Authors: Jennifer Haigh
“What about Fred?” she asked instead. Her breath felt unreliable; she wondered if she would faint. “And Ted? What are you going to do when they come back?”
“Oh, please. What do you think Fred’s been doing over there for two years?” Patsy sucked viciously at her cigarette. “You’re a child, Dottie. It’s about time you grew up.”
I
N SEPTEMBER
a letter came. Dorothy spotted it on the hall table and placed it on Patsy’s pillow. When she returned to the room that night, Patsy was packing a suitcase.
“Fred’s been wounded.” Her face was flushed, a smack of red on each cheek. “They’re sending him home.” Carelessly, angrily, she tossed garments into the suitcase: sweaters, underthings, the blue silk dress.
“Oh, Patsy.” Dorothy sat. “Is it serious?”
“He lost a leg.” She stopped a moment and looked around, as though she, too, had lost something. “He says he’s going to be fine. Can you beat it? ‘Don’t worry, Pat. They’re setting me up with a fake one. By the wedding I’ll be good as new.’ ”
“Wedding?”
“That was the plan, remember?” She shut the case and tried to fasten it; overstuffed, it refused to close. “Damnation.” She sat on the bed and leaned forward, her head in her hands.
“Here.” Dorothy opened the suitcase and repacked it, folding the slips and blouses. Her hands moved quickly over the soft fabrics. For a moment she thought of the women in the dress factory. She’d never imagined her own hands could move so fast.
“I’m a mess,” said Patsy. “An ugly mess.”
“Don’t say that.” Dorothy stroked her hair, stiff with hair spray. She hesitated. “What about Chick?”
Patsy lifted her head sharply. “What about him?” They hadn’t mentioned his name in weeks.
“Have you told him?”
Patsy laughed bitterly. “Don’t worry about him. He’ll take it fine. It’ll save him the trouble of getting rid of me.” She clicked the suitcase shut. “Don’t worry about me, Dottie. I always land on my feet.”
A
gain she ate lunch alone, nickel sandwiches and orange sodas at Peoples’. On Saturdays she wandered the stores; Sundays she went for a walk. It amazed her, how quickly life reverted to its old order, as if there had never been a Patsy at all.
One day, as she was eating lunch at the counter, someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hi, stranger,” said Mag Spangler. “Mind if I join you?” She took the stool next to Dorothy’s.
“I thought you had lunch at one-thirty,” said Dorothy.
“Mr. Leland moved me back. I’m his personal assistant now. I keep the same hours he does.” Mag removed her coat. She wore a brown skirt and blouse Dorothy remembered, the same feathered hat from her parents’ shop in Bakerton.
“That’s wonderful, Mag. I’m glad for you.”
Mag looked around. “Are you alone? What happened to that roommate of yours?”
“Patsy. She moved back home to get married.”
“That figures.”
How?
Dorothy wondered.
How does anything figure?
“Certain girls, you can tell right away they’re not serious. That one—” Mag paused.
“What about her?”
“Some girls always need to be the center of attention. She was one of those. Spoiled rotten, is my guess.” She lowered her voice. “Oversexed, too, if you want to know what I think.”
Dorothy flushed.
“I suppose it’s not her fault,” said Mag. “Some girls can’t help themselves.”
A waitress came to take their order, two creamed chickens on toast.
“
Oriental Dream
is playing at the Capitol,” said Dorothy. “Held over for one more week, if you want to go.”
“And listen to that German voice? No thanks.” Mag snorted. “She may be pretty, but as far as I’m concerned she’s not much of an actress.”
In the end they settled on
The San Antonio Kid,
a sensible western. It was just the sort of thing Mag liked.
T
hey came back in the summer, weighed down with treasures. A scarf or a ring for one kind of girl; for the other kind, silk stockings and French perfume. The best loot went to fathers and little brothers: weapons picked from enemy corpses, the grisly mementos of war.
They came home to girls who’d forgotten them and girls who hadn’t, parents aged and sickened, or like George Novak’s father, simply gone. The lucky ones found garage apartments, cramped quarters above shops downtown. Gene and Evelyn Stusick spent their wedding night on a roll-away cot in his parents’ attic, a cramped space redolent of mothballs, crowded with bicycles and Flexible Flyers, the junk of his youth.
They came home to the mines: Baker Brothers, Concoal, Eastern Coal & Coke. After the surrender came a flurry of bidding, the operators scurrying to acquire new land. There were five Baker mines, then seven, then ten. In the summer of 1945, a huge parcel of land was purchased, thirty thousand acres just across the Susquehanna; and the son of Elias Baker broke ground on Baker Twelve.
Crews were hired, equipment purchased. Coal was mined seven days a week. Paychecks in hand, the men turned their attention to other things. Tryouts were held, a team assembled. In April 1946, the Baker Bombers returned to the field. On Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, Bakerton played ball.
T
HE TOWN DIDN’T
wait for Georgie, for the navy boys still at sea. A month after V-E Day Bakerton held a parade. Chester Baker himself appeared—resurrected from the dead, some said—to welcome the soldiers home.
“This town belongs to you,” the old man boomed from the dais. He had grown frail and leaned heavily on a cane; he wore long whiskers in the old style, a mane of silver hair. “We have done our best to keep it sound in your absence, and we hand it over to you with every confidence that you will make us proud.”
Some, of course, did not come home. Polish Hill had its casualties. Two of the Wojicks had debarked at Normandy. James was killed at Omaha Beach; John landed at Utah and survived, not knowing his brother lay bleeding to death twenty miles away.
Three of May Poblocki’s sons returned. One night, drinking and carousing at the Vets, the youngest suffered a strange seizure and died before the ambulance arrived. Epilepsy, some said; the family called it a heart attack. He was twenty-three years old.
Across town in Little Italy, the four Bernardi boys—Angelo and Jerry, Victor and Sal—came back with stripes. The older cousins worked at Baker and played for the Bombers. Jerry returned to driving the hearse.
G
eorge and his new bride drove into Bakerton in a 1948 Chevy Fleet-line sedan, a wedding gift from Marion’s father. They’d been driving for seven hours, the last two on a narrow country road that wound north, more or less, from the highway. “That’s impossible,” she’d protested when he told her how long it would take. But his estimate—allowing for dirt roads and rugged hills, farm equipment and sluggish coal trucks—turned out to be correct.
“Almost there,” he said. “It’s just over this hill.” He accelerated and was rewarded by an exquisite sound, the mellifluous roar of the ten-cylinder engine.
At the top of Saxon Mountain he slowed, looking down on the town: the bustling main street with its six traffic lights; the eight church steeples; the railroad tracks that cut the valley in half. A whiff of sulfur hung in the air. From this vantage point you could see all of Saxon Valley: Polish Hill, the old mine camp known as Swedetown, the Number Five tipple just beyond. Baker Towers loomed above the train tracks; behind them, rows of
identical shingled roofs. If Marion had asked, George would have told her what they were:
Bony piles. Company houses.
But his wife, bless her, did not.
He rolled down his window. It was a clear Saturday in late June; at every church in Bakerton, someone was getting married. A warm breeze blew up from the valley, carrying the sound of bells. A riot of bells, circling and discordant: the stately carillon at St. John’s Episcopal, the twelve tones of the Angelus, the soaring refrain of “Ave Maria.” George had heard the bells his whole life; each set was distinct, recognizable, its voice as familiar as a relative’s. Intermingled now: the chorus crazily beautiful, festive as a circus organ.
Home,
he thought.
They drove through the town. Bridesmaids posed on the steps of St. Brigid’s, waiting to be photographed. A full parking lot at St. Casimir’s, Fords and Oldsmobiles decorated with tissue-paper flowers. A gasping Studebaker idled out front, a string of empty beer cans trailing from its bumper.
“My goodness,” said Marion, removing her dark sunglasses. She was unaccustomed to early mornings; the skin beneath her eyes looked slightly blue. “What is that all about?”
“They hang a lot of junk on the groom’s car. When the newlyweds drive away, it makes a real racket.”
She smiled uncertainly. “Is that a—Polish tradition?”
“A Bakerton tradition.” He grinned. “Aren’t you sorry we missed out on that?”
He took the long way through town, imagined the sun glinting off the Chevy’s chrome bumpers. The car was baby blue; in four weeks he’d already waxed it twice. The interior was white leather, the backseat wide as a sofa.
He stopped at the traffic light next to Bellavia’s Bakery. One of the
Bernardi boys, Vic or Sal, stopped in the street to stare. George gave him a wave. They crossed the railroad tracks and climbed Polish Hill. A barefoot boy ran in the street. The Poblockis’ chickens pecked quietly at the front yard. Fingering her rosary, Mrs. Stusick rocked back and forth on her porch swing, a babushka tied under her chin.
“The houses are all the same,” Marion observed.
“Company houses,” he said matter-of-factly.
There,
he thought.
That wasn’t so bad.
He pulled in front of his mother’s house and engaged the brake. “Here we are.”
“I hope they like me,” she said.
“They’ll love you,” said George, who had loved her the moment he saw her. “How could they not?”
T
HEY’D MET ON
Thanksgiving at her parents’ house in Haverford, a wealthy suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line. George had been invited by her brother, Kip Quigley, whom he knew from a chemistry class at Temple. Quigley had hired George as his tutor, which meant that he sat behind George during exams and copied with impunity from his paper. For this privilege he paid ten dollars a week, enough to keep George’s secondhand Ford in gas and lube. The car trailed oil all over Philadelphia; George had never managed to find the leak. When he could afford to, he simply added another quart.
The two were friendly, but not friends; their lives were too different. Quigley was nineteen and lived with his parents; he took classes when he felt like it, in between hangovers and tennis. George worked in a hardware store to pay for textbooks, clothes and other necessities the GI Bill didn’t cover. He studied at night, early in the morning and in the student union
between classes. He was pressed for time, for cash; most days his body felt hungry for sleep; yet when exam results were posted, he was always at the top of the class. A clerical error, he thought the first time it happened. Somebody had made a mistake.
In high school he’d been an indifferent student; if not for his father’s constant prodding, he would never have opened a book. He worked one summer at the tiny music store in town and took his pay in merchandise: a beat-up saxophone, a secondhand clarinet. His band played the school dances; onstage, he imagined himself Woody Herman or Jimmy Dorsey, enthralling audiences with the silky sound of his clarinet. School was his buddy Gene Stusick’s department. His high marks had earned him the nickname Eugenius: a boy who could name all thirty-two presidents in their proper order, who’d dazzled their sixth-grade teacher by adding long columns of figures in his head. George was no Eugenius. A grown man now, he simply studied harder than anyone else—galvanized by his dread of the coal mines, a life spent slaving underground like his father.
Mining had killed Stanley Novak. George didn’t know how, exactly, but he was sure that it had. A big man, he’d spent much of his life crammed into tight, damp spaces; from the way he walked you could tell he was in pain. His breathing was labored. As a boy George had fallen asleep to the sound of it. The jagged rasp was audible through the floorboards, louder than the Polish radio station in the parlor downstairs. His father had given his life to Baker Brothers. The mines had given him a heart attack at fifty-four.
For six months after graduating high school, George had worked as a greaser in the machine shop at Baker One—a sweetheart job, by mine standards. Before the war, the shop had been staffed by Baker’s star ballplayers, to save their knees and backs and lungs for the playing field.
The shop was cold and filthy, the noise deafening; but George didn’t mind. He was grateful to be working aboveground.
His first day at work, he’d ridden the mantrip with a dozen other men and felt his heart race as they entered the shaft. The memory still haunted him: the echoing dampness, the sulfur smell. The dark shaft was narrow and airless, no wider than the beam of his headlamp. Here and there, a rat scuttled. A few times, water fell from the low roof like a thundershower, soaking his shoulders. The One was a wet mine, the foreman explained; but where the water came from, or what kept it from flooding the mine completely, no one seemed to know. That single day had been enough for George; at the end of his shift he handed in his helmet. Luckily the foreman took pity on him and got him the job lubing shuttle cars. He was almost relieved when his draft notice came.
He would never go back. He’d made up his mind long ago, when he was still in the navy, and this resolution had guided his every decision. One of his navy buddies had grown up in Philly; after their discharge they’d shared an apartment on Broad Street. When the other fellow moved out to get married, George found a tiny studio in a rooming house downtown. He worked a series of jobs: deliveryman, butcher’s assistant, night janitor at a pet store, scrubbing down cages and shoveling dog shit. He worked and studied. His hair thinned. In the mirror he saw his father.