Page 9 of A Map to Paradise

8

“No more excuses,” Melanie said as she held the front door open for Eva. “You have to see Elwood, today. And I mean physically see him. It’s been a week. If you get any trouble from June, tell her I insist you see with your own eyes that Elwood is all right or I’m calling the police.”

“Oh, but, Melanie, I don’t think she will like that and—”

Melanie cut in. “All right, then. I’ll stand in my backyard and yell Elwood’s name at the top of my lungs until he opens his window or the neighbors call the police. Think she will like that ?”

What Eva said next made no sense to her, but she found herself wanting to protect June, at least for the moment. “Let me try another way, Melanie. Please? Let me try to be her friend. Let me try with kindness?”

Eva had spent several sleepless hours the night before contemplating that list of things she knew to be true and could not help but conclude that one of three scenarios had to have taken place. Either Elwood had indeed miraculously left the house and made June promise she would tell no one, and because she loved him, she promised. Or Elwood and June had left the house together and something had happened—an accident perhaps—and only one of them came back. Or June had done something she never thought she’d do and there was no way to reverse it. Eva knew firsthand how the deepest of passions can sometimes express themselves in a regrettable act.

One of these had to be true, unless Elwood was in the house like June said he was and Eva was simply mistaken about the lack of real evidence that he was there. But if she discovered she was right and Elwood wasn’t in that house? She wasn’t yet sure what she would do then. It would go badly for June if Melanie were to come to any of the conclusions that Eva had, and Eva suddenly realized she didn’t want that.

Perhaps because she understood better than anyone that life doesn’t always hand a person good options at the same time it is handing them terrible circumstances.

Maybe because Eva owed her life to someone who once stepped in for her when the situation seemed just as dire.

Or maybe because not blowing the whistle was the wisest thing she could do for herself. If she said nothing and just let the situation reveal its truth down the road and in its own time, she might be able to escape what would surely be a glaring spotlight on this cul-de-sac. Maybe by the time that happened she could be at a new job and far away from Paradise Circle.

Melanie huffed a breath of annoyance. “All right,” she said. “You try your way. The kind way. But if June has done something terrible to Elwood, your way is not going to work.”

At June’s, Eva looked for a way to inquire about Elwood her way, as Melanie had put it, and decided to offer to decorate the Blankenship house for Christmas. It was only a week away, though with the outside temperature in the seventies it felt more like summer. She hoped that a bit of gaiety would lighten the atmosphere in the house and maybe endear her to June a little. Decorating the house might even lighten Eva’s own mood, as she’d found out that morning Yvonne would need for her sister the room Eva had been renting. She was going to have to find a new place to live at the first of the year. Trimming the house would be a nice distraction from that looming chore also, as well as afford her a chance to get June to open up about Elwood.

When Eva mentioned the idea, June frowned slightly but then seemed to quickly change her mind.

“Wait. Yes. That would be nice, actually,” she said. “Elwood would like that. He has a little artificial tree in the garage made of goose feathers dyed green. It’s surprisingly pretty.”

She told Eva where she could find the boxes in the garage and Eva brought them in, stacking them in the living room so that June could direct from the sofa where she wanted everything to go.

Eva placed the little tree in a corner by the hi-fi. She’d seen trees like this one before. They’d been popular in Germany, and the Gellers had one. She saw it now in her mind’s eye, decorated with tiny snowflakes Louise Geller had made from shiny white paper using miniature scissors shaped like a stork. For a second she heard Louise’s voice singing an American Christmas carol as she hung the little snowflakes on a tree just like this one. But then she heard Ernst’s voice, too—he was not singing—and she shook the image away.

Eva opened the first cardboard box of ornaments and pulled out tins of tissue-wrapped baubles, all glittery, glistening, and fragile.

“These are beautiful,” Eva said.

“They belonged to Elwood and Frank’s mother. They’re Italian, I think. Frank was so fond of them.”

Eva hung a couple on the feathery tree. “Was your mother-in-law Italian?”

“No. I think she just liked pretty things.”

“Were you and your mother-in-law”—Eva cast about for the word Americans used to describe a loving relationship—“close?”

“I never got to meet her. She died before Frank and I met. The way he and Elwood talked about her, I think I would have liked her, though.”

“I am sure she would have liked you, too.”

June laughed. “Maybe. It would have been nice to have a mother in my life who was just a regular mom. I didn’t really have one of those. My mother died when I was ten and let’s just say she wasn’t your typical mother.” June laughed again, though this time less happily.

“Not…typical?”

“She was her own person, very unpredictable, I guess you could say. She didn’t treat me like my friends’ mothers treated their daughters. She’d let me stay up all night if she stayed up all night. She’d take me to the outdoor bars down at Kinney Pier or the dance hall or arcade long after dark, or she’d keep me out of school for days if she wanted to drive down to Mexico with someone she’d just met. Sometimes we had food to eat, sometimes we didn’t. Most of the time we lived in a one-room cottage in Ocean Park, but sometimes we stayed in mansions up in the hills with men who seemed to only have first names. Sometimes we slept in a neighbor’s car.”

“What happened to her?”

June paused a moment before answering. “There was a terrible flu the autumn I turned ten. Scores of people died from it that year. I don’t even know how many. My mother caught it and was gone four days later. I went to live with my grandmother and aunt in Pasadena after that.”

“I’m so sorry. You could not go live with your father?”

“I never knew my father.”

“Oh.” Eva sensed immense disappointment in those five words. She at least had her father and brother and Tante Alice when her mother died.

“My grandmother was good to me; so was my aunt, my mother’s older sister,” June continued. “But I was never sure that I truly belonged with them. They’d been at odds with my mother. It was hard for them both when she died, I know that. But they saw me as an extension of my mother and all her poor choices, I think.” June stared off into space for a moment, as if floating back to a place in her mind. “I went to secretarial school after high school. I wanted to work in the offices of a Hollywood studio because of all the movies that had kept me company on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t even care which studio. I missed my mother during the rest of my growing-up years even though I didn’t understand her. The cinema helped me imagine a different world, I guess. One without the ache of losing her.”

June brought her gaze back to the present moment and to Eva.

“My mother died when I was eight,” Eva said. “She was sick from cancer. I only have a few memories of her when she wasn’t ill. They are good memories, though. My father always talked about her like she was a gift from heaven. And my brother Arman was a little older—ten, like you—when she died. Arman remembered her far better. He would tell me things about what she was like when she didn’t have cancer, memories he would try to give me as if they could be my own.”

“What a kind thing to try to do. You must miss your father and brother.”

Eva unwrapped a glass orb striped in red and gold. “I do. I loved them both very much.”

“Did they fight in the Polish Army? Is that how they died?”

Eva sat back on her heels contemplating how best to answer that question. “No. They weren’t in the army.”

The two of them were quiet while Eva hung two more of the ornaments.

“That one is made of walrus ivory. Elwood brought it back from Alaska,” June said, nodding to a creamy white six-pointed star Eva held in her hand. “He was stationed there in the Second World War.”

This surprised Eva. “Elwood served in the last war?”

“Both he and Frank did. If you were a man between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four, you had to register for the draft. And if you were under the age of forty-four you were answerable for service. I could hardly believe it when they told me. They were forty-three in 1942, healthy and prior military. Of course the army wanted them back.”

“I would not have thought at that age…” Eva let her sentence dangle unfinished.

“I wouldn’t have, either. I hated that time when they were gone. Frank served in the Army Corps of Engineers, and he said before he left he’d just be building things, that’s all. As though he wouldn’t be in danger. But he was, nearly the whole time. And Elwood assumed he’d get a public affairs post and sit at a typewriter all day long in some war office. But he didn’t. He was assigned to Army Intelligence on the Aleutian Islands and he fought frostbite, trench foot, booby traps, and snipers while the army tried to take back the islands of Attu and Kiska from the Japanese. He could’ve easily come home in a flag-draped casket, too. It was hell knowing I could have lost them both. Absolute hell.”

This was the moment to be certain of June’s true feelings for Elwood; Eva was confident of it. But how to frame the question?

Certainly not by asking June, out of the blue, how long she’d been in love with her brother-in-law.

June would no doubt ask how Eva dared pose such a question and then show her the door.

She needed a different approach.

What if she were the first one to be honest? What if she told June the truth about herself? Perhaps June might in turn do the same.

But then again, there was risk in doing that.

And yet, as Eva thought about saying frank words that she’d not said aloud to anyone in years, an unexpected calm came over her. What was the worst thing that could happen if she told June who she really was? June could blab it to someone, yes, but there was no benefit to June in telling anyone. And June clearly had her own problems.

“May I tell you something?” Eva said, the decision made.

June’s eyes widened slightly. “Yes?”

“It is something I have not told anyone.”

A slight pause. “All right.”

Eva considered what she was about to do, and June waited. Then she spoke.

“I’m not Polish. I’ve never even lived in Poland.”

“Oh?” June looked surprised but not concerned. Not irritated for having been lied to.

“My people all came from Germany,” Eva continued. “They were all farmers from Hessen decades ago. They left Germany with many, many others—tens of thousands—when Catherine the Great offered them land near the Volga River.”

June slightly furrowed a brow. “The Volga River. But that’s…that’s in…”

“Russia. Yes. That is where I was born. Norka, Russia. It is where my father was born, too, and his father and his father. Eight generations. We all learned to speak Russian of course, but we always spoke German at home. We still felt German—even more so after the Revolution when things got very bad for us. And then when I was fifteen Germany was suddenly at war with Russia, see? It was not safe for Germans to be there anymore. My father and brother and fiancé were taken from me and sent away to labor camps far away in Siberia. No one ever comes back from the gulag. I fled first to Kyiv when the Germans occupied it and then to Berlin with Sascha’s mother, Irina, and his sister when the Red Army was marching back to recapture it. We spoke only German to each other. Irina forbade me to even think in Russian. When the war was over I didn’t want to go back to Russia. I was afraid to. A Ukrainian roommate and I were moved to a new DP camp near Munich at the start of the American occupation. We told everyone there we were Polish and that our papers had been stolen. I was given new papers that said I’d been born in Warsaw.”

“But…you are Russian?”

Eva thought for a moment. “I don’t know what I am. Sometimes I feel like I am nothing. The whole time I was in Germany I did not feel German. I know I am not Russian, either, even though I was born there.”

“And you were engaged to this young man? Tell me again how old you were?”

“I did not have a ring. But Sascha and I loved each other. We wanted to marry. It didn’t matter to me that I was only fifteen and he was only seventeen. I knew he was the only man I would ever love.”

June was quiet for a moment while she thought. “It doesn’t matter to me what nationality you are, Eva.”

Eva smiled. “Thank you. But…all of this might matter to Melanie. You see?”

A look of understanding stole across June’s face. “Oh, my. Yes, I do see. Because of the blacklist.”

“I am not a communist. I never was. It was very hard for us Volga Germans after the Revolution. That’s why when the war was over people like me in the refugee camps begged not to be repatriated to the Soviet Union though it was demanded we be returned. That’s why some of us lied about where we were from so that we weren’t forced to go back.”

“And you haven’t told any of this to Melanie?”

“When I first started working for her I didn’t know she was on this thing called a blacklist. And then when I learned of it, I did not know what to do. I knew if I told her the truth she would fire me, and then the agency I work for would fire me, too, because I lied on my immigration papers. They might report me and I’d get deported. Back to the Soviet Union. It would not go well for me there. I have tried looking for other employment but nothing has come of it.”

“But why do you think Melanie will find out about this when no one else has?” June asked.

“I have heard her talking to Mr. Edwards and her lawyer about that committee in Washington. They all say those men are looking at who she knows. Who she spends time with. I am no one to her, and I can only hope I am no one to those men. But I am with her almost every day. For several hours.”

“Yes, I see.”

“I know I should quit,” Eva said. “But Marvelous Maids would want to know why. I can’t say why.”

“Can’t you just tell them you are tired of cleaning houses?”

“But what else could I do? This is the only job I have had here in the States.”

“Do you have any other skills?” June asked.

Eva shrugged. “This is all I have ever done for work.”

“Maybe you could train for another job.”

“That takes money, yes?”

June nodded, looked away for a moment, then turned back. “Say. Do you know how to type?”

The question surprised Eva and immediately brought to mind the cheerless office in Kyiv, its rows of clacking typewriters, and the stern Wehrmacht officers plunking down documents for her to translate from Cyrillic and then oftentimes retype in German.

“I do. It has been a while, though.”

“Were you fast? Accurate?”

The Nazis had demanded accuracy but she had not been fast enough for them. No one in that room had been.

“Not really.”

“I could help you there. And I know people at the studio where Frank and I both worked. If you catch on and can do it fast and without mistakes, I might be able to help you get a spot in the typing pool. It’s not great money, but it would pay more than a maid’s wages. And then you wouldn’t have to worry about this anymore.”

This was the last thing Eva thought she’d get from June—help—and she stared at her agape.

“You would do that?” Eva said after a moment’s pause.

“Why not? It’s not your fault what happened. You didn’t ask for any of this. It was a tragedy for you.”

June’s words clanged in her head as Eva fought for words of reply. She wanted to serve those words back to June and ask what tragedy had fallen on her that she had not asked for. And what had she done about it? Where was Elwood?

And yet…

She wanted far more in that moment to do something with her meaningless existence besides cleaning up the messes of other people’s lives.

“June. I…I don’t know what to say,” Eva said.

“How about you finish with that tree and we can start today. And we don’t have to say anything to Melanie about any of this. When you’re ready to quit you can just give your notice.”

Tears of gratitude stung Eva’s eyes. Here she’d wanted to cajole June into opening up about Elwood, and instead June was extending an offer of help. June was surely no callous brute.

Accidents happen. They happen. She knew this.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Eva said.

June waved a hand. “It’s nothing. I’m happy to do it. You’re a good worker, Eva. And you don’t need to worry about what you told me. I’ll keep your secret. I promise. Melanie will never hear it from me.”

Eva was about to say she’d forgotten what it was like to have someone show such kindness to her when the doorbell rang.

June peered out the window with its view of the driveway. She drew in a sharp breath. “God in heaven. That’s Max’s car!”

“Max?” Eva sat up on her knees.

“Elwood’s agent. He’s been calling every day. I keep telling him Elwood isn’t taking calls right now.” June’s voice, now panicked, wasn’t much louder than a whisper. “Damn him for just showing up like this.”

The doorbell rang again.

Eva got to her feet. “Do you want me to take care of it?”

June stood, too, confusion etched on her face. “What?”

Eva took a step toward the door. “I can take care of it if you like.”

“He’s going to want to see Elwood.”

“I can tell him another time?”

“But what if he insists on coming inside?” June made her way awkwardly to the door but then turned to Eva. “I think he thinks…that I’m…that Elwood isn’t…” June did not finish.

Eva hesitated only a moment. “Elwood isn’t what?”

June’s countenance shifted in that moment from agitated to suddenly worn and weary, and for several seconds Eva thought she was going to spill every secret she had to be hiding. But then her features grew hard and controlled again.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“I can tell this man you are giving Mr. Blankenship excellent care if he asks,” Eva said. “He can’t insist on coming inside. This is not his house.”

The doorbell rang a third time.

June put her hand on the doorknob, closed her eyes, and exhaled what seemed to be a calming breath. Then she opened her eyes and looked at Eva. “This is indeed not his house. It’s Elwood’s and my house. I’ll handle it.” She started to turn the knob but then swung back around one last time.

“But I do want you to do something for me,” June said.

“Yes?”

“Don’t let him go upstairs.”