The Vineyard (23 page)
Authors: Barbara Delinsky
“Was Carl in on the plans?” Olivia asked.
“I'm not sure I understand your question.”
“Did you talk about the house and the kids with him?”
Natalie thought about that. “No. It was taken for granted.”
“How do you know he felt the same?”
“The way he looked at me. The way he touched me.”
“Touched you.”
“It was innocent, but caring.”
“Are we talking touching your hand, or touching something else?” Olivia asked, then caught herself. “Or shouldn't I ask?”
“You shouldn't ask,” Natalie said, folding her hands in her lap. She looked away. Seeming to argue with herself, she raised a shoulder in a tiny shrug. She pursed her lips, then released them. Decision made, she looked back at Olivia and spoke quickly, as though she feared she would lose the nerve. “We touched. He taught me things.”
“Were you kissing at the movies by then?”
There was a pause, then a soft, “Yes. I was sixteen, he was twenty. I was seventeen, he was twenty-one.” She put a hand to her chest and raised tear-filled eyes to a point above Olivia's head. “Looking at him just took my
breath
away.”
Apparently the memory still did. Olivia suddenly felt like an intruder. Like a voyeur. “I shouldn't have asked.”
Natalie drew in a breath and blew it slowly out. Her eyes fell to her lap. She was quiet for a moment. Then she raised her head. “Yes. You should. This is what I hired you for.”
“But these are private things. I'm ⦠I'm embarrassed hearing you talk about them. It doesn't seem right.”
“Because I'm seventy-six? Because you don't like to think of your own mother as being sexual, much less your grandmother?”
“I never knew my grandmother,” Olivia said, “and I know that my mother is sexually active.” She had grown up watching a stream of men come and go. “But you're different. You're a lady.”
Natalie suddenly grew cross. “Is there some reason why a lady can't feel passion? Is there some reason why she can't love with her body as well as her heart?” With a convulsive little headshake, she erased her frown. “I'm not asking you to be graphic. I won't give you anything to be graphic about. But the whole point of this exercise is to let my family know that I felt things back then. Before they criticize
me now, they should know how it was. Carl was my be-all and end-all. He was my first thought in the morning and my last one at night. Aside from when I was in school, we spent every waking hour together. He tried to shield me from work, always gave me the easier chore, but I was right out there with him. I was so in love I didn't know what to do with myself.”
“So, what
happened?”
Olivia asked. “Why didn't you
marry
him?”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“Not like that.”
“Did you love Tess's father?”
Olivia had met Jared in a coffee shop in Atlanta, where she was living at the time. He was there for a scientific symposium, looking adorably brilliant with his mussed hair and his glasses. He had a shy way of speaking that suggested vulnerability. Olivia had found that endearing, too.
“I thought I loved him,” she told Natalie. “Listening to you, I'm not so sure. I know I liked him. He was a nice person. Yes, I guess I was in love.” But Jared had been gone well before Tess was born, and though Olivia had felt his absence throughout the pregnancy, once she had the baby, she hadn't missed him at all.
So, had she loved him? Or had she simply loved the
idea
of loving him?
Natalie wore such a grandmotherly look that Olivia couldn't resist telling her more. “Jared was the kind of guy who could get so lost in his work that he didn't even know I was around. I wanted him to know. I wanted to be the distraction that he couldn't pass up. But I wasn't ever that.” She smiled lopsidedly. “He did give me Tess. She was everything I wanted and more.”
Natalie smiled. “She was all yours. She was a guaranteed love. She wasn't leaving. Not
ever.”
Olivia weighed the words and slowly nodded. “That's it. That's what I felt.”
“Then you do know what I felt with Carl. I never doubted that he loved me. I never feared that he would leave me. He was always there, and I was desperate for love.”
“But you had your parents. You had your brother.”
“You had those things, too.”
Feeling like a fraud, Olivia sat back in the wing chair. She
shouldn't have lied about her family, certainly not to the extent she had. “I wasn't completely honest about that. Having four brothers was a dream. I always thought it would be such fun. But ⦠I only had one.”
“One brother?”
Well, it wasn't
quite
as big a fib. “But he was protective. My parents were even worse. My brother was the boy. He could do whatever he wanted. I was the girl. I was coddled and kept close to home. There was a real double standard. I had to leave just to prove that I wasn't helpless.” Feeling guilty, she stopped blabbering. “You didn't answer my question.”
“Which question was that?” Natalie asked.
“About what happened with Carl. If you loved him so much, why didn't you marry him back then?”
My father wasn't doing well. When Prohibition ended, the black market went with it, which meant that our wine money dried up. But the Depression didn't end. Thanks to some of the New Deal programs, farm production in other parts of the country picked up. Our market was local, and it was fine. We survived without federal help. We fed ourselves and clothed ourselves. But we couldn't get ahead. We couldn't get a leg up on the rest of the world, which was what my father needed to do. He was a businessman. He knew the importance of growth. That was why he bought up the farms around us. He had visions of building the whole thing up and selling it, recouping what he'd lost in the stock market crash, and returning to New York.
Funny, how quickly a person loses touch. There was no way he was going to do that. We didn't own nearly enough land, and the growing season here was nothing like it was in the Midwest or the South. Asquonset was never going to be worth enough to get him back to New York, not in the style in which he'd left. Little by little, that sank in. He worked the fields from dawn to dusk, pushing his body almost irrationally but getting nowhere.
He was depressed. He was delusional at times. Jeremiah and Carl covered for him when he wasn't functional.
He was still growing grapes, though there wasn't much of a market for the native varieties, and he was wasting precious money on vines from French stock that languished for a year or
two and then died. But he wouldn't give up. When growing corn and potatoes and carrots and such didn't make us rich, he got it fixed in his mind that grapes were the answer. He kept at it, even when we were losing money that we couldn't afford to lose.
It was like gambling. After a while, you've lost so much that you have to keep going, because the jackpot is certainly around the next corner. You need the money so badly that you can't afford to stop.
Growing grapes was like that for my father. He was convinced that it was just a matter of hitting on the right varietal. It became an obsession.
Try to picture the situation. My father was physically depleted, a thin man with a bent back. He rarely talked and never smiled. He would sit with his paper and pencil at night and try to make the numbers come out so that there was a profit to show for the work that we'd done. He had high hopes that had nowhere to go.
At the same time, the world around us was going mad. Hitler was moving through Europe, annexing one country after another. First it was Austria. Then Czechoslovakia, then Poland. He made it clear from the start that his goal was world domination, but it was hard to take him seriously. To us, he was an awkward little man with a square black mustache and a penchant for invading the countries bordering his. There was nothing unusual about it. History is full of stories like that.
Then we started hearing the reports of what he was doing in those countries that he ruled. It was horrifying.
He took Poland, and soon after that, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. That gave us greater pause. We sat around the radio at night listening to the reports.
But Hitler was there, and we were here. The Atlantic separated us from him. We were protected. Besides, it wasn't like we had nothing else to think about. We were barely recovering from the Depression.
Then Paris fell to the Third Reich, and Hitler began bombing Englandâand suddenly we didn't feel so far away. My God, it was in our living room every night, Edward R. Murrow with that inimitable voice saying, “This ⦠is London.” We heard air raid sirens just as they were sounding, and explosions when the bombs found their mark. You people grew up on live reporting,
but we hadn't been exposed to it before, at least not this way. It was new to us, and terrifying.
Roosevelt agreed to supply the Allies with weapons and raw materials, but it wasn't until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that we finally entered the war.
Your generation remembers where you were when you learned that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed. My daughter remembers where she was when she learned that President Kennedy had been killed. My friends and I, we remember where we were when we learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
It was a Sunday. My parents and I had been to church in the morning and come home for dinner. I went to Carl's afterward. I always did that. His house was so much happier than mine. And he was there, of course. I was seventeen and in love.
Jeremiah and Brida had closely monitored Hitler's bombing of England. They had friends and family in Ireland, and didn't want the bombing to spread. They applauded Lend-Lease and other promises of help in the battle against Hitler. This day, they listened raptly when Roosevelt went on the airwaves to report the bombing.
We were in their living room, Carl and I on the floor by the chairs where his parents sat. Our goal was to be as close as possible to the radio at the same time that we were as close as possible to each other. I remember hearing the president's voice that day and knowing right away that something was wrong. Carl and I looked at each other the whole time he talked. I think we knew even then that what had happened was going to change our lives.
Olivia's mind raced ahead, trying to guess exactly what had changed that would have come between Natalie and Carl. “He went into the army?” she asked.
“The navy.”
“Even though he wasn't an American citizen?”
“Oh, he was an American citizen. He and his parents had been sworn in years before. They took pride in being American.”
“But he was their only son. He was needed to help run the farm. Couldn't he have gotten out of the draft?”
Natalie gave her a funny look. “Did I say he was drafted? He
wasn't drafted. He enlisted. Don't look so surprised, Olivia. It makes a bad statement about your generation.”
“It's just ⦠if he loved you ⦔
“There were thousands and thousands and
thousands
of couples like us. But what good is being in love if your families and homes are threatened by a man who is carting people off to concentration camps and killing them in droves, or by a country that killed twenty-five hundred of our servicemen in a single horrible day of bombing?
“Your generation is fortunate. You haven't lived through a war, certainly not one that threatened your own soil. We had been convinced that Hitler would never make it out of Europe, but there he was, bombing England. We were next. The isolationists in the country were suddenly silent. We had a common enemy now.
“As for Carl,” she went on, “there was never a doubt in his mind. He was hale and hardy. He wanted to fight for his country. It was a matter of pride. And he wasn't alone. Men enlisted, because it was the honorable thing to do. They didn't look for excuses to get out of the war and stay home. There was one fellow here in townâyou know Sandy AdelsonâI'm talking about her father. He was just Carl's age, the perfect age to enlist, but he was stone deaf. When the army turned him down, he was humiliated. Oh, there were other things he could do to help the war effort, and he did. But to the day he died, he insisted that the worst part of being deaf was not being able to fight in the war.”
“Did your brother enlist?”
“Yes. He did it even before Pearl Harbor was bombed. He saw the war coming.” Her eyes strayed. Beneath a soft sweep of white hair, that gentle brow of hers furrowed, and suddenly Olivia knew.
“He died in the war, didn't he?” It wasn't even a question, the answer was so obvious.
Natalie rose from the wing-back chair and went to the window. She would be looking out over rows of vines and down toward the ocean, Olivia knewâthough from where she sat, all she could see was treetops. And clouds. It was another misty day at Asquonset. The health of the grapes was in doubt, as were the Fourth of July festivities.
Turning away from the window, Natalie came to stand behind the chair she had left. She put her hands on the wings. Her voice was
quiet. “History talks about Pearl Harbor first. When we heard about the bombing there, we were appalled. We were also a little relieved. Brad wasn't at Pearl. He was at Midway.”
Olivia was trying to remember every little thing she had ever read about the war when Natalie said, “Right about the time when we were sighing those sighs of relief, Japanese bombers were hitting other bases.”
“Midway?”
“Among others. It was several days before we got word. The navy had been so startled by the speed and force of the attacks that things were chaotic. Understandably, the first efforts went toward getting medical help for the wounded. The dead couldn't be helped.”