WHEN DIANA GOES into Robin’s room, where the girl had the nerve to stay all those months, she finds the record still on the phonograph. Carefully, she lifts it like it is a precious thing and smashes it against the sharp edge of the nightstand. It cracks easily. She lifts it again and again, each time bringing it down with as much force as she can muster, until it is nothing. Nothing but shards. A useless broken thing.
MARTHA SITS ON THE BENCH, shivering slightly in her trench coat. Her valise is at her feet. She has no idea what she will do next. There is nowhere for her to go. She thinks of Robin, his face with the chiseled good looks of a movie star. His voice, so clipped and British; she used to mimic it to entertain him. She thinks of how he touched her there, and there; his lips on hers, so hungry and fierce; all the ways he entered her, his hands on her waist, his body over hers, under hers, behind hers. She cannot imagine that body cold, without life. She cannot imagine those lips silenced, empty.
Martha watches as the big black car comes to a stop across the street.
She hears footsteps running and a voice: “Winston Churchill, you are the father of my baby!”
Martha gets to her feet, leaves the valise behind, and walks quietly toward the car. Its doors fly open and men in dark suits and dark hats and faces cast dark with worry, emerge.
Winston Churchill gets out last. Martha is right in front of him.
“Mr. Churchill,” she says.
He looks up. His face is soft with a round nose and big jowls. His eyes narrow, seeking some recognition of her.
“Mr. Churchill,” she says again.
Behind her the woman screams, “I only want what is mine!”
Martha looks into Winston Churchill’s face and tries to say what is in her heart. How she loved a man who went to war and will not come home. How she seeks comfort any way she can. How she needs refuge from the things in the world that are killing young men like hers.
Without thinking about what she is doing, she goes to Winston Churchill and hugs him. Startled, he takes her into his arms. He murmurs something that she cannot understand. All she can do is smell the wet wool of his coat, his strong aftershave, and oddly the crisp smell of apples and bread baking. One of the other men comes between them, but not before Mr. Churchill has patted her back and offered some words of kindness.
Then she pushes away from him and is left standing as he disappears with all the men in black suits and hats into the building.
Martha does not move. She lifts her face to the rain. It is gray here. The bombers are on their way. Martha opens her arms, the arms that have held great men, and finally weeps.
La Vigilia
CONNIE STANDS ON THE FRONT STEPS OF HER CHILDHOOD home, refusing to move forward. Her husband, Vincent, stands close behind her, breathing heavily in the cold air. He sounds like a dragon, or something about to explode. Like a geyser, Connie thinks. Like Old Faithful. Even thinking about Old Faithful fuels her anger. On the list of things she and Vincent were supposed to do but never have, visiting Old Faithful is number two, right after a honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Instead, they drove as far as Seekonk—only thirty minutes from the hall where her family still sat drinking wine and eating egg biscuits and wandi. Vincent had stopped at the first motel he saw. So eager to take her virginity finally, he did not even wait for her to remove her pale-green going-away suit and put on her Champagne-colored negligee. Right then, she should have known. She should have picked up her American Tourister matching luggage and gone to Niagara Falls herself. Now, six years later, it was too late. Connie would never see Old Faithful. Or Niagara Falls. Or do any of the things on her ever-growing list of disappointments.
“I’m fucking freezing, Connie,” Vincent says between snorts, which finally propels her forward.
“Davy,” Connie says, nudging her five-year-old son, “ring the bell.”
But Davy can’t reach it. He stands on booted tiptoes and stretches his mittened hand upward.
Connie sighs, worried that Davy will be a short man like his father, worried that this trip home for Christmas will be just one more misguided decision.
“Jesus,” Vincent says, and leans against Connie to ring the doorbell himself.
He doesn’t move away from her when he is done. Instead, he presses against her back, making sure she feels that even in the below-freezing temperature, even beneath his long wool coat and gray flannel trousers and white boxer shorts, he has a hard-on. As if he has accomplished something special.
“Jesus,” Connie says.
Davy turns his beautiful face up toward Connie and smiles his perfect baby-teeth smile.