The whole idea of it made Alice’s stomach tighten with dread, but for a week he talked about the jobs he might find and she teased him about city girls taking advantage of her country mouse, and she washed and folded his clothes and packed them neatly in their one good suitcase, the one they had bought for their honeymoon trip to Narragansett Bay. Jimmy worked around the clock to get his Model A up and running. The car had been gathering dust in the barn for more than six months now. The repairs were minor, but how was he supposed to find the time for it when her father was always on him about the cows, and what was the point anyway—where did he and Alice have to go? Now, though, he was in a fever to get the engine humming, and on a Sunday evening—he had skipped church that morning—he turned the crank and the Model A was ready to move. He seemed about to hop in and drive off right then and there, with the sun setting and the trees reaching their frozen fingers into the sky, but Alice brought him in for dinner and told him he would need a good night’s sleep before he set out to seize that new life for them.
It was a good night. Instead of rolling toward the wall, he turned to her in bed and his hands were all over her and Alice thought, Yes, this is just what we need, but she also feared that Jimmy’s hunger for her wasn’t that of a man saying, Oh, how I’ve missed you, but instead, Once more, for old times’ sake. In the morning she made him breakfast but it was an effort to keep him at the table, so eager was he to set out. She cried and he told her not to be silly, but the tears kept coming and his mood darkened. He knew that she knew, and he wanted to be away from the scene of his crime. She dried her eyes on the cuff of her sweater and folded her arms tight against the January cold. Jimmy started the Model A and drove away from the farm. Alice waved to him but instead of returning the wave or sounding the horn or shimmying the car side to side in a woozy farewell, as he used to do in their courting days whenever he drove off, he only laid his left arm along the door and tapped out some rhythm with his hand—a victory march, or the signal for a retreat, or just some ditty that stuck in his head when his thoughts should have been on the wife he was abandoning and the baby that would grow in her belly.
That baby was currently squatting among the chickens, engaged in a heated conversation with a Rhode Island Red. Henry had assigned names to every animal on the farm, even the ones that Alice had cautioned him not to get too attached to. She remembered when she had been about his age, finding out that the main course of their Sunday dinner had only twenty-four hours earlier been a fine white-feathered chicken she had named Pearl.
Alice removed a clothespin from between her teeth and called to Henry. “Is everything all right over there?”
It took him a moment to finish what he was saying to the chicken, but eventually he stood and trotted toward his mother. “Little Orphan Annie is not a nice chicken,” he said emphatically. “I put out lots of feed, but she won’t eat it. She just kept pecking the other chickens.”
He was shirtless in overalls, with bits of feathers and feed in his hair. A real farm boy, down to his boots. He had a pair like Tom’s—he’d insisted on it, even though the ones at the shop were two or three sizes too large. Alice smiled at him, at his little boy’s body growing out of those giant-seeming feet, and swept the hair from his eyes. He had pale, straw-colored hair, like she’d had as a girl. Her father had pointed that out right after Henry was born. As if the strong resemblance to her somehow erased Jimmy’s role in bringing Henry into the world.
Alice knew Jimmy was gone for good and only halfheartedly went through the motions of wondering when she would hear from him again. It gave her something to think about, something to distract her from the fears that came with carrying his baby. Their baby, not just his, but Jimmy was gone, so maybe just her baby. She had prayed for this since her wedding night—a baby, and then many more to follow—but she had never imagined herself deserted, doing it alone. Hoping for letters, for money, for Jimmy’s return—it wasn’t for her benefit but for the baby’s. The baby deserved better than to be born into a broken family.
Things got worse before they got better. One morning her father didn’t come in for breakfast and when she trudged out to the milking parlor—seven months pregnant, her feet swollen and the rest of her dripping sweat in the Indian summer heat—she found him on the concrete floor, looking like someone had flattened half his face with a shovel. A stroke, the doctor said, not big enough to kill him but bad enough to confine him to his bed, his speech garbled and his body half frozen. She put up a notice in the post office offering board and lodging and a small wage for farm help, and after two weeks she got her first and only reply: on her doorstep stood Tom Cronin.
And then things got better. Not quickly, and not all at once, but Tom’s arrival brought a steadiness to the farm that hadn’t existed, she had to admit, since before she had married Jimmy.
Tom could be gruff, and quiet, but over the table they started to talk. He spent time with her father, sitting with him in front of the woodstove and telling him of the day’s work and making a plan for the day ahead. In time he told Alice about the life he’d left behind, and she told him about Jimmy and how she’d been too blind to see what was plain to everyone else. One morning when Tom had started the milking and Alice was tending to the baby, her father put his one good hand on her arm and said, “Marry that one.” When she reminded him that she was already married, he shook his head with great effort and said, “Good as dead.”
Soon her father passed and it was just the three of them. She had named the boy Henry, after her father, and though Tom was shy with the baby at first, he came to treat him like he was his own son. The women in town started to talk—Look at her with no husband and that man always around—but Alice had long since learned not to listen to town girls. When the second baby, a girl, came along, she was a new beginning. Grace, they named her. The world could think what it wanted.
“YOU’RE GOING TO need a bath tonight,” she said to Henry. Her fingers were gritty from where she had touched his hair.
“I don’t want to take a bath,” he said. “I want Tom to come home.” He had been talking about Tom’s return—wondering, asking, pleading—from the moment they had left Tom at the depot.
“And what if he came home and found you smelling like a chicken coop? What kind of welcome would that be?”
Henry eyed her quizzically, puzzling over hidden chains of cause and effect. Was it possible that taking a bath could trigger Tom’s return? Or was this a parent’s trick to get him into the tub, with nothing to be gained for himself? Taking a bath. Not taking a bath. It was a big risk either way.
Alice wiped her hands on her apron and told him to run along. Grace would be up from her nap soon, and she hadn’t yet finished hanging the sheets. As Henry sped away, she said to no one but the laundry, “I want Tom to come home, too.” It had been almost a week and she hadn’t heard a word from him. She knew that he had not left her, and she believed that if anything terrible had happened to him, somehow she would know. She had no choice but to wait for him to appear at the door as he had done before, all those years ago. And when he did, she would take him in her arms and know that it was him, her Tom, and then she would slap him once more in that big ugly mug and tell him never, ever, to make her worry like that again. She hoped it would be soon. Henry missed his Tom.
BATTERY PARK