“IF I’D BEEN ON THAT
LIST,
I’d have been there in a flash,” Smitty told her later. The soldiers were invited in groups into family homes for dinner; he had gone to a house on Smith Neck Road, where the only drinks were black tea or lemon water and the hostesses were Quaker ladies. Spinsters, he’d reported, his arm loosely around Bea. It was nighttime on the beach. She had shivered against him for a moment, then pulled away. When was this? Later on, of course. It must have been mid-August. Several of the saboteurs had been executed by then. Charlie had been transferred to a base in Oklahoma. No enemies had shown up on the Point. Perfectly nice ladies, Smitty had said, but not you—as if she were something altogether different from what she knew herself to be. As if she were young, not a spinster, a girl in a sleeveless eyelet blouse.
After the dinner where Smitty was not present, something shifted inside Bea. She did not welcome this feeling and did her best not to think about it, nor even to admit it to herself. Still she felt it, in a wordless, almost dumb way, the way you might sense a small animal, mouse or vole, crouched beneath the rafters, looking out. She was waiting. There was, for the first time in years, a man who fancied her. Agnes was sure of it; Bea claimed to be less so, but still she knew. She did not like change, had never courted it. Even leaving home had been a last resort, a decision made largely of grief and not enough money and because Tilly from upstairs was going, and so was the girl to her left at church, and so was the girl to her right.
Now, as she walked down the road, or sat mending on the porch, or ran the girls’ bathing suits through the wringer, or picked thyme for Annie on the lawn, or had tea with Agnes and the others, she was waiting, trying to make out the figures in the distance. That one in khaki; was it Smitty? No. That one in dress uniform, his tie stuffed in his shirt? He came closer: a beak nose, curly hair. A group of them, heads tipped in the wind, hanging off the back of a truck. “Top of the day, Beatrice!” one soldier called, trying and failing to sound Scottish, but it was Louis; at dinner, he had pretended to be fascinated by Helen’s questions and leaned too close. Still, she waved hello.
We’ll meet ere hills meet
—one of the sadder songs she knew, though as a girl, she’d thought it perfectly possible for hills to meet. And yet she and Smitty did cross paths again, more than once; he did keep finding her somehow. Of course it wasn’t difficult. With the base adjacent to the house and Ashaunt akin to a small village, it was harder to be lost than to be found. Still, it kept surprising her, for shouldn’t he have been planning, drilling, protecting, having more “shams,” the fake attacks they staged? He was a sergeant, in charge of training new soldiers at the guns, but there he’d be, strolling along the road, so relaxed; it was what she liked about him and what threw her, the jokes coming fast. Sometimes she wondered if he was only out to poke fun at her, or on a dare. “Halt, who goes there? Oh, it’s Honeybee,” he’d say. Or “Bee-bah-bee, caught you lookin’ at me,” and she’d blush, and he’d heave in silent laughter.
How old was he? How old did he think she was? Bea’s skin, which was her mother’s, had a creaminess to it, except when she rashed up from sun or shame. Her face, on the round side, had kept a certain girlishness, though she knew herself to be no beauty. Mrs. P., a few years older and elegant no matter what she wore, had once told Bea she envied her young looks, but now they could be sending out false messages. Or was it Janie that Smitty really liked, because she reminded him of his own niece, or of civilian life outside the base? “Where’s your sidekick?” Smitty would ask, and Beatrice did feel better when Janie was with her; it took his eyes off her and gave her something to do with her hands.
“Watch this,” Smitty said one morning when he found Bea and Janie on the road, a folded newspaper under his arm. Tearing a piece from the paper, he began to make an airplane, his fingers quick for a fellow on the portly side, as hers were too, her shellflowers better, she thought secretly, than some in the craft magazines. He folded, tucked and creased; soon wings appeared, then a nose and a fin. Next, he took a pen from his pocket and made a mark, the tilted pinwheeled sign the Germans used. Before Bea could stop him, he had handed it to Janie.
“A Heinkel He 111 heavy bomber monoplane.” He bowed. “For you, madam.”
Janie held the plane by one end, as if it might explode.
“So do I know my airplanes?” he asked.
The girl nodded.
“Do you think I went to airplane college?”
She shrugged. She was not and would never be a flirt like her sisters, though she wanted their attention, especially Helen’s, so much it was hard to watch. She liked her solitude, to read and draw and play games filled with characters known only to herself, and sometimes Bea. Her affections were few, fierce, and private. Mostly (Bea told herself), she loved Bea.
“Nope,” said Smitty. “
Jane’s All the World Fighting Ships and Aircraft
is how I know. It’s an army book, big as a St. Louis phone book.
Jane’s
. Named after you! Did you know you were all the world?”
“I’m not.” Janie shook her head, her voice loud, almost angry, surprising Bea, who touched her shoulder.
“You’re all the world to Bea,” said Smitty.
And then he looked at Bea, straight into her eyes, his gaze solemn, knowing and exact, and she began (was it then? It must have been) to fall in love with him, but in the most impossible way, for what he said about Janie being all the world to her was true. She met his eyes, then looked away, and as she did, her stomach turned; for a moment, she thought she might be sick.
“Let’s see how she flies,” Smitty said to Janie, and the girl gave a toss to the plane, which plunged onto the road.
“She needs a tighter nose.” Smitty picked up the plane, made adjustments and handed it back. “All right,” he said. “Throw her way up this time, and I’ll be me, which means manning the 155-millimeter small-calibers here on the Point when—
High alert, men! Resume stations!
—along comes the heavy bomber!”
“Except it won’t,” interrupted Bea. Just that week, she’d read an advice column in the Women’s Features section of the paper:
Do not bring up the war before the children. Do not warn them not to be afraid. Do not mention fear. Do not warn them about death and danger. If the subject comes up, tell them you will take care of them always, all they have to do is to stay by you and do what you say.
With Helen and Dossy, it was too late and they enjoyed drama far too much, forcing it on their sister, filling her head with tales.
“The war,” Bea said firmly, “is not coming here.”
During the Great War, two zeppelins had passed right over her town. Everyone had thought it was the war come to land; they’d even heard explosions in the distance. In the end, nothing had happened there—except, of course, for the knitting of mufflers, mitts and socks; except for soldiers filling the infirmary, the men going off and not coming back, or coming back quietly (her father) or violently (Tilly’s) undone.
“We’re only playing,” said Smitty. “She knows that, don’t you, doll?”
Janie threw the plane straight up, and he stationed himself behind an imaginary gun. “Shoot!” she cried, her little arm taking aim.
And they were blasting bullets, both of them, Janie and Smitty, their eyes narrowed, throaty gun sounds popping from their mouths, and the plane had landed again, a good ten feet from where it started. Smitty laughed and so did Janie, right out loud, and then he picked her up and hoisted her onto his shoulders. She looked so small up there, even at eight. She was wearing blue pedal pushers and a striped blouse, a sailor suit. Her curls had turned white-blond from the sun; her face was lit with joy. She put her hand on the brim of Smitty’s cap, and for a moment he was Charlie, they were playing Chicken Fight or Drop the Handkerchief or Cops and Robbers, out of time.
It was then, as Smitty lifted Janie from his shoulders and set her down, that he asked Bea: There was an OSO dance at the base on Saturday, he was on the entertainment committee, would she like to come?
“What about Agnes?” she stumbled. “And . . . the others?”
“The more the merrier, as long as they’re female. They’re bringing in girls by the busload from New Bedford. We’ve landed a first-rate bandleader.”
“I don’t dance.”
Bea’s voice came out peevish, and she saw Smitty stiffen. In fact, she had taken dancing classes as a girl—nearly everyone had at home—and had not disliked it. Girls danced with girls until the end-of-session dance; then they brought in the boys. The girls from New Bedford would be pretty and young but also common, with painted red lips, and what would she wear, and why not stop things right where they were, there on the road, with Janie at her side? It was nice. It was plenty. It was enough.
Janie muttered something, and Bea bent toward her. “What is it, love? Speak up.”
“Can I come?” Janie whispered.
“It’s not a dance for children,” Bea said aloud. (Break your own rule and the rule stays broken; not whispering in front of others was a rule.) “I’ll make a dance for you and Rose at home.”
“You’d turn too many heads for a girl your age,” said Smitty before he looked again at Bea. “So what do you say?”
“I’ll . . . I’ll see what the others say.”
“What do
you
say?”
Smitty cracked his knuckles as he spoke, and she had an urge, at once tender and angry, to still his movements with her hand. Give the child a morsel, her mother used to tell her father, who after the war held everything—food, words, money, love—tight inside his fist. Just a dance, it was; support your troops. She had a pair of blue brocade shoes, recently passed on to her by a neighbor of Mrs. P.’s. She had, for Porter family events and her own and Agnes’s birthdays (when Stewart drove them to the Grand Café in Orange), a blue silk dress, passed on to her by Mrs. P’s sister with the tags still on. Bea had brought both items to the Point, thinking that this summer she might finally look for a church that suited her (only Annie, who was Catholic, went regularly to church, irritating the rest of them with her need for rides, her endless fingering of beads). The shoes were tucked in tissue, barely worn. The dress would pinch at the waist unless she let it out, and then there was the problem of fabric—she might have to sacrifice the sash.
What was her own? Not her room, either here or in Grace Park, though both were pretty and clean and hers for the duration. Not her time, not most of it, though she loved raising Janie and didn’t mind mending or straightening up. Not her money, really; Mr. P., who was still president of Mrs. P.’s father’s insurance company, insisted on investing most of it for her (“Someday you’ll thank me.”), and what pocket money she had left went mostly to gifts, craft supplies and workaday clothes. Give the child a morsel. She could not have said, just now, if she was giving it to Smitty or herself.
“I’ll come,” she mouthed over Janie’s head. Janie’s eyes met hers—
Break your own rule
—and Bea spoke the rest aloud. “As long as it’s all right with Mrs. P.”
I
F THINGS HAD
turned out differently, she would have begun the story here—or no, Smitty would have told it; unlike Bea, he loved an audience, he’d have made it funny, drawn it out.
Drop-dead gorgeous in a blue dress . . . had never done the jitterbug . . . the whole place stank of feet . . .
Smitty met Bea and Agnes at the gate and escorted them in, one on each arm, but not long after they got there, they were separated from him, ladies to the left, gentlemen to the right. Bea had never heard of a Cinderella dance and didn’t know what to think when the bandleader told the ladies to take off a shoe and let it fly. By the time Agnes had bent gamely toward her own foot, shoes were sailing through the air—ivory, pink, black and red—and landing in the middle of the floor. Bea took off her right shoe but could not bring herself to throw it. Instead, she thrust it at Agnes and watched her friend run forward to place their two shoes at the edge of the heap and back off, hands before her face. Across from them, on the other side of the rec hall, the soldiers were clustered in a group. Bea could no longer see Smitty. She could not see much of anything. It was crowded, smoky and noisy, the lights dim, the floor in places already slick with beer. Everywhere were elbows, and girls in lace blouses and short satin evening skirts (her own dress fell just below the knee), and darting glances and craned necks.
When they had first arrived, a lieutenant in loafers (you could have taken him for Clark Gable) had clicked his heels together and greeted everybody, and the band had started up on “Night and Day.” Even with the music in full swing, though, almost nobody had danced, the girls talking among themselves, the soldiers suddenly awkward as young boys. Smitty had stood next to Bea but seemed tongue-tied, or perhaps he was listening to the girls behind them, who were babbling in another language. There were Portuguese in New Bedford; there were Greeks and Jews. The city had seemed, the few times she’d gone, dirty, crowded and unsafe, a thousand miles from the Point, though in truth it was only twenty minutes by car. New Bedpan, Helen had called it once, and Bea had suppressed a laugh. Now here they were, the girls from New Bedpan, herded like marked sheep into the Wilsons’ barn, wearing Fighting Red lipstick and too much scent.
“Show some spirit, Battery B!” the lieutenant had called out. “Come on out, boys! Find yourselves a partner!”
Still, almost no one had come forward, except for the lieutenant, his wife and a few others. Bea had been surprised: When your boss said dance, did you not dance?
“Even once they split us up, I had my eye right on you,” Smitty told her later. “And on that blue slipper of yours. But I couldn’t be the first one to cross the line—my boys would’ve never let me live it down.”
Her shoe was not hard to find; it might have been the only blue one in the heap. Standing without it, she’d felt lopsided, listing, but then there was Smitty at her side, and his arm on her elbow had felt surprisingly familiar, and somehow she had gotten her shoe back on and then they were dancing the jitterbug, which she knew just a little from watching Helen and Dossy practice in the kitchen, and then the waltz, which she knew well. She was not light on her feet, exactly, but she was sturdy and had always moved easily, winning the girls’ division of the running races set up by the church, and now, as she danced, she fell into a rhythm that erased, quite beautifully, her thoughts. His hand on her back was broad and sure, and she felt suddenly as if she were someplace entirely outside the Point, outside the several different lifetimes she had known so far.