The Longest Night (21 page)

Nat groaned inwardly, ashamed that Paul had treated a WWII veteran so disrespectfully.

“Men are never blameless, are they?” Jeannie plucked a cigarette from her gold case and pressed it between her lips, offering one to Nat, who took it to be sociable, though she was wondering at the back of her mind how long Jeannie planned to chat. “Men have secrets. If we knew all the things they did, we'd go live on our own island of women.” Her eyes glittered with some dark knowledge Nat couldn't fathom; she felt that Paul was being included in this in an obvious and deliberate way, but she wasn't sure exactly how. Jeannie glanced up at Esrom on the ladder. “That one, though. That man might actually
be
blameless. He looks like a cherub.”

Nat would never have described Esrom this way, but she turned back to him now, considering.

“Who is he?” Jeannie asked. Her brow crumpled prettily. “A cousin? A brother? I've been seeing his truck around here.”

Adrenaline pricked Nat's spine. “No, he's not related to me.”

“Is he a friend of your husband's?” Jeannie pressed.

“No.”

“Well, who is he then?”

“The gutters were clogged,” Nat said.

“Oh!” Jeannie smiled kindly, as if pleased that they'd breached Nat's resistance to arrive at an actual answer. “So
Housing
sent him out. Fabulous! I was wondering when they'd have people take care of the gutters; ours are awful. What's his name?”

“I don't know,” Nat said, ashamed at her own quick disloyalty.

“Would he do mine, do you think?”

“Your what?”

“My gutters,” Jeannie laughed.

“I'm not sure,” Nat said. “He seems kind of busy. Running around from one job to the next.”

They both watched Esrom take a slop of leaves and rain them down onto the lawn. He wiped a hand on the thinning cotton of his shirt, yawned, went back in for more.

When Nat turned back to Jeannie, she saw the woman staring at her midsection with slightly narrowed eyes. This went on for several seconds until Jeannie forcibly dragged her eyes back to Nat's face with a curious smile. Nat waited for her to speak her mind, but she didn't, so finally Nat said, “I think you may have noticed—I'm having another baby.”

“You caught me looking. I
thought
so. I thought, Nat Collier wouldn't have just ballooned for no reason. How far along are you?”

“Almost six months now. Can you believe it?”

Jeannie nodded, sucking on her cigarette. After her initial surprise—which seemed, oddly, like a confirmation of unpleasant news she'd been dreading—her reaction seemed strangely robotic, chilled. She could not seem to meet Nat's eyes. She tapped ash out the window. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“Children are a blessing,” Jeannie said, and sighed. She tossed her cigarette to the dirt and waved in Esrom's direction. “Hello! Hello! You, yes! Can you come here for a minute?”

It took a few tries before Esrom understood that Jeannie meant him. He squinted at her for a moment and descended the ladder in his clunky boots. His hands and arms glistened with gutter slime; he wiped them on his jeans with an apologetic smile. “Hello, ma'am?” he said, his head tilted to the side, wondering.

“Hello! Is Housing sending men around to do the gutters?”

Esrom glanced at Nat, then back to Jeannie. “I'm not sure, ma'am.”

“Well, could you do my house next? I know I should call the office, but since you're already out I'm sure they won't mind. I'm at 413 White Pine. If you could come by this afternoon, that would be fabulous.”

“I, ah—”

Nat's innards seemed to drop to her feet. She pushed one hand to her cheek. She wanted to blurt that Esrom was not some hired help, but her friend; yet she knew that this would sound strange or maybe even suspicious, and would she be too bold to call him her friend? Maybe he wasn't her friend. Maybe it was only his Mormon sense of duty that brought him to Nat's house to help her. After all, most people did not clean their friends' gutters.

“He might be busy,” Nat tried weakly.

“Well, he gets
paid,
you know,” Jeannie laughed, as if Esrom were not there.

Esrom looked openly to Nat. He was asking her for some kind of sign, she knew; this conversation confused him, and he couldn't quite figure out, coming into it late, why Jeannie was ordering him about and Nat made no move to correct the misunderstanding. There she was, basically selling him down the river, asking him to perform unpaid labor for this bossy neighbor lady.

“All right,” he said to Jeannie. “I can help you. I'm almost done here.”

“Terrific. Nat, you take care. Call if you need anything. Remember, I'm here to look out for you.” She glanced at Esrom. “I mean, if you're ever without
other
help.”

“Thank you,” Nat said, her face hot.

Jeannie waggled her fingers, first at Nat, then Esrom, and drove away. He was already moving back up the ladder to finish the last few feet of gutter. He scooped out the muck with his hands in that easy, natural way men had of dealing with physical exertion and unsavory tasks. His face was impassive, his movements calm and measured; he did not seem angry. But when he climbed down from the ladder and set about gathering the seeping brown piles into a large paper bag, he did not speak to her. She bent once to help him—her hands pink and clean, fingernails with thin white lines at the tips—but catching sight of her awkward, pregnant leg straddle he said, “It's all right. I got it.” So she stood back, looking uselessly at the street until he had finished. Her heart still pounded. Military wives looking out for each other, her foot.

“Can I get you anything to drink before you leave?” she asked Esrom. “Something to eat?”

“No, thanks.” He rolled down the top of the bag and pressed the air out with one short puff. He walked down the grassy decline to his truck, tossed the bag in back, and climbed into the cab.

Nat trotted after him foolishly: “Would you like to come in and wash up? Can't I wrap some food for you to take?” The sting of his rejection, after Jeannie's pointed observations, was almost too much.

“I'm fine. No point in washing up, really.” He seemed to think that this sounded petulant because he forced himself to meet her eyes and he said, “See you later, ma'am.”

The “ma'am” was a rebuff. It stung even though Nat knew she'd acted like an inconsiderate snob, sending him off to work for her neighbor as if she owned his time, and yet she also could not appear to overly care that this bothered him. He was a man who sometimes helped her around the house. He was not her
friend
.

His old pickup rattled down the street, dusty, rust-eaten at the haunches. Nat stood and watched her own yard for a minute as if something might happen. The baby in her belly gave a sideways flop like a frog off a rock. She rubbed her forehead, sighed, and went back inside to see if the girls were stirring.

J
eannie was silently grateful that Nat Collier did not attend the Frankses' dinner party that evening. She was in no mood to witness Nat's glow as she paraded her small round belly; hear people's exclamations over her news and her chirpy, saccharine replies: “I feel very lucky, yes,” or “It
is
more work with Paul gone, but we'll manage.”

“I know you don't work for the Housing Office,” Jeannie had told the young cowboy that afternoon as he dutifully enacted his part of the charade, scooping rotting leaves from the gutter in her backyard. “You don't have a badge, or a marked truck, and you didn't hand me a form to sign.”

“You need an official form to clean someone's gutters?”

“Cute. This is the army, doll. There's a form for everything.”

Jeannie standing by the base of the ladder with her iced tea, which like its predecessors was a Long Island, thank you very much: “Be careful, sweetheart. I've seen deployment widows like Nat Collier a hundred times over. She's so sweet and needy”—here, startled eyes from the cowboy—“but the second her husband comes home she'll be fawning all over him like he's the leader of the free world.”

“With all due respect, ma'am, I think you have the wrong idea.”

“No, hon. I think you do.”

“Ma'am—”

“You know what? Forget it. Just leave the gutters. Why should I care, if Mitch doesn't? Here, take a five—”

“That's too much, ma'am—”

“You people around here could use it. Almost makes me cry to look at you all.”

S
HE WISHED PEOPLE WOULD
acknowledge that her life wasn't easy. Funny she should want them to notice, when her every act was orchestrated to obscure effort; but every now and then, just for an instant, she wanted them to see how hard she tried.

Not all things come easily to other people like they do to you,
she imagined herself saying; gave herself a fantasy moment in which she gripped a satisfying hunk of Nat's hair and gave her a shake.
We don't all have adoring, faithful husbands and get pregnant the moment he looks us in the eye. Not all of us glide through life trusting that our husbands will wake up in the morning and do what's best for us. Some of us have to be vigilant. And being vigilant will make you tired.

She was becoming so silently inflamed, reliving her conversation with that dumb young cowboy and conducting this imaginary sneak attack on Nat Collier in her head, that she finally had to go into the bathroom and run cold water over her wrists. She placed one against her forehead, feeling the simultaneous pulse. Then she returned to the Frankses' party, as calm and pleasant as could be.

N
O MATTER HER SHORTCOMINGS,
Jeannie was excellent at parties. She believed that when she stood before Saint Peter's gate, he'd make a list of her transgressions—moodiness, a penchant for alcohol—but compare these to the way she had planned and conducted herself at social gatherings, and give her a pass.

She was standing patiently next to Mitch, who as usual was spinning some tall tale about his time in Nanumea—“So Grady and I go thrashing into the jungle with this crazy man right behind us, hollering, and we hear gunshots! He's got guns! He's shooting guns at us for having crept underneath his daughter's window!”—when her eyes wandered the room and latched on to a person she had never expected to see again in her lifetime.

Between the sight of this person, the drone of Mitch's multichapter tale, and the restrictive bind of her undergarments, Jeannie thought she might pass out. She could feel her face draining color as if a hole had just been shot in her jaw.

After one stunned moment she managed a smile that she hoped was both distant and friendly, the way someone's face might look if they were studying a postcard from a past vacation before throwing it away. “Eddie,” she said as a young man and his female companion approached.

“Jeannie!” Eddie smiled broadly, without that same distance, and then corrected himself. “Mrs. Richards. It's been a while.”

“It certainly has. Since Belvoir,” Jeannie said. She felt the yellow-brown décor of the Frankses' living room press in around her and thought she might be crushed by the oily, diarrheal painting just behind her.

Eddie grinned, handsome and dark. He was a charmer, like Jeannie, and he knew it. His eyebrows were expressive, his facial features symmetrical and strong without Mitch's Cro-Magnon undertones. Jeannie was not surprised to see that he was now attached. She was, however, caught off-guard by the fact that his attractive companion was Negro.

“This is my wife, Estelle,” Eddie said, briefly setting his arm across the woman's shoulders.

“Wife?” cried Jeannie, with an unnecessary tinkle. “How darling.”

Estelle smiled at him and then back at Jeannie. She fairly glowed with affection for her husband and looked like someone who had received a good amount of love in return, a glossy pet.

The Enzingers were doing their best to extricate themselves from Mitch's storytelling. Jeannie tapped his arm with her free hand. “Mitch, you remember Specialist Hollister, from Belvoir?” With looks of relief, Len and Kath scuttled off.

“Oh, yes!” Mitch boomed, with a forced transfer of attention. “Yes. Hello. But of course.” All this bluster meant that he did not, of course, recall Specialist Hollister at all, which was quite all right by Jeannie. “You're stationed here now? How long have you been in Idaho?”

“Four days,” said Eddie. “Just moved in. I start up on Monday.”

“You're at the CR-1?” Jeannie asked.

He winked. “Yes, ma'am.” His southern drawl was always held back behind his words. It was, Jeannie admitted, the nicest southern accent she had ever heard, not sprawling all over his conversation but just kept sensibly in check, adding a sort of gentility to anything he said—not that he was an especially genteel person in any other respect.

“Well, welcome aboard!” said Mitch.

“And how did you two meet?” Jeannie asked, posing the question mainly to Estelle in case the men wanted to talk man things among themselves. They should always be left that option.

“I was a secretary at Belvoir,” Estelle said, rather shyly, “and I saw Eddie every day. I couldn't help but notice him!”

“Of course not,” Jeannie said warmly.

“You know, I think I remember seeing you there, too.”

Jeannie clamped her lips shut and nodded.

“Mrs. Richards was always bringing in treats for the rookies,” Eddie said. “She's got the most giving heart. She'd bake us brownies, or, what were they—blondies? All the time, just because. We managed to convince her we were studying real hard.”

“I took pity on you,” Jeannie stammered, then added quickly, “for all that schoolwork you had to do.”

“You did have her fooled, then,” Mitch boomed. He enjoyed talk of Belvoir. It
had
been a lot of work, endless studying, and sometimes Jeannie thought the men liked to pretend that they'd made more time for fun than they really had. Of course, hard work had to be rewarded with some hard play.

Jeannie gave Estelle what she hoped was an apologetic smile. She knew that she should try her best to make small talk: Where were they living, did Estelle like her apartment, did she want to hear Jeannie's recommendations for reasonably priced décor? But she felt suddenly tongue-tied, an unusual ailment. She opened her clutch and removed the flat, filigreed gold case that held her Virginia Slims, offered one to Estelle, and took one for herself. Lighting it, she felt somewhat calmer, although she noticed with dismay that her fingers shook.

“Did you ever think you'd end up in Idaho?” she finally managed.

“Well, Eddie's talked about places we might be stationed ever since we were going steady,” Estelle said, and Jeannie looked at her more closely: How old was this girl? She might have been anywhere between seventeen and twenty.

Jeannie snorted lightly. “
I
certainly never expected to live here. Then again, Mitch and I got married a long time ago now. No one was talking about Idaho then. It was during the war.”

“Korea?”

“No,” Jeannie said, slightly miffed, “World War Two.”

“World War Two?!” Estelle shrieked, as if Jeannie had just let slip some reminiscence from antiquity.

“We were very young.”

“I hope Eddie and I will last, like you two have.” Estelle's eyes radiated a genuine warmth that Jeannie found off-putting. “I hope we will stand the test of time.”

It was one thing for Jeannie to poke a little fun at her own age, but another to see how seriously Estelle seemed to believe Jeannie was a million years old. The appropriate response would have been to express shock at the fact that Jeannie was even a day older than herself. Apparently, Estelle did not know the code.

Jeannie looked the young woman over: her broad, youthful face, curled lashes, chemically relaxed jet-black hair. “And where were you two married?” she asked, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Surely it wasn't Virginia.”

Estelle seemed to deflate slightly. Her face reddened. “We went to Ohio.”

“I see,” Jeannie said.

Estelle glanced around, chewing her lower lip.

“Dear.” Jeannie tapped Mitch's arm. “It's getting very late.” And it was: past midnight. Who would have expected a party at the Frankses' to go so long?

“Aw, Jean,” Mitch said. “The nanny's staying over anyway.”

“I'm just getting awfully tired, and a woman needs her beauty rest.”

“
That
you certainly do not need, ma'am,” said Eddie, reaching out and, dear God, pressing her hand. Jeannie wished there were some way to dull that mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Nice to see you again, Mr. and Mrs. Richards,” he said, and took Estelle's arm as they drifted in the opposite direction.

“What a fantastic man!” Mitch observed. “A good conversationalist.”

“He didn't say a word, dear,” Jeannie muttered. “That was yourself you heard talking.”

“What?” Mitch asked, leaning toward her, but she waved him off sweetly with a smile.

“Let's fetch our coats.”

Sliding on her luscious sable (which she feared she'd someday end up having to pawn, if Mitch didn't get his act together at work), she felt shaken. When she'd first taken up with Eddie she'd thought: Of all the places in the world that a young soldier could be sent, all the cities and towns and remote bases, what were the chances that they'd end up in the same spot? She hadn't known the nuclear world as well then, or what she would be in for: an endless revisiting of the same few places and people, all revolving through their small, specialized little universe. Whether you liked them or not, there they would be, four months down the road, five, six.

They were almost at the door when they heard a knock and it swung open.

“Goodness,” said Jeannie, “who could it be at this hour?”

Kinney and Slocum piled in, still in their khaki uniforms. They pulled their covers from their heads and held them at their waists like schoolboys.

“Kinney, Sloke!” said Mitch. “We were wondering if you'd make it.”

Brownie Franks scuttled up the hallway. “Well, I'll be!” she said. “Coming in at the last minute! I'm afraid we've eaten most of the food. Can I throw some spaghetti on the stove?”

Jeannie felt her heart speed up. An impromptu round of after-midnight spaghetti and booze was not on her agenda, thank you. She thanked Brownie for the nice evening and herded Mitch toward the door.

“Jean, we can't leave now,” Mitch whined. “The boys just arrived.”

“Or scrambled eggs?” Brownie was saying. “I could whip up some eggs.” It was terrible to watch her squirm this way, perspiration beading on her upper lip. There should always be an abundance of food, even when one's guests were leaving at one
A.M.
Why didn't she hire help for these events if they took so much out of her? Brownie glanced at the faces around her desperately, her pupils dilating and shrinking with the effort to make contact with someone,
anyone
who would tell her whether spaghetti or eggs were required.