And it was a family now. I felt more at home with them than I had in the first twenty years of my life. Yes, the pattern and routine would change again once we returned to the duplex in Oxford Circle. But there would always be next summer at the shore. And the summer after that. And I was certain I would settle into my own place in Philadelphia as well. Maybe I would even enroll in some writing classes, though I wasn’t worried about earning a degree. Daddy had only sent me to college to find a husband after all. And as much as I enjoyed school, it was the freedom I loved. I had found that here, and much more of it.
August was a little faster paced for matchmaking at the shore than June and July had been, largely because more young men joined their families for their two weeks of vacation. A couple of handsome ones came through our door, frog-marched by determined mothers. A few weeks earlier, I might have found a reason to pop into the living room. But now I was content to mind my own business as I sorted through the photographs of Ada’s life. I had a system and moved much quicker, watching as first her father, then her mother disappeared.
When I reached the bottom of the box from the late 1910s, my hand brushed a piece of fabric. That was a first, so I peered inside and pulled out something wrapped in a handkerchief, tied with a red ribbon.
I held the parcel in my hand for a moment. I wanted to open the ribbon. But something about it felt too personal. And the handkerchief was monogrammed with the initials JWS. It wasn’t Ada’s.
Instead, I set it aside, staring at it as if I could will it to tell me what was inside without violating Ada’s trust. But the parcel said nothing, and I found myself waiting until Ada had finished with her clients for the day.
When the last mother and daughter had left, I knocked at the door to the living room. Ada was at the desk in the corner, Lillian across from her as they looked over notes from the day, Ada wearing the reading spectacles that she never let anyone other than Frannie and us see her in. They both looked up at my knock.
“Yes?” Ada asked.
I was suddenly shy. Whatever was in that parcel—I’m not sure how I knew it was personal, but I did. And I was even a little apprehensive about bringing it up in front of Lillian, though I was sure there were no secrets between them. But curiosity and I suppose a sense of duty propelled me toward them.
“I found . . . this,” I said, holding the wrapped parcel out.
“What is it?” Lillian asked.
“I don’t know. I thought—I don’t know. I didn’t feel comfortable opening it.”
“Whyever not?” Ada asked.
“It felt . . .” I trailed off. “It just felt like I should ask you before I did.”
Ada’s lips twitched into a half smile. “How unlike you. Do you feel well? Lillian, see if she has a fever.”
“I’m fine,” I said, swatting Lillian’s hand away from my forehead. “I just—is it love letters?”
“No,” Ada said. “Those are in the Philadelphia house.”
I briefly wondered how much a love letter from Ernest Hemingway would sell for. It would set me up for life, I assumed.
“No,” she continued. “You may open that.”
“Is that—?” Lillian began.
“Let her see,” Ada said. “It’ll answer her questions about my wartime activities.”
“Hemingway?” I asked, pulling the ribbon. “These aren’t his initials.”
“No,” Ada said. “They’re not.”
With the ribbon untied, I unfolded the handkerchief to find a stack of black-and-white photographs. My shoulders sank slightly in disappointment. But as I looked at the top one, I saw that the woman was Ada. She was in France, Notre Dame looming behind her, but she wasn’t looking at the camera. Instead, she was looking at a man in uniform, her face positively glowing. I traced the line of her body. Her hand was clasped in his, but as I followed his arm up to his face, hidden slightly by his army hat, I stopped, looking back up at Ada in confusion.
She shook her head. “And you think I’m old-fashioned,” she said.
The man’s complexion left no doubt about his race.
I flipped it over. Ada’s handwriting on the back read “John and I, Paris, November 1918.”
“Who is John?”
“Does he look at all familiar?”
I turned the picture back over, holding it closer to my face, but no. I shook my head.
“He should. You’re acquainted with his grandson after all.”
I thought for a moment. “Thomas?” I squeaked. Ada nodded. “I don’t understand.” Ada chuckled as I tried to work it out. “You and Thomas’s grandfather—” I flipped quickly through the rest of the stack of photographs. The third one down was them kissing under the Eiffel Tower. “I—” Nineteen eighteen. I quickly did the math. She would have been thirty-three. And if Thomas was in medical school—“Is—are you his grandmother?”
“Of course not,” Ada said, taking the photographs from me and thumbing through them. “We couldn’t have married. I thought at the time—especially if we stayed in Europe. But he was right, of course. It wasn’t even legal in a lot of states. It was in Pennsylvania, but he had family down south. If we’d ever gone to see them . . .” She shook her head. “I loved that man to pieces. But he understood what I didn’t. I couldn’t. I hadn’t lived it.” She touched his face in the photograph in front of her.
“No,” she said softly. “He came back home and married the girl who was waiting for him. Had four kids, including Thomas’s father.” She looked up. “I told you I’d been in love twice. John was the first great love of my life.”
I sat there processing this as she spread the photographs in front of me. It explained her fierce devotion to Thomas. But it also didn’t. How could she watch the children and grandchildren who could have been hers if the world was different and not feel bitter about what she never got to have?
I didn’t ask that question out loud, but Ada could read me. “It took me a long time,” she said. “I was willing to give up my family, my life, everything. And I know he loved me too—it was why he wouldn’t do the same. Ours wasn’t a story with a happy ending, no matter how you looked at it. If we came back here, odds were good we’d find a cross on our lawn, if not our house on fire, even in Philadelphia. I didn’t really know how the world worked yet. I thought if we loved each other enough, we could find a place where our differences wouldn’t matter.” She shook her head again. “I was young and stupid and sheltered. John knew better. The world loves to destroy what it doesn’t understand. Some things can be hidden to be protected. Some can’t.” Lillian reached over and took her hand. Had it been me, she would have swatted me away, but she let Lillian’s remain, smiling at her tightly.
I tried to imagine an Ada so in love that she was willing to flout some of the most ingrained rules of our society. I didn’t know any mixed couples even now. Though to be fair, I didn’t know many people who weren’t Jewish. We tended to huddle together on this side of the Atlantic, even more so since the hazy events in Europe during my early childhood. And marrying outside the faith was so strictly forbidden. Conversion for marriage was relatively new and still viewed as strange. Even I, rebel that my family thought I was, wasn’t immune. It certainly hadn’t been a pastor’s son whom I crashed through a stained-glass window with.
And Ada, born more than half a century before me, was willing to be someone whom her family sat shiva for over a man who married someone else soon after.