One afternoon, Bea, Janie at her heels, caught Helen and Dossy at the landing window with the binoculars.
“Let me see!” Janie lunged forward.
Bea caught her by the collar, held her back. “Put that away, girls.”
“Why?” Dossy asked.
“For one thing, it’s extremely rude.”
“Not to mention illegal,” said Helen.
“Illegal?” Bea’s voice went high. She was beautifully easy to shock.
Helen shrugged. “It’s all classified information over there. But don’t worry—we’ll use what we discover for the common good.”
Bea reached for the binoculars. Helen ducked away, and Bea turned to call down the hall. “
Agnes!
”
“Call in the troops,” Helen muttered.
Agnes appeared from her room. “Well. What’s all this about?”
“These two”—Bea jutted her chin toward them—“are spying on the soldiers.”
“Give me those glasses,” Agnes said.
Dossy, who’d gotten hold of them, dropped them deftly around her neck. “Don’t you love bird-watching? I think I saw a scarlet tanager.”
“I’ll tell your father,” said Agnes.
Helen blanched, but she would not let on. “Daddy? That we’re aiding the war effort? Just wait—we might spot a submarine. We’ll catch a spy. Heinrich Heidelberg. Or Masako Fujiwaka.” She liked the sound of German and Japanese, read aloud the words in the newspaper, collected them in her war scrapbook.
“Who?” Janie asked, panicked. “Where?”
“This war,” Bea said, her face gone pale, “is not a game.”
“Her brother’s in it,” Agnes explained. “On the other side. Where there’s bombings.”
“The other
side
?” Janie shrilled. “Your brother’s a
German
?”
“The other side of the
sea
, love.” Bea’s voice shook. “He’s an air raid warden in Glasgow. You know, the picture in my room? The little boy? That’s Callum, my only brother. It’s just the two of us. I’ve told you about him.”
Janie turned to her sisters. “Bea’s only brother is in the war!”
“
Your
only brother’s in it too,” Helen told her. Bea had never liked Charlie; they all knew it. She liked girls better than boys, Dossy better than Helen, Janie better than the Queen of England, which said a lot. “And rising up the ranks. He could get shipped out.”
“Enough.” Agnes flew into motion, ushering Helen toward her bedroom. “Helen, really—you’ve got a queer idea of a joke.”
Helen sprang away and slipped sideways into her room, where she slammed the door and leaned on it, though no one was trying to get in. A joke? What none of them could see was that she was dead serious—serious in how she watched the sky and sea, serious in how she wrote to her brother every single day, serious in how she followed the news. The murders in Lidice. The lists of casualties. She had begun reading the newspaper last year in an attempt to impress her father, but it quickly became more than that. If she were old enough, she would sign up to be a lady reporter or join the WAC.
She cracked the door open, expecting them still to be there, but they had disappeared, even Dos. She took off the binoculars, let her skirt drop to the floor and crawled into bed, where, after a run of muffled, cleansing tears, she fell asleep.
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, SHE WOKE
to a dusk so dense it was hard to make out your own hand and turned on the nightstand lamp to read. She was partway through
A Farewell to Arms
, and while the book’s cover—a man and woman naked from the waist up—had announced the romance (which she’d expected, having seen the movie), it was the bits about war that held her rapt. A world limned and burnished. A road. Leaves. Bodies (wounded, dying, longing, healing, dead). Trenches. Big ideas. The book was full of things she could almost but not quite say, nor even quite think, so that reading it was like watching her own mind—a better, smarter, more worldly version of it—cross the sea and come back to report. “All thinking men are atheists,” said the young lieutenant, which seemed potentially true to her, though awful, but what then of her prayers, for she’d begun praying some nights before bed, a new thing, a secret she kept even from Dos. Her prayers were childish—she saw that now—at once too specific and too general (
Let Charlie go to active duty AND keep him safe. Let us win the war
), and worse, arrogant, for even if God existed, why should He listen to her, she who knew nothing, who’d been nowhere and made of war an attic game and thought her own brother the only brother in the world (it turned out Bea had one. Nearly everybody did). As for love, she had always felt it to be—as Frederick Henry had too at first—a sort of game, but as she read on, she saw that it was not a game for Frederick and Catherine; it was something else, a religion almost, and so was God love, sweating, tangling, in the bodies of a man and woman together? The thought upset her; she had always thought God, if there was such a thing, would be spread across the sky or, if embodied, be a giant brain of sorts, quivering, brilliant and alone.
I loved to take her hair down
, Helen was reading as her mother entered without knocking and went straight for the windows, lowering shades with a flick of her wrist and a snap. Helen slid the book under the bedclothes. While her parents didn’t much bother with what she read, to be interrupted now felt like both a risk and an affront.
“I was outside and saw your light,” her mother said. “You need to
think
, darling. If you don’t pull down the dim-out shades, the soldiers can see you clear as day!”
“How thrilling for them.” Helen propped herself up. “The shades are so the
enemy
can’t see us. And our ships, which get lit against the coastline if there’s light on shore.”
She had broken a central rule from “Additional Restrictions If Your House is Visible from the Sea”—and she the one constantly to remind the others. She had pasted the flyer in her war scrapbook, where she kept every little thing—ration cards, newspaper clippings, the stamps from Charlie’s letters.
People living in these areas visible from the sea must not only shade those windows and doors visible from the sea, but they must not allow any light to shine upward from any window, skylight, or lightwell, no matter what direction they face. Like everybody else, you must keep shades drawn as low as the bottom of the lowest light in the room.
Her mother stepped over her skirt. “Get dressed for dinner, please.” She peered at Helen, who had slipped back under the sheet. “What is it? Are you ill?”
“I’m fine.”
“Then what?”
“I’m just lost in my book. And not hungry.”
“Reading is not an excuse to malinger in bed at dinnertime.”
Somebody else’s mother, or even Helen’s mother at another time, might have phrased it differently—
please come down, we’d like your company
—or offered to have Lizzy bring up dinner on a tray. Somebody else’s mother might have set herself on the edge of the bed, kicked off her shoes and brought her feet up onto it, sunk into a pillow, asked
what are you reading, what are you thinking about?
or said
it’s not easy, is it, to have Charlie away, to have Daddy ill, to be sixteen?
Her mother stood, neither going nor staying, and then, in a motion so fluid that Helen didn’t see it coming, flipped the covers back, leaving both Helen and the book exposed.
“Why are you hiding that? It’s”—her mother picked up the novel— “Hemingway.
A Farewell to Arms.
Why are you hiding Hemingway?”
“I wasn’t.”
“I suppose the cover is racy. I didn’t like that book—it’s my copy, you know. I found it cynical, and the ending too sad, in a hopeless, unredeeming sort of way. Sad for no good reason.”
The ending of the movie was oddly dim in Helen’s mind. Birds flying, music swelling, Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper in an embrace. “I didn’t think it was so sad.”
“You’ve finished it? And you still won’t come to dinner?”
“I saw the movie.” Charlie had taken her, with a friend he’d brought home from Yale. Helen’s elbow had grazed the friend’s elbow all the way through, which had been thrilling—to watch two lovers while her skin grazed a college boy’s skin—though in daylight the boy was pompous, his skin too pale, his lips too red.
“Does she die in childbirth in the movie?” her mother asked.
“Mummy! You’ve ruined it!”
“I’m sorry.” Her mother held the book against her chest, the front cover turned in. “Now you can read something else.”
T
HERE WERE NO
tennis tournaments that year, no clambakes or Beetle Cat races—not enough people and you couldn’t sail beyond the Red Nun (one day, the Childs boys did and got escorted back). The bicycles got lots of use—the paved road was great for them if you could avoid the trucks—but the stable stood empty, the ponies and donkey back in New Jersey. The grass on the lawns went longer without mowing, which made the place look neglected to Bea, overgrown. During other summers, the houses had been lit at night; headlights bumped along the road, boats blinked on the sea, company of sorts. Now, on cloudy or moonless nights, it was as dark out as the dim-out shades themselves, except for the army’s searchlights on the water and the odd car inching along the road, headlights straining, watery, through curtained slits.
Yet even at night, even in the dark, the place was filled with men and boys, and it felt, well, Bea felt strange thinking it, but it felt most like a party, or just before a party. The soldiers were a cheerful, joking lot and seemed not to have a great deal to do. On the base—you could see from the lawn—the men slept in tents and shaved outside, using mirrors nailed to poles. They washed their pots and pans on benches, drawing water from vats that looked like dustbins (the water itself was piped from the Porters’ and stored in Hollow Hill, the army’s well too far out and dry). Sometimes Bea would catch a glimpse of a soldier dressed only in an undershirt and trousers, his underarm hair visible, dark clumps. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, they had nowhere to go, but there was a nakedness to this war she did not like.
Still, on the base, it seemed as if things would not stay like this for long. The army was fast building up and out—officer quarters shingled and edged like summer cottages, the beginning of a radar tower designed to look like a civilian water tower, barracks going up to replace the tents. More roads kept getting built, cutting through fields and scrub brush and what had been the Wilsons’ lawn. Trucks from the concrete company came and went; the lumber mill delivered wood. The noise was terrible. Sometimes, during drills, guns went off, and that was one thing, a kind of necessary, almost holy noise—it made Bea stop and think of her brother, of the war across the sea—but most of the time the sounds were of hammers and trucks, and the gate stayed open almost carelessly to let soldiers and workers through.
“Such a shame,” whispered Mrs. Porter one day as she wheeled Mr. Porter near the gate. Bea, Agnes and the girls were all there too, hovering around the sentry box, Helen and Dossy making conversation with the soldiers standing guard, the adults keeping an eye on the girls but also looking in. Sometime over the previous winter, the army had taken over the Wilsons’ Point House, and now there were tents pitched right beside it, and a long sheet of black canvas covering one wall, and pipes protruding from the roof. There was the Wilsons’ barn, become a rec hall, and the Wilson children’s playhouse with its peak and weathervane. The Wilsons had not come—nowhere to stay, and two of their own sons already shipped off.
“It’s necessary,” Mr. Porter said as his wife turned his chair around and began to wheel him back. “If they needed our house, we’d let them have it.”
He would have been out there fighting himself if his legs had worked, even at his age, and Bea admired him for that. On the day in April that Charlie had come back on leave before going to flight camp, Mr. P. had put on his old World War I uniform, which smelled of mothballs, and Stewart (butler and manservant but also friend to Mr. P., almost, it sometimes seemed, a sort of aging son) had propped him in a corner next to Charlie, also in uniform, for a photograph. Bea had not liked it—a boy playing at being a soldier, a cripple playing at being a boy.
“Not that they’d need our permission,” said Mrs. P. “And I didn’t say it wasn’t necessary, just that it’s a shame. Anyway, nothing is happening here. It must be so dull for them. Nothing
will
happen.”
“You have no idea of that, darling,” her husband said. “They’re guarding the mouth of Buzzards Bay. This is a crucial location. Anything could happen.”
“Like what?” asked Helen, who had caught up.
Bea glanced at Agnes. Janie was behind, still, showing Dossy something cupped inside her hands.
“Things are escalating, is all I’m saying,” said Mr. P. “This may be our last summer here for a little while.”
Janie caught up and released the moth she had captured—a brown flutter—to the air. “What’s ‘escalating,’ Daddy?”
Her father looked over at her, and his face softened. Mostly he was kind to his children, though now and then he played cruel, childish tricks, like getting Stewart to dress up in a bearskin and leap out at Janie from the dark woods. Janie had not been more than five then; she’d wet herself from fear. Or he would instruct his youngest daughter to spit into the river and run to the other side of the bridge to watch her spit get carried by the current, and Janie would do it—running, looking, increasingly frantic:
Where is it? I can’t see it, Daddy! Where?
“Like an escalator,” he said. “Like at Macy’s.”
“The army’s putting in an escalator?”
“And some Christmas windows.” Helen laughed. “And a dress department.”
Janie looked at Bea, who took her hand, but the girl brushed her away. “Mummy,” Janie asked. “What could happen, really?”
In Amagansett on Long Island, not even a month previous, four Germans had come ashore in a collapsible rubber boat. Stewart had read about it in the paper and told the rest of them. Later, Bea saw pictures of the men. They looked like anybody else, but one of them, the most handsome of the lot, had the middle name of Harm. Saboteurs, Stewart had called them. They had buried their gear, put on civilian clothes and taken the train to New York, carrying fishing poles. A few days later, four more Germans came ashore in Florida. By then, the Porters were beginning to pack for Ashaunt. Don’t forget the handkerchiefs. Don’t forget the tisane. Mrs. P. needs it for her sleep.