He grinned. “How did you know it was me?” And then he looked at his uniform. “Oh, the name. Powell.”
“No.” She giggled. “It wasn’t that. You’re the handsome one in the picture. Margaret will be so pleased.”
Despite Margaret’s requests, Tom had managed to evade telling her which one he was in the photo, a nod to how William liked to keep her guessing.
“Come in, come in,” she said.
He stepped inside and walked around various toys that were strewn on the floor. A doll and a teddy bear and a jack-in-the-box.
“Does Grandma’s big girl want a cookie before lunch?”
A woman walked in holding the hand of a toddling girl, and he knew that they must be Margaret’s mother and Joanna.
“You’ve caught us unprepared,” Dottie apologized. “I brought Joanna over to visit her grandparents and we were just about to sit down to eat. Would you care to join us?”
“Yes, that would be nice,” he said. “Thank you.”
His stomach growled in agreement.
Introductions were made, and Tom felt an instant ease with Margaret’s family, who apologized that she was at work. Photographs of John and Margaret and Joanna lined the walls as well as a wedding picture of George and Dottie. It was as if even the walls of the home were a welcoming hug, and it stood in contrast to the militaristic feel of his own.
He paid particular attention to the pictures of Margaret, grinning at the images of her childhood pigtails to her elegance at what must have been a school dance to the woman she was today—standing on a pier holding her hat against her head so it wouldn’t blow away. Laughing into the wind.
He couldn’t wait to meet her.
Her family gave him a seat at the head of the table and plied him with chicken salad and oatmeal cookies. Dottie offered to ring Margaret up at the Navy Yard, certain that she could get away since she was the boss, but Tom insisted that he wanted to surprise her. He’d taken a chance that he’d find her here. But maybe this was even better.
They had so many questions about his farm in Virginia and about his family. And though he sidestepped the questions they had about the war, he regaled them with stories of the John that he had known and loved.
Mrs. Beck kept a handkerchief to her eyes nearly the whole time. With any luck, he’d be sitting with William’s mother within the next few weeks. And then his own.
At one o’clock, Mr. Beck kissed his wife on the cheek and told her that he had to get back to the shop. A shipment of velvet and threads had come in and he was going to begin working on the party shoes that he wanted to put in the display window in time for the holidays. Three short months until shopping season was barely enough time to meet what he expected to be a tremendous demand.
Brooklyn was ready to celebrate the turn of the year.
“Wait, please,” Tom asked as Mr. Beck stood from the table. “Before you go, I have to ask you something.”
“Anything, son,” the man answered, swelling Tom’s heart unexpectedly. Margaret’s dad had a kindness in his eyes that Tom had never seen in his own father’s.
Tom stood and placed his hands on the table. “I’d like to ask for your permission to take your daughter to dinner.”
Mrs. Beck jumped up and pulled him into her arms, and Tom didn’t remember ever receiving quite so many hugs in one day. Mr. Beck came over and shook his hand.
“I respect you for asking, Tom,” he said. “And if it was my permission to give, you would have it. But I’ve learned one thing being surrounded by only women in the past two years. They have minds of their own. Better ones than mine. So I’ll leave that answer to Margaret.”
Joanna slapped her hand into applesauce as Dottie squealed, “I’m calling Gladys!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
September 1945
Gladys picked up the phone and smiled. Then she buttoned up, responding to the person on the other end in a very businesslike way. “Sure. We can do that. No problem. Send him over.”
Margaret wrapped twine around the box that held the scant personal items that Gladys had decorated her office with. Margaret, on the other hand, was determined to make the place feel homey for as long as the position was hers.
It was a task that distracted her from thinking about how much she would miss Gladys when she and Oliver left for London next week.
“Well, I told you it would happen,” Gladys said matter-of-factly.
“What?” asked Margaret.
“The men are coming home and they’re going to requisition our office and staff for some of the interviews.”
Margaret sighed. “We were expecting that.”
“Starting today.”
“Today? But they haven’t given us any instructions on it yet.”
Gladys looked at her watch. “Look. Do me a favor. That was a call saying that our first soldier is coming in at three o’clock. I need to go to the main administration building and turn in my badge. Can you be on hand to give him the standard application until they tell us what else they want to do?”
Margaret shrugged. “Sure. That’s easy enough. But while you’re over at admin, please tell them that we need a little more notice in the future if they want this to be smooth.”
“Will do. Oh—look at the time. Nearly three now. See you in a bit, doll.”
Gladys hurried out, and Margaret slid over to the large leather seat that was to be hers starting tomorrow. She’d placed on it her finished pillow and admired the color it brought to the space. Twenty-seven varieties of flowers found in western Europe as drawn for her by Tom Powell. She’d run out of room to stitch more, so she’d started a second one and hoped that he would discover many more to send to her.
She opened the closet where she kept her personal items and pulled out a canvas bag that contained the items she wanted to be surrounded with every day. Her desk had been in an open room across the hall from Gladys’s office, but now this room would be hers. With enough wall space to put her touch on it.
The first was a newspaper clipping of the Japanese surrendering on the Missouri. She’d had it framed, and it symbolized more than Margaret could put into words. Years of hard work on the part of Brooklynites. Her own personal participation in it. And, most important, the end of the war that had taken too many lives.
She remembered standing in the crowds at its launching. The pride that burst within all of them as they saw the magnificent vessel head into the water. Who could have known what an important role it would go on to play?
The Brooklyn Navy Yard would continue building ships—they had three aircraft carriers in various stages of construction and she hoped to see an airplane land on one of them someday. However, there was talk that the navy would start using private shipyards as well and that layoffs were inevitable, starting with the women.
To add to that, the federal government was planning to rename this place with its 144-year history the New York Naval Shipyard. It would take effect in November and already, letterhead and signs were being ordered to reflect the change. It was an unfortunate thing in the eyes of those native to Brooklyn. Yes, they were a part of New York City, but it was like saying “yellow” when “chartreuse” was more specific.