Then so softly at first, so imperceptibly she wasn’t sure it hadn’t started much earlier and she’d dismissed it, a voice talked steadily. It rose and fell. No words she could distinguish, but it lasted a long time. When it broke off, she stopped breathing, listening as hard as she could. Then sobbing. A young man’s muffled weeping as if it were miles away. It was hardly there—no more than wind against the house; no more than a whisper of a sheet dropping across a long, long room, but it was beside her too.
When she slept, she didn’t dream. She woke refreshed.
August 5, Wednesday Afternoon: An Interview
Meadoe stood in front of the impressive house for a long time before ringing the bell. What if she decides I’m a loon? She stepped off the porch, thinking she might be able to slip away, when the front door opened. An elderly woman with thin, white hair, heavily powdered, held the doorknob.
“You’re the young lady who called from the library? I’m Erica Weiss. Come in. Come in. I’ve made coffee.” Her voice was surprisingly full considering her age, and Meadoe entered the living room.
“Thank you for having me.” Dozens of framed pictures hung on the walls from long wires attached to the ceiling molding. The room smelled of vanilla and hand lotion. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell but a strong one. While Erica went to the kitchen for the coffee, Meadoe examined the pictures. There were photographs of family groups wearing late 1800s clothing sitting on the grass. Servicemen looked out from some of the pictures. Wedding portraits, graduation photos, parties, snowfalls. Meadoe recognized a younger Erica in one picture standing with what might have been parents. One was of her wedding. The groom wore a formal military uniform.
“I lost Robert in 1983,” said Erica, carrying a tray with cups and a coffee pot. “We’d just inherited the property from my mom and dad. He had a stroke while adding the garage.”
“I’m sorry.” Meadoe sat on the edge of the couch, unsure how to ask her questions, unsure, now that she was there that she wanted to ask them.
The elderly woman said, “It’s a long life, but you’ve got to live every minute of it. We had a few good years.” She balanced a cup on her knee and filled it with coffee, then filled the other and handed it to Meadoe. “I contributed to the oral history project a few years ago. Young man with a tape recorder came out and asked questions for a couple hours. Nice fellow, from the university. Don’t know what he did with all that blather.”
The coffee nearly blistered Meadoe’s lip. She blew across it and took a sip. A rich blend with a hint of licorice. “This is more for me than the library, I’m afraid. I wanted to talk about high school, about Nathaniel Shirley. I moved into his house.”
Erica put her cup on the table, then hid her hands in her lap. “What made you come to me?”
“Your picture together in a yearbook. I found drawings in the house that were his. Good art.”
Erica swayed a little, and when she reached for her coffee, her hand shook with a palsy Meadoe hadn’t noticed earlier. “He never drew me. I asked him to once, but he said he didn’t have the skill yet. He wanted to get me right.” Her voice quivered, not nearly as full as it had been at the door. She wiped at her eye. “Sorry, the infirmity of age. So many old friends have passed. I guess Nathaniel was the first.”
“Can you tell me about him?”
“It was a long time ago.” In the parlor a clock chimed the hour, six mellow gongs. Afternoon sun fell in a narrow strip along the carpet in front of the living room window. Meadoe drank again, almost holding her breath, barely noticing the scalding liquid.
“We started dating at the beginning of my senior year; he was a junior. Many of the older boys had left to Germany or the Pacific so the girls dated younger. He was a beautiful boy. Did you see his picture? He had long fingers, like a sculptor. I thought it was just a fling, of course, so I had a beau at Homecoming.” Erica sighed. “Girls now don’t understand what it was like then, I think. If a girl today likes a boy, she just asks him out. The feminists have it right; it’s a better system, but then—oh, then—a girl sat by the phone. He took me to Homecoming, and we had fun, but I didn’t fall in love until the next week. We were in choir. One morning I walked into the room, and there was a drawing of Tokyo Rose on the blackboard, a huge one done in colored chalks—he could really draw Tokyo Rose—and underneath he had written, “Erica Weiss is lovelier than Tokyo Rose.” He didn’t sign it, but we all knew, even the teacher. She didn’t erase it. It stayed there all period.”
Meadoe considered the room, the woman. It was hard to imagine her as a high school senior. In the pictures, she was pretty, curly black hair, bright eyes peeking at the camera. Meadoe couldn’t see the young woman in the old one. “I don’t know how to ask this; it sounds rude, and I don’t mean it to be, but I need to know. Were you two… serious? I mean… were you close?”
“Very close.” Erica looked at Meadoe and blushed. “Oh no, nothing like that. It was 1945, after all. Not today. We never… not ever. Good girls didn’t.”
“That’s not what I meant to imply.” Meadoe tried to smile, but that was exactly the question she wanted answered. The pinup girls. The touch on her back, the sitting on the couch in front of Casablanca were so sexual.
“Well, we were people, of course. Young people. I think most old folk forget how high their juices used to run, and the young ones, of course, believe they’ve invented sex. We thought about it. We wanted to, but I was firm. I was proper.” She looked past Meadoe at the pictures on the wall. “Most of the people I grew up with are dead now. I have their photographs.” She paused. The clock ticked. Meadoe cupped her coffee, warming her hands. “During the war young kids had less opportunity than they have now. They chaperoned the dances. My mother called slow dances, ‘vertical fulfillment of horizontal desires,’ and the chaperones separated you if they thought you were too close. We thought about it though, what with the boys going away to war. Some girls absolutely thought it was their patriotic duty.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No, we never did.” She looked miserable. “I graduated in ’45, and I was going to go to college. He still had a year left, but he told me he was signing up that summer, the summer he died.”
Talking about his death seemed to have exhausted her, so Meadoe helped put away the coffee cups.
“Did you see Casablanca with him?”
Erica closed a kitchen cabinet softly, hiding cups and saucers by the row. Meadoe believed most were never used, that the old woman took out the same cup or two everyday but never any more. The house seemed bigger now, and more empty.
“We did. At the Denham for an encore showing. It was a couple of years old by then.”
Meadoe remembered the popcorn, the quickening of breath. “Did you sit in the back row?”
They walked toward the front door. Erica paused. “Funny question.” She rubbed her brow in thought. “Yes… you’re right. We did. How did you know?”
Meadoe shrugged.
They said goodbye, but before Meadoe moved to the porch, Erica put her hand on Meadoe’s arm, stopping her. The old woman’s eyes were watery and pale, her gaze steady. “In August that year, my aunt in Fort Collins became ill. My mother left me alone in the house for three days. I was eighteen. She said she trusted me. For the first time since Nathaniel and I started dating we had an empty house. I was going to go to college. He was joining the army. I called him. He was coming to see me when he had his accident.”