amid his other expressions of passion and abandon—a look of baffled terror, as he stared up at me in excited, but panicked, wonderment. His guileless blue eyes, in that moment, seemed to be asking, “Who are you?”
If I had to guess, I suppose my eyes were responding: “I don’t know, pal, but it’s none of your business.”
When we were done, he could barely even look at me or speak to me.
It’s incredible how much I didn’t mind.
Jim departed the following day for basic training.
As for me, I was delighted to learn three weeks down the line that I had not gotten pregnant. It had been quite a gamble I’d taken there—having sex with no precautions whatsoever—but I do believe it was worth it.
As for the Norwegian sweater I’d been knitting, I finished it up and mailed it to my brother for Christmas. Walter was stationed in the South Pacific, so I’m not sure what use he had for a heavy wool sweater, but he wrote me a polite note of thanks. That was the first time he’d communicated with me directly since our dreadful drive home to Clinton. So that was a welcome development. A softening of relations, you could say.
Years later, I found out that Jim Larsen had won the Distinguished Service Cross for extreme valor and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force. He eventually settled in New Mexico, married a wealthy woman, and served in the state senate. So much for my father saying he would never be a leader.
Good for Jim.
We both turned out fine in the end.
See that, Angela? Wars are not necessarily bad for everyone.
TWENTY-THREE
After Jim left, I became the recipient of much sympathy from my family and neighbors. They all assumed I was heartbroken to have lost my fiancé. I hadn’t earned their sympathy, but of course I took it anyway. It was better than condemnation and suspicion. It was certainly better than trying to explain anything.
My father was furious that Jim Larsen had abandoned both his hematite mine and his daughter (in that order of fury, without a doubt). My mother was mildly disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting married in April, after all, but she looked as though she would survive the blow. She had other things to do that weekend, she told me. April is a big time for horse shows in upstate New York.
As for me, I felt as though I had just woken from a drugged slumber. Now my only desire was to find something interesting to do with myself. I gave the briefest consideration to asking my parents if I could return to college, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to get out of Clinton, though. I knew I couldn’t go back to New York City, having burned all my bridges, but I also knew that there were other cities to be considered. Philadelphia and Boston were rumored to be nice; maybe I could settle in one of those places.
I had just enough sense to realize that if I wanted to move, I would need money, so I got my sewing machine out of its crate at last and set up shop as a seamstress in our guest bedroom. I let word spread that I was now available for custom tailoring and alterations. Soon I had plenty to do. Wedding season was coming again. People needed dresses, but that need brought problems—namely, fabric shortages. You couldn’t get good lace and silk anymore from France, and moreover it was considered unpatriotic to spend a good deal of money on such a wild luxury as a wedding gown. So I used the scavenging skills I’d honed at the Lily Playhouse to create works of beauty out of precious little.
One of my friends from childhood—a bright girl named Madeleine—was getting married in late May. Her family had fallen on hard times since her father’s coronary the year before. She couldn’t have afforded a good dress in peacetime, much less now. So we scoured her family’s attic together, and I constructed Madeleine the most romantic concoction you ever saw—made from both of her grandmothers’ old wedding gowns, disassembled and put back together in a brand-new arrangement, with a long, antique lace train and everything. It was not an easy dress to make (the old silk was so fragile, I had to handle it like nitroglycerine), but it worked.
Madeleine was so grateful, she named me as her maid of honor. For the occasion of her wedding,