recreationally dabbling in danger, but Celia knew danger. She knew things—dark things—that I didn’t know. She knew things that she didn’t want me to know.
When I think back on it all now, Angela, it’s appalling to realize that this kind of violence seemed so commonplace back then—and not just to Celia, but also to me. (For instance: why did it never occur to me at the time to wonder how Gladys had come to be so good at covering up black eyes?) I suppose our attitude was: Oh, well—men will be men! You must understand, though, that this was long before there was any sort of public conversation about such dark subjects—and thus we had no private conversations about them, either. So I said nothing more to Celia that evening about her experience, and Celia said nothing more about it, either. We just put it all behind us.
And the next night, unbelievably, we were out there in the city again, looking for action again—except with one change: From this point forward, I was committed to never leaving the scene, no matter what. I would not allow myself to be sent from a room again. Whatever Celia was doing, I would be doing it, too. Whatever happened to Celia, it would happen to me, too.
Because I am not a child, I told myself—the way children always do.
EIGHT
There was a war coming, by the way.
There was a war happening already, in fact—and quite seriously so. It was all the way over there in Europe, of course, but there was a great raging debate within the United States as to whether or not we should join it.
I was not part of this debate, needless to say. But it was happening all around me.
Perhaps you think I should have noticed earlier that there was a war coming, but truly the subject had not yet landed in my consciousness. Here, you must give me credit for being exceedingly unobservant. It was not easy in the summer of 1940 to ignore the fact that the world was on the brink of full-out war, but I’d managed to do exactly that. (In my defense, my colleagues and associates were also ignoring it. I don’t recall Celia or Gladys or Jennie ever discussing America’s military preparedness, or the growing need for a “Two-Ocean Navy.”) I was not a politically minded person, to say the least. I didn’t know the name of a single individual in Roosevelt’s cabinet, for instance. I did, however, know the full name of Clark Gable’s second wife, a much-divorced Texas socialite named Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham Gable—a jawbreaker of a moniker that I will apparently remember till my dying day.
The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium in May of 1940—but that was right around the time I was failing all my exams at Vassar, so I was terribly preoccupied. (I do remember my father saying that all the fuss would be over by the end of summer because the French army would soon push the Germans right back home. I’d figured he was probably correct about that because he seemed to read a lot of newspapers.)
Right around the time that I moved to New York—this would be the middle of June 1940—the Germans had marched into Paris. (So much for Dad’s theory.) But there was too much excitement going on in my life for me to follow the story closely. I was far more curious about what was happening in Harlem and the Village than what had happened to the Maginot Line. And by August, when the Luftwaffe started bombing British targets, I was going through my pregnancy and gonorrhea scares, so I didn’t quite register that information, either.
History has a pulse, they say—but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when it is drumming right in my goddamn ears.
If I’d been more wise and attentive, I might have realized that America was eventually going to get pulled into this conflagration. I might have taken more notice of the news that my brother was thinking about joining the Navy. I might have worried about what that decision would mean for Walter’s future—and for all of us. And I might have realized that some of the fun young men with whom I was cavorting every night in New York City were just the right age to be put on the front lines when America inevitably did enter this war. If I’d known then what I know now—namely: that so many