Chapter 3
Sunday in Akron
You’re picking up where you left off.
Ruth Malloy woke at six, the way she did every day, and it took her a good minute, lying in the dark, to remember it was Sunday and she wasn't going to the plant.
Sunday was her only day. For two years she had worked six days a week at Goodyear Aircraft, out at the edge of town, where they built fighter planes for the Navy, Corsairs with their wings folded up like birds somebody had broken. She was an inspector. She spent her days with a lamp and a mirror on the end of a rod, looking at rivets other people had put in and marking them in chalk when they weren't straight. She was good at it. She didn't let anything get by. The foreman said she had a mother's eye, and he didn't know how true that was.
She stayed under the covers a little longer. She listened to the house. The furnace coughing in the basement. The wind, hardly anything. Peggy asleep in her room, right next to Tommy's, where nobody had touched her brother's bed, the blanket pulled tight, the way you keep a place at the table.
It was December 24, 1944. Tonight there would be midnight Mass. Tomorrow, Christmas. The seventh without Frank, and she didn't count those anymore. The first with Tommy on the other side of the ocean.
She got up.
It was cold and dry. From the kitchen window, Fernwood Street was gray and white. Old snow covered the yards, packed down, dirty at the edge of the sidewalks, snow that had fallen on Thursday and wasn't melting and wasn't falling anymore. The sky was clear. Across the street, at number 41, smoke was already coming out of the Brennans' chimney. Joe Brennan had always been the first one up on the street. He worked in tires, at Goodyear too, in the plant down below, the one you could smell, hot rubber, all the way out to the hills.
Ruth made coffee. She got out the bread. Standing by the stove, she read Tommy's last letter again. She kept it behind the sugar canister.
It was dated December 10. From England, that was all anybody knew. Tommy's letters never said anything. It wasn't the censors, or not only the censors. Tommy had never said anything, not even at the table, not even as a boy. He wrote the way he talked: not much, straight, in sentences that seemed to apologize for being there.
Dear Mom, it rains here all the time. The food's good. Eddie clowns around, the guys like him. I got the socks. Tell Peggy I didn't forget about her birthday. I think about you. Your son, Tommy.
Peggy's birthday was in February. He was already thinking about February. Ruth folded the letter and put it back behind the sugar canister.
They walked to nine o'clock Mass at St. Vincent's, because gas was rationed and Ruth hadn't had a car anyway since Frank died. Peggy walked ahead, in a coat too short in the sleeves, her head pulled down into her shoulders. She had turned fifteen in February and had shot up all at once that fall, as if she had decided to take up the room that was left.
The church was full of women. There were men, old ones, kids, a few workers off the night shift, but it was the women who filled the pews, in hats and gloves, with the face they had learned to wear over the last three years. In the windows along the street there were stars. A blue star for a son gone to war. A gold star for a son who was dead. Ruth had a blue star in her front-room window. Across the street, so did the Brennans.
The priest read the list of the men of the parish in the service. It was long. He read the names slowly, and when he got to the M's, Ruth bowed her head and heard Thomas Malloy the way you hear your own name in a crowd. Further up the list there had been Edward Brennan, and across the aisle Kathleen Brennan had bowed her head too. They looked at each other afterward. They didn't say anything. There was nothing to say they didn't already know.
The priest prayed for the soldiers, for the sailors, and for those at sea. Ruth prayed for Tommy and for Eddie, in that order, and felt a little bad about the order.
Outside on the church steps, Kathleen Brennan caught up with her. She was a short, round woman, always out of breath, who had raised Eddie the way you hold on to a kite in a high wind. They'd had their boys the same year, three months apart, on either side of the same street. They had lent each other sugar, baby buggies, remedies for whooping cough, and once, in 1938, a black suit.
“Did you get a letter?” Kathleen said.
“From the 10th.”
“Us too. From the 9th. He says it's raining.”
“Tommy says it's raining too.”
Kathleen laughed, and her laugh turned to steam.
“Eddie writes me he's keeping an eye on Tommy. He writes it in every letter. Like he's the big one.”
“It's Tommy keeping an eye on Eddie,” Ruth said.
“Oh, I know.”
They walked together as far as the corner of Fernwood Street, Peggy way out ahead. Kathleen talked about the turkey she hadn't been able to find, about Joe working overtime, about the Hennessy boy who'd been wounded in Italy and brought back to Cleveland missing a leg and who laughed more than he used to. Ruth listened. She loved Kathleen because she talked for two, like her son, and with her you never had to fill the silences.
At the corner, Kathleen took her arm.
“They're together,” she said. “That's something. They're together.”
“Yes,” Ruth said.
And they parted, each to her own side of the street, each toward her own window with its blue star.
When they got home, Peggy wrapped the scarf.
She had been knitting it since October, in the evenings, by the kitchen light, with navy-blue wool she had paid for out of her babysitting money. She had started it over three times because she knitted too tight. The scarf was a little wider at one end than the other. Ruth hadn't told her.
“It's never going to get there for Christmas,” Peggy said.
“No.”
“It'll get there in February.”
“Maybe.”
“Is it still cold over there in February?”
“Yes,” said Ruth, who had no idea.
Peggy folded the scarf into quarters, laid it on brown paper, added a card she didn't show her mother, and tied it all up with a schoolgirl's care. She wrote Tommy's military address in capital letters, with his serial number and the APO number you copied onto every envelope without knowing where it led. She wasn't going to mail it right away. First she wanted to slip in a picture of herself, the new one, her school picture, which she hadn't gotten back yet.
“You think he's thinking about us today?” Peggy said.
“He thinks about us every day.”
“Today more.”
“Today more,” Ruth said.
She started getting lunch ready around twelve-thirty. It wasn't Christmas dinner. Christmas dinner would be tomorrow, with whatever they'd been able to find, a little chicken the butcher had put aside for her because he had known Frank, and potatoes, and a pumpkin pie made with sugar saved up for a month. Today was an ordinary Sunday. Soup, bread, leftovers.
At ten to one, she set the table.
She did it without thinking, the way you do things you have done for twenty years. She took three plates out of the sideboard, set them in their places, added the silverware, the glasses, folded the napkins, and it was only when she had finished, stepping back to see if everything was straight, that she saw there were three plates.
She stood there, her hand on the back of a chair.
It wasn't the first time. Since Tommy left it still happened, once a week, sometimes twice. She would set three plates, see that there were three, put one away. Peggy knew and didn't say anything. Peggy had written it to Tommy once; Ruth had found out by accident, reading over her shoulder a letter that wasn't meant for her. She hadn't scolded her. Deep down she had been glad that Tommy knew.
She picked up the extra plate and held it against her for a moment.
She put it back in the sideboard with the others and closed the sideboard door gently, so it wouldn't bang.
Peggy was coming down the stairs. You could hear her footsteps, and the radio playing next door, an orchestra, violins, a cheerful tune for the Sunday before Christmas.
The kitchen clock struck one.
It was an oak clock, Frank's mother's clock, which had never gained or lost a minute since it was hung there. It struck the hours with a cracked chime, a little too loud for the room. Usually Ruth heard it without listening, the way you hear your own heart.
This time she listened.
A single stroke. The white kitchen, the winter sun on the oilcloth, the soup simmering, the old snow outside, the smoke at the Brennans'.
And she thought, without knowing why, with a clarity that surprised her: over there, it's already dark.