She pulled up near one of the Yard gates. Peter opened the door.
“My dear,” he said.
“My dear,” she said, charmingly. She waited for him to get out and slam the door. Then she drove away.
ONE NIGHT IN DECEMBER there was a fire in the Cambodian building. Some woman had created a makeshift barbecue on her kitchen floor because the stove no longer worked or the gas had been shut off. Not much damage resulted, and nobody was forced to relocate, but for an hour all of the building’s inhabitants stood in the street like the little band of refugees they were. When the firemen announced that it was safe to reenter the building, they filed in. Peter, watching from his window, would have liked to invite some of them for a cup of tea, but which ones? He wished Meg were beside him in her quilted robe.
IT WAS THE FRIDAY NIGHT before Christmas. Weak electric candles burned in some windows, and the hopeful young couple with the matching briefcases had installed a tree in their living room, but they were in Stowe, at the mountain resort, and the tree’s lights were out. The rest of the street was unfestive. Peter’s apartment, the exception, was glowing — he loved Friday nights; even though he no longer had a job he still felt an end-of-the-week release — but the shivering presence of Jack Wren was robbing his place of warmth. The man had stayed late at school to make sure everything was in order before vacation, like a proper principal, and then he had driven straight into Boston with all the Friday-night traffic, straight to Peter. He had arrived at seven o’clock. It was now after eight. Peter kept idiotically offering him food. Jack kept refusing. He would go home soon, he kept saying. He and Meg had not separated yet. They had not told the children. They were still man and wife. Meg was expecting him. “It’s unbelievable,” he said.
Not to mention unseemly, Peter thought. Also untrustworthy. And what was Geronimus Barron planning to do about his own wife? But he knew the answer to that question. Mrs. Barron — properly, Dr. Barron — was a distinguished immunologist; plenty of scientists were no doubt eager to keep her company. Geronimus, too, seemed to like her. Theirs had been a good marriage, Peter realized. They would part as friends.
But what about the Wren children? he asked himself, rattled. How would they fare on the inevitable vacation when they were forced to share a villa or a yacht — or, more likely, a tent and a latrine — with the overachieving Barron kids? Well, maybe the Barron children, too, tended toward the mean. Jews were subject to the same Mendelian laws as everybody else, Peter reasoned. Jews were …
Jack said, “They take our jobs, our money, our positions at schools. They take over our towns. Now they are taking our women.”
“Not our houses,” Peter murmured. “Not all our houses.”
“Meg never liked our house.”
“No, Jack. Maybe she says that now, but—”
“She always said it.” Jack pressed his nose against the window like one of his sons. “She would have preferred to live in some split-level in the boonies and send the kids to public school. Now I wish we’d done that. She wouldn’t have met any Geronimus Barron at the Nothingsville PTA.”
Peter had to agree. Which proved, he supposed, that Meg and Geronimus had been destined for each other. She had once told him that she wasn’t meant to be gentry; that she wasn’t aristocratic, just simple; and that, despite her ease with computers, she wasn’t particularly bright. Nor was she ambitious. They had been alone under the apple tree with her sleeping daughter. When he opened his mouth to argue with this unexpected and certainly inaccurate disclosure, she put her finger over his lips. “Just an ordinary prairie girl,” she whispered. He remembered now the blinding beauty of her pale, freckled face and her blue eyes, and he understood that what she felt for Geronimus was a prairie love, irresistible as the wind.
He moved to Jack’s side and put an arm around the younger man. In the supportive embrace, Jack held himself straighter.
“You’ll never get over her,” Peter said, “but the rage will ease, and the sorrow.”
“Yes,” Jack said. Peter wondered without much interest who would marry Jack. Some nice woman. She would appreciate the house but would not realize that its furnishings included a retired teacher with a bee in his bonnet about Dickens and Maimonides. Peter would be invited to visit perhaps once a year. As for Geronimus and Meg, they would live in a penthouse overlooking the redeveloped harbor. A caterer would take charge of their hors d’oeuvres. He hoped they would keep him on their party list.
Along the sidewalk below hurried a large man and a tarty-looking woman. On the other side of the street two young men walked, arguing. Though they had left their bookbags at home, their beards and their parkas identified them as law students. They would be gone after commencement, Peter predicted; they would decamp for Charlestown or the South End. The hopeful young couple, discovering themselves pregnant, would sell their folly and flee to a western suburb. The students’ places, the couple’s house, would be taken by other people. Homes allowed themselves to be commandeered by whoever came along. Not like cats; cats remain aloof. Not like dogs; dogs remain loyal. Like women, he made himself think, willing misogyny to invade him, to settle in, so that in another few years everybody would assume he had been in its possession forever.
THE NONCOMBATANT
“IF THEY FINISH UP THE WAR I’LL never be a nurse,” complained his oldest daughter.
“Why not?” Richard asked.
“There won’t be any more battles,” she said, and frowned at him from the foot of his bed. He remembered that she was reading a child’s biography of Florence Nightingale: she must see herself gliding from tent to tent in the dusty Crimea, bringing comfort to brave British Tommies.
“You could be a peacetime nurse,” he said. “Like the ones who helped me when I was operated on.” In fact he had not found them helpful, those pitying, red-armed women. He had metastatic cancer. He was forty-nine.
“Nurses in the hospital, Uglies,” this uncompromising eight-year-old was saying. “Will the war get over?”
“Yes.” The war in Europe was already over. Now, in the beginning of July 1945, the war in Asia was winding down. Richard heard exultation in radio commentators’ voices. He saw relief on service-men’s faces. His family had arrived in this little Cape Cod town three days ago, and when, that afternoon, Catherine had run from the parked car into the grocery store for some milk and bread, two young soldiers, safe now from battle, had felt as free as schoolboys to whistle, while Richard watched from behind the windshield.
Though he no longer shared their hunger, he understood it. In her little cotton dresses Catherine was indeed very pretty. The two lines of worry that stood guard between her brows enhanced the softness of her large brown eyes. She had been raised a Quaker, and she retained the stillness she had learned as a child. She was fifteen years younger than he.
Their two younger daughters were Catherine’s replicas. The oldest, this fierce girl who wanted the war to continue, resembled him. She had his narrow pewter eyes and fair skin. “If I can’t be an army nurse, I’m going to be a doctor, like you,” she said.
“A good second choice,” he commended. He saw that her face had already been made rosy by summer, whereas his, he knew, was still pale as sand.
BUT BY THE SECOND WEEK OF JULY he was beginning to look better. Within his body there seemed to be a temporary lull in combat. Since coming here he had been able to reduce his painkillers. That made him more alert. Waking up was no fun, but by ten in the morning he could sit more or less comfortably on the screened porch of their rented house. He watched his children playing under a low, gnarled tree. He answered mail he’d received during the recent hospitalization. He listened to Catherine’s fluting commentary as, near him on the porch, she sorted laundry, or peeled potatoes, or bent over the jigsaw puzzle.