“Just stupid, I guess,” Magnus responded, and then they forgot about it. But the families’ dinners together were tense for weeks, as they all worried about Josiah, after he wrote them that he was shipping out. He couldn’t tell them where he was being sent, but obviously to the front somewhere, where he would receive more combat training. Tony Salvatore, Bettina’s husband, left shortly after, and she was still in disgrace with her parents. Bert hadn’t forgiven her yet, although her mother had. Gwyneth couldn’t stay angry at any of her children for long, no matter how grievous the offense. Bettina’s marriage to a man they disapproved of was the worst thing any of them had ever done.
Bettina had gone to visit Tony’s parents at the restaurant, to do the proper thing after their rapid, stealthy marriage, and she was disappointed that they were upset and angry too. As far as they were concerned, he had a fiancée in Italy he had jilted. It had been arranged through their cousins, and the young Italian woman was supposedly a hardworking girl who would have been helpful to them, and it was obvious that Bettina was much too fancy to ever work in the restaurant. They were cold and unfriendly and barely spoke to her, and she had left in tears. They had made it clear to her that they had no intention of supporting her or helping her in their son’s absence if that was why she had come to visit them, which it wasn’t. They told her to stay with her own family and not come asking them for money, and if there was a baby on the way, they said they didn’t want to know about it. They informed her that she and Tony were on their own, and that his family had enough mouths to feed. The smell of fish at the restaurant had been awful, and she felt sick when she got home and didn’t even come to dinner. She told her mother where she’d been and how nasty Tony’s parents had been. It was a harsh lesson to her for doing something so impulsive. Neither side was willing to approve the marriage or support it.
—
In June, Andy went to New York to graduate with his class, and the whole Gregory family went with him. Blake flew back to San Francisco after the ceremony to work, but the rest of the family spent a week in their apartment. The kids saw their friends, while Sybil spent several days working at the Brooklyn Museum.
A week after graduation, they returned to San Francisco. Dinners with the Butterfields were quiet and tense, as the reports of the war continued to get worse in the Butterfields’ time frame. Andy spent time with Lucy to cheer her up, but she was worried about Josiah too. They all were.
In July, Bettina realized that she was three months pregnant, which upset her parents even more. The baby was due in early January, and she hadn’t heard from Tony since he’d shipped out, so she couldn’t write to tell him. She was so violently sick that she vomited all the time, and stopped coming to dinner. She couldn’t bear the smell of food, and Gwyneth said she was living on toast and weak tea. She was so ill that Gwyneth felt sorry for her, and Bert was even more upset that a child would result from her foolish, headstrong behavior. She didn’t contact Tony’s family to tell them, since they had been so unfriendly toward her the first time, and had made it very clear that they wanted nothing to do with them or a baby. It was a heavy dose of reality for her. She had no idea what she’d do with a child. The whole thing seemed a great deal less romantic to her now, although she had been so in love with Tony after they met in Tahoe, and on the day they got married. No one had warned her she could get this sick if she got pregnant. She didn’t know enough to take precautions on the one night they’d spent together, and he had been so anxious to go to bed with her that he had done nothing about it either. And now she was paying for her foolishness. Lucy was ill that summer too, and Andy spent hours keeping her company. He was going to miss her when he left for university.
In early August, disaster struck, and they received the telegram telling them that Josiah had been killed in France by a mine, when his unit had offered auxiliary support to British troops. Sybil found a black wreath on the door when she got home from taking Charlie to swim club, and her heart nearly stopped when she saw it and guessed what it meant. The house was in deep mourning for weeks afterward, and Blake and Sybil postponed their vacation in the Hamptons, in order to stay in San Francisco and support Bert and Gwyneth in their grief.
“Is this crazy?” Blake asked Sybil when they made the decision not to go east. “He’s been dead for a century, and we met him as a ghost. Should we be canceling our kids’ vacation for him?”
“They’re our friends, Blake,” Sybil said quietly. “I’d feel terrible leaving them.”
“He’ll be back anyway,” her husband reminded her.
“But they don’t know that yet, and we don’t know how long that takes.” She had called Michael, and he had said it could be months, or even years. “And we can’t tell them he was dead anyway. In their lives, this just happened.” In the end, Blake agreed with her, and wanted to do what he could for Bert, who was devastated by his daughter’s poor judgment and the death of his son, four months after they’d entered the war.
Three weeks later, almost to the day, Bettina was notified that her husband had been killed in France during training exercises. She was going to give birth to a fatherless baby in four months. The house felt like a tomb after both young men were killed in Europe.
Blake and Sybil found some relief when they took Andy to Edinburgh to settle him in. They took Caroline and Charlie with them, and they found it a charming city. Andy was wildly excited to be going to college at a foreign university, and he joined them in London for five days, and then Blake and Sybil took Charlie and Caroline to Paris, and then Blake, Caroline, and Charlie flew back to San Francisco. Sybil went to New York for the opening of the show at the Brooklyn Museum. She hadn’t touched the book she’d been working on since they moved to San Francisco. She just hadn’t had time. Between her children, the Butterfields, and her work, she never had the quiet hours she needed to continue the research and work on it, but she had promised herself and her publisher that she would finish it that winter. She was in New York for two weeks, and pleased that the reviews of the design exhibit in Brooklyn had been excellent. Based on the event’s success, she was asked to do a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It had been a very fruitful trip. And when she got home, she found Blake coping well. Alicia had stayed at the house to help Caroline and Charlie while Sybil was gone. Alicia was the only one at home when she arrived in the early afternoon. The black wreath was off the door, which Sybil was pleased to see.
“How is everyone?” Sybil asked her, and she shrugged when she answered.
“They talkin’ to themselves a lot.” But they all did. Sybil too. Alicia thought they were all a little odd, but nice people, and they were good kids. “They do their homework every night, and Mister Gregory, he take them out to dinner a lot. Chinese, pizza, Thai, Mexican.” This told Sybil that they hadn’t dined with the Butterfields while she was gone, and she wasn’t sure why. She wondered how they were doing after all the shocks of the summer, and how Bettina was. And she was excited to see her children when they got home from school. Charlie let out a whoop and threw himself into his mother’s arms.