Jordan blinked. “But she doesn’t play the violin.”
“She did.” Ruth’s eyebrows pulled together, and she reached for Taro’s soft back. “She did!”
“I believe you, Ruthie—”
“She did,” Ruth said fiercely. “She played for me.”
Never had Anneliese said she could play an instrument. She never asked to turn on the radio to listen to music either. And she didn’t own any violin—Jordan had seen her things carried in to be unpacked after the honeymoon, and there was no instrument case. Maybe she had to sell it?
Jordan looked down at Ruth. “Your mama said there was an incident by the lake in Altaussee. A refugee woman who, um, wasn’t very nice to you both.”
“There was blood,” Ruth whispered. “My nose bled.”
Jordan paused, heart thumping. “Do you remember any more?”
Ruth dropped her melting ice cream, looking upset, and Jordan couldn’t keep pushing. She just couldn’t. She opened her arms and Ruth burrowed into them. “Never mind, cricket. You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.”
“That’s what she said,” Ruth mumbled into Jordan’s middle.
“Who?”
A pause. Then, “Mama.”
But her voice lifted as though she wasn’t entirely certain, and her small shoulders hitched. Jordan bit her tongue on any further questions—what could she even ask?—and hugged her new sister tight. “Let’s go for a swan boat ride. You’ll love that.”
“But I dropped my ice cream.”
“You can have mine.”
Ruth calmed down by the time they got to the boats with their paddle-operated swans. Jordan still felt like a monster. Wasn’t that productive? she scolded herself. You upset your brand-new little sister, all to learn that maybe Anneliese played the violin, and that a refugee woman made Ruth’s nose bleed in Altaussee. That’s proof of nothing, J. Bryde.
Anneliese had brought very few belongings to the house, hardly suspicious for a woman fleeing the wreckage of a war. Jordan had already looked through her closet and drawers, guiltily, but there was nothing to be found. If the new Mrs. McBride had anything incriminating, it had gone on her honeymoon along with the Iron Cross.
Watch and wait. As much as she wanted to run to her father, Jordan knew she’d need more proof than two photographs, or he might just shake his head and say, Jordan and her wild stories.
By Monday the new Mr. and Mrs. McBride were back, laden with presents. Jordan couldn’t help a shiver of relief to see her dad hale and hearty, although what had she been fearing? That the dainty Anneliese would do him harm? That was the wildest idea yet, surely.
“I missed my girls!” He swooped Ruth up in a hug, and Anneliese’s smile for Jordan was so infectious Jordan couldn’t help smiling back.
“Come help me unpack, Jordan. I’ll show you the scarf I found in Concord, just your color.” She was so warm and open, Jordan couldn’t help but wonder if she’d imagined the Iron Cross altogether.
“I wondered,” Jordan asked casually as they unpacked upstairs, shawls and lace handkerchiefs piled around the bed, “did you ever play the violin?”
“No, why?”
“No reason. Oh, that scarf is pretty, Anneliese—” She let her stepmother loop the fringed blue-sequined ends around her neck.
“Anna,” corrected Anneliese, arranging the scarf across Jordan’s shoulder. “Now that I’m a proper American housewife, I’d like a proper American name!”
Yes, let’s just erase your past, Jordan thought, even as Anneliese tugged her to look in the mirror. Because there’s something there you don’t want us to know.
“WE HAVE A SUITE at the Copley Plaza Hotel,” Ginny Reilly was saying. “My sister had her honeymoon there, it’s gorgeous. So when I have my wedding night there, Sean will carry me across the threshold—”
“You should carry him across 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.”