the threshold,” Jordan observed, keeping one ear on the kitchen where Anneliese was clattering dishes. “Sean’s a string bean.”
“Shut up, it’s my fantasy.” Stifled laughter from the girls sitting around the parlor floor with a stack of magazines. “He opens the champagne while I change into a negligee. Bias-cut ivory satin—”
More suppressed laughter, up until Ginny finished with a whispered, “When the light goes out he just rips my negligee off . . .” They all exploded, Jordan laughing too.
She lifted the Leica and snapped her friends, mentally titling it June 1946: A Study in Feminine Frustration. Graduation had come and gone just after Jordan’s eighteenth birthday, and now that school was done, she found herself sitting around with a good many friends who wanted to plan their fantasy weddings—and wedding nights. They were all good girls with lace-curtain-and-Sunday-lunch parents, so nobody here had Done It, but they talked about Doing It. What else was there to fantasize about now that school was done? Ginny worked at Filene’s, and Susan was going to Boston College in the fall but had already said she’d only stay till she got engaged. And Jordan, who had yearned for high school to be done, now found herself wondering what the point was. Her father still wouldn’t budge about the question of college, when she brought it up last week. “Let me talk to him later,” Anneliese had whispered afterward, with a smile of friendly complicity that gave Jordan a guilty twinge.
“Your turn, Jor,” Ginny laughed. “How does your first time go?”
Jordan gave up fretting for the moment. “All right, here it goes.” This was all very silly, but it was their time to be silly, wasn’t it? “We’re at war with the Soviets, and I’m filming the bombing of Moscow. I meet a glamorous Frenchman working for Reuters, and after the bombing he drags me off to an abandoned tank—”
“You want to Do It in a tank?”
“There are bullets flying. It’s very romantic. Then my photo of the bombing makes the cover of TIME—”
“If I had Garrett, I wouldn’t be daydreaming about Frenchmen,” Susan said. “Is he going to give you his college ring?”
“He won’t have one until he starts this fall,” Jordan evaded. But Garrett probably would offer it to her, and if she took it, everyone would expect her to wear it around her neck on a chain, because that was the next step. The trouble with steps was that the more you took in a certain direction, the more people assumed that you would continue on, which Jordan wasn’t sure she wanted to do. She was barely eighteen; how was she supposed to know if Garrett Byrne was the One and Only? Jordan wasn’t even sure she believed in the entire idea of the One and Only.
Anneliese glided in with a tray. “Would you girls like some cake?”
“Please, Mrs. McBride!” Jordan’s friends chimed, and then when she had retreated: “Your stepmother is the best.”
“So elegant—never a hair out of place. My mother always looks so frazzled.”
“She’s wonderful,” Jordan said. If I could be certain she wasn’t a Nazi, she’d be absolutely perfect.
“Just because she has an Iron Cross,” Jordan argued to herself, down in the darkroom after her friends had left, “doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.” Trying to be fair, unbiased, like the level-headed J. Bryde who could always find truth in the middle of sensationalism. “Maybe Anneliese’s husband was a Nazi, and the medal was his. She said he was in the war, but she’s avoided saying if he followed Hitler or not. That’s the kind of thing you would keep to yourself, if you moved to America.”
Perfectly reasonable. Entirely possible.
“Even if he was a Nazi, it doesn’t mean she was. She could have carried his old medal because it was a reminder of him, not because she’s a fascist.”
Also entirely possible.
“Moreover,” Jordan went on, pacing the length of the darkroom, “maybe she’s not even keeping this background of hers a secret. Just because she didn’t tell me doesn’t mean she hasn’t told Dad. He might already know. A little secret between husband and wife.”
So ask him, Jordan thought. But something gut-deep held her back. Anneliese made Jordan’s father happy; she had seen that very clearly over the past weeks of watching and waiting. The cheery way he whistled when he shaved in the morning, the bounce in his step when he came home from work. And though Jordan had no urge to imagine what happened behind her father’s bedroom