Gladys’s cheeks grew red and they puffed out. “You can’t help who you fall in love with, can you? It’s like…it’s like one of those lightning strikes. Completely random.”
But Margaret recalled her conversation with him on the dance floor. Whether he was as sincerely reticent as he professed to be or whether this was part of a strategy to get her to make the first move, it was clearly a flawless plan, because it had worked. He knew Gladys lived life on her own terms. If he’d made advances of a more serious nature toward her, it would have put him in the same stead as every other man who’d tried and failed to get together with Gladys. If he held off, he’d almost guarantee that she would take things into her own hands. And not just for a fling, which would surely extinguish as soon as Gladys grew bored. He had long-term hopes that were about to come to fruition.
“So how did this end in a marriage proposal?” asked Dottie once they’d all calmed their voices.
The cook slipped in almost imperceptivity and exchanged their plates for steaming bowls of sumptuous-smelling beef and vegetable stew. Margaret’s eyes closed in near ecstasy at the scent but didn’t comment so as not to sidetrack Gladys again.
Gladys picked up her soup spoon and continued. “I’ll tell you, but don’t think that I proposed because I wanted to get him into bed. I’m not that dumb.”
“I wasn’t suggesting it,” said Dottie.
“It was when he told me that he’s going back to England at the end of the war. And then who knows where. It could be somewhere else in Europe. Or Asia. Or Africa. Wherever they want a reporter who is unencumbered enough to go wherever they send him. Or who has a wife who would travel with him.”
“And this prompted the proposal?”
“It did.” She shrugged. “It’s as simple as that. When he told me his plans, I realized how much I would miss him.” She wiped her eyes with her right hand and Margaret didn’t dare make a mention of it. In all their years of friendship, she couldn’t ever recall seeing Gladys get sentimental. Best to let her have this moment.
“It’s not every man who will sport a suffragette sash at a commemoration event or keep his head together while serving up soup in the Bowery line. Or talk me into joining him at a damn feline fashion show and then actually having fun together. That’s not a man you easily say goodbye to.”
Margaret reached out and grasped Gladys’s hand. “Of course you wouldn’t want to let him go. And just think of the adventures you’ll have as his wife. You’ll get to see all those places, Gladys. You’ll live in them for months on end. Your big heart that wants to bring justice to an unjust world will actually go out into that world and discover whole new purposes for you. Side by side with the man you love.”
It almost made her weepy as well, thinking about how nice it would be to have someone to partner through life with like that. Could it be the man she’d been writing to all these months? She had never anticipated anything more than his letters, never felt as liberated as she did when her words flowed back on the paper. Even though she couldn’t precisely picture him, as he still had never revealed which one he was in the photograph. She kept it pinned to the wall above her bedpost and said good night to them all before she closed her eyes. John, resting in peace. William and Tom, whichever they each were. At first, she’d imagined that William was the one with the cropped hair, the one who looked as if he could be any age. There was a teddy-bear comfort to him. But nothing that elicited a reaction any stronger than pleasantness.
Not the stirring of a heart.
The other one—the taller man—was more conventionally handsome. The type girls would swoon over during cinema outings. When she pictured this one being her pen pal, her pulse quickened like a silver screen embrace come to life.
One man’s words overwhelmed her with their beauty. The other man’s drawings made her dream of other places.
But only one in the photograph made her feel the things she’d read about in romance novels.
She knew enough from observing her parents’ marriage and those of all the older couples of her acquaintance that the endurance of love did not lie merely in the physical attraction but in the sustainability of the friendship. In the end, which was which mattered little.
Although, as Gladys had once strong-armed her into revealing, she would choose the tall one with the dark hair if pressed.
She shook those thoughts from her head. Pondering this was a poor use of her time. William, Tom. They were thousands of miles away. Life was happening right now. Right here in Brooklyn.
Talking about Gladys’s engagement.
Whoosh! The wind blew outside in a tremendous gust that sent a spray of sand across the window. Margaret had always heard people say that wind could sound like a freight train, but until this moment, she’d thought it was an exaggeration.
“Geez Louise,” Gladys exclaimed.
Dottie was the epitome of calm, however, ignoring the fact that her house seemed to be getting battered from the outside. “I am so very happy for you, Gladys,” she said, pulling the conversation back in like the good hostess she was. “But you have not answered one important question—how did you ask him?”
Gladys shrugged. “Simple. I told him he’s going to marry me and take me with him. And he didn’t say no.”
As if the skies were rebelling against her buck to tradition, the lights flickered and the house was plunged into darkness.
Chapter Twenty
September 1944
Tom burrowed into a corner under a bridge, letting the darkness of the night engulf him. He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.
Holland was a disaster.
The men had been told that if Operation Market Garden was a success, the war would be over by Christmas. His mouth had tingled with anticipation of a Virginia ham in the center of the table, glistening with maple glaze, decorated with fresh orange slices and dried cloves.
His body ached with the idea that if Margaret would forgive him when he told her about William’s death, she might accept his embrace and he would at last draw her into his arms and never let go.
The terrible defeat they’d suffered stole those hopes from him with such ferocity that he felt as if they were phantom limbs. He’d learned about such things from men in the French hospital. They’d lost arms and legs and though their eyes and their pain testified to their disappearance, the corners of their minds felt them as if they were still present.
They were ghosts.
Ghosts all around. Men, gone. Limbs, gone. Christmas, gone. Victory, gone.
Hopes, gone.
God, maybe he didn’t want to meet Margaret. Or rather, he didn’t want to burden her beautiful, cheery face with the hull of a man he was.
Maybe he would never tell her. Maybe he would continue to write her as William. To escape into the freedom he felt when he wrote pseudonymous words, to conjure the courage to write her things he would not otherwise say. Because Tom Powell…Tom Powell was destined for a career in the military. His education and his family history would catapult him as high as he wanted to go.
If, indeed, that was still where he wanted to go.
William, on the other hand, had almost become a character of their own creation. Sure, there had been a flesh and blood William. Whose loss he mourned every single day. But this whole thing had been at William’s urging. His very design—to help Tom find the poetry in life where there had only been singularly focused planning.