Not like Abigail would have. I have to tell you, I am not looking forward to meeting this woman Spencer chose to marry.”

  “Maybe he’ll settle on the West Coast,” Juliet suggested, “and you’ll never have to meet her.”

  “Our family has lived in Boston for more than two hundred years,” Grandmother reminded her. “I cannot imagine Spencer living anywhere else.”

  • • •

  Pops didn’t bring Mumma east—by which he and his family meant to Boston or the Cape—until the summer of 1947. His ship had been part of MacArthur’s occupation forces in Japan at the end of the war, and it wasn’t until fall of 1946 that Pops was discharged from the service and set ashore in San Francisco. At that time, Mumma and Meg awaited him in San Diego. Other wives made the train trip north, to be at the docks or at the airfield when their husbands came home from war, but not Mumma. She couldn’t see the point of the long, crowded train ride, with a nursing infant, and she didn’t have the time. In San Diego, she had formed an ad hoc committee of the Navy wives—both officers’ wives and the wives of ordinary seamen—to offer cooperative babysitting services. Some of these women Mumma had found jobs for (“Unless they had the gumption to go out and get one for themselves, which most of them didn’t”). Others she had enrolled in the nursing courses or teaching courses offered by the local college, for postwar employment. Mumma was especially concerned about the widows, particularly those widows who didn’t want to return to the Midwest or South or even New England, not as widows, not to lives that would offer them only years of single-parent- and social-pariah-hood. (“A woman without a husband, I don’t have to tell you girls this, she has a hard time making friends, especially among married couples. You know how possessive women can be about their men. And any woman knows what men are like. Men look around. Especially if the odds are in their favor, and the odds were in their favor those days, the way the odds always are after a war. Except for the men who’d been crippled, of course.”)

  In San Diego, Mumma had the lives of her various wives to look after, and she had Meg to look after; she wrote daily letters to Pops and read the books he recommended, if the base library had them; and she had the wounded men in the base hospital to visit, and do what she could for. Her life in San Diego was both useful and busy. She couldn’t drop everything to go meet Pops, when it was just as easy—in fact, easier—for him to find a car and come join her.

  Not that she wasn’t looking forward to seeing him, she could promise him that, promise him the kind of warm welcome waiting for him that any man would want coming home from war. It was just that not everyone had come back unwounded, not everyone had come back, for that matter, and there were people depending on her and she couldn’t let them down. It was just that he was the one with the trust fund, which meant the ready cash to buy a car and drive it down the California coast. They had the rest of their lives, so what was the big hurry?

  Besides, she concluded with canny insight, or maybe wisdom learned from encountering too many men deprived of the solitude and quietude necessary for them to shed their military pasts and reposition themselves for a civilian future, Pops had never seen the California coast, had he? He’d been living in crowds, didn’t he want some time to himself? He could take as long as he liked on the way south. He should see the sights of San Francisco and talk to the University at Berkeley, because didn’t he say he was planning on going back to take his doctorate? He could see the mountains, and the little city of Monterey, with its canning factories. That would be almost like home, wouldn’t it? Mumma guessed so, anyway, from what he’d told her about Cape Cod. Not Boston, she knew better than that. There was no fishing out of Boston, she knew, and no industry, either; she’d looked it all up in the encyclopedia at the base library. Pops could stop in Hollywood, maybe meet a starlet. All in all, he should buy that car and have a holiday. Otherwise, what was the point of having so much money? What was the point of living through a war? She would see him when she would see him, although she would certainly enjoy a few phone calls. She had almost forgotten the sound of his voice, she wrote him.

  The little family didn’t leave San Diego until March, and even then, since Mumma had never in her whole life been east of the Sierra Nevada, and since a crawling infant, as Meg then was, shouldn’t travel for long hours, they took their time crossing the country. Pops showed Mumma the Grand Canyon and the Grand Tetons; he took her to Yellowstone National Park. He also had never seen these sights. They wandered across the Arizona desert and the mesa country of New Mexico, then through the oil fields and cattle ranches of Texas, to see the Louisiana bayous. They made a huge loop north along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Saint Louis and Chicago. Mumma drove while Pops held Meg on his lap and read aloud to them both—Zane Grey, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser.
He was reading Ethan Frome when they came to New England, via the battlefields of the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Mumma had enjoyed the long drive, the geography she’d seen and the history she’d heard. She suspected that once Pops got back to the East Coast, the only places he’d be willing to travel to were in Europe, and she had her doubts about Europe.

  They were due to arrive at the Cape on a Friday in mid-July of 1947. There, Pops would be reunited with his family, Brundy having returned to his father’s law practice almost a year earlier, and there Mumma could finally meet her in-laws, not to mention the rest of his family. Pops had told her about the various connections, the first and second cousins, the aunts and uncles, the relations by marriage. He drew family trees for her to study. He described the Spencer compound, seven large original summer cottages and several more recently built smaller homes, which occupied the broad point of land stretching out into Buzzards Bay. He related the history of summers spent there, a great gathering of all ages, from the most elderly and rickety to the least self-reliant newborns, and everything in between, a mass of children running around together. Mumma had been memorizing names and relationships. Pops had called his mother before they left San Diego, and again from Saint Louis, and finally from Gettysburg, first to estimate, then to establish the day they would arrive, next to verify, and finally to confirm it. They were, Mumma knew, expected.

  (“I wasn’t nervous. I was curious. I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. Except, of course, Jo, I was expecting Jo. And then, once we got there, it took me about five and a half minutes to take their measure.”)

  They had spent four days in New York City and then driven up the Connecticut coastline, along the Boston Post Road. Rhode Island—a state Mumma always scorned for both its size and the extravagances of Newport—went by in a minute, half a minute, on their way to the Massachusetts state line, and then came the high Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, which had originally been built by private investors, but after more than ten years was purchased by the federal government, as Pops informed Mumma. (“Your father knows everything, and don’t you girls ever forget that. How else do you think I’ve learned so much?”)

  They crossed that bridge and they were on Cape Cod. They turned off Route 6 onto a narrow paved road that snaked through the geographical shoulder of the Cape’s long arm, through summer towns where Boston’s wealthier families escaped from the hot city to a quieter, simpler life, broken only occasionally by such events as weddings and funerals, large parties assembled to celebrate major birthdays and anniversaries, the Fourth of July, and the opening and closing of the summer season on the Cape, Memorial and Labor Days. Mothers and children and servants spent whole summers in the saltwater environment; fathers came out for long weekends, and—now that they could take them again—vacation weeks. Children spent days in bathing suits, by the water, in the water, on the water. Mothers sat on beach chairs keeping an eye on things. Seaweed floated up onto the little curved beaches, and horseshoe crabs plowed their blind way along the sand at the edges of the tides. Low, marshy islands could be explored when the tide was out, or visited by rowboat in high water. Clams could be dug, fish caught. On rainy days, of which there were many, especially in July, wooden jigsaw puzzles came out, and fires were lit, and children swarmed from one kitchen to another while cooks produced tarts and cookies and slabs of frosted cake, vying to be the most visited.

  During the long years of war, these summers were a sanctuary for the children, and in part for the parents, too. As much as was possible, summers had gone on as before, the only real difference being that there were almost no young men and there were only a few young women. But now the war was over, rationing had ended, the men had returned, and normalcy been reassumed.

  Wampanoag was a little crossroads town, one gas pump in front of the general store/post office/lunch counter, on a back road between Bourne and Falmouth. The town lay two miles inland from the irregular coastline where summer houses at the ends of long driveways overlooked the protected water of Buzzards Bay. Pops drove through the town center and along Beach Road, where a small public beach was bright with bathing suits and umbrellas. A few miles beyond the beach, he turned in to an unsignposted dirt road that led them into Spencer territory, where a loose tribal society had been established among the homes of Spencers and Spencers-by-marriage (like the Howlands). For Pops it was home and he knew he had no choice but to return.

  And so they finally met, Mumma and Grandmother. Grandmother had girded her loins for a great enemy, against whom she would need all of her many weapons for the inevitable victory. Mumma never girded, she just prevailed. (“Do you think he ever understood what was wrong about her?” Amy always wondered, and Jo agreed, “It never crossed his mind they wouldn’t love her, too,” but, “I was their ticket in,” Meg claimed. “The family line, the family name, even with Mumma for my mother, I was still her granddaughter.”)

  Having at last arrived, the young couple climbed out of the car, Meg asleep on her father’s shoulder. But they did not enter to the relaxed seaside life Pops had been describing. A pair of men passed by them carrying panniers that clinked of glassware and china, to load them into the back of a small van; a sedan, its rear seat piled with linens, drove out past them; men and women took trays covered with kitchen cloths out to a second van while an open-topped convertible came up and parked behind, waiting for its next load.

  The house remained impervious to the activity swirling at its hems. The Howland-Spencer house sat on a wooded ridge of hill that would have looked down to the harbor if dense summer foliage hadn’t almost entirely concealed what lay beyond. This setting was about house, not ocean. It was a typical summer cottage, with a large two-story central section and wings that spread out on either side. The shingled exterior had weathered to a silvery gray and the many windows had small glass panes. At the end of an ascending walkway, a single slate step led up to the front door, which opened wide for Pops and Mumma and Meg.

  In the door stood a scrawny girl whose hands were clasped in front of her. She had pale brown hair pulled back into a knot; she wore a shapeless, pale blue cotton dress buttoned down the front; she was a nice-looking girl, although you wouldn’t have noticed it to look at her. (“If you girls ever have maids, you make sure to dress them well, you hear me? Life is too short to make the people who work for you miserable.”) “Mr. and Mrs. Spencer?” she asked, and when they said they were, she said, “Come in, please. Mrs. Howland is expecting you in the library.” She preceded them with self-conscious adolescent steps across a broad sunny hallway to a paneled wooden door, which was closed.

  The house hummed with invisible busyness, distant voices calling out to one another, the muffled sounds of feet. Every table in the hallway bore a large display of cut flowers. “Who died?” Mumma asked Pops, and, “It’s the party,” he told her, but before she could demand, “What party?” the little maid had knocked on and thrown open the door.

  As impervious as her house, Grandmother was standing in front of a fireplace flanked by long windows. (“Like a portrait of that tsarina of Russia, you know the one, the kind of portrait that makes you see why there was that revolution, poor woman, even being the daughter of the Queen of England couldn’t save her.”) Once they had had a moment to view her, Grandmother stepped forward, arms outstretched. “Give me that beautiful child.”

  Pops passed over the sleeping Meg, and in the brief time it took Meg to wake up and take center stage, the three adults considered one another. “You look quite well rested, Spencer,” his mother greeted him, offering a cheek should he care to bend and kiss it, which he obediently did. Before he could say anything, she turned her attention to Mumma. “You must be Rida, but nobody names a child Rida. What is your real name?”

  “Rida,” Mumma answered mendaciously. She turned to ask Pops again, “What party?”

  Once again Grandmother forestalled Pops’ answer. “And you were raised in California? Are your parents there?”

 
Mumma went straight to the point of what Grandmother wanted to talk about. “I’m a foundling, so I can’t tell you anything about my parents. I don’t have any background.”

  “Oh. My. Then—”

  With characteristic good timing, Meg saved the moment—there never was a chance for the day—by opening her eyes and lifting a pudgy hand toward this new stranger, making almost-word noises to express her curiosity as well as her readiness to accept whatever attentions this person would offer her. Meg was accustomed to the kindness of strangers.

  “She has taken a shine to me,” Grandmother announced.

  “She likes everybody,” Mumma answered truthfully. “Strangers don’t frighten her. What do you want me to call you?”

  “Call me?” Grandmother played for time. “What do you mean, call me?” She wasn’t accustomed to playing for time with someone who had so many reasons to be currying her favor.

  “You’re not the Mom type,” Mumma explained, and Pops laughed, further confusing Grandmother, who was also unaccustomed to Spencer laughing. “Should I call you Mrs. Howland? Because Mother Howland sounds like a woman whose sons go out and rob banks. You’ll call me Rida, of course. Unless you’d rather call me Mrs. Howland, too?”

  “I hadn’t given a thought to that question,” Grandmother said—her turn for mendacity, since immediately after the relevant wedding ceremonies she had instructed her previously acquired daughter- and son-in-law to call her Mother H. “I’m not sure—”

  “Mrs. Howland would be a little formal,” Pops said, to help things along, although to whom he was saying this was not clear. “Even pompous.”

  “What’s your given name, then?” Mumma asked Grandmother.

  Luckily, at that moment Meg reached up her other adorably pudgy hand to pull on Grandmother’s triple strand of pearls, so that she could respond “Dorothy” to the harmless grandchild, almost still a baby, not this young woman with her alarming mahogany eyes and abrupt—Did she mean to be rude?—way of speaking. “This little girl will have to go out to meet Mrs. Cook. Mrs. Cook is going to take care of you this evening,” Grandmother informed Meg while Pops told Mumma, “Mrs. Cook is the housekeeper. She knows all about babies.”