got back to my apartment I took out the silver compact and ran my fingers along the initials. Bridget Warwick. She had lived here and drank her coffee at the kitchen table. She’d squeezed out every minute of time with her husband. They’d met here and loved here, and here is where she probably got the telegram that told her he’d been killed. I wished I could send the compact back to her. He’d given it to her, I knew that; it wasn’t something a woman would buy for herself.
Could I do that? I wondered. Could I be that wife, sitting at the table, waiting, always waiting… and then getting the terrible news? We regret to inform you…
I didn’t know if I was that brave. Even for love.
Nine
Providence, Rhode Island
March 1945
“Hurry up, Kitty, the taxi’s here. Do you have to use the bathroom?” Delia tugged on her gloves without glancing at me. Which was a good thing, because I’d left off my socks. I wanted people to think I was wearing stockings, and hoping that though I was twelve they’d think I was fifteen.
Delia had dressed up, too, in a dress she’d bought when her boss had gotten her a job in the War Department in Washington, DC, last summer. It was emerald with black satin buttons all the way down the back. She wore a dark green hat with a black veil and fresh new black kid gloves. She’d pulled her red hair back in an elegant French twist. She was even wearing lipstick. This view of my aunt as glamorous was startling, as though Delia had suddenly burst into vibrant song. I was used to seeing her in an assortment of grays, the colors of winter skies. Delia hid her beauty, just like the nuns she visited in Vermont once a month for retreats filled with solitude and prayer. “So I can keep my sanity before the lot of you send me around the bend to the crazy house,” she’d tell us, smiling as she headed out with her small suitcase and her train ticket.
She paused at the mirror she’d hung near the front door so “maybe you won’t look like tinkers on the way to school if you get a good look at yourselves.” Jamie and Muddie and I had long ago outgrown the mattress we’d all slept on in the closet. With Da’s overtime and a bit of luck, the increase in the family fortunes coincided with the Duffys moving out of the adjoining apartment to live with their daughter in Pawtucket. We took on their space as well. Since the landlord had thrown up a wall in order to create two out of a full-floor apartment, Da simply knocked it down again. Now Delia had her own room, as did Jamie, and Muddie and I shared the small back bedroom overlooking the yard.
A taxi to the station! I couldn’t believe it. I held myself very still in the backseat so Delia wouldn’t correct me. It was hard not to ask a question, but I could tell Delia was nervous about missing the train. She kept checking the delicate watch on her wrist. Maybe she, too, was nervous about going to a real Broadway play.
Well, it wasn’t on Broadway, not yet. The two of us were going to New Haven for the tryout of a new musical called Carousel, and I’d read that there would be a real carousel onstage. Delia had bought the tickets, shocking everyone in the family because she never did anything extravagant and didn’t approve of my voice and dance lessons, even though she paid for them. “It’s time Kit knows what she’s in for,” she said. Leave it to Delia to turn a pleasure trip into a warning.
As we sat on the train, I was content to look out the window and not talk. Delia seemed on edge, and when I said I had to go to the bathroom, she snapped, “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
I looked down at my bare legs. I had a scab on one knee, and my calves were dotted with bruises. I realized how silly I was, believing that people would think I was older. Delia’s sleek legs crossed and recrossed, her stockings whispering. I could see a man down the aisle looking at her legs, and how Delia’s head jerked away, how she managed to convey to that stranger that he was a lout for even stealing a glance. I lifted my chin, too, trying to