Fireworks Over Toccoa (13 page)

Jake continued watching her as she put on her clothes and did the best she could to smooth her hair out with her hands and fingers. It was these little ordinary things, subtleties of women that drove men crazy, that both tantalized and allured. And now, the way Lily tossed her hair back. Buttoned her dress. Slipped her foot into a sandal. It was carnal, bewitching, watching her engaged in the simple routine of her life. Jake committed the images of her to long-term memory, his mind reeling, wondering what it would be like to see her every day, to be part of these private moments first thing every morning, to share the conversations and intimacies of two people living their lives together every night before sleep.

She caught him staring at her.

“What?”

“You’re beautiful, Lily.”

She smiled back at him, looking away for a moment as all his attention rushed over her. Feeling flattered, cherished, and so close to him, she finished dressing as he watched. Then she turned and looked at him intently.

“Last night, I remembered something,” she said. “When I was nine and a half years old, I saw fireworks, amazing fireworks, from the backyard at my parents’ house, and I remember having this incredible sense of not just how beautiful and magnificent they were, but how they made me feel, expansive and open and capable, I really think, of sharing everything big and small, all that the world has to offer, with another person. It was the first time I got a glimpse into the depths of who I was, who I am. Someone with me, my father, I think, told me never to forget how I felt, that wonder and sense of possibility, but I guess as I got older, I don’t know, it kind of faded into the background, chalked up as some silly childhood memory, and I never saw fireworks again. Until you.”

Lily took his hands and gathered her thoughts, continuing. “Jake, meeting you has made me feel the way I did when I was that child, and no matter what, I never want to lose that again.”

He kissed her, and in an instant it made his insides swim. He put his cheek on hers, to feel her skin on his once again. Closing his eyes, he ran his fingers through her hair, still damp-ish, taking her in with all his senses. Her sweat was a potion, her scent elixir.

She kissed him back.

Getting ready to go, they made sure the fire, where they had burned the paper sack and wax paper, was completely extinguished. Before they left, she put the journal paper he had given her in the glass jar with her paints, her other prized possessions.

He watched her screw the metal top back on the jar. She was right, of course. This was crazy. He’d just given his heart to someone who was hiding it under a board in the floor. But where else was she going to keep it? Where else could she hide her secrets? He didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about two days from now. He just wanted to think about when he would be with her next. That thick shell he had developed, the guardedness that had kept him from being close to people, that had sent him on the road, had dissolved like the morning mist in the heat of the sun. He could feel it. And for Jake Russo, Lily Davis Woodward was the sun.

Lily pulled the Packard up the driveway, parked, and got out. The eastern sky was already bright and honeyed with new day. She strolled up to the house feeling a little like she was drunk. Her hair was a mess. Her dress dirty and disheveled. And she looked as though she had never been more radiant in her entire life. She hummed a little to herself, one of the songs she’d heard in that night in the field.

Lily bounded up the back stairs and into the kitchen and immediately realized that something was wrong. Something was very wrong. She looked around and it hit her. The boxes were gone. The entire mess was gone. She looked around and discovered that everything had been unpacked and her entire kitchen was set up.

She ran into the foyer and saw that the boxes that had been there were now also gone, their contents unpacked.

She swung her head into the living room and was immediately startled by the man sitting on her sofa.

“Daddy!”

“Good morning, Lily,” said Walter Davis.

What are you doing here?”

“I called you over and over, Lily,” Walter Davis said. He stood, which was something that had a powerful effect in a room.

Lily remained silent and walked toward him, feeling smaller with every step.

“Then Havis Brown called me yesterday,” he continued. “Said he’d seen the Packard by the side of Owl Swamp Road, over by Bartam’s Field. I got concerned and left Atlanta early.”

Lily remembered she’d seen the Browns’ pickup drive by and slow when she was with Jake in the field, when he was tending to her knee. She also remembered that Lilah Brown was active with the Ladies Auxiliary. The Browns were such busybodies, she thought. Lily paced the living room, looking around, while her father stood calmly.

“You cleaned everything?” she said nervously.

“Everything needed to be cleaned.” Walter Davis paused for a moment, then looked hard at his daughter. “I’ve been here all night, honey.”

There was another long moment between them. She knew very well what he was saying to her. As always, her father quietly knew everything. She felt a distressing mixture of guilt and sadness, like she had let her father down, but also regret that she couldn’t share with him all the wonderful things she felt about this incredible man whom she had met. Perhaps saddest of all, Lily felt, was that Walter would have liked Jake. He would have liked Jake a great deal, even though Jake was Italian, of that she was sure.

But this wasn’t one of their camping trips from her childhood, where they talked openly and freely about what ever came to mind, sparks from a fire crackling before them through the night. No, those days were gone. Though Lily felt fairly sure that both she and her father were still essentially the same—this was still the man who would come home from a trip and throw down his jacket and roll up his sleeves and shampoo his little girl’s hair in the tub and then talk to her for an hour about his travels and her dreams while she sat in the warm water—everything around them had changed.

“And there’s something else,” he continued. “Paul got himself onto an earlier plane. He will be home tomorrow.”

Lily took that in. Walter watched as she was hit with a tidal wave of mixed emotions.

“Does Mother—”

“Your mother knows he’s coming home early, and she’ll be back from Atlanta tonight. But she doesn’t know why I left early for Toccoa. I told her I had to leave yesterday to get some sales figures I’d left at home for the London office. As you know, some things are best kept from your mother. I don’t like lying, Lily. But I also understand that sometimes people do what they need to do.”

Lily nodded, sensing that he was talking about her.

“Sit down, honey,” Walter Davis said gently.

Lily acquiesced, sitting back straight, knees together, as though polite posture could somehow distract from the disheveled mess she knew she was, a girl who had been out all night in the woods with a boy.

Walter paced for a moment as though he were in a board-room, thinking, pondering her life with the same acumen and weight he gave to multinational business decisions affecting tens of thousands of employees. Then he walked over and sat down next to her, leaning in close as if to comfort her. She could smell the sweet scent of perique, the expensive tobacco that her father always smoked in his pipes. When she was a child, she always knew he’d been in to check on her when she’d awake in the night and smell that sweet scent in her room. That scent always soothed her.

“Lily, if you had come to me and asked what I thought three years ago, I would have told you that I thought you were too young to get married.”

Lily was surprised. “Daddy, I had no idea that you—”

“Let me talk,” he cut her off, and she shut her mouth. “I would have told you not to do it. But you didn’t ask. And your mother…well, you know what she thought. So I let her speak for both of us, as you know I often do.”

Lily was shocked to hear this. But as the information sunk in and she thought about her father’s muted reactions to her wedding, it made sense to her.

“When I was in law school,” he said, continuing, “before I met your mother, I dated. I had ‘flings.’ I had what you might call a preadulthood. You did not have any of that. Your childhood was stunted, just like much of the world the last three years. But all that is over now.”

“Daddy—” Lily had never heard her father speak to her like this.

“No. Listen. Three years ago you did not come to me and ask what I thought, and even if you did and I had told you, you wouldn’t have listened to me. Well, you listen to me now. You are not asking, but I am telling and you will listen. You are beautiful and smart, Lilybelle, and as far as I’m concerned the most tenacious person I have ever met. You got that from your mother and I swear you are more obstinate than her. But you are an adult now. And that means you have responsibilities.”

“I love Paul, I do, Daddy, but—”

“The last few years the entire world has been upside down, and due to great sacrifice it’s been made right again. Don’t talk to me about love. I know all about love. From the first moment I held you in my arms I loved you so deeply you can’t even begin to comprehend it, and I know I don’t tell you that enough, but there you have it. You mean everything to me, but you are an adult now and it’s time to start acting like one. Sixty million people died, Lily. Half a million Americans, including your brother. To change the world. To make it a better place. Not because it was easy or because it felt right, not because of love. They did it out of a sense of selflessness, out of a sense of duty.”

“Daddy, I just don’t—”

“Stop. Don’t talk. Just be quiet.” Walter Davis rarely raised his voice above an even pitch, but when he did, as he did now for a brief moment, it silenced senators, stopped dictators mid-sentence, and could bring tears to the eyes of his daughter. Lily wrung her hands. Nothing could get to her like the idea that she had disappointed her father.

“The world is now right and it will stay that way.” He leaned in even closer to her. “I have been married to the same woman at least five times. Marriage comes in phases. Some good, some not so good. But you work through things, and you grow, and you change, and you stick by the decisions that you made, even when you were seventeen. That is your duty.”

Walter Davis rose. Lily stayed silent.

“Now, your mother will be at our house at noon. We are entertaining the Woodwards this evening, who will be coming up from Gainesville this afternoon. I’d like you to come early and greet them, and help your mother and GiGi prepare supper. Your house is ready for tomorrow. I’d like you to be, too. I love you so, Lily.”

Walter Davis kissed her on the head and walked out.

“Have you ever seen Toccoa, Georgia, look so bright and happy?” exclaimed Honey.

“No, Mother. I can’t say I have.”

Honey drove Walter’s 1942 Cadillac sedan, the huge company car, down Doyle Street through the center of town. Though the chrome had been painted per “blackout” orders from Washington, like all of the few cars still delivered after December 1941, the Davis sedan was quite a sight. On Honey’s request, Mrs. Keener had slaughtered an eighteen-pound goose that morning, one of several that had been fattened for years on the grass in her peach orchard. Lily accompanied Honey downtown to pick up the bird, which would be the main course of their evening meal with the Woodwards.

The sidewalks were jammed with people and it seemed that nearly all of them looked up and smiled and offered a greeting when they saw the big Caddy cruising down Doyle. Honey and Lily found their smiles, as they always did, and waved back. Coming downtown alone was one thing. Coming downtown with Honey was like accompanying a duchess. Lily’s arm often hurt from all the waving. They parked the car and got out. Lily took a deep breath, making sure her downtown face was suitably applied.

Immediately folks began to greet them and wave to them, and of course Lily and Honey greeted them and waved back with an effortless rhythm, in perfect harmony with each other, as though they had spent months practicing. They walked by Barron’s Drugs, packed with people young and old, all gathered around the soda fountain. Tobacco-chewing men in blue overalls at Ralph Wilson’s Feed & Seed, who’d come from all over the county to discuss the fine points of manure, stopped their conversation and waved respectfully as the Davis women walked by. At a corner, Lily and Honey could see up the street dozens of rockers moving like pistons all along the wide Victorian-style porch on Mamy Simmons’ mansion, which was flooded with guests, mint juleps in many hands, “white lightning” and OJ in others. Continuing along Doyle, Honey and her daughter approached the Ritz movie theater, where Lily had kissed Paul throughout much of
The Maltese Falcon
without ever taking her eyes off the screen. Its marquee read:
WELCOME HOME, BOYS
.

Women from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Down to Earth Garden Club, the Civitan Club, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Ladies Auxiliary of Toccoa had descended on the town, decorating lampposts and storefronts and Confederate monuments in front of city buildings for the homecoming celebration.

Someone had wheeled an upright piano out onto the sidewalk under the Ritz marquee, and a young sailor was playing a very up-tempo version of Johnny Mercer and Ziggy Elman’s “And the Angels Sing.” Several people passing by, some in uniform, some townsfolk, joined him and started singing. A few started swing dancing. Another sailor produced a bugle and joined in the impromptu celebration right on the sidewalk in the center of Doyle Street. “We meet, and the angels sing. The angels sing the sweetest song I ever heard. You speak, and the angels sing. Or am I breathing music into every word.”

It became impossible to ignore this joy that was spreading across town like the scent of the sweet-tomato barbeque sauce pouring from steel barrel grills. A returning soldier and his date started dancing on the sidewalk, too. Soon a few more couples joined them. Lily watched with Honey as a young Army officer took the hand of a gleeful local girl as the impromptu dancing grew and poured over into the street. “You smile, and the angels sing. And though it’s just a gentle murmur at the start. We kiss, and the angels sing. And leave their music ringing in my heart.”

Even a lady of society like Honey Davis had to smile at the goings-on downtown. Such manners would normally be derided as the conduct of bohemians and pinup girls, and, certainly, dancing under the movie marquee was not typical behavior for Toccoa. But these were not typical days.

“Hi, Mrs. Davis.”

“Hello, Mrs. Davis.”

“Afternoon, Mrs. Davis.”

Hats were tipped as Honey and Lily walked by and returned the joyous greetings. Just as they were approaching Keener’s Market, someone came jogging at Lily from the crowd on the street.

“Lily?”

She turned at the sound of her name being called.

“Lily!”

An exuberant and very pregnant young woman waddled over and threw her arms around Lily, barely giving her a chance to breathe.

“Oh, look at you, Lils! How are you?”

“Hi, Jenna.”

“You look fabulous.”

“And you look—”

“Twins! Can you believe it?! Ahh!”

The young woman patted her massive belly, radiating joy. A young man in a wheelchair joined her.

“Hello, Lily,” he said.

“Hello, Mark.”

He wheeled himself over, next to his pregnant spouse. The deep and whimsical smiles he and Lily exchanged were not lost on Honey.

“Mrs. Davis,” the young man said, nodding a respectful greeting to Honey.

The young man was pensive, contained, his carelessly rumpled hair a stark contrast to his brightly dressed and ebullient wife.

“It’s nice to see you home, Mark,” said Honey.

Mark nodded but seemed to bristle uncomfortably in his chair.

“We simply couldn’t miss the homecoming,” Jenna said. “Oh, it’s just so wonderful to see everyone!”

“I know your parents are happy to see you. Your mother fills me in on all your exciting news every time I see her at the club. How are things in San Francisco?”

“Sausalito,” Mark said.

“Oh,” said Honey, unable to hide that she was misinformed. “How are things in Sausalito?”

“It’s really quite an interesting town. Just across the bay from the city. The shipbuilding has stopped for the most part,” Jenna said.

“A lot of artists are starting to move there,” said Mark.

“And you’re working for a paper, I understand?” Honey prompted.

“A news agency.”

“He’s a reporter,” Jenna said.

“Well, something like that.” “Reporter” sounded more exciting to many people than the reality, which was sitting behind a desk and fact-checking news before it went out over the wires.

“We thought it was important for us to, you know, strike out on our own,” Jenna said. “While we’re young.”

Honey knew that the young couple had been under a lot of pressure to work for Jenna’s family’s business, but they were resistant to the idea, Mark apparently more so than Jenna. Her family owned one of Toccoa’s most successful firms, a casket company. The manufacturer had prospered for decades, but business during the last few years had never been better. In 1942, the casket company had removed its signage so that it was no longer visible from Route 123, the road from the train depot to Camp Toccoa, traveled by new soldiers when they arrived in town for training before being sent to the battlefield.

“I was so sorry to hear about your brother,” said Jenna.

“Thank you,” Lily replied.

“I remember watching him play football when I was a little girl. He was so good.”

“And your brother comes home on the Fourth?” asked Honey, changing the subject.

“Yes, he does. We’re all so excited.”

“That
is
exciting. Paul comes home tomorrow,” said Honey.

“Oh. You must be positively jumping out of your skin,” squealed Jenna, reaching out and squeezing Lily’s hands. “Three and a half years he’s been gone, right?”

“Three years, four months,” said Lily.

“Wow.” Jenna giggled, perhaps envisioning what a man and a woman do when re united after so long.