In 1936 I was such a naive girl. What I knew about sex was that when a man and woman married, the woman must listen earnestly when the man explained something important to her. That was what my mother had told me; that one day I would be told “something important.” Though I menstruated, I did not connect that with sex. How it ever came clear to me, I don’t exactly recall. Because when I was pregnant with Martin, the doctor, unsolicited, volunteered that after giving birth to a baby, my cramping would end. “Cramping?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “You don’t have menstrual cramps?” I was shocked to hear him say the word aloud. He was quite affable — a friend of Miles’s who had attended medical school at Yale during the same years Miles was there. I think he talked so much because he was trying to be friendly, though actually he was quite uncomfortable: his friend’s mistress — well, I’d never known the word had that other meaning, until it became obvious by the context in which Alice used the word that awful day we sat in the living room of the house in Maine and he told her everything, that I was someone’s mistress. Whatever name she gave me, I was terrified. I was certain I was going to be sent back to Montreal, and as much as I feared my parents’ disappointment — they thought the United States was another world, a superior country, and I would have been ashamed to have failed there, to have failed at making Alice like me, in spite of everything I’d done setting up the house, in spite of the bulbs planted, the dinners cooked — if you can believe such a thing, there was actually a time when I thought that it was fine to sleep with a woman’s husband because he requested it. I assumed that was my responsibility toward being part of the family. There were secrets my mother had kept from my father: money put away in food jars; the scrawny cat she sometimes set a saucer of milk out for, at the same time he was trying to run it off. In my innocence, I simply thought that sex was a secret Miles and I were keeping from Alice, like a saucer of milk placed under the bushes. It seems difficult to believe, but you have to take it on faith I didn’t know any different. I believed in Santa Claus as a real man who came from the North Pole until some girls set me straight when I was eleven years old. I thought fairy tales were interchangeable with stories in the newspaper long past the time when everyone else understood they were just made-up stories. Though I did not like sex, and I certainly did not want to be pregnant, especially because I had been horrified to have to spread my legs in a doctor’s office and feel his hand inside me — although I considered it a personal failure that had caused misery to everyone and would no doubt cause further misery once my parents found out, I nevertheless did like Alice, so when she raged at me, my heart was broken. If she had not spoken to Amelia and gone through a sea change, I would have died of a broken heart. This many years later, I can only wonder what Amelia must have said to her that caused such a change. Suddenly Alice accepted everything, taking both my hands in hers and apologizing to me, though I don’t remember her apologizing to him. While Martin was just a tiny fetus inside me, it had been decided that the child I carried would be their child. No one would know any different. We would go abroad, and I would give birth there. That plan did not materialize, of course: the war continued, and everything changed. We ended up hiding from people, beginning in my fourth month, in the house in Maine. Miles’s friend from Yale arranged for a doctor to watch my pregnancy, and to send a young colleague of his to be present, along with the local doctor, at the birth. It was decided that nothing would be said to my parents. I was so grateful for that, it was the biggest relief of all. When I wrote them or spoke to them, the baby was the one thing I never mentioned. In all the world, the only people who knew — except for Gordon, who was too young to understand — were Amelia, the doctors, and Miles’s friend Ethan Bedell, who came unannounced and opened the front door without knocking and walked in on us, when I was hugely pregnant. It is so easy to forget that people have their personal preoccupations. When they encounter the unexpected realities of others’ lives, their preoccupations nevertheless continue just as strongly. He was there, if you can believe it, because he feared for the health of the painter Grant Wood; though he did not fear for Wood’s mortality, he feared Miles would fail to acquire important paintings before Grant Wood’s death. “You didn’t listen to me about The Black Flag,” I remember him saying. “You must absolutely listen to me now.” Alice always maintained that Ethan Bedell was the only man she’d ever heard of who went to fortune-tellers. A fortune-teller had predicted the untimely death of someone very talented, known to Ethan only through his work, not personally, and Ethan had jumped to the conclusion the man was talking about the death of Grant Wood, whose painting Death on Ridge Road he interpreted as a curious departure, a harrowing vision of the painter’s own death. After registering his initial shock in how he found us, he recovered himself quickly, then launched into a heartfelt description of the paintings of Grant Wood, pulling one photograph after another from his briefcase, seizing Miles’s hand as if he could, in the moment, press him into buying whatever paintings were available. Alice and I had to leave the room, we were so overwhelmed by Ethan’s fervor. “God — that awful picture of the farmer standing by the ugly woman and the pitchfork!” she had squealed, as we went upstairs.
Martin was born on December 8, 1941—the day after Pearl Harbor. That was when the Americans acknowledged there was a war; everyone in Montreal knew that in 1939, of course. On Christmas Day, Hong Kong was taken by the Japanese. The radio and the fire crackled constantly, and we waited, day after day, for information. I think we all forgot ourselves, forgot our individual lives had real meaning. Strange, the names you remember. Like a song that was being sung by everyone, Miles and the people he talked to on the phone seemed to be in constant contact with a Harvard chemist named Louis Fieser. For a while, it seemed the miraculous substance he was developing in his laboratory would be the solution to the war, and Miles and Ethan Bedell were convinced Fieser should have investors behind him, private investors, as well as the ear of the press, rather than working alone and trusting that the U.S. Army would deal correctly with his product. There were numerous calls every day, instigated by Ethan and by friends of Fieser, who for some reason would not communicate directly with Miles or with Ethan Bedell.