Margaret stood now, head to door, eyes closed and listening to the sounds of the morning as it mustered the energy to turn into day. Birds perched on electrical wires, the baker’s ovens hummed, car horns blared as drivers maneuvered their way down streets that fell into worse disrepair as each day passed. Resources were needed elsewhere.
She felt unraveled. It was the Word of the Day in yesterday’s New York Times and she thought it an ideal term for the circumstance. Like spiraled heaps of yarn laying waste after discovering a flaw in a knitting project.
Dreams were like that too. You imagined what your life would be like and it didn’t turn out to be so. She remembered sitting under red-and-white umbrellas at the shore the first summer she met Dottie and all the ones after that. Little girls with big plans who never could have imagined what a world at war might look like.
What having a baby under these circumstances would mean.
Indeed, Dottie’s news had left Margaret feeling tangled up inside. That her dearest friend was pregnant should have been something to celebrate. Their childhood full of dolls and dress-up and playing house was about to blossom into something real and wriggling.
It was all they’d ever wanted.
But one paramount step in the long-ago playacting had been bypassed: the wedding.
It’s not that Margaret held any religious opinions on the order in which things had happened. The joy she felt at the revelation was genuine—in seven months or so, a little niece or nephew would make an entrance into the world. Margaret’s brother, John, was the father and she had always known that he would make such a very, very good one.
It was the need for secrecy that unsettled her.
The worry over what Dottie’s family would do when they found out.
And the fear that John might never make it home.
That part, she couldn’t share with Dottie. Not in her condition. But every day, the local newspaper posted the names of the dead and missing from Brooklyn. How could they presume that their family would be spared the great tragedy that had befallen so many others? At least for now, John was safe, training in England, parachuting from the airplanes he loved so much. Out of danger as far as they could tell. But how long would it be before his unit was called up to the front and the real peril began?
War draped every breath in a cloak of uncertainty, and Margaret ached to tether herself to something dependable. The need to keep quiet about Dottie’s pregnancy only added to the many shadows that had been cast upon their lives.
She pulled herself away from the row house door, one beleaguered step at a time until she made it to the bus stop and the short journey passed by in a haze.
Twenty minutes later, they rolled up to the entrance of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Margaret’s spirits were raised by the pride that arose every time she saw the masts of the three unfinished ships through the dusty glass panes. The handiwork of tens of thousands of men. And more recently, a handful of women like herself. A flag stood outside the entrance, billowing in the morning breeze. Forty-eight stars reminding her that her troubles were mere droplets in the vast sea of sacrifices being made here and around the world.
Just two weeks ago, she’d stood in this spot along with thousands of civilians watching thousands of troops board the Samaria, bound for Liverpool. Once a grand passenger ship in the Cunard Line, it had been requisitioned by the Royal Navy for troop transport. Including her brother. He’d gone to basic training in Georgia and then jump school in North Carolina, and by some unexpected twist, his company in the 101st Airborne was departing from right here in Brooklyn. Right here in the Navy Yard, just a few miles from where he’d been born. She’d hoped to see him, but the soldiers had been given no leave time for visiting families since few of them were from this area. Instead, she and Dottie and her parents had stood in the bleachers hoping to catch a glimpse of that one face they loved so much.
It was to no avail, but John knew they’d be there in that crowd and she hoped that was enough to bolster him as the shores of his homeland disappeared from view. They’d watched with handkerchiefs pressed against their faces as the uniformed young men sailed off, about to learn that war was more than the playacting they’d done in their youth.
The memory brought tears to her eyes once again, a salty concoction of pride and fear, but she wiped them away as soon as they formed, leaving only their tannic burn behind. She had to stay strong. For John. For Dottie. For her parents. For all of them.
She wished she had someone who could be strong for her.
Margaret pulled her identification card from her bag and strung it around her neck before stepping off the bus, avoiding puddles from an overnight rain. The fumes from the exhaust and the fishy stench of the East River made for a nauseating combination, but seeing Gladys Sievers’s bright red hat near the fence brought a smile to her face.
“There you are, doll,” Gladys shouted through a haze of cigarette smoke. She smoked the unfiltered kind, preferring the gravelly, husky contour it gave to her voice. “Maybe if I sound more like a man, I’ll be treated as well as one,” she’d say with some sarcasm.
She dropped the butt onto the sidewalk and ground it down with her stiletto heel.
Entirely unsuitable footwear for this weather and this place—they had to walk over steel grates to get to their workroom—but she insisted it was all part of the picture she liked to paint about rights for women. “Men know deep down they couldn’t take two steps in these babies, though I’d like to see them try. Ha! That would show them what we’re made of.”
Every breath Gladys took was tinged with the burden of a father who’d left and a mother who had quite literally worked herself to death before the preponderance of unions and workers’ rights. So she never missed an opportunity to advance the causes that combated such injustices, in all ways large and small.
She didn’t have any more money than the rest of them, but Gladys was a whiz at embellishing old pieces and making them look snazzy. As Margaret approached, she could see that today’s heels were red with gold embroidery. She recognized the shoes as one of Gladys’s thrift-store purchases. One had a coffee stain on the toe, if she remembered correctly. But the way Gladys had used gold thread to create a flower pattern on them had made them look brand-new.
“Where’s your sidekick, sick again? Dare we hope she’s loosened up at last and given herself over to a night of debauchery?” Her thick gardenia perfume nearly masked the cigarette smell and it put a tickle in Margaret’s nose.
Margaret checked her wristwatch, relieved that she’d be able to clock in on time. She smiled at her friend. There were some things the war could never change. Gladys would always be a force unto herself, her words and ideas and sarcasms a perfect storm of originality that had earned her the nickname of Hurricane, at least between Margaret and Dottie.
“Yes—well, at least to your first question. She must have eaten something rancid. She hasn’t been able to keep anything down.”
Margaret winced at the untruth, but Dottie had begged her not to tell anyone about the baby yet. Not even Gladys, whom she wanted to tell in her own time. Not until she could think things through. If her mother got wind of her pregnancy before they made a plan, she’d be sent away to a home for unwed girls, where the child would be taken away as soon as it was born.