The Vineyard (28 page)

The fires had barely been extinguished, the bodies removed, and the damage assessed at Pearl Harbor when every able-bodied man in town began to think about enlisting. Carl was one of the first, he felt that strongly about it. Before I could turn around and say that I thought we should be married before he left, there he was in uniform, ready to be shipped overseas.

It was early 1942. A raw February day. February 8—I won't ever forget the date. Carl and I had agreed that I wouldn't go to the train station. It would be too painful. We were in the tractor shed, awake all night holding each other. We didn't care that it was cold there. We had nowhere else to go.

The sun came up—cruel sun, on such a dismal day. The fields were barren. Ice coated all the little spikes of dead grasses and plants in a way that might have actually been beautiful, had the circumstances been different.

We didn't talk. There wasn't anything to say. He was doing what he had to do, and I supported him in it. But he was about to be sent God knew where and suffer God knew what. We had never been separated before.

Three times he went to the door to leave. Three times he came back. Then he couldn't put it off any longer. He went to the door a fourth time, stood there with one hand on the big iron latch and the other limp at his side, and looked back. I remember the details of it as clearly as I remember seeing him when I was five. The clothes were bigger, but with the exception of work pants for overalls, he was dressed much the same—similar hat and jacket, similar boots. His hair fell over his brow. We knew it would be shorter by the time the day was done. His shirt hung out of his pants, the last of that kind of thing, too. His eyes held me, touched me, loved me. Then he put his head down and slipped through the door.

My heart went with him. I ran to the door and watched him walk away. The farther he went, the smaller he grew, until he turned onto the path that led to his house and disappeared from my sight.

I slipped to the floor and cried. Just cried. Had I not known how strongly he felt about doing this, I would have run after him and begged. But that wouldn't have helped either of us. I just … sat there … sat … and cried.

No. I'm … all right. Give me a minute.

It was just … oh my … just a heart-wrenching time.

There. I'm fine. But that isn't what you really want to know. What you really want to know is why we didn't marry before he left.

Believe it or not, he didn't ask me. And I didn't think anything of it. Things happened so fast. It was like he was here one day and gone the next. I just assumed that we would get married when he came home. If he came home. Yes, I do see the cup as being half full, but the reality of those days made it harder. Hitler was a monster. We may not have known the details of it back then, like we do today, but we knew he was evil.

Who was Carl to fight that? He was a gentle man. A nonviolent man. I told myself he was strong and determined, and that those qualities would carry him through the war and let him come back in one piece. But there were bombs falling. We heard them on the radio each night. How could Carl protect himself from a bomb?

I was seventeen, and I was terrified for him. Yes, I wish he had proposed before he left. It might have given me an argument not to marry Alexander—and again, I don't want that misconstrued. Alexander was a good man.

But I loved Carl.

Was I angry that he hadn't proposed? No.

Actually, yes. The days that followed were so tumultuous for me that it's only natural anger should be one of the emotions I felt. However—and this is important, Olivia—I did not marry Alexander on the rebound. There were other reasons why I married him.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to my not marrying Carl. Like I said, I didn't think about it in the flurry of his departure. Once he was gone, though, I did. Other girls I knew were marrying their sweethearts. It struck me that we might have been married, too, and suddenly I was desperate for it. But Carl hadn't been. For years, I wondered why. I asked him about it only recently—it took me that long to get up the nerve.

His answer surprised me. I had thought that the timing was his only reservation—my age and the rush of his induction. But he had other reasons to pause. He was Catholic, we were Protestant. His parents were immigrants, mine were blue bloods. He wasn't educated. He wasn't rich. He wasn't a landowner. He felt inferior to the man my father had been in his prime. He said that in all the years my parents had known him, as kind as they had been to his parents and to him, they had never once taken him seriously as son-in-law material.

He was right. My parents made that clear to me when Alexander proposed.

I didn't see it at the time, though. I was so in love with Carl that I just assumed my parents knew how I felt and what I wanted. There was no reason to talk about it. I was only seventeen. I hadn't even finished high school.

My parents had been discussing my future between themselves, though. In the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, while I was dreaming my girlish dreams about marrying Carl, they were nurturing other thoughts. Alexander Seebring was the son of a successful businessman. His family had spent their summers in Newport way back when we did, so I knew who Al was. We hadn't been friends, though. He was ten years older than me.

That fall before Pearl Harbor, our families started getting together. I remember the preparations—the cleaning and polishing and sprucing up designed to impress guests. I was stunned that things could look so nice. My mother had been sick on and off, and hadn't put any effort into appearances, so I was accustomed to something simpler. When everything was done up, though, we didn't look quite so poor.

Even then, I didn't think anything of it when the Seebrings came to visit. Alexander was giving my father a hand. The Seebring business was shoes, which meant that Al made regular trips to Europe. He was helping my father in his quest for the perfect grape.

I used to ask Al about those trips. He could talk for hours and be totally enchanting. It didn't occur to me that our parents were encouraging those talks for anything deeper.

I did know that my father was better when the Seebrings were around. As soon as they left, he would sink back into depression, and that was before war had been declared. After Pearl, after Brad died, the depression deepened. He would go for days without saying a word, leaving the work in the fields to Jeremiah and us while he sat and withered alongside his vines.

My mother was in a panic. She couldn't talk about Brad, because his death was painful and fresh, and my father was getting worse by the day. So was she. We later found out that what we had thought was chronic indigestion was a tumor. All I knew at the time was that she was painfully thin and growing more frail by the day.

Carl had barely been gone a month when my mother suggested I marry Alexander. She was so desperate that she didn't even dress up the reasons. We needed money, she said. Alexander had it. She claimed that if I married him, he would pour untold resources into the vineyard. My father would be able to buy
many more vines and make them grow this time. He needed this desperately. Otherwise, he would die.

Yes. That was what she said. If I didn't marry Alexander—if there was no infusion of funds—my father would die. For my part, I was thinking that my mother might die first, and that if this was her last request, how could I possibly deny it?

Alexander enlisted. He wanted to marry me before he went overseas. I had all of a week to make my decision.