The Stars Are Fire

In the large kitchen, when she and her mother first entered it, they discovered a wringer washer and a gas clothes dryer. At first Grace didn’t recognize the appliance. It was three feet high, two feet across, and low to the ground. When she opened the enameled hopper, she learned that there was a metal drum inside. The appliance had only one switch—on or off—and she and her mother concluded after several tries that it took only fifteen to twenty-five minutes to dry a load of wash. Towels and flannels didn’t need ironing. She and her mother were amazed. When Grace thought of the time needed to dry sheets in the wet spring, she could only shake her head.

Grace is certain that Merle never used the machine. Laundry would have been Clodagh’s province.


“They’re building tin houses for the homeless,” Aidan says that evening as he and Grace are reading in the sitting room.

“How do you know this?”

“I heard it at the post office.”

“Is that where you go when the kids are napping?”

“Either there or the market. The houses are temporary until the new ones can be built.”

Grace remembers the aluminum clinic. “Won’t they be awfully cold?”

“They must have some kind of insulation. They can’t be comfortable, but people are desperate to get them.”

Grace is silent. “We should be taking in refugees here.”

“You already did,” he says.


“What do you and Aidan talk about at night?” Marjorie asks Grace the next morning while they are eating oatmeal.

Grace stares at her mother. Why this question now? “We don’t talk a lot. We’re polite, but mostly we’re just reading.”

“Reading?”

“Yes,” Grace says, avoiding her mother’s gaze.

She rises to rinse out her tea mug and sees Aidan giving the children a ride on a sled he must have found in the barn out back. Because the barn is farther up the hill than the house, he’s able to work up some speed as he sleds down. The children squeal and beg for more. In order to get Tom back up the hill, Aidan puts Claire on the sled and tells her to hold on tight to her brother. Grace watches as Aidan digs in his boots to fit the foot-size ledges in the snow he’s made earlier. It produces the illusion of him climbing a flight of stairs.

Grace snatches her wool coat off a hook and steps outside at the front of the house, and for a few minutes, she is free. She slides down the slippery hill of the driveway, crosses the coast road, stumbles through the brush, and arrives at the beach. In her haste, she forgot her gloves and hat. Her ears sting. She puts her hands into her coat pockets, where she finds a quarter. Where did that come from?

The sea has a chop to it that produces a deep blue-green. Living on the water is like watching a movie in color. She happens upon a large rock and sits on it and covers her ears until her hands are too cold.

She’s not sure she’s ever been this happy—with her children and her mother safely in a large house; with Aidan to help and to talk to. She remembers sitting at her kitchen table at Hunts Beach, smoking a cigarette, and staring at the sink. How lonely and grim that seems now.

“You forgot your hat and gloves.”

Aidan settles the hat on her head and hands her the gloves, and she realizes she wished him here.

“Thanks,” she says, glancing up at him. “My ears were stinging.”

“It’s pretty cold out,” he says, drawing his black wool coat tighter. He claps his gloved hands together. He wears a black watch cap.

“The children are in?” she asks.

“Tom got a snootful of snow and started to cry. I had to take them to your mother.”

“It looked like fun.”

“They’re wonderful.”

Grace smiles. “I agree.”

He stands beside her, staring out to sea. Perhaps he’s as mesmerized by the chop as she is. It makes the ocean seem alive.

“I’m always amazed that we’re not looking at England, but at Portugal,” she says. “And it’s warmer in London than it is here.”

“The Gulf Stream,” they say simultaneously.

“Do you ever wish you could go back to Ireland?” she asks.

“In the war, I went to every Allied country on the European front, which didn’t include Ireland or Switzerland because of their neutrality. Yes, I’d like to go back there sometime. I still have brothers there.”

“Do you?” Grace asks, surprised.

“Two of them. They were older than I and more settled when we left.”

“It must have been painful for your mother to leave them.”

“My parents planned to save money for their passage, but the oldest refused to leave and the other followed suit.”

“I can’t imagine growing up in a large family. I was an only child.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” Grace answers. “You?”

“Twenty-nine last September.”

“So you just travel from place to place whenever they need a pianist?”

“I’ve done it all,” he says. “Taught music in school, soloed with orchestras, tried to put some bands together.”

“You don’t mind not having a place to call home?”

“I didn’t used to.”

“It’s wonderful to have such dedication,” Grace says.

“It’s a gift. I won’t deny that. But I admire you.”

“What for?” she asks, squinting up at him.

“Finding a safe place for your family, keeping life sane when you must be worried sick about your husband.”


After dinner, Grace meanders into the sitting room with her book and is glad to see Aidan there.

“I’ll go out tomorrow and start looking for a job,” she announces. “There’s a bus I can take.”

“Where will you start?”

She tilts her head. “I’ll tell you when I get one.”

“I’m breathless with anticipation.”

She reaches a leg out and kicks his boot. “How is your search going?” she asks.

“I’ve half a dozen queries out. We’ll see what comes of them.”

“Where are you looking?” she asks. She notes his knitted vest of brown wool. Hand knit. A mother? A lover? A sister? A wife?

“Boston, New York, Chicago, Baltimore.”

“So far away?”

He sits up straight and clears his throat. “I’ve got to go where there are orchestras.”

“What are you reading?” she asks.

“It’s a biography of Antonin Dvo?ák.”

She doesn’t know who Antonin Dvo?ák is.

“He was a Czech composer. Brahms was his mentor. What are you reading?”

“The plays of Eugene O’Neill. I found the volume in the bookcase beside you. Right now I’m reading something called The Iceman Cometh.”

He nods.

“You know it?”

“Yes.”

“I try to picture the play as I read it,” she says. “O’Neill was Irish American.”

“Are you enjoying them?”

“He’s very dark and full of pain.”

“Our national heritage.”

“Are you dark and full of pain?” She means it as a joke.

“Sometimes.”


Grace’s evening conversations with Aidan often end abruptly. She wants to tell—ask him—so much more, but like in her exchanges with Gene, they talk in bits; unlike her exchanges with Gene, the bits fascinate her.


Grace removes a pile of papers from a drawer in Merle’s bedroom and sets them on the bed next to her as she sits up, her back to the headboard, to find out how the house is run and what the bills might be. The date, 1947, is affixed to the first page by a paper clip, and after that the papers have no obvious organization. She locates an invoice for shoe repair under an account for electricity, but there’s no indication as to whether either of these has been settled. No dunning notices, no checkbook. Did Merle pay only in cash, sending it through the mail? Grace unearths a breathtaking statement for a bracelet containing ten one-carat diamonds in gold. She hasn’t come across a bracelet of that description and imagines that Merle squirreled her best jewelry in a hiding place. Perhaps a safety-deposit box.

Several doctors’ bills are clipped together—first, those of Dr. Franklin, then of a cancer specialist, then from the hospital. Was Merle supposed to pay these as she lay dying? There has to have been a will, accounts with a bank. Gene would know about these. It’s odd he never mentioned anything but the house.

She comes up with an invoice from Best & Co. in Boston for four dresses with detailed descriptions. “Satin belt with paste clasp.” “Navy wool skirt cut on the bias.” “Blush pink silk Fortuny skirt with thirty-six pleats.” “Mink hat, turban style, lined with royal purple silk.” Where did Merle go in these clothes? Would she have worn the Fortuny silk to a cocktail party? The skirt cut on the bias to play bridge? The satin dress with paste clasp to a winter wedding?

At the bottom of the pile are three bills clipped together, each dated a subsequent month, for a case of Edgerton pink gin.

Anita Shreve's books