Page 40

“Listen, Pete,”

Claire began, feeling uneasy, but Mrs.Nilsson called from the backyard and he went bounding off before she could finish her warning, and then Lina’s voice piped up.

“Mail, MissClaire—and could you try one of these?”

Hauling an enormous platter of brownies over.

Claire braced herself as she selected one—Lina had improved a lot, but one of her roofing-tile brownies had broken a crown last year, and hadn’t that taken a chunk out of Claire’s savings. But it was unexpectedly delicious: big chunks of chocolate, and were those dried cherries? “Good work, Lina.”

“I want to enter the junior division of the Pillsbury Bake-Off,”

Lina blurted. “Would this do it? The best bakers in the country enter, and you have to be at least twelve to qualify for the junior division, but I’ll be twelve next year...”

Claire looked dubiously at Lina: still looking ten at most, not a very appealing child with her slightly crossed eyes and her gummy please-like-me expression. But the entire Briar Club had made it their mission to buck Lina up whenever possible, so Claire said, “Sure you can, kid”

and pilfered another brownie before heading to the hall table for her mail. She flicked through a few advertising circulars and began to saunter back upstairs, only to hear the front doorbell ring.

“Can you get that, MissClaire?”

Lina’s voice floated from the kitchen. “I’m up to my elbows in batter...”

Claire shrugged and went to swing the door open—a warm Saturday evening in September; who on earth was calling? But her mouth dried up utterly when she realized who was there. “ Sid? ”

It didn’t look anything like her Sid. This crumpled woman with her arms about her middle slumped against the doorjamb, no pocketbook, no gloves, no hat. Her knuckles bruised and scraped. Her hair falling lank over her face, not hiding the fact that both her eyes had been blackened.

What did he do? Claire thought in utter horror. What did he do ?

“H’lo, Strawberry,”

Sydney slurred, managing to look up. She had finger marks around her long, long neck, above the ripped collar of her blouse, Claire saw in the endless, horrified moment before that tall, slim body crashed into hers, as Sydney whispered, Help .

“He told me how he won his Bronze Star.”

Sydney kept saying it, over and over, as Claire got her up to the third floor without old Nilsson seeing, eased her down on the bed, slipped her jacket and blouse off. “He told me how he won his Bronze Star...”

Claire stared at Sydney’s ribs, utterly at a loss. She’d been disjointedly thinking of ice packs and a soothing drink, but this—

“I’ll be right back,”

she mumbled, heart fluttering in her throat, clutching Sydney’s cold hands. “Don’t go anywhere, sweetheart. Please promise you won’t go anywhere?”

“He told me how he won his Bronze Star,”

Sydney whispered, staring at the carpet. Claire took that for a yes and bolted out the door, down the stairs to Fliss’s room. Fliss was a nurse, she’d know what to do—but no one answered her frantic hammering. Dammit, if Fliss was at the park she could be hours running Angela around the pond... Claire hesitated only an instant before running right to the top floor.

“Grace,”

she panted when the door opened, “I need help.”

Why Grace? Claire wondered belatedly. Was it because Grace gave off the impression—despite her smile and her curls and her flower vine—that she was tougher than old boot leather? If you couldn’t have a trained nurse in an emergency, you wanted someone tough. Someone who wouldn’t flutter or demand explanations, but do exactly what Grace actually, in fact, did: come right downstairs without a word, take one long look at Sydney, and not bat an eyelash when Claire stuttered out, “I’m n-not wrong, am I? Those are shoe prints—she’s been kicked —”

And then Claire’s throat closed up completely and she could feel the panic rising, her own carefully cultivated toughness completely melting away, but Grace just fetched a blanket and unfolded it across Sydney’s shaking shoulders, commenting, “Let’s get you warmed up, all right, Stretch?”

“S-Stretch?”

Sydney’s teeth were chattering.

“Because you’re so tall. I’m thinking your mama took you by your head and your heels when you were a baby and stretched you out like a rubber band. Just let those shakes go right through you; you’re in shock. How about some tea?”

Heating the kettle on Claire’s hot plate, talking inconsequentially in that warm Iowa voice. “Lots of sugar, that’s good for shock. Claire, have you got any brandy, whiskey—”

Claire flew for the pint of Virginia Gentleman she kept stashed in her laundry basket away from Mrs.Nilsson’s prying eyes, feeling useless. She’d been knocked around before—the mugger who snatched her handbag last year and shoved her into a wall when she fought him for it; a black eye from the assistant manager she’d sucked in a stairwell when she was eighteen and had asked for her money up front—but she had no experience at all with something like this. Black and blue , everyone used that phrase: My goodness, the way the children climb all over me, I’m black and blue! But Sydney was literally black and blue, bruises the entire length of her torso, her face, her long arms, her shins—she’d clearly been on the ground shielding herself from punches and kicks...

Claire bolted for the hall bathroom and retched. Pull yourself together , she said viciously, dragging a hand across her mouth. How dare she be sickened by this, she wasn’t the one who’d had to endure it. Sydney had come here, to her. Hold it together, for her.

Sid was sitting up straighter when Claire returned, one hand curled around her mug of sugared tea with its slug of bourbon, one hand holding an ice pack to the worst of her black eyes. Grace was feeling gently around her rib cage. “Maybe a few of these ribs are cracked,”

she was saying. “But nothing broken. Not your ribs, your nose, your eye sockets...”

Finishing her gentle probe of Sydney’s stomach: “Does it hurt here? Here?”

“Not badly. He was— By the end, he was careful. Kicking my arms. My hips. Not my center.”

Grace sat back. “Then you’re in a bad spot, Stretch.”

“Really?”

A burst of semihysterical laughter erupted out of Claire. “You think so? Really? ”

“Think about it.”

Grace’s customary amused expression had utterly disappeared. “He made a point not to break ribs, damage organs. He did all this”—a wave of her hand over Sydney’s injuries—“yet he was in control enough for that.”

“But he wasn’t in control,”

Sydney objected. “He’s never been like this, it’s never more than a slap, a pinch—”

“Yes, it is,”

Claire heard herself saying. “He’s used a fist before, you said—”

“Rarely anywhere someone can see. Today was different.”

“I’m sure it was. Today, he didn’t care about damage people could see.”

Grace looked at the black eyes, the finger marks around that long throat. “But he cared enough that you wouldn’t have internal injuries and need to go to a hospital.”

Sydney looked down into her mug. Claire’s lips felt dry.

Grace’s gentle voice was merciless. “What happens when he finally stops caring even that much?”

“I won’t set him off,”

Sydney whispered. “I know better. I shouldn’t have asked...”

“How he won his Bronze Star?”

Claire finished.

Sydney looked down into her mug again and told them.

“It started with one of his long afternoons at Martin’s Tavern,”

she started. “Shaking hands and buying rounds and talking policy... Got to glad-hand the movers and shakers if you want that House seat , that’s what Barrett’s father tells him, and he wants it so badly. Hours and hours of whiskey, but it’s not the whiskey. He can hold his liquor, drink half a pint and never slur a word. But he’s not free around those men, the ones he needs to impress, he has to weigh every word, so he comes home and he needs to talk.”

A long pause, biting her lip.

“They’d been at him all afternoon to tell the story, how he won his Bronze Star. When his company was ambushed by a German patrol on the push through France, and he saved them all. He knows how to tell it, the eyes down, the aw shucks . I didn’t know there was anything more to it, but he was so drunk when he came home... I suppose he felt like he had to tell someone the real thing.”

Claire wasn’t going to ask, but Grace did, voice steady. “What was the real thing?”

“He did save his men. That part was real. It’s just what they did with the German soldiers afterward.”

Sydney’s voice was flat. “In the report, the enemy had all been killed by exchange of fire. That wasn’t what happened. There were seven German soldiers taken prisoner, only Barrett didn’t take them prisoner. He lined them up on the side of the road and gave orders to mow them down with a machine gun. Because they were all Nazis and the rules didn’t apply.”

In the silence, Claire heard the blare of a horn from the square outside. The nonsense rattle of some little girls on the sidewalk below, singing a hopscotch rhyme.

“That was the first time.”

Sydney looked up, her blackened eyes blank. “Once he learned they could get away with it, he said they didn’t always bother taking prisoners. They were just—storming through France, drunk on the terror of victory. Hunting down everything they could. For most of them, if it moved it died. Barrett said he used to man the machine gun himself. Not that I wanted to , he said. Because I had to set an example. A good officer takes the lead. ”

Germans , Claire tried to tell herself. Germans, who had been the villains in everything for so long. The black-hatted devils who deserved everything they had coming to them.

“He’s not sure how many...”

Sydney’s pause was so long this time, Claire wondered if she was going to speak again at all. “But they wrote up the reports to make it look right, and no one really cared. They were the winners, the heroes, every one of them Gary Cooper in a white hat. H-He said that it was the best time of his life. All the dead Krauts you could want, and all the grateful French women, afterward. And then he added something about how sometimes the women weren’t all exactly grateful, but there was no one they could complain to so it amounted to the same thing. So who really cared.”

The little girls outside were really quarreling over that hopscotch game now, Claire thought frozenly. Impassioned cries of That’s not fair! and I’m telling! drifting up through the window.

“I should have just let him pass out,”

Sydney whispered. Her tea was down to cold sugary dregs now, but she still stared into it like it was a magic mirror with all the answers. “But I started—shrieking. How could you? How could you? I stormed out and started throwing things into a bag for Bear and me. I said we wouldn’t stay one more night in a house with a war criminal . And he went mad.”

Quietly, Grace replaced the half-melted mess of ice in Sydney’s cold pack with a fresh mass of cubes from the icebox, wrapped in a fresh towel. Sydney pressed it to her other eye.

“You know the worst part after that?”

Her words were starting to slur now, whether from the shock or the bourbon. “Bear walked in at the end. My little boy, seeing me on the floor trying to shield my face from being kicked. And he ran in crying, trying to jump in the middle, and Barrett just... switched off. Flicked it off like a light switch, all that rage, and he picked Bear up and walked him back and forth, holding him and patting his back while he cried and I just—huddled there, bleeding. And then he sat Bear down on the edge of the bed when he was done crying, sat him down where he couldn’t see me, and explained very kindly that there are times when daddies have to discipline mommies, and it’s just part of being a grown-up. Like when I have to give you a spanking when you’re bad. Daddy doesn’t enjoy it, but it’s what the man of the house does, okay? You’ll learn that someday. And he took him out of the room to get ice cream down in the kitchen, and I lay there thinking, My son is going to grow up just like his father .

Sydney looked between them, from Claire to Grace and back. Claire’s mouth felt thick, like someone had crammed it full of cotton wool. “You can’t go back,”

she heard herself say, but Sydney gave a reflexive, instinctive shake of her head.

“Don’t tell me it’s because you still love him,”

Grace began, but Sydney shook her head to that too.

“How would I leave?”

she said simply. “I don’t have five dollars cash or a charge card in my name or a single relative in this country. Where would I go? What do I do?”

“You can’t go back,”

Claire repeated, heartsick, helpless, but Sydney was still shaking her head.

“There’s no chance I could get away—”

“There will always be a chance,”

Grace said quietly. “This is the land of second chances. You can find yours.”

Claire was less certain. Because Sydney was going to go back, she could already see that. In another hour, when she’d pulled herself together and restored a little order to her hair and borrowed a scarf from Grace to cover her bruised throat, she’d don a pair of sunglasses to cover those blackened eyes and slip into a cab, lips trembling.

And Claire was the one left thinking What do I do? as she watched that cab disappear toward Georgetown. Because it was no use—no use at all—pretending anymore that she did not love this woman desperately, painfully, horribly, to the end of the earth and back.

Claire had never seen Senator McCarthy up close. At a distance a few times; he always seemed to be moving in a cloud of lackeys and hangers-on, just another bad-tempered man with a loud voice. But that Monday—four days after watching Sydney head back into the monster’s lair she had to call home, three days after a quick whispered telephone call of I’m fine; he’s already cried on my shoulder and told me he didn’t mean it at least reassured Claire her lover hadn’t walked home into another beating—she saw the junior senator from Wisconsin close enough to count every bristle on his unshaven chin.

“Do hurry, Claire,”

Senator Smith called over her shoulder as she pushed the button for the office building’s elevator. “I want to pick up that folder from Lewis before I head out again...”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Claire followed the senator into the elevator, clutching the minutes she’d just taken at a meeting so boring she couldn’t tell you what it was about. A man’s heavy hand slapped the doors open before they could close.

“Margaret,”

Joe McCarthy greeted Claire’s boss. The man who waved lists of Communists in the State Department; the man who said the government was riddled with homosexuals. Tail Gunner Joe, who probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as he had without a nickname like that. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Fancy that,”

Senator Smith answered calmly and turned to Claire. “File the minutes when we get back to my office, then see if MissHaskell needs any typing done. Once I’m back from committee—”

Claire nodded, more conscious of the man moving heavy-footed into the elevator at her boss’s other side. That face, familiar from the newspapers with its perpetual five o’clock shadow; the wrinkled collar and tie pulled askew. He stank of whiskey; the elevator reeked as the doors slid closed. Claire could see Senator Smith’s nostrils twitch, but she kept talking calmly. “—and the meeting at five, but I’ll have MissWing take that—”

“I’m not sure I’ve been up this close with you since summer of ’50, Margaret,”

McCarthy interrupted them. “First of June, wasn’t it?”

“You know it was, Senator,”

Claire’s boss replied.

He was standing too close to her, Claire thought. Looming, almost, with his liquor breath and meaty hands and big smiling teeth, the man half of America revered and most of America was petrified of. Except Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who had stood on the Senate floor, looked him in the eye, and said: Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism...

“I remember asking you a question that morning, Margaret,”

Senator McCarthy went on, clearly enjoying himself. “When we bumped into each other on the way to the Capitol. I said, ‘You look very serious, are you going to make a speech?’”

The right to criticize , Claire thought, wondering why exactly she remembered so much of that speech when she’d thought her boss a fool for making it . The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought.

“I said yes I was,”

Claire’s boss replied now, “and that you weren’t going to like it.”

“Well,”

McCarthy answered as the elevator descended. “I didn’t.”

The exercise of these rights , Claire thought, her brain still unhelpfully reciting the words that had been spoken on the Senate floor that day, should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.

“Senator,”

Margaret Chase Smith said evenly, “words cannot describe how little I care that you didn’t like it.”

He laughed at that, the sound big and sudden in the cramped space. Claire flinched. “You still think it was worth it, Margaret?”

Stop fucking calling her Margaret like she’s your secretary , Claire thought.

Senator Smith stared straight ahead at the elevator doors. “I do. Joe. And that was the goddamn point.”

His face darkened. “If you think—”

Claire dropped her armload of paperwork in a sudden shower of mimeographs and foolscap. “I’m sorry, ma’am—”

Scrabbling to collect everything, Claire managed to wedge herself on Senator Smith’s other side when she straightened up again, forcing McCarthy to take a step back. “Don’t forget your two o’clock appointment, ma’am. With the committee in charge of—”

There was no two o’clock appointment, but Claire made up details about it until the elevator doors opened (finally) and they could escape the malevolent whiskey reek breathing down their necks.

“Thank you, Claire,”

Senator Smith said once the elevator whisked away. There was just the tiniest tremor in her voice that made Claire wonder if she wasn’t as iron-calm as she’d seemed, trapped in that too-small space with the biggest bully in America.

The biggest bully except, maybe, the man who had bruised Sydney black-and-blue, who had put his hands around her neck and choked her when she said she wouldn’t spend one more night with a war criminal. The man who was very likely going to be a senator himself someday, just like McCarthy.

“Ma’am,”

Claire blurted, blushing when her boss’s clear gaze turned back on her. “Why did you do it? Give that speech.”

The speech about which MissHaskell had snorted, If a man had done it, he’d be our next president. “Weren’t you afraid?”

Because when you called bullies to account, they weren’t likely to back down. They were more likely to put their hands around your neck and choke you.